Salesmanship
A Mug's Game
What motivates the salesman? In Influence, Robert B. Cialdini talks about Joe Girard, the greatest car salesman in history. Why was he so successful? Girard reckons all that matters is ‘’finding the salesman you like, plus the price. Put them together, and you get a deal.’’ A few pages later, Cialdini notes that Girard would send every last one of his former customers holiday greeting cards. The message was always the same, no matter whether the greeting card changed, whether it was a New Year card, a Thanksgiving card or a Valentine’s card: ‘I like you’ Caldini would say. It ‘‘came in the mail every year, 12 times a year, like clockwork[…] on a printed card that went to 13,000 other people too.’’ Cialdini doesn’t propose that this was an insincere gesture, though he certainly sees it as a good business move. People love flattery, he says, and while much is made of whether or not the salesman is likeable, what perhaps matters even more is that the salesman is seen to like their customers. F William Howton and Bernard Rosenberg note an ‘‘underemphasis on money and overemphasis on kicks, and ‘to a total range of awards.’’’ (‘The Salesman: Ideology and Self-Imagery In a Prototypic Occupation’) Some might wish to see the salesman preoccupied by greed, but Cialdini, Howton and Rosenberg don’t see it that way, and this question is played out quite differently in the three films we shall be looking at: Death of a Salesman (1951), Salesman (1968) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).
In Wall Street, Gordon Gekko so insistently believes greed is good, and we might wonder if his mantra is evident because his relationships with others are all but absent. An asset-stripping investor isn’t meeting on a daily basis with the little people, and when in Wall Street Gekko happens to do so, it is at an AGM where he holds the microphone and the attention of a huge room. The little people here aren’t so little (they are shareholders and include the wealthy), and this isn’t the salesman going into someone’s home, but speaking to them in an impersonal, vast space. This might be the central difference between salesman films and finance cinema: the intimacy of personal exchange against the abstractions of people and numbers. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman regards the need to be liked as vital to the American Dream, as though taking a dimension of his profession and expanding it into a general principle. In Salesman, four men on the road draw on aspects of their personality, selling to mainly struggling people an expensive, illustrated bible. Glengarry Glen Ross focuses more on the office politics after a hotshot from company headquarters, Blake, tells them they have a week to turn things around, otherwise, most will lose their jobs. The first and third works are, of course, adaptations of famous plays by Arthur Miller and David Mamet, and reflect the writers’ given emphases, with Miller interested in pathos and Mamet in one-upmanship. Salesman is an example of Direct Cinema: a documentary movement that observes subjects with no voiceover or direct-to-cinema address.
Yet all three capture well a post-war fascination with face-to-face selling, with Miller’s play not only an account of someone who sees increasingly that the American Dream wasn’t made for him, but also insists that central to its possibility is the combination of likeability and people buying. It is perhaps the most famous of all American plays, and sees salesmanship as important enough to make it into the title. Other key works by Albee, Williams and O’Neill offer abstractions like Long Day’s Journey Into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but Miller’s literal title puts the profession right at the centre of the work.
While Howton and Rosenberg note that it isn’t all about the money, Miller proposes that it is centrally about dignity. Depending on the actor playing the role, the failure of retaining dignity becomes a vital feature of the work, and also surely a central feature of salesmanship. Miller said he wasn’t so happy with Fredric March’s performance in the 1951 film: ‘if he was nuts he would hardly stand as a comment on anything’’ (TimeBends). If the play’s purpose is to register dignity and its collapse, Hoffman’s mid-eighties performance (on stage and then in a TV adaptation) better encapsulates this problematic. Nevertheless, March conveys well enough a man failing and falling, and shows how the two come together when one’s career fails, and memory for many years refuses to do so. As Miller noted, ‘‘If I could make [Willy] remember enough, he would kill himself.’’ (‘Death of a Salesman at Fifty: Still Coming Home to Roost’).
If the salesman is vital to American mythology, and yet dignity is something one can easily lose in the profession, then this must surely raise interesting questions about America’s relationship with dignity more generally. Writing chiefly on David Mamet and Glengarry Glen Ross, Robert J. Cardullo notes that ‘‘Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946), and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)—[all] features a salesman among its main characters.’’(‘The Death of Salesmen: David Mamet’s Drama, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Three Iconic Forerunners’) If three of the United States’ most prominent playwrights find the subject so fascinating, and Mamet too, it must be a pressing central question in American culture. To explore this, we can offer three notions: the dying animal, the face-to-face encounter and the zero-sum game, and how they feature within the context of the dignified encounter.
While Willy Loman frequently comments on the importance of being liked, we might see this as a misguided belief, when what matters is doing the job properly. ‘‘Be liked and you’ll never want,’’ Will says to his sons. This comes after their neighbour, Bernard, has said he and Biff need to study maths, otherwise the teacher will flunk Willy’s older son. Bernard is liked but not well-liked, and Willy says that Bernard might do very well at school, but when he enters the business world, Biff will be five times ahead of him. Is Willy wrong? The play (and film) seems to propose he is, but that most successful of salesmen, Joe Girard, wouldn’t seem to concur, noting that a fair price and a likeable seller is all you need to become successful. Does this mean that the most famous play ever written about a salesman doesn’t know what it is talking about? One thinks not, but this is where we can talk about the face-to-face encounter, and our hunch that salesman films differ from finance films chiefly because of this face-to-face relation, to use Emmanuel Levinas’s term. Levinas might not have the salesman in mind when he discusses this question, one that is chiefly a metaphysical concept, but when he speaks of his ethical philosophy, he says ‘‘it takes off from the idea that ethics arises in the relation to the other, and not straightaway by a reference to the universality of a law. The ‘relation’ to the other man is unique…’’ (Is it Righteous to Be?) He names the face as the basis of ethics and, later in the book, talks about Hobbes, saying Hobbes’ concept of man is being ‘‘a wolf to man,’’ wherein the State only signifies the limitations of natural cruelty. For us, quite the opposite is true.’’ Hobbes sees the necessity of the law to counter the aggression of the individual, vis-à-vis the individual. Levinas says this is where ethos is evident, and it is in the abstraction that the problem resides. If there are two different ways to see man - as predator or friend, as an object or a subject, in this bald dichotomy, what is a salesman? While Miller proposes that Willy is misguided in putting so much emphasis on likeability, this isn’t because he thinks the world is harsh but that Willy has a misplaced sense of likeability’s significance and fails to see that the world is changing around him. Likeability is of importance, if Joe Girard is right, but that import is of value when the encounter remains a face-to-face one. If we are correct in assuming that a central difference between salesmanship and finance rests on the abstractness of the latter, then likeability loses its value, becoming replaced by professional efficiency.
This doesn’t obviously mean there is no efficiency involved in salesmanship; only that the emphasis shifts from the personal encounter to abstract competence. When interviewing various salesmen, Howton and Rosenberg point out how important presentational qualities are for the salesman, and likeability would be one of them. ‘‘You have to like people and be easily liked.’’ taking into account the general consensus among salesmen. But this can create a problem because likeability isn’t only an active quality but also a passive reception. One can be as likeable as one wishes to be, but that determination needs to be confirmed by the other party. Good looks help in this confirmation. Cialdini says ‘‘research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favourable traits as talent, kindness, honesty and intelligence.’’ (Influence) This worries Cialdini, and partly because it can imbalance the Girard notion that a salesman needs to be likeable and offer a reasonable price. What happens if the seller isn’t offering a fair deal but is comely? The customer admires the person’s looks and gets conned into buying something they don’t really need, or at a price they don’t want to pay. Cialdini sees this issue of attractiveness getting in the way of comprehension in politics and the judicial system, as well as salesmanship, but the problem resides in making ‘‘these judgements without being aware that physical attractiveness plays a role in the process.’’ (Influence)
One of the ironies of Death of a Salesman is that, even if in the 1951 film Willy Loman is played by Fredric March, who was always seen as a striking cinematic presence and only in his early fifties when he played the role, for all the talk of personal qualities mattering in salesmanship, he is no longer young and no longer handsome. His son brims with energy and wholesome healthiness, and Kevin McCarthy may have never become any more than a minor star (while March was a major one), but he is years younger. By the logic of Loman’s own argument, he is no longer much of a salesman because he no longer has the energy or the looks to sell, as these are assumptions central to his thinking. He believes that looks, sporting prowess and likeability are all more important than the substance of a thing, evident when he says that while the neighbour Bernard might do well at school, it will be different when he gets into the real world. ‘‘Out in the business world, y’understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. That’s why I thank Almighty God that you’re both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead.’’ Cialdini would admit that Willy has a point.Cialdini would admit Willy has a point.
Even if we may watch the play feeling Willy is talking nonsense, this can’t come from what he says here, since the evidence would seem to back him up, however problematic we might find it. The reason Willy is talking nonsense within the broader context of the play rests on Willy’s ageing and Biff’s rejection of the phoniness of selling. This, of course, hinges on a key moment in the past that takes place after this exchange about Adonises. Biff searches out his father when his dad is on the road and finds him in a hotel room having an affair, which he denies. He sees the father for what he is: a fake, and he seems unable to buy into the wholesome American dream thereafter. Central to the play and this adaptation is showing Willy both deluded in the importance of being liked, and handsome, as he himself becomes less attractive and appealing, and his determination to see in his son, who may be deemed likeable and good looking, someone who needs to turn these qualities into something special. But Biff insists he isn’t anything special: he is a dime a dozen, and there is nothing wrong with this, as he wants to enjoy simpler things than becoming important. All he wants is ‘‘the work and the food and the time to sit and smoke.’’ He may have qualities, but he has no great urge to capitalise on them, and no need to live a life of denial as these things that would make him ‘special’ inevitably fade. Best to acknowledge one’s mediocrity young, he seems to propose, and live a self that can be happy without the constant need for external affirmation.
Such a hope may in some ways be futile: that the clam of the inner self is hardly un-reliant on the validation of those around us. But there are degrees, and the salesman might be at the epicentre of such anxiety. We see it in different ways in Willy Loman, Paul Brennan in Salesman, and Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross. They are all dying animals, to use the title of a Philip Roth novel on quite a different theme, even if the salesman wasn’t a subject alien to Roth. The fathers in Portnoy’s Complaint and The Plot Against America are insurance salesmen, just as Roth’s father happened to be. But what we want to extract from Roth’s work is no more than the title he uses for his 2001 novella, and what this might mean in the context of the three films under discussion. Mamet reckons "every scene should be able to answer three questions." "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?" We might agree or disagree. But we can usefully apply these dictums to the films under discussion. Willy wishes no longer to be out on the road, as his sales have dropped off and he can no longer make a living. He wants to persuade his boss to give him an office job. If he doesn’t get it, he will kill himself, even if he hopes to do so in such a way that his family will be left with the insurance. Why now? Some might say because Biff returns home, but it seems more because he is a dying animal, with no longer the vigour and good looks to make a sale.
In Salesman, Paul wants to make a few sales. His failure leads to a despondency that leaves him desperate. Will he take his own life like Willy? This is a documentary and eschews the melodrama Miller draws upon, but Brennan did go on to become an alcoholic. As Albert Maysles reckoned in an interview with Gerald Peary, ‘‘Paul was not made for the job he ended up with. He was too soulful a character to be on the road pushing a product, even if the product he was pushing is the Bible.’’ (’Film Remembrance: Death of a Bible “Salesman”’) His ex-wife, Lilian Brennan, believed Salesman was a film about failure. She divorced Paul because he couldn’t stop drinking. (‘Film Remembrance: Death of a Bible “Salesman”’) If Peary could call his article ‘Death of a Bible Salesman’, Glengarry Glen Ross earned the moniker, Death of a Fucking Salesman, making clear the connection between the three texts. Shelley Levine would be the leading character in this narrative, just as Brennan is the ‘lead’ in Salesman, no matter if, unlike Miller’s play, they are ensemble works. Salesman follows four figures as they head from New England to Florida; Glengarry Glen Ross shows four men working in a New York real estate office. If we believe the emotional centre of the latter pair is consistent with Miller’s work, it resides in Brennan, Levine and Loman, viewed as dying animals. Our claim that they are all potentially suicidal characters, or at least desperate ones, rests on the questions Mamet asks, and that cannot be answered in the works with much optimism. Brennan and Levine want sales, and want them from customers who are reluctant to buy, or will buy without having the wherewithal to pay. Why now, is that all three can no longer sell, and this is the crisis point for people who have predicated their lives on getting others to buy from them. Failing to get them to do so leaves them feeling worthless. When you add to this worthlessness a feeling of ageing fragility, despair might seem inevitable.
Of the three works, Miller’s is the most sensitive to this aspect because he sees his play as a critique of the American Dream, while Mamet’s is almost brutally insensitive, no matter if it was based on personal experience. As he says in the Author’s Note accompanying the play, he was a middleman discovering who would be the best people to screw over. ‘’My job was to call the [the client] back, assess their income and sales susceptibility, and arrange an appointment with them for one of the office salesmen.’’ (David Mamet: Plays 1)
Miller insisted he wished to place ‘’a time bomb under American capitalism.’’ (Timebends) and reckoned Loman violates the law of success. This is ‘‘the law that says that a failure in society and business has no right to live.’’ (‘Death of a Salesman at Fifty’) Mamet might say he doesn’t have a right to exist. Leo Adam Biga notes that Mamet is now ‘’an adherent of economist Milton Friedman’s free-market beliefs and a combatant in Donald Trump’s culture wars,’’ (American Theatre) A playwright’s personal beliefs may not reflect their theatrical work, and Mamet would have still seen himself as a ‘’congenital Democrat’’ in the eighties when he wrote the play. But when the bullying character Blake, who was added to the film version, and who tells the salesmen that two of them will keep their jobs and two will be fired, that if they don’t like it, they can leave, he also says to one of them, Moss: ‘‘Nice Guy. I don’t give a shit. Good father. Fuck you. Go home and play with your kids.’’ We might not agree, but we are expected at least to chuckle, to see that a failure might just about have a right to live, but has no right to work in sales. Blake doesn’t believe in good months and bad months; there are good months, and there is unemployment.
Miller might make Loman’s plight a sentimental one that the viewer may resist, but Mamet makes Levine’s a desperate one that the viewer is likely to find easy to feel no compassion over. Levine weasels his way into people’s houses, lies to them about a great deal he can offer, tries to cajole and bribe the office boss to give him better leads, and eventually steals them. Then, when all hope is lost, as he’s aware the boss will reveal what he has done, Levine invokes his sick daughter, leaving the boss responding with a ‘‘fuck you.’’ Miller might propose that capitalism steals a person’s dignity, but Mamet would likely say it only steals it if you let it. Miller proposes that the system is wrong; Mamet that the individual adapts or fails to do so. It wouldn’t be the case that Levine is too soulful to be a salesman; it is now that, like Willy, he is deemed too old to be a successful one. When Harold Bloom proposed that Loman isn’t much of a tragic character as ‘‘all that Loman actually shares with Lear and Oedipus is aging; there is no other likeness whatsoever’’, Bloom also says that ‘‘Miller has little understanding of Classical or Shakespearean tragedy; he stems entirely from Ibsen.’’ (Introduction to Willy Loman. Bloom's Major Literary Characters)
Yet Miller understands tragedy well enough to show an interest in characteristics of the form: in pathos, catharsis and fundamental flaws. None of these would be of much interest, and nor would Ibsen, if we assume part of Bloom’s invocation of the Norwegian playwright rests on a comment Peter Szondi offers from Balzac, when speaking of Ibsen’s characters: ‘‘We all Die Unknown.’’ (Theory of the Modern Drama) But it is also there in Raymond Williams’ remark ‘’Society is not merely a false system, which the liberator can challenge. It is actively destructive and evil, claiming its victims merely because they are alive.[…] merely to live in it, now, is to become its victim.’’ (Modern Tragedy) Williams speaks of Ibsen, but also about Death of a Salesman. Loman’s problem is clearly different from Oedipus’s and Lear’s: when he insists he is Willy Loman and that he is special, nobody is going to take him seriously. Williams sees this as a societal problem rather than an individual one, and that society doesn’t look after its own. Mamet would likely see this as a failure of the individual, who doesn’t know how to adjust to the society in which they live. If Levine is a dying animal, then he should have been successful enough to sort this out years earlier: to have made enough money to make sure he can pay for his daughter’s medical care without turning it into blackmail after being caught with his hand in the till. His office boss isn’t one to hold him by the other hand, but to slam the till shut with Levine’s paw still in it.
The difference between Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross is the difference between a maladjusted society and a maladaptive individual. Miller proposes that the dignity of a person is undermined by capitalism; Mamet indicates that a person’s dignity is removed by their own behaviour. After all, Levine isn’t the first person Moss goes to in trying to get someone to steal the leads. He asks another of the four, George, and this is who we assume has taken them, after we find out there has been a break-in and they’ve gone. It isn’t until late in the play when Levine’s big mouth gives him away that the office boss pins it on him. We almost tangentially realise that George is the hero of the play, such as Mamet would consider heroics. He has resisted Moss’s request and retained his dignity, thus proving, even if his situation may be as desperate as Levine’s, that he needn’t reduce himself to theft. There might not be much room to manoeuvre in Mamet’s zero-sum world, but if you can’t benefit from the spoils, then at least retain your self-respect. Levine may be the closest to a Loman character in Glengarry Glen Ross, and the closest to a central one. But the play insists he isn’t worthy of our compassion, only of our contempt.
If we have proposed the problem of the dying animal, while Mamet incorporates it into Levine’s failures, he is more concerned with Levine as a maladaptive creature, someone who is part of the old ways, one who wouldn’t be inclined to master new ones. The play suggests there isn’t much point in trying to teach an old dog new tricks in a new dog-eat-dog world. Gekko’s famous lines in Wall Street (Lunch is for wimps and greed is good) were mantras for the times, as Mamet’s play preceded Wall Street by a couple of years, even if James Foley’s film came out four years after Oliver Stone’s. But Stone was still interested in morality tales and Faustian pacts, with Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, ignoring his union man father Carl’s advice (Charlie’s dad Martin), and getting too close to Gekko. Mamet’s was a much more accurate account of the shift because he refused to coat the material in a sheen (so to speak) of outdated thinking. In Stone’s film, society is still the problem, and Gekko isn’t a visionary but a criminal, as he indeed will go to jail after Bud wiretaps him. The gap between Gekko and Levine is enormous, and Levine will go to prison for an old crime (a petty theft), while Gekko will be jailed for a new one: It was the crime of insider trading, an offence that would famously see Ivan Boesky go to jail for 3.5 years in the mid-eighties. Wall Street is thus a morality tale partly because it shows that the big, bad guys trying to change the way money works will be locked up. Glengarry Glen Ross offers instead the idea that nothing much will change for the big guys, but the little ones chancing their arm will have it handcuffed. Levine tries to get ahead and goes under, and nothing in the film indicates we should have sympathy for a man who just isn’t good enough.
Willy isn’t good enough either, or anymore, and it looks like Paul Brennan was never going to be great at the job, even if the background to the story would give credence to why he might be struggling at the time it was filmed: separating from his wife and drinking heavily. Nevertheless, Miller and the Maysles propose that these are lost or misguided souls, with Willy in denial about his limitations, and Brennan doing his best at a job that others do better. But then both Death of a Salesman and Salesman are in the world of concrete interactions, the very face-to-face encounters that when we see practised by Levine or related by others, indicate he is just a pest, or the people willing to accept his company and sign on the dotted line are crazy and have no money. Mamet seems to believe that, however good or bad these salesmen are, they are all on the way out, as if selling over the phone or knocking on people’s doors is an old-fashioned way of doing business. Indeed, perhaps it is if zero-sum games are the thing. A zero-sum game is ‘’when two or more people are involved in a situation, like a game or a contest, and for one person to win something, someone else has to lose the same exact thing.’’ (Philosophy Terms)
This might seem all the more pronounced in the film (as opposed to the play) with its additional scene, as Blake tells them how to go out and sell, making clear he cares little about the customers, and that the four salesmen should care little about each other. Why should they when they are competing with their colleagues, as two will be fired and two will keep their jobs. Levinas’s face-to-face encounter becomes dog-eat-dog, and gone even is the pragmatism of back scratching, which would be mutually beneficial. Blake’s world seems so different from how Howton, Rosenberg and Cialdini describe a salesman, and very far away from the Girard approach, which is about a nice guy with a good deal. Blake is surely a nasty guy who doesn’t care whether the deal he has to offer is any good, as long as he gets the customer to sign on the dotted line. Nothing indicates that Blake comes from the same world as Girard, and we would be astonished to hear that Blake sends a postcard each month to his customers, telling them that he likes them. If he were inclined to send a postcard at all, it would probably be to his sales team, telling them, in the play’s language, quite different from Miller’s, to buck up or fuck off. Mamet’s language is demotic because the environment has been desensitised, and Blake looks like someone who sees salesmanship as a mug’s game – but the mug must be the customer, and the harassment doubled. He harasses the salesman, and the salesman harasses the customer. Neither the customer nor the salesman will be happy, but Blake can buy himself a yet more expensive watch.
Blake and Gekko encompass well an abstract world rather than a concrete one, and might be all the more psychotic as a consequence, taking into account commentators on the link between finance and psychopathic behaviour. David Oakley notes that ‘‘psychopaths are more commonly found in financial services. than in other sectors.’’ (Financial Times) He adds, ‘’It has even been argued that up to 10% of employees in financial services could be psychopathic.’’ Clive Roland Boddy says his research ‘’has found that psychopaths are willing to knowingly cause financial harm to the entire global community, in order to receive a financial bonus for themselves. Personal greed outweighs the immense social and community costs of implementing that greed.’’ (The Conversation) There is even now a term: “’financial psychopath’ was coined after the financial crisis of 2007−2008.’’ (Oxford Academic)
There might not be much in common between the salesman and Levinas, but the concern for the other is evident in both, and very clearly absent in Blake. In figures like Blake and Gekko, the abstract is more real than the concrete, and neither figure would seem to have much truck with shame, as Sartre’s notion of the encounter shares similarities with Levinas’s. As Ana Falcato notes, ‘‘for Sartre, what is important about shame is not that it reveals to me the Other's presence as an “audience” before whom I am ashamed but that what I am ashamed of is only constituted in and through an immediate encounter with the Other. In what Sartre calls an “ekstatic” moment of consciousness, shame discovers the for-itself in its constitutive mode of being-for-others. It thus seems that, contrary to the internalization of a critical figure, what Sartre's interpretative model delivers is an externalized form of self-constitution.’’ (‘Shame and self-image in Sartre and Bernard Williams’) Howton and Rosenberg believe that for the salesman ‘‘it is necessary to be sensitively attuned not only to the customer’s basic disposition but also to his current frame of mind.’’ (‘The Salesman: Ideology and Self-Imagery In a Prototypic Occupation’) Yet just as Levinas and Sartre see the problem arising when an ethical system is detached from the human encounter, then we might wonder if a similar problem arises when salesmanship moves from an interaction between individuals, as it becomes a question of wealth accumulation, over an engagement with another person.
When Blake balls Moss out, saying ‘‘I made 970,000 last year. How much did you make? You see Pal. That’s who I am. You are nothing’, this isn’t simply a case of only being as good as your last sale; it is about how much money you can accumulate in the process. If Howton and Rosenberg are right, when interviewing numerous salesmen, this wasn’t their chief priority. ‘’Though the chart on the wall is of immense importance as they want to sell and make good money, equally’, they note, ‘‘the need for likeability and genuineness as personality traits is inherent in the logic situation in which the encounter between buyer and seller takes place.’’ What happens if that encounter doesn’t take place, or is reduced to a zero-sum game, where the winner takes all, and the loser either doesn’t get the sale or sells rubbish?
While Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is finally more finance film than salesmanship cinema, it follows the transition from one to the other. It opens in the 80s, and the salesmen aren’t interested in anything so daft as genuineness while they sell over the phone plots and properties that don’t exist. As long as someone puts up the money and greater and greater sums of cash are being made, the customer gets a return on their non-investment. The bricks and mortar they might believe they have invested in may be no more than rubble and weeds, but as long as everyone can believe there is something behind the ever-circulating lolly, the lie can be sustained. But when the music eventually stops, and the parcel is opened, there is nothing there. What the guys are selling in the early stages of The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t anything concrete, but a dream of high returns. Even if all goes belly up, the salesmen have walked away with a wide enough financial girth that they won’t be the ones tightening their belts.
If Girard is right that a good salesman needs to be likeable and sell a product of value to the customer, then many contemporary films would propose that this is old-timer talk. You aren’t selling a product but selling a dream; yet instead of the dream being one the buyer gets, it is one the seller aims for, in selling what is actually closer to a nightmare. Whether it is The Wolf of Wall Street or The Boiler Room, or the TV fictional or documentary examinations of Bernie Madoff, making a buck consists of pulling a fast one. Few were faster than Madoff, who made off with many millions in a $65b Ponzi scheme that is regarded as the greatest ever in financial history. In 2009, as the case was still unfolding, The Wall Street Journal listed some of the corporations that had money locked up in Madoff investments. These included Santander, BNP Paribas, The Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, and The Royal Dutch Pension Fund. This was a monetary woodworm that could cause the financial system’s floor to collapse.
Though it is true Madoff relied a little on interpersonal skills as he was a member of the Palm Beach country club, where he would find the odd willing victim, this is the sort of fraudulence that needs an enormous level of abstraction as money is created out of thin air and returns offered on the assumption that people will keep investing and won’t suddenly ask for their cash back. Joe Girard had cars to sell, and any charm he offered had a material object to offer in exchange for the money the customer handed over. It was a doubly concrete transaction. The sort of financial deals Madoff was offering was doubly abstract. He needn’t usually meet the client one-on-one, and what he was selling them was a return on an investment. He would take money and give a percentage of it back, claiming the rest was carefully tucked away. Instead, it was being used to cover others who had invested similarly, and a financial black hole became ever deeper until it reached its nadir, with Madoff sentenced for nine financial felonies in March 2009, months after the financial crash that people like Madoff had helped create. It may have been Milton Friedman who insisted there was no such thing as a free lunch, but he might have been better insisting that there are plenty of free lunches as long as nobody goes near the buffet. As soon as someone tries to start eating, the lack of food becomes evident.
Friedman is often credited as central to the crash. Shortly after it, Reuters reported: ‘‘Friedman, the champion of unfettered markets, is under siege for theories that some blame for unleashing the global financial crisis. His legacy is even being questioned on the leafy University of Chicago campus that he once called home.’’ As a great believer in markets, ‘‘the Friedman Doctrine heavily influenced the economic policies of leaders like Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, who implemented tax cuts, deregulation, and privatization of state-owned enterprises.’’ (FasterCapital) For a while, there were free lunches all around, but the food turned out to be fake, and deregulation made many people rich. It was as if Girard sold people a car that never materialised, and each month sent a note telling people what suckers they were.
We exaggerate for effect but also to make a point: to show that salesmanship and finance, while interacting, aren’t interchangeable. This doesn’t mean that selling is full of honest individuals and finance occupied by chancers and hucksters, but the abstractions involved in the financial sector lend themselves well to selling a product that hardly exists to a customer who needn’t be seen. When securatization involves a package of financial assets that rely on the say so of an agency, one which has a vested interest in claiming they have value, and are bought by a financial firm that also has an interest in believing they are of value, as they take a cut out of these apparently ever ballooning assets, then it can all feel like a victimless crime. When it goes wrong, it is not because nobody has suffered, but that the guilty and the innocent can seem such abstract entities. If Girard sold someone a duff car, the guilty and innocent parties would be very clear indeed.
Death of a Salesman and Salesman occupy a world of face-to-face encounters, where clear buyers and sellers exist. This is still evident in Glengarry Glen Ross, but it is one where subjects and objects are becoming a bit fuzzy, and shamefulness has little to do with the encounter between buyer and seller, but between the seller and the company for whom they work. Shelley Levine won’t care what his customer thinks of him as he pushes himself upon them, and Ricky Roma is hardly going to be contrite as he lies to the customer whom he has sold to (and who is having second thoughts), as he needs to play for time in the cashing of the client’s cheque. Humiliation rests on failure, not exploitation. Yet Roma and Levine are still in the world of salesmanship, even if they have absorbed an ethos that would become vital to perceptions of the finance world in film and televisual form: ruthlessness. Roma carries an air of this new world order; Levine carries the clammy and damp despair of the old one as he seems in the tradition of Willy Loman and Paul Brennan, even if all three of them are nevertheless far away from the Joe Girards of this world. But at least their failure is their own. When salesmanship becomes hyperbolic finance, the failure becomes everybody’s as the abstract potentially creates many victims and few faces.
© Tony McKibbin