Work is hard. In case you didn't get the memo, you haven’t been working.
While one honestly can
question the life decisions of all members of this cast of salesmen, who are
peddling land to people who near-randomly divulge their private contact
information, one must appreciate the sincerity of their efforts to survive.
Very few people today would
be able to live a life on the brink as these sales-folk. To live off of
commission, where if you don’t close you don’t eat, is no one’s choice of
occupation. Stress is not something that is sought after, and if an easier job
can be had, where even as meek as pushing papers puts food on the table, it
will be taken over staring survival in the face.
Thus we can pity the
life-choices of the characters, for choosing to live a life which leads to an
Alec Baldwin diatribe. But in doing so, we would pity ourselves, for we lack
the courage to live in a perpetual state of risk, or practical life and death.
There is perplexity in the
current political economy of society, where no one enjoys the machine and
participating as cogs within it. Yet what is unrealized is the appreciation
that this machine shields the world of ancestral struggle, and enables an
artificial reality for everyone. For the few marooned souls outside of the
artifice, they are left with scraping by with any work they can get.
Unquestionably, they work
because they have no choice. The leads delivered to each salesman by the front
office are indeed weak. The business itself is near-fraudulent, feasting off of
the meek emotions of decaying people who have a gluttonous surplus of money on
their hands and nothing worth breathing it into. We can only imagine the owners
of the enterprise and their origins in concocting such a scheme, where they can
live off of the toil of those living off of the aimlessness of others.
The drama unfolds when this
scheme stagnates, and a fire is felt by the salesmen from their feudal lords of
Glengarry and Glenn Ross. Desperation out of fear for losing a lousy job
touches each of them, except for the top salesmen. The distinction of the
top-man from the others is clear in his philosophy. While the others are
resentful of the lives they have lead, made clear with their disdain for their
work, Romano celebrates his deceitfulness which creates his sales numbers and
brand new Cadillac at the end of the month.
Is this entire play a
critique of Capitalism? In this day
and age, what isn’t? The entire order of nature can be blamed on that ambiguous
word, which resembles more an attack on the despondence of nihilism which
modern society indulges in, yet resents when asphyxiation sets in. The motion
of money, like a matter of physics, directs itself where the individual members
of society direct themselves. The invisible hand does not actually exist: what
does exist are individual members of society and their individual relations to
the world around them. If the world becomes alien to them, whereby the uncouth
morality emerges as successful, we have a critique on human society.
A business which can subsist
off of fools and their parted money can only subsist where fools live.
Grade: A-
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