Salesman
Yesterday in class it was brought up that this film could have brought the ire of the catholic church. While I'm sure the catholic church wouldn't be thrilled about the film, I'm not sure what they could really do about it. The aim was to display that these bible salesman were no different than any other salesman and the bottom line was making a profit. The salesman were visibly stressed and often depressed when they struck out on sales. If this job was purley about the joyful endeavor of selling bibles and spreading the word of god, then why were so many people incredibly stressed out? When the Badger said he sold zero bibles you would have thought someone just died by the reactions in the room. I was amazed by the tone of the meetings/briefings with all of the churchs bible salesman present. If I didn't know they were selling bibles I would swear I was watching a police chief talking tough to his beat cops. The red headed bible salesman/manager commented on getting rid of sour apples and essentially threatened his coworkers. The documentary did have some humorous parts, such as that crazy florida couple who busted out some beatles jams in the middle of a sale, but there was a lot of depressing moments as well. Regardless of Maysles "making ammends" comment I felt the film stayed objective to showing the reality of bible salesman being no different than regular salesman. Do you think this film was objective and showed the truth?
posted by ORTONRA @ 12:15 PM
2 Comments:
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I think that the question of objectivity in documentary (or any media medium) is erroneous. Everything has a scope, everything is viewed from an angle. but, i do believe it shows a true side of the commision-pay/ door to door salesmen industry of the late 60's (and beyond.) these guys weren't "with" the church as they said, the church of commerce yes, the community's church, nope. that was just a ploy to get in the door. and i doubt that their motives were to spread the good word, if that were the case i don't think it would matter what color the bibles were nor would they be interested in off-loading volumes of catholic enclyopedia and other books to accompany their purchase. they're just moving merchandise just like the guys at radio shack who set you up with a ridiculous cell phone plan when all you did was go in to buy batteries for the cell phone you already own and already had a plan for. i hope that i'm not misunderstood, i'm not meaning to degrade their business nor the sales industry. we live in a nation where that's what is intended for us to do. buy buy buy. sell sell buy. the irony that in our country we'll capitalize on another person's moral coil by selling them a book they could receive for free, when there's countries that have to smuggle books like that in, is blinding. the wolf in sheep's clothing approach, or the exploitation of good people tactics of disarming their clientele is off-putting. but with that in mind it's interesting to see where our roots are. meaning that, this film plays as an interesting precursor for contemporary american commerce. these days, we don't need people to come knock on our door to sell us out of our pants. our plethura of media influxes into our homes does it quite well. and shit, we don't even have to be wearing pants because not even the mailman comes to the door anymore. just sit on the couch, flip on the tv and listen to your mental rolodex wishlist spin. marketing and advertising is an art that's now executed with frightening precision. so evertime we hear a puff daddy song and all of the sudden want a pepsi or see a beer comercial and think "daaang, I wish that beer would make my girlfriend skinny too," we should feel for ourselves just as panhandled and extorted as we felt for the people in the film. but we don't. and probably won't.
whooooa tangent.
any way, a question i have is, how did you know that dood's hair was red?
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