"There is only one": William Friedkin's The Exorcist - Page 2

The demon is first shown as a tiny statue, with the noise of insects buzzing incongruously as it is discovered. Friedkin is already establishing that this thing is royalty--it is the Lord of the Flies. We see it stop a clock. We seem to hear its influence in the cacaphony of the town--the clanging of hammers on anvils, the thunderous stampeding of carriage hoofs as a wild-eyed woman (not the last one we'll see, oh no) is pulled past, mouth agape as if in some silent scream. We see the potential of the little statue realized in a massive monument--monkeylike head, insect wings, snakelike phallus, blank eyes. The noise swells and buzzes and screeches and growls and screams. That kind of intensity is unmistakeable: War has been declared.

The battleground is a body, that of Regan McNeil, a young girl from Washington, D.C. (and that is surely no coincidence). Here, actually, is where many critics stall: This must be a film about male anxiety over female sexuality! Well, yes, it is that--if Regan's curiosity about her mother's love life didn't tip you off, and the displaced menstrual imagery of urination and surgical blood spurts didn't either, and dozens of male doctors penetrating her with all manner of needles and tubes still left you guessing, surely "Fuck me!" and "Let Jesus fuck you!" and "Lick me!" and "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell, Karras!" weren't insufficiently obvious. But it isn't any more about just that than, say, Apocalypse Now is just a critique of U.S. foreign policy in Indochina. Human sexuality--human female sexuality--the onset of human female sexuality--these are just weapons in the war, accessible by either side. What better way to erode the resistance of the humans who comprise both the battlefield and the frontline troops than to force them to focus on areas they see as private and personal, if not shameful and animal?

As in many wars, at first the wrong kinds of troops are deployed. We're supposed to be comforted by the clinical whites of modern medicine, even when they're stained red. But it becomes rapidly apparent that as much guesswork and dead-ending and thinly veiled savagery is present here as in the work of the "witch doctors" such disciplines believe themselves to have supplanted. The boundaries are blurred further by the sideline professions of the witch doctors themselves. Our very first glimpses of Father Lancaster Merrin show him to be an archaeologist, apparently of some reknown; he simply seems to have brought along, in addition to intellectual curiosity about the old gods, fear of them as well. But our protagonist witch-doctor, Father Damien Karras, does not have the regal, professorial carriage of Father Merrin. What he has is a massively sympathetic face with eyes that seem to pour forth emotion like faucets, a degree in psychology as valid as that held by any of the condescending experts, and the frightening knowledge that his faith is failing him. This modern witch doctor, who has been the latter half of his split personality, is about to see his belief in the former shaken to its foundations as well.

Article Author: Sean T. Collins

Visit Sean T. Collins's author page — Sean T. Collins's Blog