Free How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson

you. It is worth looking.
    â€œAttention must be paid!” is the plaintive urging from Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), and what it calls for is our looking closely at this man Willy Loman, not simply for his own sake, but because he is a metaphor for changed times, and because not being noticed was already perceived as a threat of larger cultural invisibility. Willy’s wife, Linda, tells their children: “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in thepaper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog.”
    He is not just Willy Loman, he is a dying salesman in an economy where that plight will become salutary. Loman is as old-fashioned as Bob Cratchit; he was door-to-door and selling is now instant actual. Even if you’ve never seen Death of a Salesman , you likely get it from what I’ve told you. The play is a moral-social-literary tract that simply waits to be illustrated onstage—and I believe it’s an overrated classic. But his wife has this sense of attention as a kind of moral duty: Did you really look at Loman? What color were his suit and his hat, his shirt and his tie? If you were directing it anew onstage, what wardrobe decisions would you make? Did Willy seem to walk OK or could you tell his feet were folding under him from carrying suitcases of samples up hopeless staircases? Look at his eyes. Oh, you can’t quite see the eyes in the theater? Very well, perhaps we need a new medium, one that can break your heart with eyes and their sadness. In which case we’ll need an actor who can do sad-eye. Dustin Hoffman?—too old. Lee J. Cobb?—dead. Brian Dennehy?—too robust. Philip Seymour Hoffman?—he played the role onstage not long before he died. Don’t worry—the applications are lining up. Star actors are coming to audition, down-at-heel and melancholy. It’s actors’ sad-eye that has pumped pathos into attention.
    In a book called How to Watch a Movie , do you really need this instruction in keeping your eyes open? We’ll see.
    As I write, I have just come back from walking my dog in the early morning at Crissy Fields in San Francisco. That is an expanse of meadow and shore that looks out to the water,the Pacific, Alcatraz Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge. It is a walk I have done a few thousand times. Today, as on every day, I looked at the bridge with a facet of its brick color made amber or gold or pink (whatever) in the rising sun. I surveyed the water and the small waves coming in. I noticed some people I usually see on these walks, and I watched the dog. I also noticed the geese feeding on the grass; they are often there, fifty or so of the gray-black birds. I did look to see if the heron was there—he or she often is—but not today. I didn’t see a coyote, but that slinky shape is there sometimes at dawn.
    I looked at the bridge but I saw nothing—no collapse in its structure; no vehicle on fire; no one jumping off into the water. I looked at Fort Point, the tip of land beneath the southern end of the bridge, but I saw no hint of a blonde woman in a gray suit plunging into the water. So I didn’t have to consider diving in after her, and that’s a mercy if you have vertigo. When I got home, my wife asked, “Did you have a nice walk?” I said it had been grand. “What happened?” she asked. “Oh, nothing,” I replied.
    A camera is helplessly open, yet it doesn’t see things. We live in an age now of surveillance footage where a camera in a top corner of some location records any transgression against the emptiness of that space. (Do you remember Nina, the revealed betrayer, looking up at the surveillance in the last episode of the first