A Death, Darker and Closer: Volker Schlondorff’s Death of a Salesman
The televised production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, directed by Volker Schlondorff, creates an atmosphere that accentuates the frenzy and physicality of Willy Loman’s loosening grip on reality. Schlondorff uses lighting in a theatrical way to indicate the difference between Willy’s idyllic imagined past and the time in which the action of the play takes place. The sets are overtly theatrical and painterly, particularly the city-scenes. This use of “set-like” scenery makes the televised production congruent with the Broadway production from which it was adapted, making the story and actors seem more theatrical, and therefore central to the action. The blocking of the characters is tense and more physically confrontational than Miller’s original blocking specifically indicates. This makes the play frantic and the all of the characters, particularly Willy, when acting in the present, seem harried and inept at responding to their inexplicable victimization by the unseen forces that shape American life: the arbitrary system of winners and losers. The stylistic choices made by Schlondorff make this production replete with violence and fury, one that feels as though it is constantly about to boil over or, as it happens, crash indeterminably into a meaningless ending with a crash of diegetic sound and a fluttering consolation of flute music.
Lighting is one of the most convenient and straightforward tools in a playwright’s repertoire. Seamless lighting transitions from an exposing, clinical white fluorescence, to a soft red-hued glow indicate the onset of one of Willy’s hallucination, an escape to his idealized past. These memories begin to seem cobbled and unreliable interpretations of the past and this lighting technique works well to heighten the illusion, and show the audience the past that Willy sees. The pinkish glow casts perpetual twilight over Willy’s dreamlike memories. The handsome skyline creates a glowing background for Biff and Happy to dart about, professing their endless love for their traveling father, and their loneliness in his absence. The black and white kitchen, however, is lit savagely from above and the action that takes place there is primarily in the misery and confusion of the present. The kitchen, the setting for the most critical confrontations, is drained of all color and the black and white tiles make the characters seem like chess pieces engaged in battle. They maneuver within the rules to accomplish what they feel compelled to; in this room the characters are cold, calculating and, at times, vicious. Schlondorff’s lighting techniques open up the rich narrative, with all its complexities, by indicating moods with shifts in the colors of the scene.
The time the production spends in the city beautifully maintain the theatricality of the production. The windows in Charley’s office are backdrops that create a faintly orange skyline with an imposing industrial complex in the foreground. Howard’s office is similarly artificial, its backdrop windows give the impression of buildings across the street and simulated rain appears to be coming from a garden-hose. The set choices render these two city places demonstrably theatrical. The choice to make Charley and Howard’s respective offices, as well as the restaurant, all seem like stages is a decision to bolster the richness of the lines delivered in these places.
The production opens with cacophonous car sounds and Willy driving through the rain. This immediately seems to exclude the possibility of the production maintaining faithfulness to the Broadway production, but framing only the car in the shot and not showing the car from any appreciable range, Schlondorff keeps a theatrical atmosphere. This is consistently done throughout the production, keeping exterior shots tight, making the props unobtrusive and small, and framing everything with the characters central to the frame. The camera is trained as though it were confined by the same boundaries as the eyes of someone in the audience on Broadway. Both the objective boundaries of a theater and the subjective boundaries created by the compellingly complex characters keep the camera close. And this is to no small effect; the character study is enriched by this proximity, which in many ways enhances the theatrical experience by diminishing further than a theater ever could the distance from audience to actor. The close-ups on Willy and Biff in the final kitchen scene are almost uncomfortably close. The emotion is not conveyed passively – rather, it is thrust upon the viewer, unabated by the distance that can easily move an eye or a mind to stray from the emotions being communicated.
Throughout the play Willy is at the mercy of things he only vaguely grasps. A multitude of questions plague Willy, and they have an increasingly detrimental impact on his psyche because he fails to directly question himself. Instead these crucial questions go unasked, and the resultant confusion borders on insanity. Is Biff throwing his life away out of spite? Is he worth more dead than alive? The most obvious manifestation of this troubling mental deterioration is the confusion of the past and present, calling out to ephemeral visions of his brother, seeing his children at a younger age, and moving freely between New York in the present and New England of two decades prior. This confusion has a draining, and bewildering effect on Willy. Dustin Hoffman uses his body in an interesting way to communicate the bewilderment of Willy. He is shaky and constantly moving. After the confrontation with Bernard in Charley’s office about Biff’s fall from grace, he paces – almost darting – to the door and back to the chair as though he were exercising. His gesticulation is confusing and equally erratic; Bernard extends his hand and Willy grabs his face. Similarly, when Howard is trying to avoid continuing the conversation with Willy and is standing by his office door, Willy communicates with his hands toward the other side of the room as though Howard were sitting at his desk. These are examples of the concretization of the abstract condition of Willy’s psychological degeneration running throughout the play and giving it much of its weight. Willy’s weakening mind is manifested physically in his hands, in his quick turns and pacing, and in his unsure and roaming glances.
Hoffman chooses to emphasize the physicality or violence in Willy Loman. Without the suggestion of Miller’s blocking, Hoffman slaps his knee near the end of Act I when he feels Linda is interrupting. She says, “I’ll make a big breakfast –“ (Act I, 1264), and Hoffman slaps his knee as punctuation to his aggressive response of, “Will you let me finish?” (Act I, 1265). The angle of the camera makes the receiving surface of the slap ambiguous; it could either be Linda’s or Willy’s leg. Willy also gives Linda an assuring or affectionate slap on the face that, given the way they communicate throughout the production, is inappropriately aggressive. He does the same thing to Biff at the restaurant in a very tense moment. Schlondorff puts the camera tightly on Biff’s face, and, in blocking not included in the text, shows him push strongly against Willy’s fist as Willy ridicules Biff. This scene is one of the most brilliant additions to the text. Making physical the issues that exist between Biff and Willy, Hoffman’s small fist on the rather pronounced (and magnified) chin of Malkovich intensifies the emotional and mental conflict that has already ripened at this point in the production. The fist to Biff’s face is the last straw for Biff; the brutal and exasperated father unable to communicate any longer must use his fist to punctuate his sentiment. The instances of Willy being physically violent are all markedly ineffectual in Schlondorff’s production. He is, as Willy confesses to Linda near the beginning of the production, a short man. At one point Biff shoves Willy to the floor and he is seen looking up from the ground terrified, defeated.
One other type of violence is introduced with Hoffman’s portrayal: a sexual violence. Willy gropes Linda’s breast when he tells her, “You’re my foundation” (Act I, 138). He also grabs the breast of Jenny, Charley’s secretary. Both of these sexually aggressive gestures are not written in the original text, but develop a different sense of Willy. The gestures not only expand upon the desperation, but here they develop Willy into a lewd and absurd man who asserts his dominion over women as callously as Happy. This 1984 adaptation perhaps wanted to develop Willy’s misogyny in order to bring a relevant reason for the audience to despise Willy. This understandable contempt for the man eventually blossoms into the sympathy the audience feels by the end of the production. This development of audience emotions is an effective way to make drama profound, actively altering perceptions throughout the course of the production. All of Schlondorff’s production decisions intensify the darkness, the confusion and ineffable sense of defeat that comes to a man like Willy, a dreamer, when he realizes (or fails to realize) illusion is all he has left. He dreamed the wrong dreams and ascribed to the wrong ideals, and so the audience’s contempt is confused and eventually replaced with a more emotionally complex perception of Willy, and a more complex and rewarding understanding of a very provocative piece of art.
Works Cited
Death of a Salesman. Dir. Volker Schlondorff. Perf. Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid,
John Malkovich, and Stephen Lang. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002.
DVD.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Norton Anthology of Drama. Ed. Gainer, Garner,
Puncher. New York: Norton, 2009, 759 – 824.
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