Glengarry Revisited
A week or two ago I posted about Liam Rector’s use of the Alec Baldwin speech from Glengarry Glen Ross. Here is a later scene in the same movie, a monologue by Al Pacino, which in that context seems to open up the holding in another kind of way–not to subvert it, but to gather out:
Here is a list of people who have disappeared.
“Let’s talk about something important”
My first year at Bennington, the first thing we did at orientation in a dark room full of the whole student body and faculty was watch the Alec Baldwin monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross. We watched it with little to no introduction from the then head of the program, Liam Rector, who has since taken his own life. Liam played the clip at least every other semester for the new students, sometimes mentioning that it was the only thing they needed to get out of the program, and sometimes just sitting down and grinning wildly at the screen. A lot of people didn’t seem to understand what Liam wanted us to watch this scene for. A lot of them just shrugged it off and kept asking when the panels on publishing would be. You may or may not have seen this bit before, but thinking of it in context of the opening to an MFA program to me seems pretty right on both as in the mind of business and of art, if “mean” in a totally constructive and let’s-save-you-and-me-some-time kind of way. So, for Liam…