American Beauty and Death of a Salesman
Critical Essay for English Individual Study"The characters in the texts deal with a shallow concept of success"Discuss in relation to Sam Mendes' American Beauty and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman."There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." (Oscar Wilde)While the American Dream is much more attainable for the average person in America today, it still fails to fulfill and satisfy the deeper needs of a people trapped in a material culture. The study of Sam Mendes' American Beauty alongside Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman exposes various similarities inherent in the values possessed by the central protagonists of the texts. Both Mendes and Miller explore the notion of the American Dream: While Mendes presents it as a shallow and un-fulfilling goal, Miller shows how such a dream in unattainable for the American Everyman in the late 1940s. One can follow the progression of this Everyman from the post-depression era to America in the present and come to the realisation that, following Freud's teachings, what has been repressed of the individual, has not been fulfilled. Both Mendes and Miller explore a similar sense of success but in the comparison of
Willy masks his ordinariness as Angela masks hers, failing to believe that he is what his son Biff tells him he is, "A dime a dozen. Both of these men have families and the potential to be happy, but in attempting to find money, they push their families aside and lose the more stable chance of being fulfilled. In comparing and Contrasting American Beauty to Death of a Salesman, it is apparent that American society is trapped in a cycle of false hopes and unattainable happiness. He relies upon the promise of the American Dream and aspires to his brother Ben, "That man was success incarnate. He assumed that While the film has a satirical nature, its comedy is dark. Mendes shows that beauty is neither, beauty is truth and real love, all of the things that are discarded when trying to obtain monetary success. " Happy, Willy's son, reflects the cyclical nature of the American Dream in American society passed from generation to generation. Walked into a jungle, and comes out, the age of twenty-one, and he's rich. America has become a country where money can buy everything, even, Lester believes, happiness. Ricky sees beauty in a plastic bag, "dancing with him," in a homeless woman and a dead bird. " Mendes and Miller show how there is life behind people that are suppressed by a pursuit of money, of success. He is an ordinary man but he lives an illusion that he is well liked and 'successful' in the American sense of the word.
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Acceptance Essays
