The salesman lives – Arthur Miller’s product placement
Tony Coult shows how the world of Death of a Salesman, with its powerful reminders of the illusions behind the American Dream, remains just as relevant to our world as it was in the 1940s.

The great plays always speak to us. However, there are times when drama has an added edge. Events can suddenly snap a play into a sharper focus, years after its first arrival on stage. This frequently happens with Arthur Miller, whose play The Crucible, Miller himself notes, is frequently performed as a warning just before a dictatorship is about to come to power, and just after one has been overthrown – as a reminder.
Since September 11th 2001, there is a sense in which all American drama has taken on a sharper edge and, for me, Miller’s Death of a Salesman is one play that suddenly demands that attention once more be paid to it. This powerful play came sneaking back into my consciousness recently as I drove into my local North London Shopping Mall (calls itself a Retail Park but in the era of Fresh Prince, The Simpsons and Buffy, we know what we’re really talking about here). I found myself parking next door to a Chrysler PT Cruiser, walking into MFI and past a SMEG fridge.
Now this trivial moment may seem an ocean away from the events of last September in New York, and decades distant from the opening of Arthur Miller’s classic play Death of a Salesman on Broadway in 1949, but bear with me. ‘9.11’ means there has never been a more important moment to listen to what thoughtful Americans say about themselves, so closely are we tied in commercially, politically and culturally to the US. Many of our everyday aspirations and desires are American in colour and over the last hundred years American Dreams are what have given immigrants and asylum seekers a glimmer of hope that they can escape from poverty and injustice (think ‘America’ from West Side Story). The problem with dreams is when we confuse ‘What We’d Like To Happen’ with ‘What Is Actually Happening’. Instead of being what we aspire to, dreams become illusions. Willy Loman’s disappointment with himself, his sons and his life comes about because he is in the grip of illusions.
So what links my Chrysler in the car-park and fridge in the furniture store is that they both peddle a dream. They’re retro-styled to look as if they come from the 50s, but specifically an American 50s. (Yes, I know SMEG is Italian, but cut me some slack here, it looks American …) These twenty-first century style statements have the fat curves of a prosperous America of fifty years ago, an America grown chubby on the industrial expansion driven by a war. The design of these two products – a perfectly ordinary four-wheeled people-carrier and a fridge which keeps things cool – evokes an exciting, mysterious world, a mythical America where families cruised the freeways in big, soft gas-guzzling cars, guys played in the football team, moms cooked turkey for Thanksgiving, and dads travelled upstate to sell products to people just like them. The world of Death of a Salesman. But of course this is not the real world of Death of a Salesman – it is a fantasy world through which a sharper reality pokes, one where fathers feel failures, sons don’t make their marks on the world, disappointment eats away at happiness and confidence, and the implacable laws of the market face down human feeling. Like all great works of art, Death of a Salesman isn’t reducible to this or that set of themes or messages, but there’s no doubt that Miller wanted to touch the wound of what was already, in the late 1940s, an American illusion – that human worth and value can be measured in financial terms.
What makes Miller so powerful a critic of that world is that he was no carping outsider, sneering at the consumerist fantasies of a gullible nation. He was the son of a salesman, and from the profits of his play about a salesman he bought himself a fabulous green Studebaker Starliner convertible. The Studebaker was the height of early 50s cool – jet-engine intakes for a radiator and a dramatic, leaping look about it. (It’s in a Studebaker, probably the more mundane Commodore, that Willy Loman had thought about gassing himself, and in which he finally commits suicide by driving at high speed into a wall.) Arthur Miller himself nearly died in his new Studebaker the year after Salesman opened. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge (inspiration for A View from the Bridge) late at night, after river mist had rendered the wooden road surface dangerously slippery, Miller nearly crashed into one stalled car, only to spin round and become the target for another sliding vehicle – a Ford, fresh from a garage repair-shop. The homely Ford came off worse than the stylish Stude and luckily neither driver was injured. Driving an iconic car across an iconic bridge, it seems, can’t keep reality at bay.
As for the on-set fridge, that was always a source of fear and loathing for Willy Loman. Like stylish new cars, fridges and washing-machines represented a powerful status symbol, but also a drain on the family finances. Keeping up the payments on these consumer products might be all well and good when you’re on a salary. But, if you’re kicked down, as Willy Loman was, to payment-on-results only, then rather than flatter or excite, suddenly the brand names burn you with debt and uncertainty.
The world Miller lived in at the end of the 1940s, and evoked in Death of a Salesman, may be more than half a century away from us now, but aspects of the American Dream are even more brand and status-obsessed than in Willy Loman’s day. Modern employment practices put people more and more on short-term, commission-based earnings. Competition is fierce and the markets rule even more certainly.
It’s one of the ironies of this contradictory country to which we owe so much that its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, plays into the hands of a consumerism that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers could never have imagined:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’
There’s a world of possibilities in those words about ‘… the pursuit of Happiness’ being an ‘unalienable Right’. Unlike most other parts of that great document of 1776, it sounds quite modern, almost more the invention of an advertising copywriter than a Founding Father. (You can imagine a cynical Studebaker copywriter using it as a strapline to a picture of a Starliner cruising over Brooklyn Bridge to a pre-Twin Towers Manhattan, glowing like the Wizard’s Oz in the distance, ‘Starliner for 1950! – pursuing your right to Happiness!’)
You can’t avoid product placement. I found myself browsing Death of a Salesman websites and came across one called Novelguide.com, full of the usual helpful breakdowns of themes, plot, character and so on. Bannered across the top was an ad for that retro-styled MPV I’d encountered in the car-park, the Chrysler PT Cruiser. And the mind-boggling slogan it proclaimed was this, ‘Drive = Love’.
A grotesque illusion if ever there was one! And almost as tragic as Linda Loman’s final, puzzled despair as she sobs to an uncomprehending world, ‘We’re free … we’re free.’ Thanks to Willy’s death insurance she is free – of debt, of payments on the fridge and the washing-machine. But a prisoner still of her and her husband’s American illusions.
Tony Coult is a playwright, critic and Drama teacher. His book about Brian Friel in the Writers and Their Work series is published by Faber & Faber.
This article first appeared in emagazine 17 September 2002