The Universality of Vigilance, Discernment, and Dissent: Analysis of 'The Crucible' and 'Land and Freedom' Sapfira Milman 12th Grade

Political theocracy is an inherently oppressive, autocratic system, rendering individuals ultimately powerless. A composer’s political and personal representation subjectively constructs an audience’s conceptual and contemporary opinion through intertextual tension and this respective reality. Arthur Miller’s historic diatribe “The Crucible”, presents disruption and instability as the catalyst for theocratic power and communal dissent. Similarly, Ken Loach’s politically circumstantial, Spanish civil war film, “Land and Freedom”, exemplifies the integral attainment of autonomy against political autocracy. Subsequently, both authorial contexts determine the responder that an individual, without vigilance and dissension, is ultimately powerless against hegemony and systematic rule.

Power and political causation under havoc and hysteria is evinced in both texts through authorial representation of incisive, individual dissent against communal conformity. Arthur Miller, having been a subject to despotic communist chastisement, contextually censures the political ideology of McCarthyism. The religious echelon of power and manipulation is thematically structured in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692, through “The Crucible”, paving for Miller’s...