Playtime with Pazuzu

Rating: Null/10 (5 March 2015)

Mary Russell published "The Sparrow" in 1996. The novel opens with Jesuit priests intercepting a message from an alien planet. This message consists of beautiful singing, which the priests interpret as the holy songs of religious aliens. Believing that God wishes them to make first contact with these aliens, the priests hop aboard a spaceship and fly to the alien planet. Once there, the aliens torture the priests, rape them, break their bones and reveal themselves to be both cannibals and serial abusers. The priests also learn that the songs they intercepted were a form of alien pornography.
"The Sparrow" used gore and sensationalism to make a simple point: either the Jesuit priests misinterpreted signals and God doesn't exist, or God exists and he is a vile monster capable of unimaginable horrors. William Friedkin's "The Exorcist", based on a novel by William Blatty, does the opposite. Here a little girl is subjected to horrible torture at the hands of a devilish creature, only to be eventually saved by faith in God.
Released in 1973, "The Exorcist" became one of the decade's most profitable pieces of backlash cinema. The film puts agnostics, atheists, science, medicine, knowledge, universities, libraries, liberals, hippies, female sexuality, drugs, single woman, feminists, rebelling children and swearing on one hand, and the church, men, Christ, traditional values and clerical paternalism on the other. The film's reactionary stance on the generation gap - and the civil rights movements of the 1960s - becomes apparent early on, when mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is shown working on "Crash Course", a celluloid tale of campus revolt and student riots.
But most of "The Exorcist" centres on the plight of Regan (Linda Blair), Chris' daughter. Months away from becoming a teenager, Regan's possessed by Pazuzu, a creepy demon. This demon causes Regan to swear, spit, attack others, masturbate and slander Christ. Chris believes she can cure her daughter – she's a strong, independent woman after all – but Pazuzu proves to be too powerful. Enter father Damien Karras (Greek for "conqueror of darkness"), a troubled priest played by Jason Miller. Because his mother died, Karras is questioning whether or not God exists. Regan's possession settles his doubts. The film climaxes with Karras sacrificing himself, Christ-like, so that Regan may be free of her demons. A recruitment film for the Catholic Church, the film led to a massive increase in church attendance.
"The Exorcist" co-stars Max von Sydow as a priest who mentors Karrass. Max von Sydow, of course, starred in a number of Ingmar Bergman's films, Bergman being a director renowned for numerous films which deal with God, faith and existential crises. One of Bergman's masterpieces, "Cries and Whispers", itself resembles "The Exorcist". Released in 1972, "Whispers" watches as a dying woman is confined to her bed. Around her, atheists and believers wrestle with various moral and/or philosophical problems.
But Friedkin is no Bergman. Though packed with religious iconography, his film has little to say about religion, suffering, God or disbelief. Friedkin's God is itself neither punitive or loving, and instead reduced to a kind of sports team mascot, the film more interested in violent slugging matches between Team Good and Team Evil. A form of spiritual blackmail, the film asks you to reconsider which Team you're on - the heroes or the monsters – lest you too be condemned to hellish suffering. That the heroes here are Catholic priests fighting valiantly to stop child abuse is an irony lost on Friedkin.
The 1960s and 1970s saw European neorealism making its way to Hollywood. Once there, the movement became almost immediately perverted, now married to special effects, shock tactics, gratuitous violence, gore and sensationalism. "Realism" was increasingly important only insofar as it sold a heightened form of fantasy. We see this in "The Exorcist", what would ordinarily be a Bergmanesque chamber piece turned into a war-zone, heads spinning, vomit spewing and children torn to shreds. "The Exorcist's" bludgeoning tactics would pave the way for every sensory-overloading quasi-religious picture from "Saving Private Ryan" to "The Passion of the Christ"; spiritual blackmail with state-of-the-art gore.
Though a film about crises of faith, "The Exorcist" is largely devoid of spiritual or psychological introspection. This is largely because William Blatty's a bit of a nut (he's currently suing Georgetown University for not being Catholic enough, and for being too pro-choice and pro-contraception). Friedkin's aesthetic, though, is mostly masterful. This is a film of creepy spaces, chilling blues, disturbing images, nauseating ideas and grotesque faces. Though its shock tactics are largely crass (pulverizing a cute girl), and though it's almost half a century old, "The Exorcists" primal sights and sounds are likely to torment even contemporary audiences raised in, or familiar with, Judeo-Christian culture.
6/10 – See "Heart of Glass" (1976) and "Cries and Whispers" (1972).