First: a heartfelt RIP to Albert Maysles, the man who has shaped film documentary beyond measure. In a moment of true existential absurdity, I found myself informed of his passing seconds after sharing my most recent blog post on Twitter. That post, on Werner Herzog, grappled with Herzog's craft by citing none other than the Maysles brothers themselves. How many people in the world do you spontaneously recall, hours before their unexpected deaths? The sight of his name in the Trending topics had an ominous feel to it, and my suspicions were confirmed when I clicked to find out the news. Based on my own reaction and that of the Twitter algorithm, I'm sure the sense of loss was heavy among cinephiles. Still, seeing all of Twitter lit up with remembrance seemed a worthy tribute to Albert Maysles' legacy. Any superlative describing the Maysles' contributions to film would be a gross understatement. They are (despite there being two of them) singular.
I may not think of Albert and David Maysles every day, but their films are never far from my mind. I remember watching GREY GARDENS with my mom in mutual bemusement, a memory we still reference to this day. That viewing was a formative experience of surfing the same cinematic wavelength with another person. The world of the Beales beguiled us, and our venture into it was the kind of precious shared time I always hope to have with my mom. Their GIMME SHELTER, equally notorious in its time, remains to me a defining tower of non-fiction complexity. To stare into the murky depths of its supremely troubling last sequence is to stare into the abyss of murder itself. Few documentaries dig so deeply into their subjects and our minds, and we have the Maysles brothers to thank for both of them. Who were these men, who have brought us such films? I know so little of them, but now they are both gone. As I finish watching SALESMAN, the last of the Big Three films I haven't seen, I hope my continuing experiences with their films bring me a greater appreciation of the men behind the camera. We are unlikely to be gifted with another such pair of masters anytime soon.
I mention the Big Three films, by the way, because they have had long afterlives as cultural landmarks, and the Criterion Collection has seen fit to enshrine them as such. And I mention the Criterion Collection because I watched SALESMAN through Criterion, and it brought something interesting to mind. The clean presentation of this movie, more than half a century old at this point, removes any easy distance between the subjects and the viewer. This movie could very well have been filmed yesterday, save for a few give-away period details. The absence of distracting scratches or film grain has an odd effect of removing it from its historical time. It is not ahistorical in the sense that it transcends its cultural context and somehow becomes "universal," but rather that its specificity is contiguous with any period of modern American history. These are men of my grandfather's generation, men who look like younger versions of him, or perhaps of my dad. Or me. They are white men, and I'd wager that white men in generations to come will look a lot like them as well. We cannot view them as relics of a bygone age because they are simply the white men we have always known, for better and (often) for worse. They are representative of a time in history that extends far beyond 1969 in both directions. We cannot distance ourselves from them anymore than we can distance ourselves from the white men of today.
This is what film restoration can do for us. Where postmodern pastiche knowingly perverts iconography and stereotypes of earlier eras (witness, say, the American Horror Story series on cable TV), a restored film from decades earlier exudes an almost uncanny familiarity. This is not the self-conscious fantasia of period pieces. This is reality, or reality filtered through the cameras of Charlotte Zwerin and the Maysles brothers. While we cannot directly access our own reality any better than Zwerin and the Maysles could access 1969's, we interpret these realities similarly, because the world has simply not changed very much since then. The casual racism of the Bible salesmen is ugly to watch, but I can confirm from personal experience that this is the way white men talk to each other, alone in a room together. Their profane and cynical jabs at the world around them are the stuff of high-profile comedy today, presented to you by such curators as Seth Rogen and Daniel Tosh, Sony Pictures Studios and the Comedy Central Network. Is this really the enlightened age from which we can lampoon the stuffy, conservative mid-century America? To put it lightly, I have my doubts. When we do not view the past as influencing the present, we cannot see the source of what pollutes the present. SALESMAN doesn't have any answers of course, and how could it? What it can do is capture its world from its particular perspective, so that even we who do not sell Bibles for a living can learn to see the world more clearly.
SALESMAN is instructive in other ways as well. When the four main salesmen take time to attend a sales conference, the terms of their employment become remarkably clear. Melbourne Feltman, "the number one salesman of the world's number one best-seller," exhorts the less-successful attendees to put their hearts and (Christian) souls into their work, to truly believe in what they do. Here we can see the beginnings of the "do what you love" mantra*, under which laborers are meant to devote their lives to capitalism, not because it is a necessary (?) evil, but because it is the moral thing to do. In the 60s and 70s, neoliberalism as we know it was still just a twinkle in Alan Greenspan's eye, and its ideology had not yet evolved into the dominant logic of American culture. It made sense at the time to expect Bible salesmen, presumably religious as they were, to love what they do. Indeed, as one speaker at the conference notes, why would they abandon higher-paying positions for something as lowly as door-to-door salesmanship, if not to honor the one true God? This joining of sacred spirituality and vulgar commerce may seem like the ultimate form of Sartrean bad faith, but again, who are we to judge? We are a nation of mediocre DIY artists, English-major digital freelancers, and aspirational businessmen/coding specialists who sleep next to bedside tables stacked with Steve Jobs biographies**. The noble promise of spiritual enlightenment promised by Melbourne Feltman has long since crumbled to dust. Our gods are consumer goods, and we worship them dutifully, selling our labor for them in place of a distant, unknowable higher power. We are the precariat, and we do it all out of love.
This irony of putting on your public face for such private subject matter doesn't go ignored. The film's main focus is on Paul Brennan, the salesman who seems least able to reconcile the gap between profit and prophet. He is a fascinatingly inscrutable man. Mumbling bitterly about his customers when he's not speaking in caricatured Irish patois, Brennan seems poorly-equipped to the false intimacies of salesmanship. Listening to his spiel tells a different story, if only for that span of time. He claims the Bible is the best purchase a customer can make, that it would never lose its value and always hold a cherished place in the home. He draws on his own Irish heritage and buoyantly chats up his customers en route to sealing the deal. The first scene of the film, showing Brennan pitching to a young mother, appears as a suburban idyll, a place where believers can meet in piety. But by the end of the film, Brennan is falling apart at the seams. He seems the truest believer of all when he's selling, but his constant grumbling leaves his colleagues hardly able to stand him. Even he seems aghast at times how cynical he is.
Where is the real Paul Brennan? The brief glimpses into his personal life provide scant clues. A phonecall home to his wife (conspicuously unseen) reveals little inner life. He claims to be homesick for Boston after only four days, but that train of thought disappears soon after emerging. In any case, it's hard to imagine what could be rooting him there. He profanes the name of Jesus with the Maysles brothers around, only to put on a wholesome performance for the customers moments later. Out of all the salesmen, he seems the least devout, as well as the least willing to hide behind pleasantries. What drives him to house after house, door after door? My guess, and it can only be a guess, is what I've recently come to view as "infra-ideology". It's belief in belief, or a belief in the sanctity of ritual. The challenge and the overcoming. Absent any meaningful manual labor, the likes of which men tend to valorize, Brennan's extended journey seems to be the reason in and of itself. There's no end in sight, nor any particular goal, other than the eternal chase of the sale. Paul Brennan simply continues onward. Who knows, maybe there's something over the horizon. Or in the next life.
If Paul Brennan's ambivalence seems pitiably unexamined, I would at least argue this is an honest response to the affective labor demanded of him. He's clearly no fundamentalist, and whatever depths of spirituality move him to sell those hefty Bibles, they're not enough to give him peace of mind after repeated failure. Those dead ends illuminate the falsity of his salesman performance all the more, leaving him adrift and alone in a sterile American landscape. But this confused Bible salesman never really left us. He just learned to sell different things. When religion was the glue of white American culture, we were sold cheap, gaudy paraphernalia to capitalize on it. The omnipresence of religious knick-knacks grew oppressive to the children of those believers. Before long, an exodus began. Malls replaced churchs, rock stars replaced gods. The cycle continues, and the worship becomes secular. Throughout it all, capitalism didn't blink. It's just as happy to sell us iPhones instead of Bibles. Hell, iPhones cost more and go "out of date" every few years, so this state of affairs is probably even better. Who needs the permanence of religion when you can have planned obsolescence instead?
Of course, we have not fallen from a lost paradise. America was never any kind of Eden, not at its inception nor on the cusp of Christianity's decline. One need only look at the lonely and quiet homes of SALESMAN, the elderly women whose families have left and the people of color struggling to assimilate. Changes came, and we duly adapted. My main observation, one I find myself struggling with quite often, is whether anything has changed for the better. I do often think so, and even the smallest of gains made by marginalized people give me hope and courage for a future worth seeing. But on the flipside, I see a steep and ugly plunge from door-to-door Bible salesmen to tech industry entrepeneurs. I see a generation of armchair nihilists who lost their faith in gods, politics, and maybe most importantly of all, in people. Trust in others, and in change, comes with time, patience, and communication. If you can't be bothered, well, I guess there's always Netflix.
Paul Brennan at least had the ability to doubt. Next time you walk into an Apple Store and find a young, bearded Genius rushing up to greet you, look to see how much uncertainty you find in his eyes. I imagine it won't be much, because consumerism doesn't leave room for doubt. There is only belief, infinite and cold, in the beauty and the power of the iPhone. Innovation, creativity, and progress. Disruption, growth, and potential. Speed. Glamor. Love.
*I'm aware that Jacobin has lately come under scrutiny for its bullying behavior as a major leftist magazine (e.g. against The New Inquiry). I'm most familiar with the plight of Sarah Kendzior, but I imagine there are others as well. So I cite this article with apologies, as I don't want to legitimize them any more than they deserve. This article is the only one I've ever read from them that significantly guides my thinking, meaning I won't have much reason to cite any other ideas/articles of theirs in the future.
**I cite middle-class "career" examples because this is, at its most repulsive, a middle-class problem. Where before labor unions were meant to prevent exploitation of lower-class industrial workers, the disappearance of organized labor has not only freed capital to roll back the rights of the lower-class, but also to rebrand this exploitation into a Faustian bargain for the middle-class. Work tirelessly all your life without a set salary, benefits, or a pension, and maybe one day you'll be famous enough to not need any of it anyway! It's hard to imagine the working poor accepting further instability for deeply dubious promises of luxury and fame. Lucky for capital, then, that the middle-class is too estranged from the lower-class to intimately understand exploitation; and proximal enough to entrepeneurs through mass-media and social media to believe it stands a chance of joining the .1%!
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