The Scarlet Mistake

The Scarlet Letter is a book recognized by the general public as a staple of American literature. It is a book about love, passion, self-recognition, sin, religion, history, and much more. Unfortunately, from this masterpiece came something much, much, worse. The Scarlet Letter’s movie adaptation. Not only does this cinematic monstrosity worsen all of The Scarlet Letter’s weaknesses, turning them from mild put-offs into glaring gashes in the narrative, it also fails in every new thing it attempts to do.

One of the weaknesses of The Scarlet Letter is that the symbolism is laid on very heavily. For example, a meteor literally manifests the letter A into the sky for Dimmsdale to see. You might think that nothing could possibly be more overt than that, but the movie version of  The Scarlet Letter somehow accomplishes this. Instead of just wearing the scarlet letter in public, Hester is also followed around by a little boy who bangs drums to announce her presence. There is no reason for this other than to put extra emphasis on Hester’s shame, as if the glaring scarlet letter isn’t enough. Another instance of this is the red bird that flies around the scenes in which something sinful is occurring. Why, in a visual art form, should you have to add something to represent the sin and let the viewer know it is happening while they are currently watching it unfold? 

There is one thing more confounding than focusing and expanding on the weaknesses of text you have chosen to adapt: creating extra content that has no reason to exist. In the movie, there is a character named Mituba, an enslaved person owned by Hester Prynne. This is how her character develops in the movie: she is introduced, we watch her bathe, she dies. The only possible reason for the creators of the movie to do this is to make it more appealing to the general public, by adding both another sexual aspect to the movie and a murder to make it more exciting, but what they really did was over-stuff the narrative and make the movie considerably more awkward.  There are also events added into the movie for no reason other than this same cinematic populism. For example, Hester Prynne undergoes an attempted rape in the movie. This adds no substance to the movie, and it’s a shameless attempt to turn a horrible crime into an exciting and dramatic event. The climax of the movie is also of this nature, as it is a town-wide battle of Puritans against native Americans. Again, this adds nothing of substance to the narrative, and takes away from the actual climax of the story, which is Dimmesdale’s speech on the gallows. There are hundreds more mistakes in The Scarlet Letter’s film adaptation, but pushing the already heavy handed symbolism of the text too far and creating events and characters for the attempt at pleasing the viewer with exciting events rather than building on the narrative are the two mistakes that affect the movie in such a negative way. However, if only the issues brought up in this essay were still included in this movie and everything else was perfect, it would still be borderline unwatchable. This movie is the perfect example of Hollywood marketing’s attempts at a quick cash grab over a good story, and it’s a shame that it had to be in any way related to the beautiful text it was attempting to adapt.