Drama Death of a Salesman -- Comparison

Drama

Death of a Salesman -- comparison between the play and a 1985 TV rendering of the play, starring Dustin Hoffman

The tragedy of Willie Loman in the play by Arthur Miller seems like a man who wants to be great, yet falls to a tragic and small end. However, the televised version of the play makes Willie seem like a little or 'low' man throughout. Thus, although the Arthur Miller 1950's play "The Death of a Salesman" is often defined as a modern-day tragedy, whereby the central father and patriarch of the Loman family, Willie, is a kind of modern-day tragic hero who sacrifices his life to the folly living according to the rules of cutthroat, American capitalist 'salesman' society, in the television version Willie Loman ultimately strikes viewer of the Arthur Miller debacle as merely a man of small ambitions -- to make money, to be liked, and to make a better life for his sons -- ambitions he fails to accomplish in a meaningful fashion.

This sense of smallness of the man, and the smallness of his life and ambitions is intensified in the 1985 made-for-television film version of the play, starring Dustin Hoffman even visually -- in the television version of Loman, Loman is even physically smaller than his two sons, Happy and Biff, as well as Willie's wife Linda. The house Hoffman's Loman has worked so hard to build is a tiny, tenement-style structure, rather than something remotely impressive, worthy of sacrificing many hours selling upon the road. Flapping, drying laundry hangs in the breeze as Willie and Biff have their final confrontation, as Biff states that he is a failure and Willie expresses surprise and disbelief that his son likes him as a man, despite his failings as a parent. When Linda, after Willie's death, marvels that now the family owns the home and is free and clear, the house seems hardly worth anything, much less Willie's implied suicide and hard-won earnings as a salesman, a salesman who ends his days selling on commission rather than even in a semi-honored fashion by the company he worked for during his professional existence.

Although this sense of smallness is also conveyed to some extent throughout the play, then intensified in the later scenes, Willie physically dominates some of his earlier recollections on Miller's page, such as when he bullies the intellectual Bernard as a young boy, seduces a woman on the road with silk stockings, and loudly complains at the beginning of the play about Biff's decision to waste his life and early promise riding horses out West. But Hoffman makes such bluster seem slightly pathetic on the television screen. It is really more effective to see Loman as dominant in the play's scenes of typical fatherly, masculine authority, only to see Willie brought down (no pun intended) lower later on in the drama as he begins to lose his tenuous grip on reality.

Furthermore, there is no real tragedy, however small and ordinary, about an initially small man cut down even smaller by life -- in Miller's original rendering, there is something 'large' about Willie in his initial perceptions of his authority over his sons and sales. Furthermore, as the flashbacks in the past are supposed to take place in Willie's own head, it seems more fitting that Willie should seem domineering and powerful in these scenes, rather than tiny and withdrawn into a world of depression and madness like in the made for television version.