The Crucible: Movie Analysis

The Crucible is a movie based on a play written not long after the McCarthy era, which focuses on the chaos surrounding the small town of Salem in 1692, where numerous accusations of witchcraft plagued the town. This movie reflects upon how personal profit, community wide terror, and easy justification can ruin both the individual and the group as a whole. “Witch hunts,” as they are later called, are a series of events (often accusations) that have no logical evidence, are biased, and are often connected to a situation involving heavy amounts of fear. Witch hunts have occurred during many points throughout history, such as the McCarthy era and the Salem Witch trials, trying to find communists and witches respectively. Often witch hunts are composed of three roles: the punisher, the accuser, and the accused. While these roles on the surface may seem simple, it becomes more complicated in a witch hunt like the ones mentioned before: the accused is automatically considered guilty in the eyes of the punisher just by being accused, and the only way to escape harsh punishment is to accuse someone else of a similar crime. If the accused is not to name someone else, they are to be dealt with in an unforgiving manner. This both keeps the punisher in a secure situation, and gives the accuser temporary power over another person; power which can potentially be misused.
In the Crucible, the focus is on a small Puritan town called Salem. The first scene involved a …show more content…
In the movie, it depicts a community that breaks down and destroys itself. It shows that people are always searching for solutions, and when there are none, the search for them can potentially become quite dangerous. The In this sense, Arthur Miller has given us an emblematic story that illustrates the perils of supplying answers when the reality is that there are sometimes none to be had. It is a warning for societies like it, both past and