House of Games (1987)

Acceptance by the criminal element is a type of hipness much sought after by overbred bookworms. Maggie is psychiatrist, an academic type who secretly suspects that she might actually be a dorky uptight geek Her professional pride is at stake here. Ultimately, the revelation of what kind of ride she’s been taken for, has a lot to do with where her character arc comes to rest.

Unfortunately, the way of the world seems to be that bad people always know more about good people, than good people – even career head-readers like Maggie – know about bad people. But wait, that’s too simplistic. More accurately: a thoroughly dishonest person knows more about a more relatively honest one, than vice versa.

So: House of Games (1987, directed by David Mamet)

Maggie’s book about compulsive behavior is a best-seller. Like the title of the book, she herself is “driven.” She’s a shoulder-padded, tailored-suit-wearing, compulsive-note-taking straight arrow. Her mentor tells her she’s working too hard and needs to have some fun.

A patient, Billy, tells Maggie that he owes a $25,000 gambling debt and the guy is going to kill him. Moving from her sterile, efficient glass-and-steel world into a film noir setting of darkness, steam, and neon, she goes to the House of Games to confront the gambler, Mike.

He pulls her into his world by a number of steps – first, revealing that Billy only owes $800 (Your client lies to you, I don’t.) Mike asks her to help him put something over on another gambler, which will cancel Billy’s debt (You can be useful, part of the action, not just an observer.) Then she is allowed to “discover” that this in itself is some kind of con. (You’re too smart for us, lady! Let’s all have a good laugh.) Mike and Joey, his older cohort, teach her a short con involving a $20 bill. (You’re one of the guys now; we won’t keep up our pretenses in front of you.)

She proposes doing a study of the con artist world, with Mike, of course, as her guide. He pretends to be surprised, but says okay. (Even though you’re an intellectual, I can see that you deserve to be accepted by the common people, like us ripoff artists, for instance.) He takes her to a Western Union office to demonstrate a more complicated con game. Meanwhile, all this time, Mike is very plainly telling her, in so many words, what a dupe she is, but she refuses to hear. He explains it’s called a confidence game because he is giving the mark his confidence. “Don’t trust nobody!” Mike says. He knows exactly what she wants – “Somebody to come along, possess you, take you into a new thing.” She agrees, and also agrees that she wants to make love with him. They go to a hotel where there are supposedly no available rooms, but Mike swipes another guy’s key. Every step into deception intrigues Maggie more, and she becomes increasingly bold, getting into this outlaw mode.

When she’s anxious about the room’s real tenant returning, Mike says, “If he does, we’ll deal with that thing then.” This kind of stuff really works on her head. She knows her world is conventionally tedious, and knows more spontaneity would do her good. She admires this man who meets the world moment-by-moment, rather than meticulously planning everything out ahead of time.

After they’ve had sex, when they’re getting dressed, there’s more deep conversation. Again, Mike tells the unvarnished truth. “I’m a con man, I’m a criminal.” Maggie asks him, “What am I?” Mike gets all sincere, and reflects, “I think what draws you to me is this. I’m not afraid to examine the rules and to assert myself – and I think you aren’t either.” This is, of course, exactly the kind of thing she wants to hear.

Leaving the hotel, Mike says he’s late for a job with Joey, and Maggie begs to come along. With feigned reluctance, he lets her. (We accept you – one of us!) It’s a scam that has to do with $80,000 that Mike supposedly borrowed from the Mob for this one night. When the mark is out of the room, Joey complains about Maggie’s presence. Which of course gives Mike the opportunity to defend her. (I’m giving you my confidence.) Maggie discovers the mark is really a cop and warns the others. She panics and insists that she has to get out of there, but the cop prevents her from leaving and is shot by Mike. Now she owes him bigtime, and is up to her eyeballs in something very, very bad.

The three flee through the bowels of the hotel. Joey says, “She’s killing us, the bitch is killing us dead,” and gets rough with Maggie, allowing Mike yet another chance to be her knight in shining armor, so she owes him yet again. He makes her steal the car that supposedly belongs to the dead cop/mark.

When they’re on some waste land wiping fingerprints off the car, preparing to abandon it, they discover that Joey forgot the briefcase with the $80,000 in it! So now, Mike is sure to be killed by the mob. Maggie goes to her bank and takes out that amount and gives it to Mike, so he can pay the mob and not be killed. But they have to separate and lay low for a while…..

Maggie starts to crack up. She’s out $80,000 which Mike may or may not pay back. Much worse, she’s also an accessory to murder. She turns patients away; cancels her appointments; throws a copy of her book at her diploma, breaking the glass; dumps all the files related to Billy into the wastebasket; and generally demonstrates in other palpable ways how she’s falling apart.

But… she accidentally sees Billy the “patient” drive away in the car she “stole.” Everything begins to fall into place. At night, Maggie goes to the bar where Mike habitually hangs out. She sneaks in through the back door and eavesdrops, as Mike splits up the loot with the gang, all of whom are present – Joey, Billy, the man whose hotel room key they supposedly stole, the mark/cop who was supposedly shot dead… and there’s plenty of jocular conversation about how they made a fool of Maggie.

But the worst is yet to come. Joey remarks how slick it was of Mike to get Maggie’s money and screw her into the bargain, and Mike says, “It was a small price to pay.” On top of everything else, sexual humiliation. Mike’s quip adds the final insult to the already untenable injury of having been bilked out of so much cash by a man using psychological judo on her. As the old saying goes, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Goddam right. In most times and places, offering herself to a man will potentially or actually lead to the payment of a heavy price in some other area of a woman’s life. Aside from the personal pain of being made light of in such a way, by getting mixed up with this bozo, Maggie has risked a brilliant career. So yeah, she’s pissed.

Mike also tells the gang that he’s catching a plane to Vegas at ten that night. So Maggie is at the airport waiting for him. Leading him into a deserted area, she reveals that she knows about how he scammed her. Mike is the voice of sweet reason. “Of course you gave me your trust. That’s what I do for a living.”

“You used me,” Maggie insists. Well, duh!

Mike remains composed. “You learned some things about yourself that you’d rather not know.” He suggests that she just accept the lessons learned and get on with her life.

This script is loaded with nice little ironies. For instance, when Joey complained, “The bitch is killing us….” oh, how right he was. But the big irony here turns out to be: the hang-loose, live-for-the-moment Mike meticulously planned this elaborate long con, with many steps. And look how badly that methodology works out for him, when by-the-book Maggie spontaneously shoots the son of a bitch once and then demands, “Beg for your life.” Instead, he persists in trying to convince her that she was at cause, having sought him out in the first place.

It’s not only Maggie who learns things about herself that she didn’t particularly wish to know. Men always hope to die bravely, and Mike’s last lesson in self-knowledge is that yes, he can maintain his cool in the face of death. After being hit by the second bullet, he says, “Please, sir, may I have another?” Imagine that, a con man quoting Dickens, by way of Animal House. Somehow it doesn’t quite fit, and it might be one of those bits of authorial self-indulgence that could have been left out. On the other hand – why not? Mike’s sardonic remark could be a last-minute clue that maybe we don’t know Mike as well as we thought, and now we never will.

Maggie continues to shoot him until he’s good and dead, picks up her handbag, and calmly leaves. We last see her, a new woman, now in a flattering flowered dress and dangly earrings, at an upscale restaurant, meeting her mentor for lunch. Maggie tells the older woman she’d taken her advice: “When you’ve done something unforgivable, you must forgive yourself.” Then she steals another diner’s lighter.