SOURCE: Pearce, Howard. “Plato in Hollywood: David Mamet and the Power of Illusions.” Mosaic 32, no. 2 (June 1999): 141-56.

In the following essay, Pearce examines two female characters—one in House of Games and another in Speed-the-Plow—analyzing their identities as artists and how other characters and audience members relate to them.

As Aristotle long ago observed, mimesis is a two-way street: as much as humans take pleasure in seeing representations of themselves, so much are they disposed to imitate what they see. As Plato's dialogues suggest, however, dramatic characters can take different forms, just as there are different ways of responding to art or to the dramatic experience: at one extreme there is the Socrates type who evaluates the performance by the standards of “thought, intelligence, memory … right opinion and true reasoning,” while at the other there is the Philebus type who abandons himself to the “mixed pleasures” involved...