Turn it on. There’s this story, about the first production of the play “Death of a Salesman'' in 1949.
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The last line of the play is said, the curtain comes down...silence.
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The audience doesn’t clap, or boo, or even move. But there are men in their seats that are just helpless.
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They have handkerchiefs over their faces. And eventually someone starts clapping, and then everyone claps, and the actors bow, and
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things look like they should at the end of a play. But there are these men who are still crying, and they can’t stop.
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Some switch has been flipped, something’s been released, and it can’t be pulled back in. Doctors are called to the theater.
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The men are taken to the hospital. They just can’t stop crying.
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This is a story that’s taken up space in my brain for years. On one hand, it’s deeply sad, obviously.
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You ever seen your dad cry? This is like, a whole theater of your dad crying. Advanced levels of sad.
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On the other hand it’s...it’s a little funny? Like in an absolutely pitch-black sense, I’m talking Twin Peaks Funeral level, maybe just
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laughing because we don’t quite know how to deal with the emotions in front of us. It’s an intensely weird thing to imagine happening.
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And on a, uhh, third hand, it is really a story about what a megaton Death of a Salesman
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was in 1949, because what else could have caused this sort of reaction?
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Let’s talk about the play and give some context, just in case you slept through this
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part of english class. Death of a Salesman is probably one of the most famous pieces of American literature
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of the past...I dunno, lifespan of America. Like I said, it was originally staged on Broadway in 1949- it’s been revived for Broadway
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four times since then, most recently in 2012. It’s also been produced like a billion more times for every regional theater and community
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production and high school showcase. Its author, Arthur Miller, is similarly one of the most influential playwrights in American
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history, and although he wrote over two dozen plays, Death of a Salesman is right up there
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at the top, maybe sharing space with The Crucible- another play you might have slept through.
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The story of Death of a Salesman follows Willy Loman, an aging...man who does sales.
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We never find out what he sells, nor does it really matter. Willy has these grand ideas of what a salesman is, what the profession represents- a prosperous
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man, well-liked, known. The problem is, of course, Willy is none of these things.
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It’s not that he’s achieved nothing- he’s married, owns a house, has two kids.
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But at 63, he can’t come to grips with the idea that he is going to continue aging and eventually die without ever achieving whatever he feels he ought to.
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This manifests in near-constant delusions- Willy lies to his family and himself about
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how respected he is and how much money he makes. He keeps himself going in a vain attempt to return to “glory days” that he never really
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had. And, most damaging of all, he imparts these expectations and pressure onto his son, Biff.
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Biff Loman, clearly Willy’s favorite child, was a high school himbo and football star
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and then did what most people who play football in high school do. He just became a guy.
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He did odd jobs, worked on a farm, bounced between places. None of this is particularly damning, he just wasn’t an office guy.
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Seems like he woulda lived a totally normal life- except for Willy’s insurmountable
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expectations in the, uhh, potential success of his son.
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Willy constantly tells Biff about all the business he should be succeeding in, if only he’d put his mind to it.
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And Biff believes him, because Willy has been telling the same lies about himself his whole
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life. What Biff is left with, then, is a spiral of guilt and disappointment, never able to
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become the man his father wants him to be. The same spiral his father is living in his own life, fittingly enough.
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In the middle of the play, we find out that Willy has been trying to kill himself. At the end of the play, he does.
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Just before, as delusional as he’s ever been, Willy fantasizes about all the people from all the towns that will come to the funeral, showing once and for all to his family that
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he was known, that his life meant something. He’s also delighted that the money from his life insurance policy can go to Biff,
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which he can finally use to invest in a business and really become someone.
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Of course, neither of these happen. Willy’s funeral is almost completely unattended, and his sons are as lost as they’ve ever been.
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Obviously, this struck a nerve in 1949. The ideas in the play, of Willy’s failure as a businessman, his sons growing up to be
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no greater than him, the fact that the world doesn’t care about someone who’s just
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“ordinary”... Newspaper headlines wrote about the play with headlines like “tragedy of the ordinary
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man.” Willy is tragic as an individual, but he’s tragic as a symbol too.
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You can imagine the unsuspecting audiences of those first showings, dumbstruck by a representation
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of their unspoken, repressed fears; that the American Dream was a lie, or evolving faster
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than they were, or simply out of their reach. The idea that they wouldn’t be able to give a better life to their children.
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There were some that viewed the themes of Death of a Salesman as so electric, so infectious,
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that it posed a threat to, uhh, AMERICA. It’s not hard to read the play as a profoundly anti-capitalist piece of art; the story only
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works, the characters only make sense, because we’re already familiar with the crushing expectations and callous indifference of the system we live in.
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Written by the ~communist-adjacent~ (and also very Jewish) Arthur Miller and released in
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the early years of the Red Scare, Death of a Salesman was construed as dangerously subversive
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by some institutional actors. In fact, for a 1951 film version of the play, Columbia pictures attempted to slap a pre-movie
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short called “Career of a Salesman” onto every showing, a short that reassured audiences
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that the film they’re about to see, full of tragedy and dread, has nothing to do with
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the modern salesman, who’s instead full of vim and vigor and presumably never faces
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the least bit of existential despair. It was never released, partially because Miller refused to sign off.
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He said ‘I was being asked to concur that Death of a Salesman was morally meaningless,
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a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.’’ But it’s mere existence indicates the electricity of the ideas in the play- something in this
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work touched people, spelled out anxieties, in a way so powerful that, I dunno, what if
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it convinced people to dismantle capitalism?? Spoilers, it did not.
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But this scale of reaction is the reason I started with that story of the men who couldn’t stop crying.
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It’s such a perfect encapsulation of the lightning bolt that was this play.
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Almost unbearably poignant, debilitatingly bright. The thing is- that story about the men crying-
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The sources for this information are...well, they’re mixed. The first part, about the audience's silence after the curtain came down, comes from Arthur
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Miller himself. He told the New Yorker about that exact series of events in 1999, and is about as primary
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a source as you could hope for. He was an 84 year old man talking about something that happened fifty years previous, but still-
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if we can’t trust his account, then we’ve got nothing. The second part, the men who couldn’t stop crying, is- okay the first place I heard it
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was from my theater teacher when I was a junior in high school. She’s rad as hell, and absolutely knew how to impress the importance of a play onto a
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group of teenagers, but, ya know- she wasn’t there.
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There’s another person who’s recounted this story though- Mike Nichols, the man who
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directed the 2012 broadway revival of Salesman, as well as The Graduate and Who’s Afraid
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of Virigina Woolfe, he’s a big director. And he did actually see the original production!
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He was there in 1949! And he said “there were fathers for whom the doctor had to be called, because they
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couldn’t stop crying all night.” Case closed. Okay not actually.
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Nichols says he went to the production in 1949, but he also says he doesn’t really
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remember it. He would have been 18 at the time. And his full quote is actually
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“If you went to a progressive school in New York, a private school like I did, it
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was a big deal because there were stories about fathers for whom the doctor had to be called because they couldn’t stop crying all night.
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It was a kind of a legend. It was so clearly a great play.”
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And that’s...that’s less conclusive. That’s not a firsthand account, that’s another person talking about a story he heard.
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Although he did give that interview after my theater teacher told me the same story, so like...she didn’t hear it from him, at least?
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They both independently heard it? Which makes it...more possibly true, I guess?
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It’s not uncommon for ~tall tales~ to spring up around art with this kind of energy.
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Here’s one of mine- I saw “Gone Girl” in a packed theater of college students. It’s one of the most fun movie experiences I can remember.
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When I tell people about this, which I’ve done several times because my life isn’t
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that exciting, I say that at the climactic Neil Patrick Harris Box Cutter scene, “the
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whole audience was screaming.” That’s not really true. A lotta people gasped, and there were definitely some whoops, but what I’m trying to communicate
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with my hyperbole is there was some absolutely wild energy in that theater at that scene.
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“A whole lot of people were feeling a whole lot right then” doesn’t really give the vibes I’m looking for.
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So, “the whole theater was screaming.” I’m a liar. You caught me.
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There’s a more interesting version of this though, one that’s worked its way into film
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history. Everyone knows what I’m going to say, let’s say it together, “L'Arrivée d'un train
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en gare de La Ciotat”, of course!! So here’s the story: the year is 1896.
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Film is new, like really new, and there are these hot young brothers on the scene, the Lumière brothers.
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They’ve shown a couple films already, and by films I mean “literally just things that
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are filmed.” Previously, their smash hit was “Workers leaving the Lumière factory,” a recording
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of...workers walking out of a factory. But in January of 1896, they did a public showing of “L'Arrivée d'un train”, or
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“The arrival of a train at La Ciotat station.” And this is what becomes the stuff of legend.
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So the film itself is, well it’s pretty well described by the title. There is a train and it pulls into a station, slowing to a stop, and then various people
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walk around and get on and off the train. It’s about 50 seconds long. We watch it now and have the appropriate reaction, which is “hey trains are pretty neat!”
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But in the original screening in 1896, the audience had a different reaction.
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The train draws closer and closer to the screen and it’s not slowing down- in fact, it’s
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speeding up! Someone in the audience screams. They jump to their feet. The train is going to crash into them!
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Suddenly the theater becomes a stampede, people running and jumping, attempting to get out of the way before the train crushes them beneath its wheels.
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The power of cinema!
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This is an incredibly fun story for several reasons. First off, it gives us the chance to condescend towards people a century ago, which we all
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love to do. “If I was present at the invention of cinema, I would have simply recognized the separation
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between reality and pre-recorded images.” But at the same time, that awe and terror the audience displays is satisfying.
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Sometimes I daydream about getting in a time machine and like, showing the recent Spider-Man
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game to an arcade crowd in 1980 or something. I would hope their reaction would be as over-the-top as an audience running from a filmed train.
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But I think the primary reason this story has stuck around is it reinforces the power of film.
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From our position in the 21st century, when video is the predominant form of...entertainment, news, how to learn new dances, it’s clear that this technology radically changed the
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world. We want to hear that the arrival of film was like a bolt of lightning, earth-shaking, literally
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something that causes people to leap out of their seats.
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In the 2011 movie Hugo, a movie completely obsessed with the legacy and power of old
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Hollywood, there’s a scene where a train smashes clean through a station, nearly running
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over dozens of people who scramble out of the way. Hugo’s train scene is a number of things: one, a bombastic demonstration of how far
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technology has come. Two, an attempt to parallel the arrival of real 3D (Hugo was a big 3D movie) with the
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arrival of film as a medium. And three, just to pay tribute to this foundational part of movie history.
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If there’s one thing Marty loves, it’s preserving cinema, remembering the past, paying tribute to the people who laid the rails we’re still following today.
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Which makes it all the more interesting that (you may have seen this coming), the panicked reaction to the “L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat” almost certainly never
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happened. In an absolute banger of an article called “Cinema’s Founding Myth, ” author Martin
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Loiperdinger goes through, step by step, everything we know about Lumiere’s train screenings.
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He considers factors from the theater’s architecture to contemporaneous police reports
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to newspaper articles of the day. Nothing implies there was even a momentary terrified reaction.
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However, by highlighting passages written about the train by journalists and scholars,
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Loiperdinger is able to triangulate where this myth would have grown from.
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In 1896, Félix Regnault wrote:
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We repeat what has often been said about the nature and life of the scenes that Lumière presents us:..The beer foams that the waiter at the coffee-house pours, and the glasses
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are emptied when the men drink. The locomotive appears small at first, then immense, as if it were going to crush the
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audience; one has the impression of depth and relief, even though it is a single image
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that unfolds before our eyes. And the same year, a Russian journalist named Maxim Gorky is maybe the most explicit of
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all. In July of 1896, he wrote: A train appears on the screen. It speeds right at you—watch out!
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It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered
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bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building,
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so full of women, wine, music and vice. A compelling description, almost 1:1 with the myth we’re familiar with!
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But then he continues: But this, too, is but a train of shadows.
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Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen. The train comes to a stop, and gray figures silently emerge from the cars, soundlessly
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greet their friends, laugh, walk, run, bustle, and . . . are gone.
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The common link between all these descriptions isn’t an actual fear of being run down, but a turn to that language because of an inability to otherwise describe the sensation
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of watching this film. In a way, it’s disappointing to learn that this foundational cinematic experience was
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an analogy, not a literal accounting of events. But a more charitable take recognizes that it’s still pretty remarkable that many independent
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writers wrote about “L'Arrivée d'un train” using this same language.
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Despite the lack of an audience stampede, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to describe the experience of seeing this early film as an encounter with the fantastic, almost supernatural.
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Loiperdinger describes it as hyperrealism, not just a simple depiction of life.
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That the audience’s reaction wasn’t panic but still, in a way, a brush with something
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indescribable. Comical fleeing from the big filmed train sticks around because...well, because we can
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describe that. There is, as with everything, also a layer of politics under all this.
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As soon as 5 years after The Arrival of a Train, there were new films like “The Countryman
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and the Cinematograph” which depicted a, let’s say, “Bumpkin” comedically terrified
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by a film of a train. Running alongside the story of the magic of early film screenings is another narrative,
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one of the susceptibility of common (often lower-class) people to unfamiliar technology.
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The most famous instance of this isn’t on film but radio, Orson Welles’ 1938 radio
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play of War of the Worlds. And since you’ve made it this far and likely know this video’s game by now, I’ll tell
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you: everything is not as you’ve heard about the reaction to this play.
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So, once again, let’s start with the legend: It’s October 30, 1938. You know, the day before Halloween.
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Orson Welles and a team at the Mercury theater have decided to put on a radio play, an adaptation
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of H.G. Wells novel, War of the Worlds. But their adaptation is a little different, a little more exciting.
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It’s designed to sound like a series of breaking news bulletins, urgent reports cutting
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off the evening’s pre-planned programming. And, it’s important to note, Welles and company did say, did clearly say, that they
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were presenting a play. [In the War of the Worlds by HG Wells]]. But it’s radio, so if you happened to, I dunno, get bored and switch to this station
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somewhere in the middle of the program, you wouldn’t have heard an announcement that you were listening to a play.
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You might have heard something like this. [screaming].
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In the play, scientists observe explosions on mars, then a strange object falls on a
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farm, then aliens come out of the object and use a “heat ray” on bystanders, and then
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a series of news updates detail the aliens landing and wreaking havoc around the country.
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The military can’t stop it! They’re releasing poison smoke around New York! And then the broadcast goes silent.
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When it picks back up, it’s a more typical radio play, following one guy wandering around
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post-invasion, trying to survive until, like in the book, the aliens are eventually killed
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by “microbes” in the Earth’s atmosphere. No one really talks about the second half though.
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Here’s some important context: this was in 1938, a...somewhat tumultuous time in history,
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and one in which real news bulletins would often interrupt whatever was currently playing
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on the radio. Americans had been hearing these really scary “breaking news” segments from Europe,
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basically tracking what would become World War 2 less than a year later.
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If you were listening to the radio and you heard one of these “we interrupt our program to bring you a special broadcast” type deals, you were primed to hear some heavy stuff.
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So even though War of the Worlds was a well-known entertainment property and even though they
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announced that it was fiction at the beginning of the show, and even though the sequence
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of events is improbably, hilariously condensed- from explosions on mars to a full takeover
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of the united states within 30 minutes- people thought it was real.
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Switchboards lit up, thousands of people were calling the police department, people needed to know if they should get in bunkers or on the roof, people reported seeing smoke or
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even machines coming over the skyline. This panic was reported on across the country- “Radio play terrifies nation!”
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“Fake radio ‘war’ stirs terror through U.S.!”. Newspapers really latched onto this story, amping up its infamy until, looking back now,
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it almost seems like it was some Purge-esque night, people running screaming through the
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streets, convinced that they were moments away from being wiped out.
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Weeks later, a newspaper survey would estimate that millions of people were listening to the show, and almost 1 in 12 of them thought it was real.
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The legend of War of the Worlds radio broadcast grows, demonstrating everything from the gullibility
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of the nation to the power of radio to the pre-war fears gripping America.
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And let me say: some of this definitely happened. We have interviews with switchboard operators, for instance, who got many calls related to
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the program. But, in terms of the immediate impact on the population- well I like this analogy Professor
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Michael Socolow used on Radiolab: Let me give you an analogy, okay?
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If you were to ask 100 Americans today, did you see a plane fly into the World Trade Center
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on September 11th, I think you would get an extremely high percentage of people say they
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saw that plane fly in. But that’s because it’s part of our national visual memory. It’s really a trauma and it’s-it’s the kind of that hysteria and panic we’re talking
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about. It’s that moment in time in our relationship to the media, okay? But if you were to actually find out whose TVs were on live at 9:48 in the morning that
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day and who was actually watching there would be a discrepancy in that number. Now, am I saying all those people are lying?
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All those people are confused? No, what I’m saying is that the relationship of memory to the media is extremely complex.
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I mentioned the survey done weeks later where millions of people said they were listening.
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There was actually also a survey done that night, the night the radio play aired. 5,000 Americans were asked, more than enough to get a statistically significant answer,
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and of those surveyed, only 2% said they were listening to War of the Worlds. And of that 2%, NONE said that they were listening to a news broadcast.
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What Socolow and many other media scholars have theorized is that the reports of panic from War of the Worlds were exaggerated by newspapers, who had an ongoing feud with the
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relatively new medium of radio news. By painting radio as a dangerous form of communication, one in which pranksters like Welles could
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cause national panics, newspapers could establish that they were still the true reliable sources.
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And to them both, I say PODCASTS WILL BE THE DEATH OF YOU ALL.
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The fascinating thing about the War of the Worlds broadcast is, despite the original’s
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inflated mythic quality, there have been re-broadcasts of the play, and these have...also caused
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panic? There was one in 1968 in Buffalo New York that, despite repeating several times that
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it was fiction, still resulted in thousands of phone calls. There was a performance of it in Quito, Ecuador in 1949 that resulted in actual military deployment
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and deaths, although the deaths were after listeners realized they were being tricked
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by the radio station. Because the legend of War of the Worlds has more obvious political machinations behind
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it than Death of a Salesman or Train Arriving at a Station, it’s harder to unravel how
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people felt about it as...ya know, as art? But I think the idea of helplessly hearing about something terrifying, something life-altering
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over the radio, hearing about events that will change the course of history and being
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unable to act on them in any way, is as frightening as it’s ever been.
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In 1938, the radio was reporting on sparks that would lead to World War 2, in 1968 people
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would have been hearing about the atrocities of Vietnam, both real and awful conflicts that we were both intimately involved in and completely detached from.
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And that’s what War of the Worlds taps into, the bizarre double reality of being safe at
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home and embroiled in a conflict of life and death.
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Death is one of the most dominant, maybe THE dominant, theme in Homer’s Iliad (that’s
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right, we’re talking about this now). Is fate set? Are the deaths of heroes inevitable?
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What is the cost of war? The epic poem dives into all of these. But, as rich as those themes are, the moment of death makes up only flashes of the two
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dozen books the story is divided into. In a translation of the Iliad by Alice Oswald however, death is the entirety.
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She begins her forward by saying “This is a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story.”
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Barely a hundred sparse pages, a fraction of the original work, her book- titled “Memorial”-
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is made up exclusively of death, bracketed by brief similes. The start of the book is a list of names, two hundred names, with the promise that we
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will watch them each die. Oswald’s translation draws inspiration from funeral rites of the time, rituals involving
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poems said over the dead, but she’s not trying to simply repeat a mourner’s lament. Instead, she’s attempting to evoke a very specific feeling, one apparently felt by those
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who originally heard the Iliad orated, one with a name you’re probably unfamiliar with:
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Enargeia. It’s a feeling Oswald translates to “Bright, Unbearable Reality.”
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Here is a typical page from Memorial: Beloved of Athene Pherecles son of Harmion Brilliant with his hands and born of a long
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line of craftsman It was he who built the cursed fleet of Paris Little knowing it was his own death boat Died on his knees screaming
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Meriones speared him in the buttock And the point pierced him in the bladder And Pedaeus the unwanted one The mistake of his father’s mistress
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Felt the hot shock in his neck of Meges’ spear Unswallowable sore throat of metal in his mouth
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Right through his teeth He died biting down on the spearhead
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Like suddenly it thunders And a stormwind rushes down And roars into the sea’s ears And the curves of many white-patched waves
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Run this way and that way Like suddenly it thunders And a stormwind rushes down
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And roars into the sea’s ears And the curves of many white-patched waves Run this way and that way
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That repeated phrase is intentional, it’s one of the most striking parts of Memorial. While Oswald’s translation is nowhere near literal, it’s an attempt to represent the
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oral tradition, and thus the feeling of the original Iliad. In her own words:
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This version...takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order
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to remember what you’re worshipping Because what she’s striving for here isn’t completeness or unbiased accuracy, but that
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elusive concept called Enargeia. How do we define Enargeia?
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On a very base level, it’s something in a work that induces visualization. If I wanted to be boring, I could say “the room was cold and the door was blue.”
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Bam. Enargeia. But that’s not what it means really, certainly not when used in context of these ancient
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oral traditions. Oswald translates it as bright, unbearable reality, and- to further impress the power
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of the feeling- she continues, “it’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise
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but as themselves.” The Iliad, and Homer’s works in general, were known for this Enargeia feeling.
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In an article by Rutger Allan (et al.), they describe his stories as such: “The spell of poetry can make the hearer forget both himself and the poet and the real
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world about him.... The story [in Homer] seems almost to tell itself. The words which transport us to the world of the heroes come from a source so submerged
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from view that the heroic life seems to move of its own vitality.” Oswald’s version specifically is drawn from what she knows of funeral and mourning rituals,
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an attempt to recreate the laments for each man that were built into the larger epic.
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And through her words, we can try and catch a glimpse of that bright, unbearable reality
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they were said to experience. Hearing poetry with a transportive effect, one that in a way lets the audience bear witness
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to the last moments of a person’s life. I can only imagine the impact of this, when people you knew had likely died in the very
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same ways, would have been staggering.
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Now listen- I have used other people’s research, newspapers, eyewitness accounts to try and
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assess the validity of the other claims we’ve talked about today. There is no chance of doing this with performances of The Iliad from thousands of years ago.
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The epic itself is oral tradition, and so too is our knowledge of what performances of it are like.
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If the legacy of reactions to a performance 72 or 83 or 125 years ago have been exaggerated,
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who knows what could have happened in the 8th century BCE.
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But whether the audiences of Homer and his ilk were mentally swept to bloody battlefields
32:45
or not, whether the sense of immersion was really as powerful as is told, I can’t shake
32:51
this concept of Enargeia. Can’t stop thinking about the bright unbearable reality.
32:58
It’s the brightness of watching a screen come to life, a frozen train station animate
33:05
in a way never seen or imagined. It’s the unbearable pressure of a war that might be around the corner, manifested in
33:13
a fantasy on the radio. It’s the reality I imagine men saw in Willy Loman’s desperation, their own darkest fears
33:22
reflected back at them. Describing the impact art has on us is incredibly difficult.
33:29
It often takes the form of feelings we’re not able to verbalize, reactions we’ll only come to recognize years later.
33:35
I have spent, uhh, years here trying to focus my own thoughts on the things that have affected
33:41
me and help others do the same. And maybe that’s why I’m forgiving of these hyperbolized stories, drummed-up accounts
33:48
of extreme behavior. Because while the men who couldn’t stop crying or the audience that leapt out of their
33:54
seats maybe never happened, the myths in themselves are a form of Enargeia.
34:01
Showing us, through legend, that bright unbearable reality.

summarize this in a list
analyze the actual political view of the writer separate from the content that the writer talks about. put it on a political compass, 1 for extreme alt left and 5 for extreme alt right