The regurgitated 1960s is a staple of our cultural diet. Woodstock. Altamont. Civil Rights Marches, Little Rock. Haight-Ashbury. Kent State. The Weather Underground. Motown. The Black Panthers. Timothy Leary, Electric Kool-Aid Acid test. The Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, Allen Ginsberg. Vietnam, Cold-War. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young. JFK. MLK. LBJ. Free love, flower power, turn-on, tune-in, drop-out. The summer of love. More than any modern era, we continue to rehash, re-present and memorialize the 1960s. In an endless stream of documentaries, movies, books and nostalgic propaganda we are constantly creating a cultural mythology of the birth of contemporary America, the America we know now. The 1960s: a period of rupture, with battle lines drawn, the established order was profoundly challenged. Crisis, chaos, change. The tumultuous 60s.
But not everyone was engaged in the tumult. My parents were in their twenties during the 1960s. Other than a photo with my mother wearing pointy, horned-rimmed glasses and an absurdly short, loud dress, and a bedroom they decided to paint bright green and red with large black footprints going up and down the walls, my parents successfully evaded free love, flower power and protests. Struggling with the challenges of making a living, building a home, raising a family, theirs was a working class life lived in a world parallel to the 1960s we know so well retrospectively. The events and people of the tumultuous 60s came into their lives through the television set, as unreal and disconnected with their daily lives as any sitcom or drama. In our constant revisiting of the 1960s, this other world— the one my parents and millions of others inhabited— is rarely examined or documented.
The Maysles brothers 1968 documentary Salesmen provides a glimpse into this world. Think of it as a companion piece to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller portrays the dissolution of a family and the demise of Willy Loman, an everyman character who, as it happens, is a traveling salesman. But we never see Willie’s life on the road. In this documentary, we watch a group of Willy Loman’s as they live in motels for weeks on end, schlepping door-to-door peddling expensive Bibles to people who clearly can’t afford them. In contrast to Death of a Salesman, we get almost no glimpse into the personal lives of these men. We just watch as their days and lives are absorbed by the dehumanizing and desperate pursuit of getting a sale. They would work all day to sell only one or two Bibles (the fiscal logic of the business model eludes me). The customers become the enemy to be conquered. Watching the monotony of their days is grim and depressing. The film could be subtitled: Watching salesmen slowly die. The film captures a bleak austerity and sense of desolation like a Cormac McCarthy novel but without overt violence. But there is a quiet violence in the film. The management’s berating ‘motivational’ talks convey a violence against human dignity as they push their salesmen into psychological coalmines. There is a violence against social trust in the manipulative sales tactics. There’s a violence of profit squeezed from human lives as the customers and salesmen alike are exploited. There’s violence in the exploitation of sincere religious beliefs. Filmed in black and white, the starkness highlights soul-killing desperation as salesmen try to pry a dollar here or there out of the hands of equally poor and desperate people. The entire film conjures an image from T.S. Eliot: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling along the shores of silent seas.”
Though filmed in 1968, a year sandwiched between the Summer of Love and Woodstock, there isn’t a trace of the tumultuous 1960s that defines the period for those of us who know it only retrospectively. Not one tie-dye observed, no long hair, no rock and roll, no itinerant hippies in the background. Not even a bumper sticker or sign or graffiti to indicate this is the same 1968 we’ve all read about and seen through endless films. This is a different, parallel 1968, the one my parents inhabited, one rarely documented and memorialized. This film provides a photographic glimpse into the square 1960s that counter-culture, well, countered. And it’s not a pretty sight. This is the world that creates Willy Lomans.
In one scene, the mythological 1960s does surface. During a sale with a husband and wife, the husband, uninterested in the Bible, opens a wooden phonograph console. When he sets the needle on the record, out pours a maudlin, orchestral arrangement of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday,” which he proceeds to play repeatedly. Possibly he hoped to drive the salesman away. Enduring this as a viewer of the film, the tactic seemed promising enough but didn’t perturb the hardened salesman in the least. But it highlights in a fingernail-on-chalkboard sort of way exactly how far these lives were from the 1960s as we have come to know and understand them through constant retelling.
Amidst the spectacle of the 1960s, millions of people tried to just get on with their lives, to put food on the table, get their kids into college, keep their jobs, own a home. Though not as glamorous, sensational or riveting as the more widely propagated portrayal of the 60s, it is, ultimately, this other world that had to shift and change. “Salesmen” is a rare glimpse into this other world, the backdrop against which the tumult played out. And for this, it is remarkable.
