Director: William Friedkin (USA). Year of Release: 1973
An excavation site in northern Iraq. Hundreds of men with makeshift pickaxes are hammering against rock. Their heads are covered against the fierce sun. One of them rushes through the ruins towards an older, whiter, man and brings him to the spot where he has been digging. Alongside the usual archaeological stuff there is a small medal which the older man holds in his palm and confirms is from a different era.
The Exorcist takes a while to get going, doesn’t it? I’m not saying this as a criticism, just to mention that all the bits that we remember of a vomiting, cussing girl are preceded by long scenes of an archaeologist doing his stuff in the Middle East. The archaeologist will be later identified as Father Merrin, but we sort of know this already as it’s Max von Sydow. I guess the lengthy exposition is the writer’s way of telling us that this is a Serious Film and not just about the spectacular money shots.
Anyway, let’s rush past the exposition and get to the meat of things. Chris is a some-time actor who we see on set taking a megaphone and addressing a protest. When she’s not acting, she’s bringing up her daughter Regan while Regan’s father is in Europe. At first, Regan seems a stable enough kid – maybe a little too old to have an imaginary friend, but basically sound. And then she starts complaining that she can’t sleep because her bed is rattling
In a typical film, we’d take the bed rattling to be a projection from Regan’s adolescent conscience. Indeed, this is what Chris thinks must be happening. She takes her daughter to a doctor who prescribes Ritalin. But given that we see the bed rattling, we must presume that this is real. Also, this is in a film which is called the Exorcist. And if you don’t at least roughly know what is going to happen, then where have you been for the last 50 years?
Things start getting worse when Regan develops lesions on her face and develops the ability to levitate. Chris calls in Father Karras, and asks him what he needs to do to organise an exorcism. At first he is sceptical – he’s a psychologist after all – saying “I’d have to send the girl back to the sixteenth century”. But after Regan’s behaviour gets more extreme, it’s “Sixteenth Century, here we come”, with Father Merrin called up to strengthen the ranks.
I do have a problem with the Exorcist, and it is a similar problem that I have with Marvel films. This is a fiction, with which I find it impossible to feel full empathy. Now it is not a fiction like Wuthering Heights or Casablanca which depict events which did not happen. The Exorcist shows us things which cannot happen. To quote its tagline, it is “almost beyond comprehension”. The devil does not possess young girls because the devil does not exist. The characters’ behaviour is irrational.
I understand that this is largely my problem. Some people – normal people – are able to suspend the necessary disbelief and accept the film’s logic on its own terms. Lucky people. Others just do not accept my premise. Fundamentalists like Billy Graham denounced the Exorcist on release because they felt it promoted a Satan in whom they very much believed (a very large cross in the film’s plus column for this by the way).
I do find it difficult to empathise with the people who were shocked by the Exorcist. It is so obviously a story about things which could never happen. Demonic possession is simply not a Thing. Even 50 years ago, the subject matter clearly belonged to the past. Now there are religious fundamentalists who do believe in Hell and the devil and all this shit, but they’re not People Like Us, are they? Are they?
Many of the individual scenes have become so ubiquitous that they cannot but lose some of their original impact. If you turned up in 1973 to a new film about which you know little, the sight of a young girl masturbating with a crucifix and telling a priest that his mother socks cocks in hell was bound to affect you one way or another. Now we just unthinkingly react by murmuring “oh, it’s that scene”. When Linda Blair spews green vomit, we literally know that it’s pea soup.
Added to this, we have got used to profanity in film. I’m not sure that the swearing carries the same shock as it did in 1973. The Exorcist is a film of its time. It was released shortly after Watergate during the fag end of the Vietnam war, so it just bristles with nervous paranoia. It spoke to a time of uncertainty. Maybe, as it reaches its 50th anniversary, some of the uncertainties which it was addressing are returning, but at the same time, the world has moved on.
The Exorcist also leaves itself open to quite right wing readings. First, there’s the religious bits. I forget who, called the Exorcist one of the most pro-Catholic films ever. It posits an abstract concept of Evil which exists outside social relations. But there’s more. In these days of mistrust and conspiracy theories, there’s also an anti-science, anti-medicine aspect. What are these doctors doing prescribing medicines when it’s obvious that their patient is possessed by the devil?
I’m not saying that this is what the film is “about”, just that the cultural implications of art change over time. And to say that a film could be open to right wing interpretations doesn’t make it bad art as such – quite the reverse. It means that the writers trust the audience to make their own decisions. A collaboration between a devout Catholic writer and a secular Jewish director was always going to provide ambiguities which make for a more interesting film.
The Exorcist also reflects some universal worries about kids, and in particularly young girls growing up with all the messy expectations of blood and sensuality. In this sense, it addresses universal truths, and you cannot deny how spectacular and memorable the key scenes are. I could never fully let myself go and enjoy the horror as mindless horror, but the film works as a drama almost as well. Not quite as great as I remembered, but still well worth seeing.
CinePhil 