06.03.1997

Anti-communist witch hunts continue

Lee-Anne Bates reviews Arthur Miller's The crucible (directed by Nicholas Hytner)

Arthur Miller’s play comes to the screen with all the power of the original. Miller himself wrote the screenplay which is very faithful to the stage version, apart from a few subtle omissions which slightly shift the unfolding dialogue.

The film version however almost inevitably loses some of the intensity of the play first performed on Broadway in 1953. Firstly in being transferred to the big screen the intimacy of the theatre is somewhat lost. Though massive proscenium arch theatres dominate today, undoubtedly the best performance of this play I have seen was performed in promenade with the audience enveloped in the pulse of the action and thus to an extent caught themselves in the emotions displayed.

It is noticeable that the characters in the film version appear much more as historical studies.

Of course much of the intensity is also lost by the sheer timing of the film. It has aroused no controversy and has been received enthusiastically though simply as a welcome revival of one of Miller’s greatest plays. It was less well received in 1953. At that time Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times wrote that Miller “has had more trouble with this one, perhaps because he is too conscious of its implications. The literary style is cruder.” Eric Bentley, one of America’s most popular academic critics, slated the play as a melodrama and complained that the very rationale of the play was flawed, since witchcraft was a chimera, whereas communism was not.

The play, though set in the village of Salem in the 17th century, is a commentary on the anti-communist witch hunt that ripped through the heart of America in the 1950s. The play was staged while the hunt went on. Anti-communist investigations began in the l 930’s - the beginning of the Great Depression, as well as a wave of radical unionism, when the antecedents of the committees that swept the country were chaired by Hamilton Fish. The committee which tried the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was in exile in America from Nazi Germany, was established in 1938. Committees such as the Senate Internal Security Sub-committee and others in various states, such as the Rapp-Coudert Committee in New York, followed its example.

Their activity subsided during World War II, emerging as a more formidable and terrifying power under Senator McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, on which Richard Nixon also served. The show trials began with the maximum of publicity by hitting the entertainment and particularly the film industry. Norms of natural justice were abandoned as those arbitrarily fingered had to prove their innocence under the weight of prosecution hearsay, suspicion and concentrated power. Those who invoked the First Amendment of the Constitution were indicted for contempt of court and sent to jail.

Today no such House exists in society. The struggle between god and the devil, between the US and the USSR, between workers and bosses does not cleave society. This makes the film a safe entertainment commodity, its script relatively intact. The bourgeoisie has no problem with this and even makes a virtue out of sanitising radical works of art once the threat of radicalism itself has gone. However, this does not destroy their content. As with all works of art which unveil the dynamics of society, that content can and must be reclaimed for the revolutionary movement.

Thus this film with all its ambiguities has still important lessons for us today. All sorts of parallels have been drawn by the bourgeois media about religious fundamentalism and scapegoating in society, but the strongest image which still emerges from the play is the powerful grip of anti-communism. We may not be in 50s America any more, but the underlying trend of anti-communism has not disappeared and in fact reappears, even in our own movement, as communism becomes a word to be written out of history and communists witch hunted still, just as they were in the Labour Party. Today’s scapegoats in society at large may be the unemployed, immigrants or single mothers, but once the working class is organised with its own vision of the future we can have no doubt that it will become once again ‘the enemy within’.

The common analogy drawn about The crucible is one of mass hysteria, of football crowds and concerts, of how irrational emotion can spread and take over whole communities. What is clear from the film is that the events in Salem in 1692 and McCarthyism were actually the work of cold calculation, of vengeance, fear and power. The trial undoubtedly spirals out of control, but it is fuelled from above by the need to maintain its authority and from below by a cowered instinct for individual survival.

Arthur Miller notes in his introduction that “The witch hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom” (A Miller The crucible New York 1983, p16). Salem, set in a threatening environment peopled by Indian tribes, had been built on the authority of fear. The threat of unknown evil forces kept the village bowed in hard work and conformity. Yet, as the fear began to fall away, so did the authority of the church and village committee as greater freedoms began to be looked for.

Underlying themes of human love, knowledge and morality run quietly through the whole play, particularly in the relationship between John and Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail, themes which are somewhat overshadowed in the film’s predilection for big crowd scenes and panoramic views. There is no let-up in the tension in this play, whether there are two or 20 on stage, but the stiller and more intimate moments of tension tend to disappear in the pace and business of the film.

The film loses some of the mystery and tension and sheer contingency of the witch hunt in the opening scene. Here we see Tituba, the Barbadian slave, dancing and conjuring spirits with the girls of the village in the wood. Perhaps this was included to dispel any such banal comments as those of Eric Bentley in 1953. The conjuring of spirits did happen, and for this village dancing and nudity were just as much the work of the devil as drinking blood and casting spells.

Accusations of witchcraft begin to grow, as Reverend Parris tells of stumbling on the girls dancing in the wood. In the play these stories emerge piece by piece by word of mouth, and by word of mouth grow and develop. Reverend John Hale, a specialist in the ‘invisible world’ is sent for before Parris himself knows of the conjuring of spirits. All the audience knows is that his child is ill and the doctor cannot find the cause.

With the accusations of witchcraft the divisions in the village, the power struggles, the battles over land, the conflict between Parris’s church and those that find themselves unable to worship his alien god and look to a more human faith, all these erupt onto stage.

A hunted and terrified Tituba relents to the witch hunters and points at others to save herself. Led by the driven and calculating Abigail, the girls follow her example, immediately swelling the ranks of both hunters and accused.

But the witch hunt, as it begins and develops, has other motives. Parris brings in the witch hunters to save his direct authority over the church. The finger is pointed in petty vengeance and in a grab for land. The village is divided between the accusers and the accused, as quarrels and jealousies are settled by pointing the finger of witchcraft. This is not a hysteria which embraces the whole community, but the calculation of a few who invest themselves with the power of god and draw others - the most cowardly, bitter-minded and greedy of the community - into their net. John Proctor asks,

“Are the accusers always holy now?” As deputy-governor Danforth says,

“A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it: there be no road between. This is a sharp time now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky after-noon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”

These are people looking to rid their village of all those who challenge its norms and its very authority. But perhaps the true horror is how the silent minority allows the tragedy to unfold. Those who cannot bring themselves to actually join the witch hunt to save their own skins, those who try to hide, realise too late the scale of the nightmare that they have allowed to unfold. Even the most virtuous and respected are not safe, as by the time a tiny minority come to challenge the court Rebecca Nurse and Elizabeth Proctor lie in the cells.

But no evidence has been needed to convict a witch and no evidence can be accepted to overturn the court. “The entire contention of the state in these trials is that the voice of heaven is speaking through the children,” says Danforth. The court is temporarily shaken when Mary Warren seems to challenge this, but now it has gone too far - the court and Parris’s authority could not be allowed to collapse. By the end of the film, as Reverend Hale pleads with John Proctor to sign a confession, the audience cannot believe that Parris and indeed Danforth any longer have any belief in what they are doing. But having begun the process, they have to believe. Born out of hatred, this has become a mission of god in their eyes. The more it is brought into question, the more vigorously it must be protected.

Having colluded with Reverend Parris in an honest belief that it is witches, not human conflict, that is causing the strife in the village, having given the girls the ammunition they need to play god, not even Reverend Hale can stop the process. The village is on the edge of rebellion, but it is too late. The attempt to force a confession from John Proctor is an attempt to save the court’s authority: “Unconfessed and claiming innocence, doubts are multiplied. Many honest people will weep for them.” John Proctor can save his life by confessing to consorting with the devil. This is the most tortured scene in the play, as Proctor is aware that by confessing he gives the court its authority and “it is hard to give a lie to dogs”. Yet to die as a saint with Rebecca Nurse would be a lie to himself, as he struggles to find what is good in an inhuman and uncompromising community.

Nineteen people were hanged and many more lay in the cells, refusing to confess, before Parris was finally voted from office.

Lee-Anne Bates