AMERICAN FILM CRITIQUE

American Film Critique: “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller

American Film Critique: “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller

Introduction

Arthur Miller's The Crucible is widely recognized as a thinly disguised attack on the tyranny of the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) era. The dramatic intensity of the play is also driven by the playwright's struggle to develop a fictional framework, within which he could give voice to the on-going private conflicts he experienced, between the individual conscience, personal ambition, and the self-sacrifice required by collective action. However, some fundamental questions must be raised about some of the play's discursive implications, which at times reflect the fundamentalist reduction of the women in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic discourse, to either virtuous and maternal in essence or seductive and whore-like.

Thesis Statement

Arthur Miller's The Crucible is widely recognized as a thinly disguised attack on the tyranny of the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) era.

Discussion

In Massachusetts, the town of Salem, a group of women are caught dancing in the woods at night and accused of being witches are processed. They make every effort to pass onto other people into believing their claim to the court to be moved by the devil. In The Crucible, such prototypical reductions structurally reinforce rather than challenge the ideological notion of witches as agents of sexual corruption, whilst also tending to affirm the Old Testament legend of Adam's fall from grace as a result of Eve's actions. Similarly the cause of John Proctor's entrapment is directly linked to sexual jealousy and female intrigue. The youthful Abigail seduces him with her bewitching physical attraction. Elizabeth also contributes to his entrapment indirectly because she is frigid towards him and directly in the defining moment of the courtroom scene where she lies to protect him. To complete Proctor's downfall, the servant girl Mary Warren caves in under pressure, denouncing him as a warlock. Thus Miller in attempting to focus on the political exploitation of mass hysteria, wittingly or unwittingly ends up partially confirming rather than demystifying essentialist stereotypes (Bentley, 2003).

[Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe]

Storytelling and Genre

The character of Proctor may be linked to the role generically blueprinted by the well-established conventions of self-doubt, residing in the narrative border-country between hero and anti-hero. However, the action in The Crucible falls into the same trap that had exposed Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils to ridicule. The fallible hero, the vain but politically solid priest, Grandier, is rendered a true martyr as he falls victim to sexually driven female hysteria. Sexual repression is portrayed as a major agent in the process of political oppression. In exploring this causal link, fictionally as well as historically, I found that there is the danger that writers and historians may end up ichnographically colluding with the very orthodoxies they are ostensibly attacking. In my opinion if Arthur Miller's Salem project was intended as a critical exploration of the mind set prevalent amongst the historical communities he is trying to represent, why did his own emplotment so uncritically adopt ...