The Crucible

This review is about a good film, The Crucible. But I’ll admit I’ve chosen to write it because I want to write more in these articles about a thing called acting, and in particular the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. He plays lead as John Proctor in this film, and he plays him well, but this is the first piece I’ve written of his acting, and I purposefully start here because it’s a performance not yet of his later majesty, which I dare not yet approach, just yet, in reverence.  

I’ll say this first about the film, which is that it itself is a story about acting. The substance of the film is historical, the truly terrifying phenomenon of the Salem Witch Trials that took place in Salem, Massachussets between 1692 and 1693. The story of the film is about acting because the events in Salem were, collectively, a case of mass hysteria, in which dozens became caught up in the pretension that the settlement was beset by witchcraft (they pretended to have seen this or that act of witchery, by this or that other person).

Calling the events of Salem all about acting is a delicate thing to do, because it was clearly a case of the very strange psychological phenomenon of mass hysteria, which entails pretence, but not always out-and-out performance. Undoubtedly, amongst the dozens accusing others of the heresy of witchcraft, there were those conscious in their performance of a lie; but the complexity and rarity of true historical events of mass hysteria suggest it’s not always just the performance of a sound mind but sometimes the pathology of a mind most unsound. In Salem, evidence seems to suggest both a perfidy plain and a paranoia pure were equal parts of the potion that was the witches’ brew.

The curiosity of the psychological phenomenon is not the substance of the film, but it’s necessary to identify it as the material of its dramatic action.

The film itself is based on the 1952 play of the same name by Arthur Miller. I’ll admit I’ve not read it, nor seen its stage production, but if you care for an honest opinion on the film’s failure to capture what is regarded the play’s greatness, I point you in the direction of Roger Ebert’s two-star review of the film.

I have read about the trials, though, principally by way of Stacy Schiff’s excellent non-fiction work of history, The Witches: Salem, 1692. It’s a book thoroughly researched, full of diary entries and letters and records of the weather on certain days—these, the beauties that artful renditions like The Crucible we trust to capture the spirit of, but which we can only ever properly appreciate when undramatised in the more humble hand of the historian.

The filmed story is a thing deserving of consideration in and of itself, hence this review, but to stay on history for a  moment: the events of Salem are no unburied artefact of archaeology, a trivial incident of our past. The Province of Massachussets Bay (the British colony that would become the modern state, MA) was chartered just a year before the trials began. The very first of the colonies, Virginia, was chartered not long before, in 1606, when the first of the Puritan and Seperatist zealots of Old England ferried their way across the Atlantic in what is now mythologised, in part, as an exodus to a promised land in which religion might be practiced more freely.

It's in the soul of the American myth, this unshackling voyage to a freer, purer land. But I care not to tread lightly in referencing the obvious irony that the freedom the Puritans supposedly found in this new land they put quick to use in the barbarism, in Salem, of executing twenty innocent people, each convicted of heretical escape from the imprisonment of church doctrine.

I’ve been imprecise in my description to make more precise my point; the heresy each was convicted of was no act freedom, but the craft of plain evil: witchery. The accusation behind each conviction was, in every case, patently false.

So to make my point about a history not so historical: the present myth of America as a land of freedom could not be more tightly bound up in this earliest irony: the freedom sought by the founding Puritans was soon showed itself the most impure hypocrisy, a heresy truer and uglier than that falsely cast upon a score of executed innocents.

I’ve said I wanted to talk about the film because of acting, and acting is what the film is about itself. Central and brilliant in her performance is Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams. If the hysteria of the film is some pathology, Ryder’s inspired performance is the foul contagion that makes the fever catch.

Day-Lewis acts well in the film, but the part he plays of a (mostly) honest man, is uncorrupted by the false morality all around him, and thus he is one of the only characters who does not act. I’ll have many more words to write of his genius in other films, but something has always stuck with me frim this, one of his earliest performances.

I’ll lay it out.

Proctor (Day-Lewis) is given near the film’s end the opportunity to sign a confession of witchcraft he’s been accused of by Abigail but, in fact, has not committed. Signing the confession will save him from the noose.

But here’s the thing: he first agrees and signs the document, and in doing so he acts—he lies, he pretends, that he is guilty of a heresy he hasn’t committed.

But then, in some drama, he tears the confession to pieces.

Why?

Because there is something more valuable to him than life itself, which is the preservation of his honesty. He won’t put his name to the false confession.

But these are just the plot elements that incidentally precede the moment in the film which really has stuck with me. And though it’s a moment of real pathos, that’s not why it’s stuck. It’s stuck because of this moment in Day-Lewis’ performance that emblemises, for me, his genius to come.

There is something so horrible to Proctor in putting his name to a false confession, to him it is better to die. And so these eternal lines:

‘Leave me my name!’

The words alone are simple, and, given voice by a lesser actor, I think a fair chance would have taken the form of some dramatism only nominal. But knowing the play (Day-Lewis met Arthur Miller and went on to marry his daughter), he showed, to me at least, a sensisitivity to the truth of drama—drama being not the figuration of some principle of life, but its embodiment in action.

Aristotle wrote in the Poetics:

Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions.

I doubt many modern actors have read these words of Aristotle’s. Not because of his performance in The Crucible, but from all else I’ve seen of him, I’d be very surprised if Day-Lewis hadn’t.

I’m entranced by the concept of acting, and I plan to write a lot more about it. But in his performance of this—Leave me my name!—I want to say that Day-Lewis understood of acting the essence of his craft, which is the imitation not of a man and his principles but of the tragic action that is life itself.

In his tragic enunciation of these words, Proctor gives himself up to the certainty of execution. But the brilliance of Day-Lewis’ acting consists not in the imitation of the man’s honour, but in the tragedy of life itself.

For the misfortune he suffers belongs not to a man alone but to the human condition, that is, it belongs to the action of life itself.

Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.