Seeing Inside Willy Loman’s Head: The Tragedy of the Commoner on Film

Abstract

In speaking about anagnorisis Aristotle had in mind the tragedies of his own culture. The protagonists of those tragedies were great even if they were flawed (hamartia) and even if the audience moved toward catharsis in the theatrical experience. Despite the continuities that are appealed to in the construction of “Western” culture, which is part of intellectual history and the trope of the translation of empire, there have been great changes. Many of those transformations, especially since the Middle Ages, and, particularly since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, have been technological. Trains, planes, automobiles, film, television, and computers are just a few innovations that go beyond those scientific discoveries that drove navigation, manufacture, warfare, and artistic production. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller looked back to the witch-hunt in Salem, Massachusetts, at the end of the seventeenth century to create a typology between that hysteria and the recent outbreak led by McCarthy against Communists and those who would be smeared with that name. In creating Death of a Salesman, Miller addressed the idea that an ordinary person could be the focus of a tragedy. Democratic America—the brave New World—could usher in a new kind of hero. Moreover, film and television directors could produce plays with ethical and theatrical values that built on those of the Greeks but that also differed with them.