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.

摘要

亚瑟·米勒（Arthur Miller）的《推销员之死》（Death of a Salesman，1949）是美国电影中适应性和适应性最强的戏剧之一，在电影，电视和其他流行文化产品中产生了大量拨款。通过适应新的社会文化环境，推销员的概念贯穿了几代人和不同文化。本文研究了Asghar Farhadi的《推销员》中的适应性和专有性特征（2016），作为一种电影话语，将推销员模因延伸并本土化到当代伊朗。它探讨了推销员模因的适应性，该模因在二十一世纪初期的伊朗以各种化身再现，并特别强调性别政治和人际关系破裂。文章以理查德·道金斯（Richard Dawkins）和琳达·哈钦（Linda Hutcheon）的“模因”为理论推论，认为这种适应性赋予推销员跨越历史，文化和社会的能力，这是人类易失性和对社会神话的迷恋的普遍标志。