The Thousand-faced Salesman: Revisiting Willy Loman in Tehran

Abstract

ABSTRACT Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) is one of the most adapted and adaptable American plays, spawning numerous appropriations in cinema, television, and other products of popular culture. The salesman concept travels through generations and cultures by adapting itself to new sociocultural environments. This article examines the adaptive and appropriative features in Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016) that, as a cinematic discourse, stretches and indigenises the salesman meme into contemporary Iran. It explores the adaptability of the salesman meme, which reproduces itself in various incarnations, in the early twenty-first century Iran, with specific emphasis on gender politics and fractured interpersonal relationships. Basing its theoretical thrust on Richard Dawkins’ and Linda Hutcheon’s ‘meme’, the article suggests that such adaptability confers the ability on salesman to cross histories, cultures and societies, as a universal sign of human fallibility and obsession with social myths.