David Lynch’s Errand Into the Wilderness

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1835 story “Young Goodman Brown,” set in the New England of two centuries prior, tells the story of a young Puritan’s loss of faith not only in God but in his wife and his community. Wandering out into the woods one night, the eponymous hero finds all the respectable folks of his town engaged in a Satanic rite resembling those described in the testimonies of the Salem Witch Trials. Brown and his wife, Faith (as you likely know, Hawthorne went hard on allegory), turn out to be the only townspeople yet to be initiated into the demonic conclave, and the ritual is to mark their initiation. Brown implores Faith to resist; it is unclear whether she does. The next day, he wonders if it was all a dream, but the story concludes with a somber account of his subsequent confusion, cynicism, and disillusionment. At Brown’s death, the story ends, “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”