As with the last five movies I've watched, Salesman was selected because it's on Steve Buscemi's Top 10 list of films in The Criterion Collection. It's also been on my watchlist for several years now, though more for its reputation than for its subject matter. That's the neat thing about documentaries; how interesting they are has far less to do with their subject material and far more to do with the documentarian(s) crafting them.

For instance, I recently watched Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a doc whose subject material I've enjoyed for 28 years. Unfortunately, the doc itself is no more engaging than reading a comprehensive Wikipedia page.

I knew going into Salesman that it was from the same team that made Gimme Shelter, which I watched four years ago almost to the day. I found the film itself interesting, but it was the totality of the Criterion supplements that I consumed the next day that really "unlocked" that film for me. I kept that in mind while watching Salesman, because I frequently had the feeling that with a little bit more elaboration here and there, a lot of the film proper would engage me more than it did on its own.

I don't have access to the film on disc, though, and the only supplement that Criterion has made available for streaming is the original trailer, showing on the film's page on their website. One thing the trailer connects most directly is the hard line between supervisor Kennie Turner about eliminating sellers who detract from moral, and central figure Paul Brennan, whom we see become increasingly demoralized and demoralizing.

Salesman may be more valuable today as a historical record than it was at the time of its release. Audiences were conscious of how obsolete the culture depicted was becoming, but everyone who appears on camera seems to be oblivious. Even Brennan's cynicism is about whether he is becoming obsolete within that world, not whether that world is becoming obsolete. We see several instances of hard sells not materialize. The closest we get to awareness that there is a world outside the Mid-American Bible Company circuit is a sequence when Brennan can't find his destination and is lost driving around a "Muslim district" in Miami, where the streets all have names like Ali Baba, Sesame, and even Harem.

In an effort to gain more insight into the film, I read Toby Miller's essay, penned for Criterion's 2001 DVD release of the film. Miller notes that

Underneath this critique of failure and smallness lies a more powerful indictment of American commercial society: its petty obsessions with status, its propensity to exploit the gullible, its way of concealing exploitation behind goodwill, and above all, its snide trick of offering religion and its promise of deliverance in the afterlife, rather than improvements in everyday life.

All true, but one thing that stood out to me that Miller doesn't mention is the toxicity of the "bootstraps" work ethic when married to the "higher calling" self-image pushed on these sellers to see themselves as serving a religious purpose, that there's greater value in what they're selling beyond the obvious tangible good that makes them superior to other door-to-door sellers of mere worldly goods like vacuum cleaners.

This is all summarized early in the film's coverage of the convention meeting, where Kennie Turner lectures about how if anyone isn't making money selling Bibles, it's their own fault, just before Melbourne I. Feltman insists that the sellers, "Stop thinking in terms of Bible peddling, because I'm confident that once you realize what you are doing for others, you and your own esteem will rise so high -- not in conceit, but in humility! -- knowing that you have the privilege and the power to be of service to others."

Only Brennan seems to be invested in his identity as a Catholic, though it's hard to tell the extent to which it's something he believes in or if it's merely something he's worked into his sales routine so thoroughly. The others all have the air of ordinary hustlers who 20 years later would instead have vied for on-air jobs at QVC and the Home Shopping Network, dedicating the same level of enthusiasm for an elaborate Catholic encyclopedia set as for an earring and necklace set of cubic zirconia. Even without anyone indicating that they're considering their "privilege and power to be of service to others", we see the pressure placed on them to justify their hustling techniques, no matter how conniving, strong-armed, or outright deceitful.

Salesman is a microcosm of everything wrong with sanctified (and sanctimonious) hustling. This entire industry was built around pushing on churchgoers posh books they didn't even need at prices they couldn't afford by sellers whose status as either a world bettering agent of God or a failure with only himself to blame determined by whether or not those sales were made. Viewing the film in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown and the bitter lessons we're collectively still processing makes Salesman all the more surreal. It's laughably naive and disgustingly cynical all at once.

As a film to be viewed, Salesman is generally interesting and moderately entertaining. As a conversation-starter, though, it's everything its makers could have hoped it might become. Often when I get around to seeing a prolific film, there's generally more a sense of satisfaction from having chipped away at my list of shame and now being able to catch references to that film. Salesman is in a smaller subset, though, of films that I now want to find others who have seen so I can discuss it with them.

Salesman entered my Flickchart at #560/1850