What you don't know won't hurt you, what you don't show will kill you

This past holiday weekend I spent 2 hours watching one of the best animated feature films of all time, Beauty and the Beast. I've loved this movie for my whole life but after reading The Crucible, I saw one specific scene in a new light. When Belle returns from the Beast's castle to help her ailing father, a mob comes to their house to take her father to the "Asylum de Loons". Belle, trying to save her father, shows the mob the Beast on her magic mirror. When they see it they are immediately frightened and begin to head towards the beasts castle in attempts to loot and destroy the castle and all it's inhabitants, including the beast. As they head towards the castle the mob sings "if you're not with us you're against us". This lyric is almost an exact quote from Danforth in The Crucible where he says ""A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between"(87). It puts people into a black and white catergory and polarizes those on the outside of the mob, like Belle and her Father. It also shows the closemindedness of a mob mentality, that if you don't agree with everything they mob believes, you're on the outside and theres something wrong with you because you don't fit in. Its interesting to see how so many people can get swept up in one mindset and how it snowballs into what happened in The Crucible with the hangings of "witches" and "wizards" and in Beauty and The Beast with the storming of the castle (but because it's Disney, everyone lived happily ever after).


PS- The title of this post are the lyrics from the Butch Walker song If (Jeannie's Song) off his album Left of Self-Centered. His website is on my "People Worth Following" tab, check him out.