My reaction to watching Mamet's House of Games for the first time was suprise as to the ending. In the course of a few days, the lead, Margaret Ford goes from driven professional therapist to cold blooded murderer. What message was Mamet trying to convey?
I think perhaps Margaret found something herself that reminded her of a con artist. When she starts following Mike around, he appears as the most brutally honest person in her life. When she tells him that she thinks he interesting, he bluntly responds: "no I'm just a criminal". She sees how he cons people by gaining their trust and then using them in his scams and perhaps realizes that in a way, everyone is a sort of con artist including herself. In her therapy practice, she gains the trust of her patients and makes money off of them, when at the same time she admits to her mentor that she has no way of helping many of them, behavior in many respects identical to Billy's. Perhap this sudden realization that she, like the con man is only in the business of helping herself causes her to snap, releasing all her repressed desires, which causes her to murder Mike.
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