What vexed Miller were the stories Americans have told themselves about the power of positive thinking, the instant money and spiritual purity that are sure to follow from unfettered entrepreneurship, the decency of the profit motive, the goodness of the national past, and, when all else fails, the possibility of escape and reinvention in the West. This land is your land: Henry David Thoreau crosses uneasily with Norman Rockwell; the tenets of Ayn Rand crash into the gospel of Jesus Christ; the Book of Mormon reads strangely in parallel with the Bill of Rights; Huckleberry Finn lights out for the territory but never becomes the Marlboro Man, exactly. Above all, Miller responded to a culture that cherished a sanctimonious and noxiously sentimental vision of family life as a beacon of health and wealth.
Yet it’s clear from Miller’s screenplay for John Huston’s movie The Misfits—a film celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year—that Miller didn’t see the American family as a problem that had an answer. Flee the traps of family life on an Eastern stage, and you might find yourself wandering lost and mangled in a film set in the deserts of Nevada, atomized and disconnected, drifting among strangers from divorce court to highway to rodeo to whiskey bottle to bed with fast friends. The myth of the family and the myth of self-reliance—how does the same culture hatch two such irreconcilable dreams? Miller’s characters are always being crushed by conflicting motives and impulses, forced into impossible situations by self-delusions or the repression of past betrayals. In his Eastern plays, blood relations doom one another, acting like planets circling closer and closer to moral black holes. In the movie script that heralded the end of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, absolute freedom from family ties in the West appears to be another kind of American disaster—one papered over with a Hollywood ending. (...)
Recognition of long-suppressed truths hits Miller’s families not in the self-help mode of Dr. Phil but in the old styles of William Shakespeare [England, page 43] or Euripides [Corinth, page 23]. Miller’s sons—Larry and Chris in All My Sons, Biff and Happy in Death of a Salesman (1949)—sometimes attempt to escape claustrophobic houses haunted by trauma, old ghosts, secrets, and lies, but they rarely leave the nest for long, and then only to fail, or die, or return to learn unbearable truths about their fathers. The children can sing in their chains or struggle in their traps, while their mothers grieve. In these plays, Miller’s mothers, for their part, are fatally strong, not simply all-suffering—they are actively complicit in the tragedies that unfold. At the end of All My Sons, Kate advises Chris, “Forget now. Live.” Good luck with that. In Death of a Salesman, Linda Loman torments herself with an ending the ancient Greeks might have appreciated: “I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home…We’re free and clear.” Tear out your eyes.
by J.M. Tyree, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
