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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
David Mamet's 1991 film, Homicide, which he wrote and directed, is intensely of its historical moment, so much so that the historical moment (in the sense that Foucault sees the disappearance of the author into history) takes over. (1) The film represents a break with the previous boundaries of Mamet's views on ethnic identity, which were emerging in his short plays of the period immediately leading up to Homicide. (2) Historically, it is not coincidental that Mamet's film appeared the same year Arthur Schlesinger's now famous essay, "The Cult of Ethnicity, Good and Bad," appeared in Time magazine. Schlesinger wrote, "The United States escaped the divisiveness of a multiethnic society by a brilliant solution: the creation of a brand-new national identity. The point of America was not to preserve old cultures but to forge a new American culture." (3) By 1991, this pressure had in many ways reversed itself; Americans were increasingly becoming divided along ethnic lines. Homicide examines this tension between American national identity and ethnic identity, a tension that had become the issue of the historical moment in America in 1991.
On the subject of ethnic identity, sociologist Craig Calhoun suggests, "Self-knowledge is always a construction no matter how much it feels like a discovery." (4) In Homicide, Mamet explores the implications of Calhoun's remark for Jewish-American notions of ethnic identity in the early 1990s, engaging in dialogue with anxious voices of this particular historical moment in American ethnic history. Fears about the possible balkanization of America in the face of a trend to identify with one's ethnic group were emerging in various discourses. Schlesinger cautioned, "On every side today ethnicity is breaking up nations.... if separatist tendencies go unchecked, the result can only be the fragmentation,
resegregation, and tribalization of American life." (5) In Homicide, Mamet engages related and growing questions of competing meanings of Jewishness in the contemporary Jewish-American community. In the process, he--intentionally or not--suggests the possibility of a future period of post-ethnicity.
Police detective Robert Gold, a non-practicing Jew and the film's central character (played by Joe Mantegna), stumbles into the candy store murder of an old Jewish woman, Mrs. Klein, who was once a freedom fighter for the State of Israel. Initially, Gold believes the murder to be just a part of a petty candy store robbery. But Mrs. Klein's family insists the murder is the result of anti-Semitism. Gold and his partner, Tim Sullivan, are also working on capturing Randolph, an African-American drug dealer. Mamet uses African-American ethnicity, Randolph's family, the Klein family, Jewish ethnicity, the Gold-Sullivan partnership, and the police squad to pose questions about the meaning of group identity.
Initially, however, Homicide appears to be part of a subgenre in American film and literature about a Jew coming into recognition of his neglected Jewish identity through confronting anti-Semitism, an idea Mamet had already explored in The Disappearance of the Jews (1982). Instead, Mamet ends up with an exploration which subverts accepted notions of tribal identity. Gold finds real anti-Semitism when he joins a Jewish cabal Mrs. Klein had belonged to, only to be betrayed by his fellow Jews. The film ends with Gold's attraction to ethnic identity ruining him with the police community and getting his partner and closest friend killed.
Gold has wished to reify a concept of identity which comes from a combination of past prejudice he has experienced as a Jewish police officer and a longing he shares with many people who want something more than whatever identity they have at the moment. His name itself suggests a possible history of the process of his parents or ancestors severing themselves from their ethnic roots with the suggestion that perhaps it is a derivation of Goldberg or Goldstein. Mamet uses the name Bobby Gould in his earlier Disappearance of the Jews to raise, in softer form, many of the same ethnic questions that Detective Gold raises in Homicide. (6) His exposure to the Jewish underground organization involves the process Anthony J. Cascardi sees as forming individual identity: "The modern subject is defined by its insertion into a series of separate value-spheres, each one of which tends to exclude or attempts to assert its priority over the rest." Cascardi sees the result of this as a series of contradictions within the "subject-self." (7) Such contradictions in Gold's sense of his own identity are apparent from the film's outset. As Gold and his closest friend, and police partner, Tim Sullivan, sit amongst other officers and listen to two men from the mayor's office describe the necessity of arresting an African-American drug dealer, Gold makes a casual joke. Mr. Patterson, an African American and the assistant to the Assistant Deputy Mayor, tells Gold, "you come out with a joke ... it's no joke, Mister, and it happened to a white man, then it wouldn't be a joke...." (8)
When Gold attempts to make amends to Patterson, Patterson calls him "Little kike." The tension between the African-American Patterson and the Jewish Gold introduces a racial structure in the film that connects Gold's growing interest in ethnic identity--or in arriving at a sense of identity based on tribal affiliation--to the trend for ethnic groups in the larger culture to do so. Mamet wants to explore the difference between the construction of personal identity and the reconstruction of identity as part of an ethnic group (although the implications for relations between African Americans and American Jews extend well beyond the film). (9) The causes of Gold's uneasiness (and that of ethnic groups generally) and his growing interest in tribal identification are summarized in a remark made by Vaclav Havel, "The fewer the answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human beings, the more deeply it would seem people ... cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe." (10)
As director, Mamet provides a consistent visual narrative of racial tensions in America. That it is a black man who calls a Jew a kike in Homicide conjures up recent clashes between African Americans and Jews that specifically arise out of perceptions of one's own ethnic identity and the ethnic identity of the other. (11) Throughout its early moments, Homicide provides a consistent flow of small reminders about the omnipresence of racial tension in America. Why, for example, does Gold feel restless at all when he is moved to step up, against Sullivan's instinctive resistence (and against police subculture wisdom), to offer to find Randolph? One early version of the film's response to this question materializes in the police squad room in the area of a holding cell, an instance of the film's consistent subtext of racial material. After Patterson's ethnic slur on Gold, several officers go out of their way to articulate their support and affection for Gold. Sullivan steps up and offers to fight Patterson. Detective Olcott (an African American) approaches Gold and remarks, "You all right, man? Fucker had no call to get on you like that" (13). (12) Olcott's support provides a visual assertion that, for Olcott, police relations take precedence over tribal relations. Detective Frank, intending to offer his own reassurances, comments, "Gimme couple serious Irish cops, cigars in their mouths, go out there ... go bring your man in" (13). Of course, when the Irish came to dominate police forces, they did so partly because they had been shut out of other professions due to ethnic bias. But the reference also reminds Gold that he...
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