The Salesman:- A Timely Film
As playwright, writer, and director, Asghar Farhadi has shown natural instincts for building tension through deliberate pace. Films such as “Fireworks Wednesday”, “A Beautiful City”, and “A Separation” have gained him dozens of awards from all across the globe. His latest, “The Salesman”, is no exception to his talents. Farhadi crafts a meaningful blend between a classic American play and an Iranian couple whose marriage is tested and stressed by a traumatic incident. Through this, social aspects of class, patriarchy and honor are shown to be a big part of Farhadi's landscape.
“The Salesman” observes a husband and wife, working together as actor and actress for the upcoming play “Death of a Salesman”. They weave
…show more content…
They are constantly involved in conversation that adds layers and meaning to their relationship and their surroundings. They are able to see their struggles in perspectives we wouldthat normally would have been unable to detectundectable without that dialogue. In “The Salesman” we are unfortunately without the gift of communication and opportunities to let the audience see the viewpoints on both ends of the spectrum. More than often we are left in the dark. What the film lacks in in-depth conversation from main point to main point, it excels in with the situational development of the characters through their actions., and less their …show more content…
There is a sudden weight that seems to fill the space, and the audience is left in confusion. That is, until Farhadi leads us to see the meaning as the story progresses.
Later on in the story, Emad’s detective and/or stalking work leads him to the attacker of his beloved wife. The attacker shares his regrets and begs for forgiveness for what he had done, but Emad refuses. Using the attacker’s fears as his strength, Emad calls the attacker’s wife and family to come over for dinner. We can see the attacker’s slow unraveling and submission as Emad mentally tortures him mentally during the visitation, threatening at any moment to share what had been done, and ruin the accused’s life.
Slowly we are led to see how a simple, innocent man can lose the demeanor of mercy and civility as he allows revenge to dominate his emotions. The kind, peaceful, and helpful Emad we knew in the opening scene is now clouded in a different ideation. In the most calculated manner, Farhadi lets us visualize Emad’s earlier reply to his student, how a man can gradually change into a different
Clearly, Amir hears how his father compares the two, and unlike Hassan who manages to meet Baba’s expectations, Amir grows bitter towards Hassan. He is unable to fight off his envy which later causes him to sacrifice his best friend’s innocence: “Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba” (82), and this is all because he realizes “his shame is complicated by his own realization that in part he doesn’t help his friend precisely because he is jealous of him” (Corbett, 2006). From here, Amir develops strong feelings of guilt that induces him to perform even more destructive acts, such as having Hassan and his father evicted from the house. Amir not only loses a close friend, but now he has to continue to live with remorse as he dwells on these memories.
At the conclusion the reader is left with a vision of destruction of human life both literal and figurative that is absurd rather than tragic because the victims are not heroic figures reduced to misfortune, They are ordinary characters who meet a grotesque fate.
In Arthur Miller's, “Death of a Salesman” and Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s, “The Yellow-Wallpaper” both struggle to maintain their own individual expectations in companion with Societies' input. Death of a salesman focused on how financial success plagues the family as they fail to meet the standards of the American Dream. The Yellow-Wallpaper focused on how society’s view of gender inhibits the narrators in functioning beyond her basic duties.
However, Amir’s happy day turns dark, when an hour later, he witnesses Hassan, his best friend, raped in an alley. He had “one final opportunity to decide who [he] was going to be”. 77. Instead of standing up for his friend and loyal servant, he runs like “a coward.” 77.
Communication is a vital component of everyday relationships in all of mankind. In plays, there are many usual staging and dialogue techniques that directors use to achieve the attention of the audience. However, in the play, “Post-its (Notes on a Marriage)”, the authors Paul Dooley and Winnie Holzman use both staging and conversation in order to convey the struggles of modern relationships. The play is unconventional in how it attempts to have the audience react in a unique way. The authors use staging and conversation to portray to the audience that there are complex problems with communication in modern relationships.
In the play Death of a Salesman, appearance vs. reality is one of the major themes
"After all the highways, and the trains, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive," (Miller, 98). This quote was spoken by the main character of the Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman: Willy Loman. This tragedy takes place in Connecticut during the late 1940s. It is the story of a salesman, Willy Loman, and his family’s struggles with the American Dream, betrayal, and abandonment. Willy Loman is a failing salesman recently demoted to commission and unable to pay his bills. He is married to a woman by the name of Linda and has two sons, Biff and Happy. Throughout this play Willy is plagued incessantly with his and his son’s inability to succeed in life. Willy believes that any “well-liked” and “personally attractive man” should be able to rise to the top of the business world. However, despite his strong attempts at raising perfect sons and being the perfect salesman, his attempts were futile. Willy’s only consistent supporter has been his wife Linda. Although Willy continually treats her unfairly and does not pay attention to her, she displays an unceasing almost obsessive loyalty towards her husband: Even when that loyalty was not returned. This family’s discord is centered on the broken relationship between Biff and Willy. This rift began after Biff failed math class senior year and found his father cheating on Linda. This confrontation marks the start of Biff’s “failures” in Willy’s eyes and Biff’s estrangement of Willy’s lofty goals for him. This estrangement is just one of many abandonments Willy suffered throughout his tragic life. These abandonments only made Willy cling faster to his desire to mold his family into the American Dream. They began with the departure of his father leaving him and...
She pinched his arm. He bent back her little finger and grudgingly raised her right arm while deftly elbowing him in the crotch with her left” (Smith 110). Physical violence is the hallmark of the power struggle within Samad and Alsana’s marriage; it is the manner in which Alsana expresses her defiance to the proper role that it is assumed she should take in her marriage. This physical violence is so common, in fact, that as they violently fight in their garden, their twins calmly watch, placing bets on who will win (Smith 167). This normalization of the violence further highlights how innate it is to their relationship.
Throughout history many families can’t face reality. In the play Death of a Salesman the main characters Willy, Linda, Biff, and Happy use self-deception as a means to mentally escape the reality of their lives. Biff is the only character who becomes self-aware by the end of the play. Willy wants to live in his dream world; Linda and Happy don’t even realize that they’re in a dream world. Biff had no idea he was in a dream world until he had an epiphany.
Hadomi, Leah. Fantasy and Reality: Dramatic Rhythm in Death of a Salesman. Thesis. 1988. N.p.: N.p., N.d. Gale. Web. 6 May 2014.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Seventh Edition. X.J. Kennedy, and Dana Gioia. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Seventh Edition. X.J. Kennedy, and Dana Gioia. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999. 1636-1707.
In conclusion, Millers’ work portrays the death of the American dream while Mamets’ work takes that death and uses it for social criticism on capitalism and the world it has created. Death of a Salesman is modern in that it has a common man as the tragic hero and his downfall is during modern times, it adds irony to Aristotle’s nature of tragedy, it has a clear plot and characters, is subjective, and has a clear distinction between high culture and low culture. Overall, it is a warning to the audience to make sure they do something meaningful with their lives rather than chase the capitalistic American dream. Glengarry Glen Ross is considered a postmodern play because it doesn’t create meaning for its characters lives, doesn’t try to make any point across to the audience other than entertainment, is playful, and it doesn’t give us any catharsis.
The visual and emblematic details established throughout the story are highly concentrated, with Araby culminating, largely, in the epiphany of the young unnamed narrator. To Joyce, an epiphany occurs at the instant when the essence of a character is revealed, when all the forces that endure and influence his life converge, and when we can, in that moment, comprehend and appreciate him. As follows, Araby is a story of an epiphany that is centered on a principal deception or failure, a fundamental imperfection that results in an ultimate realization of life, spirit, and disillusionment. The significance is exposed in the boy’s intellectual and emotional journey from first love to first dejection,
Death of a salesman. : McGraw-Hill, 2007. Print. The. "