Deep Archetypical Contrasts

Rating: Null/10 (30 November 2000)

In the documentary on the DVD, von Sydow says that if you are open to it, this film will scare you and perhaps affect you spiritually. Certainly true. Why this and not the many other similar films? Keep in mind that essentially all the rest of Friedkin's work is mundane, worthless.
A large part of the question, I think, is that the creators of the film have stumbled into a rich field of archetypal conflicts, stuff deeper than just a sweet kid cursing and masturbating.
The film is set in a Jesuit University. Even today, if you go there, you find a very strange vibe. The notion of authoritarian faith being crammed down from above certainly has a place in society, but such a brotherhood running an academy of open inquiry is a puzzling, disturbing mix. And that's underscored and mirrored by a similar (though less militant) conflict around psychiatry. Here we have the priests of `medicine' torturing this little girl to confirm their theories.
The priest is the center of the film, and embodies all this: Arcane `faith' versus modern inquiry; Taking direction blindly rather than acting on knowledge; Understanding the mind versus understanding the soul; Serving the weak (his mother) versus battling powerful evil. Friedkin increased these ambiguities wherever he found them, usually against the positivist stance of Blatty.
Interesting in this context are two tricks, one conscious, the other I suspect not.
The conscious one is the self-referential wrapper. This is film about a film star, making a film. What triggers the possession are the visits by the director who probably had some deviant intent or action. He is the first victim. Thus, Friedkin places himself in the action and himself openly exploits Linda Blair. Meanwhile the actor playing the director dies in real life.
The unconscious one is the Persian reference. Best scholarship has Judaism coming from Zoroastrianism flavored by Egyptian superficialities. A lower form of Zoroastrianism devolved into the much more widely adopted Mithraism, characterized by the warring of good and evil. This is sort of the professional wrestling of religious belief, both in style and substance, and continues today to be the root of `fundamentalism.' So in a very real way, Satan was invented in northern Iran, and any student of religion will end up `digging' around there.
How sad and strange that this film seems to have bolstered the Catholic church.