The Exorcist

Some half-formed thoughts, after a rewatch of The Exorcist.

The Exorcist is a well-written Horror novel.  The film is well made.  The story is deeply toxic and pernicious.  This doesn't mean you can't like the book and movie; I do, in some ways.  As is often the case with good Horror, the effectiveness of the story comes directly from its toxicity and perniciousness.  

The power of the uncanny as a genre stems from its willingness to dramatise the anxiety of life in modern society, but this does not guarantee that the anxiety being dramatised is politically healthy or constructive.  Indeed, the anxiety is often intense precisely because the opposite is true.  

The story of The Exorcist aims to present demonic possession, and thus the metaphysical claims of a variety of Catholicism, as a reality. 

The founder of Jesuitism, Ignatius Loyola, famously said "Give me a child till he is seven years old, and I will show you the man."  In the dedication to the novel The Exorcist novel, William Peter Blatty wrote "To the Jesuits, who taught me to think."

The story's strategy in both book and film form - is to be meticulous in its reproduction of the facts surrounding cases of possession.  So it introduces much of the evidence that helps us make sense of such cases in the real world.  It then flatly rejects the real-world explanations - despite these being readily available, well-supported, convincing, and vital for proper humanitarian understanding and treatment of the 'possessed' - by depicting them as definitively unequal to the task of explanation.  Instead, the story makes it unambiguous that a religious explanation is the only reasonable one.  This is more pronounced in the film than the book simply by virtue of how books and films work as texts, and the decision to film the story in a very 'realist' style.  

The story goes to such lengths to introduce material explanations in order to reject them that it goes out of its way to heavily imply that Regan has been sexually abused by a particular character (Burke Dennings), even showing us this obvious possible explanation being missed by Regan's mother and all her doctors.  (This has been noticed but crudely misinterpreted by some 'critics'... looking at you, Rob Ager.)  But this is depicted as the doctors missing the obvious because they are unimaginative materialists who can't conceive of a religious explanation, and as the mother being a selfish career woman.  The entrenched refusal of patriarchal society to notice or care about sexual abuse of children is noticed but steadfastly misinterpreted by the story.  

This is a cameo of what the story does: it conscientiously documents the facts of cases of 'demonic possession' (or rather, it thinks it does... it actually relies on anecdotal evidence... but that's a whole other topic) only to evade the social implications of such events in favour of rhetorically decreeing the truth of a religious interpretation which rests upon the very same patriarchal blindness to the abuse (sexual or otherwise) of children that is noticed but misrepresented in the clueless doctors, etc.  

As is often the case, the ostentatious employment of nuance turns out to be a rhetorical cover for what is, in the end, rather crude propaganda.  As such, The Exorcist - far more than supposedly less 'serious' films of a similar type from the same era, like Rosemary's Baby or The Omen, or even The Amityville Horror - is an overt artifact of the early 70s reactionary cultural counter-revolution against the revolutionary turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s.

It is hard to pin down the actual social effect of any text, but it's worth noticing that the broad recognition of the existence and scale of child sexual abuse in the late 70s and 80s did not, as might have been hoped, lead immediately to materialist social explanations but to a hysterical and reactionary whiplash effect - the most visible part being the 'Satanic Panic' - that we still live with.