Watching the film with the class yesterday, I was aware of my son’s repeated frown and bemusement. What he seemed to be communicating was going on with Willy Loman? What more importantly, was going wrong?
Afterwards in the car home, Edward remarked on the confusion surrounding Loman’s existence in the present and his over-reliance for reassurance and dialogue upon the mysterious visitor in the white suit. Of course Loman’s brother ‘Ben’ is dead and his haunting revisitations denote the ambivalent relationship endured by Willy Loman both to the past(nostalgia as Edenic) and to male authority figures specifically. ‘
The past is only ever finished in Miller, never finished with.’
Willy Loman feels the absence of a paternal advisory figure in his life and so reinvents the cliched Ben as mythical adventurer and explorer- even saviour. This messianic figure is of course less attractive to Linda, the besotted yet pragmatic wife of Willy Loman. She rightly recognises the destabilising presence of Ben where Willy’s family life is concerned. ‘Alaska’ with its promise of diamonds and riches seems Loman’s Eden, even his Xanadu. Of course the audience is also aware that such yearning involves the ‘fall’ of hope and Willy Loman’s insatiable need for a language of material success is pathologised, so that reality seems elusive and illusory. The American Dream is contaminating and distorting. It offers the individual a straitjacketing linguistic register which constrains and debilitates, finally suffocating naturalness and care. When Willy wonders at Biff’s tender need of his love, he has almost lost the capacity to recognise tenderness and connection. Self has become other, and other….? Intimacy has been lost in the tidal wave of meaningless material promises.
Everyone was aware of Happy’s repetitious promise to marry someone, anyone in order to gain attention and one wonders why Linda colluded with the redundancy of Happy within the family unit! How ironically he is named! And little surprise that he spends all his time bedding women in an empty attempt to gain attention from someone.
I enjoyed the shuffling gait of Hoffman’s Loman with the physical ‘ticks and twitches’ that could not be healed. Any momentary lapses of understanding were abruptly squashed by his desperate need for llusion. Nothing so angry as the deep seated guilt of the fallen father.
Affluenza indeed!