Jacob Way
2nd Hour
The Crucible:
Real vs. Reel Elements
In the
late 1600’s, all hell broke loose in Salem, literally. People were accused of
witchcraft and many were tortured, jailed, and hanged. These actions were known
as the Salem Witch Trials. The events that occurred in Salem in the late 1600’s
have been manipulated multiple times and have been told from many different
perspectives. Some events have been over exaggerated and dramatized. The main
two sources of the somewhat accurate events that occurred in Salem are the
popular movie, The Crucible,
and the short story, The Devil in
Salem. The real events however, differ greatly from the events that
happen in both the film and the story. Nothing major was changed, but many of
the small aspects, like people’s age and jobs, were slightly altered. The
events that were changed were very subtle, and both sources don’t alter the
events in a significant way.
Throughout both
the movie and the story, there was a constant relation to both God and the
devil, but based on the real life events, was mentioned and included a lot less.
In the movie, The Crucible,
towards the end, John Proctor, the protagonist, stood in the middle of a pond,
and proclaimed, “God is dead in Salem.” Water represents rebirth and cleanliness.
For the “good guy” to say that God was dead in Salem, was bad enough, but for
him to say it while in water, which is supposed to refresh the village, made it
even worse. He gave in to the devil and his temptations, and he suffered for
it. This scene is not portrayed in the story The Devil in Salem, nor is told to be true in the real life
plot line. This scene may have been too difficult to make on paper. The energy
and feeling we experienced in the movie, we may not have felt on paper,
therefore, was not included. Arthur Miller did a brilliant job of covering up
for that exclusion and makes you almost totally immune to the fact that it was
in the film, yet not the story. When John was locked up in the Salem prison,
Abigail comes to him with money and offers him a ride out of town to save him.
He states, “It is not on a boat that we shall meet, but in hell.” He makes a
reference to hell and the devil. It is almost a constant battle between God and
the devil, and it seems the devil wins more than God. God was the basis of
belief in the movie, and to say that John no longer thinks that God can save
him, says a lot both for John, and to Abigail.
Another aspect
that was different from the film and the real events was the involvement of
God. In the film, The Crucible,
it makes many references to God. In many instances, we see people talking about
God, questioning God, or swearing by God. Many times when a person is upset or
disgruntled with another character in the film, they often will say something
to the effect of God shunning them or the devil taking them. This concept goes
to the extent of Gods involvement and it shows how big of a role God played in
the film. In The Devil in Salem, rarely is there a conversation about or
toward God. There is not much evidence that they worshipped a god. They
probably did go by the law of a greater power, but there is no piece of
evidence that shows this to be true. There is a significant amount of God or a
higher power mentioned in the film. More than one time, John Proctor swears to
God that the girls are just pretending to see the soul of his wife, and that
his wife is innocent. Also, more than once in the story, the girls pretend to
see the soul of someone that really wasn’t there. They proceed to pray to God
for him to take away the soul that is haunting them. They exaggerate it the
most when they want to send Elizabeth Proctor to be hanged. All the girls chime
in and proclaim for God to save them and take away the soul of Elizabeth. There
are very few signs of references to God in the story, but many in the film.
Overall, the
events that occur in the sources we read about the Salem Witch Trials versus
what actually happened were quite similar, but a few key things stood out to be
different. Both Nicholas Hytner, the director of the movie, and Arthur Miller,
the author of The Devil in Salem, did a tremendous job of capturing the energy
and emotion of the trials. Many times, when movies in modern day time make a
movie on an event in history, all the scenes in the film are not one hundred
percent accurate either, but both people did an outstanding job of not getting
too inaccurate. They kept it believable and on point. Both had their own
details that stood apart from the other, yet both followed the track of the
timeline of events and didn’t fail to portray the exciting events that occurred
in Salem that fateful year.
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