A superior retelling of the Salem Village witch trials of the 1690s. It's rather stripped down by Hollywood standards because this is, after all, a television production. But, some minor fabrications aside, it's probably as accurate a history as we're likely to get.
The cast is fine. Vanessa Redgrave gives one of her best, most intense, performances. Will Lyman as the Reverend Parris, a stern, downcast, and somewhat self-pitying minister, is equally good. Patrick McGoohan is always a pleasure to watch and listen to, what with his distant smile into which one can read volumes, and his cracked voice. (You don't see much of him.) If there's a weakness in the casting, it's the children. The possessed girls all seem as if they were ripped fresh from the classrooms of the nearest Middle School.
Is it really necessary to go over this plot? Okay. It's Salem Village in 1693 and the villagers have been separated from the Separatists in England for a long time. As Redgrave, the narrator, puts it, "they were adrift." They're afraid to make a change and afraid not to. There are clannish disputes over land borders too. They are not happy campers.
Some young girls learn fortune-telling from the Reverend Parris's Caribbean slave Tituba. Admonished and starved by the preacher for toying with the devil's tricks they soon begin, one by one, to show signs of what Freud and others, two hundred years later would recognize immediately as hysteria -- epileptiform seizures, screaming, gibberish, elective mutism, anesthesias that don't conform to neural patterns, hallucinations.
Alas, the doctors of the time know nothing of collective behavior and everyone attributes the spells to witchcraft. This attribution raises the immediate question of who's doing the bewitching. The accusations fall mainly, but not exclusively, on marginalized older women and on people already disliked by the rest of the village. How convenient for everyone else. It's only when fingers are pointed at people of higher status that the hysteria dies down. That's what generally happens in these cases. The hysteria isn't put to rest by objective facts. They just overreach and then fade away.
The film isn't too harsh on the girls -- and it shouldn't be. The social context promoted belief in witchcraft and the girls' behavior was, willy nilly, rewarded entirely in accordance with the principles of operant conditioning. B. F. Skinner easily taught pigeons to walk in circles for a bit of cracker. (Later, when he got into it, he taught them to play ping pong and guide falling bombs to their targets.) The cracker was the reward.
For the girls, the rewards were more complicated -- attention was paid to them, doctors attended them, they received succor, they were cast as victims. People caressed them, wept and prayed over them. They were feared. That's a lot better than a cracker. (For a sociological perspective you can Google books by Kai Erickson and Richard Weisman.) Twenty people were executed after the kangaroo courts. One was crushed beneath a pile of stones. Yet, it would be arrogant of us to judge the community from our present enlightened perspective. Unquestionably, we are doing things right now, and interpreting them, in ways that will seem insane to whoever is left alive three hundred years from now. Mass hysteria is always with us, although the form it takes is more sophisticated. Nobody would get away with throwing an hysterical fit today, but accusations of child molestation and covert anti-Americanism will serve very well as a substitute. By the way, whatever happened to the nation-wide Satanic worship conspiracies?
This is a production of the Public Broadcasting System. It's supposed to be educational -- and it is. It's long, though, and those who need most to see it may find it boring.
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