Psychology – HystericallyBored

2024-01-07

Profound Contrived Authencity: Little Bird (the MiniSeries)

Together, they reached for what Moscovitch calls “profound authenticity,” and created an opportunity for narrative activism: the idea that victims can help heal their trauma and change attitudes by telling their stories. Globe & Mail

I don’t mind if someone wants to make a film or mini-series that “will help heal trauma and change attitudes”. Just don’t put it on my playlist.

Changing attitudes is not the mission of real art. Real art is about expression, revelation, insight, and beauty. The minute you say, “oh, and we want people to adopt our political views”, you have sold out the aesthetic dimension to the social dimension. To make a film to tell people what to think about the way indigenous people were treated in Canada is to make a bad film. To make a film about the way indigenous people were treated in Canada, just make a good film. And if you are authentic about it, tell us what you know about the subject: not what you want us to think. And be honest: don’t caricature or exaggerate or make things up just to drive your point home. Watch a film like “Come Sunday” which makes its point without dumbing down the issues.

So when my wife asked me to find the series “Little Bird” for her to watch, I checked it out. I thought, it might be good. I might want to watch it. I looked for reviews on line and found the “review” (it’s not a review: it’s a press release disguised as news) linked above.

I suspect this series is about making liberal viewers feel great about themselves: I watched a sad story about injustice and felt bad for the victims for I am a good person.

I watched the first ten minutes. As I feared, it starts by showing the girls who were abducted by the Canadian Child Family Services and RCMP living in nearly idyllic conditions with their happy affectionate parents. Even worse: there’s that jerky hand-held camera work that immediately conveys “oh look how authentic we are we’re pretending we’re actually filming the real thing which wouldn’t be possible if we had a tripod” vibe.

I am immediately repulsed by most films that show parents being incredibly tolerant and affectionate and patient and loving with their kids as a setup for imminent tragedy or threat. Nobody interacts with their children the way these parents do. It’s manipulative and dishonest. It is the hallmark of bad direction. And that is how “Little Bird” starts.

In “Little Bird,” Bezhig is driven by her newly emerging repressed memories. Variety

Oh no. Seriously? We’ve been through this movie before and it did not turn out well. Not at all. Not this time either.

Podemski: We looked at all the various ways in which trauma presents itself. Especially when it has been repressed for many years . We worked with our two story advisors, Nakuset and Raven Sinclair, who supported us in shaping the way in which our lead character, Esther, experienced PTSD through intrusive memory. We were able to express this authentically through the use of acoustic and visual layers which I think played very authentically throughout the story.

Okay, firstly, it’s not the trauma that has been repressed but the memory of it. And memories are not repressed. That is a fake trope from the 1980’s that has pretty well lost all credibility. And the method by which they decided to tell the story of the “repressed” memories sounds more like therapy than art. But please don’t try to claim anything like “authenticity” when you are clearly constructing a narrative that projects a political and social idea rather than any particular real human experience.

A CBC article on the movie contains this flag:

WARNING: This story contains distressing details

Oh please fuck off with your trigger warnings. This is bullshit. What kind of news is “distressing”? A man falsely accused of rape while feminists claim that women never lie about sexual assault? Al Franken resigning his seat in the Senate over ridiculously trivial allegations of inappropriate behavior? Tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums? Music by Neil Diamond? Senile white men running the U.S. government? Prescription drugs developed at publicly-funded universities which cost pennies to manufacture selling for $30,000 a pop?

2023-02-27

Oh My God! We’re Getting More Anxious

Ross Douthat of the New York Times— the token conservative commentator on the opinion page– accepts the results of a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that show that teenagers today– especially–omygawd! girls– are more anxious, more depressed, and more unhappy than ever before.

By “social liberalism” I don’t mean the progressivism that took off in the Trump era — antiracism and diversity-equity-inclusion and #MeToo. I mean the more individualistic liberalism that emerged in the 1960s and experienced a second takeoff across the first decade of the 2000s. Its defining features were rapid secularization (the decline of Christian identification accelerated from the 1990s onward) and increasing social and sexual permissiveness — extending beyond support for same-sex marriage to beliefs about premarital sex, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, marijuana use and more.

And it’s all because of the liberals! Douthat doesn’t think gun violence should depress anyone, or the cut-throat competitive nature of the U.S. economy, or the fear of being bankrupted by medical expenses, or the fact that a sexual predator and psychopath was elected president in 2016. Oh no. It’s the widespread availability of sex, gay or hetero, as a woman or a man or neither, and, of course, drug use. Have we heard this before?

I have two points. First of all, we hear about these studies all the time– and I mean ALL the time. Sociologists and social scientists just love asking teenagers if they are happy. Now, imagine for a moment you are a teenager. And life is not great, but it’s not all bad either. You’re kind of getting through it. You have some hopes and dreams and know you might have to work hard to achieve them. You have friends. Then someone comes along and asks you if you are happy or depressed or anxious. They ask you again an hour later. They ask you again the next day, and the next, and the next. You read articles in the New York Times or see pieces on CNN that tell you that a big problem today is that teenagers are not very happy. You start to wonder. Maybe I am unhappy. Maybe I’m depressed.

I don’t deny that it might be true. What I question is the assumption that these numbers represent a net change from previous eras, like the 1940’s, the 1950’s, and 1960’s. How would we know? It’s a great question to thoughtfully ask yourself: how would we know?

Nobody studied issues like this in the same comprehensive, systematic way in the 1950’s as we do now. We didn’t have the internet, obviously, or social media, and even television and radio was completely different than they are today. We didn’t have as many books or magazines or records or films. We didn’t have as many family photographs or recordings, let alone video. We had numerous wars around the world, and the U.S. itself was embroiled in Korea, and about to get embroiled in Viet Nam.

We had a lot of obvious racism, whites only schools, whites only restaurants and drinking fountains. We had a lot of drunk driving and date-rape, both of which now are severely punished, but were not back then. In fact, the consensus on rape seemed to be to not report it at all. We had a lot of teen pregnancy, “shotgun” weddings, and groping and petting. We had a society that blindly worshipped the military and the police. (It is no coincidence that Douthat, a conservative, would harken back to an era of such “stellar” values even if he doesn’t make explicit those particular values).

I suspect that a big part of our perception of the 1950’s has been shaped by unrealistic media portrayals, most emblematically, in “Happy Days” and the movie “American Graffiti”. Have a look at “The Last Picture Show”, “Diner”, “Rebel Without a Cause”, or “Badlands” for a corrective.

Secondly, Douthat clearly implies that enthusiastic membership in a church is a viable corrective. If only we had a study that showed that teenagers who are active members of churches are happier, less depressed and less anxious, and happier, than those who are not. We have no such study.

What studies we do have that compare church-going folk with non-church-going folk seems to show that we are all largely the same, holy or profane, saved or damned. We all indulge in porn. We all cheat and lie. (But only one side votes for Trump and loves guns and only one side believes you may have been born to the wrong gender and the world is warming.)

Even for Douthat, this column is unusually contrived in his desperation to find some way to blame liberals and progressives for the sad state of America. Like all conservatives, he knows that his side, the side of regressive, low tax, deregulated economies, benefits by promoting a sense that we are on the brink of catastrophe. Nothing new. We’ve been on this brink according to the Douthats of the world since Elvis first gyrated his hips.

2023-01-04

The Captive Psychiatrist

The great challenge of American film and literature is this: the protagonist must disclose powerful personal stories of past abuse or crushing disappointments or betrayals to win the audience’s sympathy (and excuse his addictions, infidelities, and other bad behavior) but telling all this to the object of his or her affections would come off as self-pitying. The only plausible venue for this type of disclosure is the therapist’s couch. But in the popular imagination, only a weak effeminate pussy would voluntarily become so vulnerable as to disclose such details, so it must be dramatized as coerced. Somehow, we must create a dramatic situation in which the protagonist can simultaneously disclose his vulnerabilities and mock the inquisitorial mind.

Here’s the problem, and it’s not a small one: no psychiatrist or psychologist worth his salt would waste a minute of time on a patient that doesn’t want to cooperate. It is a bedrock principle of psychotherapy that you can’t provide therapy to someone against his will.

And what therapist would even want to try?

But what if it’s a condition of probation, or shared custody of the children, or a job? The problem does not change. If a patient behaved the way Will Hunting behaves in “Good Will Hunting”, the therapist would almost certainly wish him luck in future endeavors and tell him he has willfully thrown away his probation or the job or the custody arrangement or what have you.

And so we have “A Clockwork Orange”, “Good Will Hunting” and “Shawshank Redemption” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Gangs of New York”, “Antwone Fisher”, and perhaps the worst of all, “Reign Over Me” (in which Liv Tyler played the psychiatrist– seriously) and so on. It’s become an extremely tiresome trope, a sure indicator that a film writer has run out of ideas or is concerned that his audience is so stupid they won’t get the point of the story.

(An additional trope in many of these films is the therapist who cares so much that he or she chases down the reluctant patient and begs them to receive therapy. Seriously. The audience is invited to project themselves into a character so lovable that professional psychiatrist and psychologist will abandon personal schedules and work obligations in order to track them down and drag them into their healing arms.)

“The Sopranos” toys with the issue and frequently straddles the line. Tony has a real problem: panic attacks. He stops seeing Dr. Melfi for a while but the panic attacks resume. He tries a different psychiatrist, who proves ineffectual. He returns to Dr. Melfi on just barely believable terms, though he frequently blurts out something like, “I’ve had enough of this crap”. The audience projects itself into a character who thinks he’s smarter than a psychiatrist.

What’s really going on in these scenes is the writer is trying to show that he is smarter than a psychologist or psychiatrist.

The most contemptible examples of this are those mildly enlightened films that pretend to have a real theme, an idea, an enlightened perspective on something, like “Reign Over Me” and “Good Will Hunting”. “Good Will Hunting” lays the groundwork for the millions of Trump followers who are convinced that those educated elites are really no smarter than the average janitor (played by the charismatic Matt Damon). But it would not be an asset to the character to have Will admit to how much harm he has suffered from his traumatic upbringing unless he is compelled to admit it; thus, the kludge plot mechanism of having his probation depend on attending therapy sessions with the utterly charming and sexy Robin Williams– who, nevertheless, threatens to kill him at their first session after Will makes light of Dr. Maguire’s wife. (And the probation? Another tired trope: Will was involved in a gang fight. Because he is a bad boy? Oh no– one of the gang members used to abuse Will when he was a child. Hollywood loves bad boys but not if they’re really bad, just as they love titillation, but not real, honest sex.)

I used to work in a children’s mental health centre. I can tell you that almost none of the psychiatrists or psychologists in these films approach believability. Dr. Melfi in “The Sopranos” is particularly inept. Now, I’m not saying that psychiatrists or psychologists can actually be smart and effective. But they do have extensive training and they will have some idea of how they are going to approach the task at hand, even if their approach is contrived or transparent or just plain ridiculous. Dr. Maguire in “Good Will Hunting” is supposed to win our respect by showing how tough he is when Will mocks his (deceased, unknown to Will) wife.

It’s not admirable: it’s downright stupid.

2022-04-11

The Uncanny Absurdity of the Uncanny Valley

The problem with programming a machine to feel for others is, of course, that the machine might start to develop other feelings, ones unproductive to her work. But Klara’s evolving emotions are crucial to our understanding of the novel as a technology of interiority. The reader experiences Klara’s care for Josie through Klara’s empathetic narration, in which her desire to see Josie flourish and grow fails to completely suppress Klara’s desires. [From a review by Jane Hu in the New York Review of Books. 2021-11-04]

I am completely baffled that a Nobel Prize winning author, Kazuo Ishiguro, would be responsible for such rubbish, or that a reviewer in the New York Review of Books would countenance such an observation.

I thought, perhaps Klara is a biological creation, as the replicants in “Blade Runner” may be (it’s not completely clear that they are). When Roy Batty demands “more life”, he is expressing a desire, a want, an aspiration, which no machine can ever have. That might be intriguing, but, of course, that essentially makes an argument for slavery.

But no: Klara is a robot. She is at times relegated to a closet. In the end, when Josie goes off to college, she is sent to a dump.

It appears that Ishiguro wants it both ways, in which case, he has failed as a novelist (I haven’t read the book– so I’ll come back to that when I do). If, inevitably, humans become aware (as they are in the book) of the fact that robots have feelings, they won’t, presumably, leave them in the closet. I leave open one possibility: Ishiguro has imagined a new kind of relationship that the humans experience with their robots that blurs the distinction between mechanical and emotional. But that does not seem likely given that the characters in “Klara and the Sun” sincerely believe that Klara does have feelings and treat her accordingly. (It is perceived as an act of kindness when one of Josie’s friends prevents another of her friends from tossing Klara into the air to see if she can land on her feet.) On the other hand, they put her in the closet. Which is it?

Yes, many smart people really believe that it is possible for a robot to have feelings. The theoretical framework for this concept rests on the perverse idea that human consciousness is formed by a quasi-mechanical process that takes place in dense particles. If you have enough dense particles, eventually a “consciousness” can develop. This fundamental to the belief in AI.

AI, my friends, is a myth. Come back to me in 20 or 50 years and you will see I am right.

I have argued that this process cannot possibly produce a being with an aspiration or desire or emotion or any other biological characteristic. Where does it come from? How can you add 1 plus 1 and get 5? There is no component of feeling or consciousness in any of the raw elements of a machine. No matter how many 1’s and 0’s are in a computer brain, they cannot produce a 2: only a sequence of 1’s and 0’s. Biological cells are not mechanical: they aspire to eat, to consume, to fuck, to absorb, to kill. A robot only ever does what it is programmed to do“. Klara can never be sad about losing her relationship to Josie because she could never have been glad to have it in the first place, and Ishiguro’s concept is absurd and Jane Hu’s review is a hollow, empty shell of misconceived rubble.

In “Never Let Me Go” the Klara’s are biological creations who exist only to give up their organs to other humans. It’s a strange, alien concept (to us at the moment, in the civilized part of the “civilized” part of the world) which he made believable and sad. I have no problem believing that such a circumstance could, at least theoretically, exist.

There is no way, theoretical or otherwise, a robot with feelings will ever exist. Whatever we get– and I’m sure we’ll get it, given our surrender to every commercialization of every device ever– will be something mimics feelings which many stupid people will believe are just as real as their own.

Fuck them. This is a dangerous course of intellectual development which, if it happens, will have dire consequences.

2022-04-112022-04-12

The Myth of Sybil

The story of “Sybil”, the woman with 16 different “personalities”, is a myth, pure and simple.

(NPR on one of the books that has debunked it.)

One website, defending Sybil, refers to “Michelle Remembers”–without comment–as a reference to the influence of “Sybil”. That is astonishing. “Michelle Remembers” is one of the most discredited books of the 1980’s.

First of all, you do need to know what in no other developed country is the concept of a “multiple-personality” widely accepted. Only in America, and only in a certain part of America.

As is well known, Sybil herself acknowledge the hoax in a letter to Schreiber:

She got the very, very strong impression when she went in and brought this letter of recantation to Dr. Wilbur that if she didn’t go with the program she was not going to have Dr. Wilbur anymore,” Nathan says. “Dr. Wilbur was giving her 14 to 18 hours of therapy a week. Dr. Wilbur was coming to her house and eating with her, giving her clothes, paying her rent … so, how could you give up Dr. Wilbur?

Is this really difficult to see? Look at the culture around MPD? Look at who revels in it, thrives in the lurid stories attached to it?

Or look at hypnotism:

HS: Yes. She was very hypnotizable, what I call a “grade five.” On a zero to five scale we can classify most levels of hypnotizability. The top group—the hypnotic virtuosos—are about 5 percent of the population and they show extra phenomena that we don’t ordinarily see even in good hypnotic subjects. For example, they have the ability to regress in time and they will report past experiences in the present tense. It is as if they “ablate,” or remove from memory, the period of time from, say, their fourth birthday to the present time, and you have an expression of what was there up until the age of four. For most people, to get them to a fixed point in time, we use something that has an affect potential. You can’t just say, “I want you to go back to January 14, 1916″—that doesn’t mean anything. You will say to the subject: “You are getting younger and younger. You are now nineteen, eighteen, seventeen years old, twelve years old, seven years old,” and then: “This is your fourth birthday.” NY Review of Books

If this impresses you, I have some bitcoin I want to sell.

Let’s put it this way: if you want to accept what Dr. Spiegel says about hypnotism at face value, it would be possible, for example, to go back in time to when you lost your keys and discover where you lost them. In fairness, I believe Dr. Spiegel implies that this is not possible.

It is not possible, unfortunately, and neither is it possible to go back in memory to “a fixed point of time” (see Dr. Spiegel covering his tracks?). You are always only going back to a memory you already have, or one that you have constructed, if you are suggestible, and I would suggest that the best patients for hypnosis– or any kind of psychiatry– are very suggestible.

That said, even Dr. Spiegel didn’t buy Sybil’s multiple personalities and he made clear why Dr. Wilbur and Schreiber did (and why they stopped speaking to him):

Schreiber then got in a huff. She was sitting right in that chair there, and she said, “But if we don’t call it a multiple personality, we don’t have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!”

Exactly. The publishers knew what gets you on Phil Donahue and 20/20 and maybe even 60 Minutes, and they knew that that is what sells books and makes movies.

2022-03-17

Watch Me Risk My Life

I am ambivalent about films and stories about men and women who unnecessarily risk their lives, on mountains, in cars, under water– for… well, that’s the question. For what?

Almost no documentary or book about these individuals would dare suggest that these people are selfish, self-centred individuals interested primarily in self-promotion and ego gratification. (I make an exception for “Into Thin Air”, the amazing book by Jon Krakauer which considers the issue at some length.) Think about why that’s so. Why doesn’t “The Last Mountain”, for example, seriously consider the issue?

Could that be because the viewer, who adores these stories, would feel implicated? I get pleasure by watching other people put themselves in grave peril at the expense, sometimes, of their lives? Could it be because the writers (often the daredevils themselves) or film-makers (ditto) really want you to believe they are doing something important and admirable? Think of how often they claim there is some higher purpose to their activities: to learn more about sharks, to extend human endurance and achievement, to fulfill personal goals?

2022-02-25

Pre-School

According to a study in Tennessee, children from poor backgrounds offered a pre-school program (for 4-year olds) did worse in several important categories by Grade 6.

This is not supposed to be true. It is counter to other studies which generally showed that children do better — they graduate high school and have fewer disciplinary issues– if they have an extra year of school at about age 4. For as long as I can remember, that has been the accepted wisdom on pre-school. But this study flatly contradicts those assumptions.

If it survives further analysis and assessment, it will have to be taken into account regardless of the politics of government-funding for pre-school.

2022-02-10

Justin Alexander’s Bid for Authenticity

In the first post on his travel blog, Adventures of Justin, he wrote: “I am running from a life that isn’t authentic…I’m running away from monotony and towards novelty; towards wonder, awe, and the things that make me feel vibrantly alive.” Outside Online

I am always deeply impressed and disturbed by men like Justin Alexander who embark on quests for “authenticity”, and always disappointed in their inability to relate the “authentic” to me in comprehensible English.

They try, and they are often quite eloquent, but not about what matters most. This is partly because what matters to them is something that is very hard to describe or explain. But, like Christopher McCandless, they often scrap and scrape and flourish phrases and ideas and images before you without connecting all the dots. McCandless ended up dying, stupidly, alone, in an abandoned bus in Alaska, just a short trek from help because he didn’t really know the terrain or the challenges of living in the wild. He thought he was on to some incredibly valuable insight into the purpose of life but didn’t even take good hiking boots with him (a truck-driver who gave him a ride gave him his boots, out of pity).

He starved to death.

Countless others have died on mountains or in obscure, remote regions. Justin Alexander is another. No one knows what happened to him.

There’s not point pitying these men: they took responsibility for themselves and made choices that mattered to them and probably accepted that they might pay a price for it. In a way, I do admire them, because they are largely right about the predictability and mediocrity of life in the modern suburbs.

The one thing these people don’t seem to really consider is that, just as they might have some secret insight that sets them apart from mainstream society, mainstream society might have some secret insight that keeps them from wandering into the bush or the wild mountains and starving to death.

And yet some of them might have lives that are rich and rewarding and meaningful.

2019-11-27

Be Careful Little Eyes What you See

In the category of “you couldn’t make this stuff up” is the story about a North Carolina police department that arrested a 17-year-old boy for having nude pictures of himself on his cell phone.

This is in a country in which 3/4 of the population will admit they don’t know what the 3 branches of government are. They certainly don’t know what a marginal tax rate is. And they will never know what common sense really is; they will think they have it, but they will be wrong. Sense is anything but common in America. And they will never, ever be able to independently assess the question of what is terrible about a teenager having nude pictures of himself on his smart phone. You just have to say “nude”, and “pictures”, and “teenager”, they will howl with outrage.

We live in a world in which we can be surrounded by morons who say, “but that’s what the law says” or “it may seem strange, but that’s what the law says”, or “we are complete morons so we only do what the law says”.

Are you telling me there would have been serious consequences for a sergeant or a detective who said, “I don’t care what the law says, no, we are not going to prosecute a teenager for taking pictures of himself”?

A young mother in Utah who took her shirt off in front of her family has been charged with lewdness. Her husband took his shirt off too, but he is not being prosecuted.

Of course not.

That would be stupid.

Do you have a mirror in your bathroom?

2019-09-13

The #Metoo Crucible

“Stratford Festival decided to put on a sure-fire crowd-pleaser this year: “The Crucible”, one of the greatest, and certainly the most powerful, American drama.

“The Crucible” is about a group of young girls in a small town in Massachusetts in the 1690’s who are caught dancing naked in a woods. Think about the cultural climate– puritanical New England. The upstanding leaders of the devout community are beyond horrified, and this is immediately apparent to the girls so they connive to persuade the town elders that they were, in fact, bewitched. Their deception is helped by a particular girl who seems to be having fits and hysterics and claims to see apparitions.

Who bewitched them?

They begin to name names, including upstanding members of the community.

One of the girls, named Abigail, was a handmaid to a couple, John and Elizabeth Proctor. John had an affair with her, which Elizabeth knows about. John and Elizabeth reconciled and evicted Abigail but are terrified that the community will find out about the affair and disgrace John.

Abigail is convinced that John really loves her. What were the girls doing in the woods? Abigail had persuaded Tituba, a black slave, to show them how to cast spells, so she could curse Elizabeth Proctor and win John back. With the community in hysterics, and her own position in the community under threat, she seizes the opportunity to accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft.

When some in the community become suspicious of the girls’ motives, they too are named. Eventually, 20 citizens are hanged, and one is “pressed” to death because he refused to enter a plea. Yes, this really happened– the historical record is unmistakable.

Years later, the magistrates who condemned them would– astonishingly– come to the realization that they had been in error and issue an apology. How often does that happen?

Arthur Miller wrote the play in 1952 and he clearly intended to draw a parallel between the Salem witch-hunts and the McCarthy communist witch-hunt that was taking place at that moment, and which had snared Miller himself. Miller was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and admitted that he had been a communist at one time in his life. That was not enough for them. They demanded that he identify fellow-travelers. He refused and was black-listed.

In the play, as in real life, a man named Giles Corey discovered that some of the accusers stood to benefit by acquiring the land of the accused (if convicted of witchcraft, a citizen’s possessions were forfeit). He is then accused of witchcraft himself. He refuses to plea because doing so would result in a conviction and the land he hoped to pass on to his sons would be forfeit. He is sentenced to be “pressed”: placed under a board with the weight on it increased gradually with rocks. He dies under the torment, mocking his accusers.

Do you see a problem with this play? I don’t see a problem. The play is historically accurate. More importantly, it is psychologically accurate: I find the portrait of a community that is fearful and cowardly and not really virtuous in the sense that they all believe it of themselves to be quite convincing even today. (Think of how we symbolically recycle, and conserve, and care for the environment, while doing absolutely nothing that will have any real impact on global warming. Think of how women go on national television to tell the world how ashamed they are of having been sexually assaulted.)

But the #metoo movement saw a big problem. You see, a credo of the #metoo movement is that girls are ALWAYS to be believed. They never lie about abuse or rape or assault, even if it is assault by the devil himself, as in the case of Salem. (I am not exaggerating: I heard three women on the CBC discussing the issue and they all insisted that women never lie about abuse and there is never any “collateral damage” (ie. innocent men accused). Do women ever lie about rape? Judge for yourself.

And the play makes it clear that the girls are sly, conniving, convincing liars, and that they are responsible the deaths of 20 innocent victims.

So the #metoo movement demands an adjustment. And the Stratford Festival Theatre made it. Here is their description of the play from their website:

His (John Proctor’s) refusal to take responsibility for his actions leads to an epidemic of fear and suspicion that engulfs the guilty and the innocent alike. Inspired by historical events but no less pertinent to our own times, this American classic stands as a timeless tragedy of abusive behaviour and its all-consuming consequences.

This is worse than a distortion of the play. It is an obscenely malicious reversal of it’s meaning. It is all John Proctor’s fault. The girls are innocent. Abigail was forced to lie because she was oppressed by the patriarchy. They were justified in causing 19 innocent individuals to be hanged to death.

Abigail didn’t enjoy seeing those people hanged. Not at all.

Or maybe the girls were telling the truth after all: maybe there really were witches.

No young woman or girl would ever lie about that.