Bad ponies, long cons and David Mamet's House of Games

Sometime in high school, I discovered David Mamet's House of Games. It was playing regularly on Bravo at the time, and I remember being sucked in to this dark world, where nice, smiling men wanted to take your money -- and make you want to give it to them. That was the trick. It's a good trick.

Really, it's the only trick, the one all storytellers play. It's a game, and you're the gamepiece. They move you around on a board, teasing you with fantasies, promising you the world--and then the movie's over. And at the end, you thank them for it. Why shouldn't you? You had a great time.

I don't mean to be glib about what con artists do. Obviously, at heart, these are some callous, petty, self-serving people. Some of them are more than just petty. Know them well enough, and you'll pick up the scent of brimstone and smoke in their wake. But they're just so damned interesting.

House of Games eventually led me to read The Big Con, a much drier and somewhat dubious history of con artists in America. As with all confidence men, you shouldn't believe everything the book tells you. The same principle holds true for the characters in Mamet's film, though if you decide to play along with them, you're guaranteed to be taken on a pretty good ride. Check out my review of it on The Parallax Review, a new film site that just launched.