The lone and eerie glow of the car headlights shown brightly with a viny gothic title sequence as the vehicle raced by honking unseen cars hidden within a strange glowing haze. In this live action adaptation of Arthur Miller's screenplay, Volker Schlöndorff took Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman, and began with an expressionistic introduction as Willy arrives home and declares, "I'm tired of the death." With a worried wife who claims Willy needs to rest his "overactive" mind, we begin to see this over-activity at work as the archetype of the grumpy aging man, missing whatever his ideas of the "good ole days'' were, takes root. Making bold statements one after another, then contradicting himself after a patient correction or reminder from his wife, he'd back track in the spirit of a fixed mindset as if to say, "Yeah, didn't I tell ya?"
You see the overcorrecting defense mechanisms in an interaction with his wife over something as trivial and small as cheese from the original screenplay by Arthur Miller:
LINDA (Trying to bring him out of it.): Willy, dear, I got a new kind of American- type cheese today. It’s whipped.
WILLY: Why do you get American when I like Swiss?
LINDA: I just thought you’d like a change—
WILLY: I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese. Why am I always being contradicted?
LINDA (With a covering laugh.): I thought it would be a surprise.
WILLY: Why don’t you open a window in here, for God’s sake?
LINDA (With infinite patience.): They’re all open, dear.
WILLY: The way they boxed us in here. Bricks and windows, windows and bricks.
After this, Willy, with sadness, looked out the window at their neighborhood and brought out the nostalgia: apartment houses, no growing grass, asking his wife if she "remember[s] those two beautiful elm trees out there, when I and Biff hung the swing between them?", the smell of spring. All of these recollections were peaceful and pleasing memories before loudly exclaiming, "There's more people now! There's more people! That's what's ruining this country! Population is getting out of control! The competition is maddening! Smell the stink from that apartment house and another on the other side!" Then, as quickly as the hysterics had started, he turned back toward his wife and calmly asked, "How can they whip cheese?"
As the dramatic monologue began, Willy was staring out the window, as if looking back to the past with Linda behind him resting a hand on his shoulder in reassurance. Then, he stood and screamed about the "population" and "competition," the camera zoomed out past their bedroom. There was no roof, the walls were not connected to each other only to the floor, and the other apartment buildings rose to heights around them. Only for the shot to be cut right back to the couple in the bedroom as he asked that innocent question, "How can they whip cheese?"
Volker Schlöndorff has plenty of source material for the set, music, and color setting of the film from the screenplay's stage direction from Miller himself, but the panning shot mentioned above was a brilliant example of building and accentuating the vision laid before him to expand the present of an aging 60 year old man drifting in and out of a nostalgic senility.
Expressionist films date back to those classic German horror thrillers that showed how emotions can distort how a character, or audience, sees, hears, and feels their own reality. It becomes a twisted experience that one has with their own reality that looks different from different perspectives. In film, literature, art, or truly any other medium, it becomes completely subjective. This Death of a Salesman adaptation is a prime example of expressionism as Schlöndorff takes this classic American tragedy from the stage to the screen with practical effects. He allows Willy's occasional madness to distort the setting’s reality before bringing everything and everyone back to what actually is. Arthur Miller’s work has stood the test of time over and over again because of the completeness of context to his stories. The Crucible and its connection to the age of McCarthyism is a glaring example. Emotional stakes are not the only thing at hand for all the pivotal characters involved. Behind a veil of sorts, the audience is left on an edge waiting for a breakthrough metaphor to explain the themes and meaning. Similar to an “aha” moment when the bad guy is caught in an action thriller.
Dialogue is a big indicator of the actions around. Schlöndorff believes this to be true and used his medium of film to be abundantly clear on the expression of how Willy is maddened by the changes in his way of life, job, and family. In a way, Willy showed how he was innocently amazed by the changes with the simple innocent question of "how can they whip cheese?" He is amazed by it, but he can not understand these changes while he remains the same. There is a testament to his multitude of struggles with change when they are compared with his multitude of struggles with failure.
The use of imagery, how well it coordinated with dialogue and Willy’s ever changing mood dictated each scene in such an impactful way. Retaining the same cast as the 1984 Broadway stage revival, Schlöndorff made the film feel exactly like a stage play through its editing, cinematography, and sound. Not unlike recent adaptations of plays like Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, or films like Marriage Story. There's a myriad of themes surrounding the American Dream, denial, and the passage of time. Sometimes, it was more on the nose than others. For example, Willy Loman’s name alone is a homophone for a “low man.”
At one point, Linda tried comforting her husband, saying, “A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.” There is a sense of pitiful sadness throughout the entirety of the narrative, but there’s a shift toward the end. At first, the audience is left wanting everything to go right for Willy. For him to get everything he’s worked so hard for, to find happiness in his addled age with his wife and children. The shift comes gradually as we learn our tragic hero is no hero at all. He not only failed at work, but, with affairs and a deeply unresolved relationship with his sons, namely Biff, it became clear he failed at home, as well.
A man's struggles with his pride, ego, and age have always been present in American literature and stories. When film became one of the most enticing mediums of the entertainment world, it allowed for expressionist films to come to life vividly in front of our eyes. In Volker Schlöndorff's adaptation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the audience is given a front row view to the unraveling of the life of Willy Loman through his memories. After all, what's more expressionistic than what we remember of our own memories? Miller’s message of inevitability, time, and our choices comes across to the audience. No matter if it is through the stage or the screen. With each subsequent viewing, the themes become more nuanced and poignant for each viewer. Willy Loman was human through and through with all of his failures, mistakes, and regrets. Each viewer has their own varying weights that they eventually will have to settle amongst themselves. We learn from Loman that unchecked accountability can be a siren song that leads our boats to the rocks while looking for a shore.
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