Closer
–Jose Saramago, All the Names
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“Ever seen a human heart?” asks Larry, a dermatologist whose profession–like those of the other three characters–seems a bit too purposefully chosen, demonstrating the skin-deep values of a society more surface than substance. “It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.” This striking image of human brutality and suffering may not completely represent Marber’s point of view–there’s ample evidence to suggest that beneath his characters’ ferocious sexual competition, unmitigated loneliness, and selfish savagery lies a slightly more hopeful view of human interconnection. But it does suit the greater part of the play.
The quartet’s many dissimulations are as much self-deceptive as purposely dishonest. The men are egotistical and painfully self-involved, deluding themselves into thinking they’ve fallen in love when in fact they’ve been seduced by their own hackneyed fantasies–the sperm-thirsty vixen on the Internet, the stripper in distress they can rescue. “You give us imagery,” Larry tells Alice when he meets her at a lap-dance club. “And we do with it what we will…” The women may not be as vicious and culpable as the men, but they still project their own cliched images on the male characters: Dan is the sad-sack artist in need of mothering, Larry the perpetually erect, swaggering physician. Falling in love with one’s own fantasy and self-image may be the most common act of the egotistical. But narcissism and onanism are ultimately unworkable for these four characters, because they’re so far from lovable.
