Salesman: Discomfort in the Marketplace of Religion

Salesman Trailer

One of the ironies of the Maysles 1968 documentary, Salesman, is that for years it didn’t really sell.  It’s one of those films that I have been intending to watch for a long time but there was always something readily available that I wanted to see more and this is a film with a few factors that might put you off. Salesman was shot on 16 mm using a pretty basic camera and microphone set-up in which the sound of the film moving through the camera comes very close to drowning out the words of the Bostonian salesmen depicted. After 10 minutes, I resorted to subtitles because I was feeling lost, although thankfully not in the same way as Paul Brennan, the bible salesman at the centre of this piece, a lost sheep who fails to find sufficient comfort in the capitalist gospel of America. Some have made the case that the technical shortcomings of Salesman merely underline its brilliance. I was, however, amused by Albert Maysles’ response, in a dreadfully shot DVD extra, to an earnest compliment from a young interviewer who claimed that the fact that the Maysles brothers could only shoot 10 minutes at a time should be seen as an advantage because they had to choose their shots so carefully. Maysles likened this to a writer’s excellent prose being accredited to using a pen that ran out every three minutes.

Watching Salesman I was reminded of Jeremy Carrette and Richard King’s excellent and thought-provoking book, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (2005) in which it is argued that spirituality has become a powerful commodity in the global marketplace and, in so doing, has become part of the capitalist infrastructure. Many of the examples in that book are relatively subtle but not so in Salesman, in which, for example, one housewife is told that the bible she is being persuaded to buy will have so much more value when she gets her priest to bless it.

At the time when Salesman was made a paperback book cost about 35 cents in the United States but the four salesmen we meet in the film are trying to sell bibles for $49.95, a colossal sum at the time. What is worse is that they are selling bibles by going door-to-door in quite impoverished Roman Catholic neighbourhoods, using local churches as a means of generating business. They don’t do it directly but it seemed to me that these salesmen were guilty of using the authority of the church to try to get people to make purchases they couldn’t afford and didn’t need. Wouldn’t this bible be a great thing for the children, helping to shape their future? Isn’t owning this very fancy bible a symbol of your goodness, of the fact that you are a person who takes faith seriously? Why wouldn’t you want to be good? Why wouldn’t you want your children to grow up blessed by the word of the Lord? It only costs $49.95. You can have it for as little as a dollar a week. I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want that.

Are you cringing yet? Paul ‘The Badger’ Brennan is the salesman we spend the most time with, largely because he is the worst at his job. Everything that goes wrong he blames on the customers, little realising that as he gets more desperate for a sale, he also gets more aggressive, leaving him with no chance of success. He never looks into the camera but we get to look deeply into him. He doesn’t believe in his product and the endless grind of motel rooms and doorstep rejection has been an assault on his dignity.

Dignity is a theme much on my mind at the moment and I wonder if, rather than seeking this as a film about a salesman who can’t sell, we might view it as being about a human being trying to hold onto his dignity. Michael J. Fox wrote, “One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered."Nice words from a Hollywood hero but it seems to me that in the vulnerable moments of life we may be inclined to surrender our dignity too easily. Not so, Paul Brennan. About a year after filming was complete, Albert Maysles caught up with him. He was no longer selling bibles and had been such a notable screen presence that he was invited to go to Spain and act in a movie. When he heard this news, Albert Maysles was ecstatic but Brennan went on to say that he’d rejected the opportunity because they weren’t offering a big enough part. Maysles probably thought Brennan was crazy but at least he kept his dignity.

And what about Jesus, the man in the book, leather-bound and yours for only $49.95 ($360.62 in today’s U.S. currency)? Is his message really any more valuable or dignified for being on gold-edged paper? Would the Sermon on the Mount have been better remembered if they sold T-shirts and CDs or Jesus had been sponsored by Evian Living water? Is a book more precious if blessed by a priest or is the real blessing what the reader gets out of it?

My dad worked as a Methodist minister and once in a while someone would turn up with an old family bible they didn’t want. Probably they thought cluttering up churches with old bibles was better than cluttering up their homes. Often these bibles had decades of dust on them and had turned grubby and my dad would unceremoniously throw them out. Had these people known they may have been upset – throwing the word of God into the bin has to be some kind of sin doesn’t it? Ultimately though, whilst the contents of a book may inspire, a book in itself isn’t a ‘holy’ thing. A human being is holy; dignity is holy; a book is just a book and religion that comes with a price tag is probably not the real deal.