Films: 1970s
(1973) The Exorcist
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The Exorcist
Director: William Friedkin
Released: 1973
William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" features photographer Owen Roizman's finest work - at times aggressive and discomforting, at times painterly and meditative.
Coupled with Friedkin's use of light, the cast's clearly immersive relationship with the story, and the powerful script written by novelist William Peter Blatty, "The Exorcist" represents a convergence of the perfect team on the perfect project.
Linda Blair plays Regan MacNeil, a girl on the edge of adolescence, living a kind of fairy tale existence in Georgetown with her actress mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn). While Chris MacNeil is on location, Regan is apparently dabbling with the occult at home. Her awakening to womanhood, it seems,is both physical and, in a crooked way, spiritual.
Next door, at the Catholic church, desecration of the Virgin Mary prompts Lieutenant William Kinderman (a splendid low-key performance by Lee Cobb) to investigate possible cult activity in the collegiate neighborhood.
Concurrently, at the same church, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) coaches priests in crisis through their psychological quandaries. Meanwhile, his mother in New York City lingers near death and he thrashes with guilt and his own loss of faith at the universe into which he has drifted.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, a gristled priest with a weak heart, Father Lankester Merrin (Max Von Sydow, remarkably convincing as a man 20 years his senior), conducts archaeological digs into Ninevah, unearthing strange and unsettling evidence of a darkness buried in holy ground.
These disparate plot lines interweave as Regan's body becomes an invitation to darkness itself.
At first possessed by sudden bouts of foul language, physical resistance and vulgar behavior in public, Regan quickly dissolves into a brutal and sexually self-loathing version of her prepubescent girlhood. Her mother throws scores of doctors, tests and consultations at Regan's symptoms, but not only do they result in no explanations, they seem to provoke a progressively violent reaction from Regan.
There are also events which the doctors and Chris cannot explain, and their collective grasp on the problem as scientific loosens. Finally, Chris' colleague Burke (Jack MacGowran) suffers fall from Regan's window while in the house alone with her.
Chris resorts to the one avenue science has left her: The church.
Through Karras, Chris petitions for an exorcism. His initial visit raises more questions than it answers, but is clear to him that her condition is more than natural. Whatever has happened to Regan, she exhibits unusual knowledge of his mother.
In the films only concession to narrative over verisimilitude, the church agrees fairly swiftly to Karras' recommendation of the ritual. The the semiretired Merrin is summoned from rural New York to lead the ceremony.
What ensues is a night in Regan's room, during which both priests work the exorcism. It is as much a face to face encounter with human vulnerability as it is with anything demonic. It is a proving ground for Karras' belief in himself, whether or not he believes in anything spiritual.
Horror, in "The Exorcist" is biological (Regan spews vomit and hacks herself to shreds, she is also subject to myriad graphic medical exams), it is sexual (most of the demonic nature of Regan's possession revolves around her genitalia, and it's no accident she fights this battle in a bed), it is psychological (the mother-daughter split that comes with puberty, and the violent struggle on both parts to preserve the previous connection,), and it is spiritual (the visual language is rife with blasphemous imagery and the actual graphic language of the script is extraordinarily unsettling coming from a clearly young and innocent-looking actress).
All of these folds, these permutations of horror, suffuse "The Exorcist" with an unrelenting and saturated sense of the overwhelming. It's an exhausting film, a journey into the heart of our fears about little girls.
Packed into the gradually shifting glands and limbs of the pubescent female is the very core of religious doctrine, a ritualized suppression of the anti-civil impulses that come, perhaps, from raging hormones.
"The Exorcist" tell us how our reliance on conventional structures fails to address Regan's condition.
Merrin's parochial faith is ultimately ineffective in curing Regan, as his doctrine is based in suppressing the genesis of her womanhood. Chris' adherence to societal dictates from men falls short, as Regan is not subject to societal pressure yet and she has already lost faith in fathers. In both cases these tactics only fuel the grotesque masculine rapist that has consumed Regan's girlhood.
Karras' atheism, then, cuts to the quick of "The Exorcist's" universe. Only Karras understands the meaning of the Virgin Mary disfigured by both crude breasts and a bloody horned phallus. In some subconscious route, he discovers the secret of Regan's quest for a father she can touch. He obliges.
Since the beast in Regan projects the adult-on-child sexualization inherent in the Western view of the adolescent girl as temptress and treasure, Karras assaults Regan on the demon's terms, covering her with his body, pummeling her from the bed.
On the floor, seething in what amounts to a mock sex act (with which the demon has already taunted almost every male in "The Exorcist") Karras wrestles the masculine oppressor from Regan, transforming himself into a visual representation of the carnivorous energy that made her ugly and robbed her of her youthful feminine innocence.
Regan is left in a kind of spiritual post-rape collapse, sobbing and broken and innocent again - now, and once again, the helpless child to be scooped away by her mother. Karras, bearing the responsibility of his skewed patriarchal burden, throws himself into the void, destroying both the energy and the vessel that carries it.
Friedkin and Blatty sidestep the question inherent to all these representations: "Why would a loving God let something awful happen to its creation?"
Instead, the pair set up the question and then hint that it is merely a model for dealing with a deeper problem: How awful a thing is this journey through life, and when the awfulness manifests as something powerful and angry, how much of a threat will it pose and how much personal responsibility for it must must we accept?
"The Exorcist" shocks because it is truthful and uncompromising. Blatty and Friedkind posit this answer: We must accept all of the responsibility for what is wrong with our children. It then resolves Chris McNeil's inability to do so by sending in Karras, the scapegoat. He falls so that the American family may once again climb. What is left is a slightly befuddled detective and a bloodstain on the stairs. Orderly society is only at the edges of the combat in the bedroom. It can have no province there.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
The Exorcist, 1973
On the floor, seething in what amounts to a mock sex act (with which the demon has already taunted almost every male in 'The Exorcist') Karras wrestles the masculine oppressor from Regan, transforming himself into a visual representation of the carnivorous energy that made her ugly and robbed her of her youthful feminine innocence.
