The Exorcist is terrible and the VVitch is brilliant UNFINISHED

NB THIS IS UNFINISHED but I will never get around to it now so here's some thoughts that probably don't go anywhere.

 

I watched the exorcist a few years ago, ready to enjoy what is regarded as a great horror movie, and i hated it at a fairly deep level. It's become a stock rant for me to go on and on and on about whenever I get the chance, so here's an outline of my argument so I don't ever have to say it again.

It's worth remembering that I take against art pretty swiftly if I don't like it's politics, and that's what's happened here. A work can be as well-made as anything, and if I disagree with its core values, i'll hate on it, like Ex Machina. I think this is the converse of the argument about watching 'trash' movies, ones that are terribly made but stick around because they have some sort of redeemable core quality to them.

I really respect a lot of the people who say they like it - noteably Mark Kermode, who rates it as his all-time favourite film, and yet is unable to explain why. When John Peel can't explain why Teenage Kicks is his favourite song, I don't mind; it clearly just resonated him with a way that sometimes a song can do. However, Peel was a DJ, not a critic, and I wouldn't bug him for a detailed breakdown of why he liked what he liked; a curator might have their reasons, but should also Show Not Tell. 

I'm not bothered if the film isn't scary any more - I didn't find the Babadook scary, but I still loved it as a deep and rich horror movie with a great deal of subtext.

 

1. the battle with a foreign god 

The film opens with The Exorcist out in the Fertile Crescent doing battle with a local god; a statue of Pazuzu - an ancient Mesopotamian god of wind - thought to be a protective spirit.

The sight of an old white priest going out of his way to invade a foreign country and kill their gods doesn't have much surface to scratch below to expose an unexamined colonialist narrative. My hackles were already up at this point; the locals and dogs are meant to appear threatening I suppose - being for'n and all - but I instantly identified with them, rather than the religious extremist touring the world looking for trouble.

There's a link here to Paradise Lost, which paints all the pagan gods as 'devils', but in what I think is quite a sensitive and accurate way. The devils are of course just fallen angels; and the angels are just other local gods of the fertile crescent, as Yahweh was before being elevated above the many other gods. I think this has led to the canonisation of these other gods as devils, which of course could be used as a justification of racism and cololianism, and The Exorcist draws on this; and of course, reductively casting foreign gods as devils (without the sympathy and greyscale understanding of Paradise Lost) is very, very problematic.

So yeah, I found the opening to be a massive problem. 

Watching the film once, I don't recall any mention of  the name 'Pazuzu', so from here forwards I will refer to the possessor as 'the devil'.

2. the concerns of a conservative mother

So when Regan is possessed by the devil, what do they actually *do* that is so bad?

 

1) masturbate

2) swear at her mum

3) develop a skin condition

4) have nausea

So I think we can establish that Regan is transitioning into a teenager.

 

Probably the first thing that rankles me about this is that all of the 'bad' things she does is that they're all so anti-female; here's a nice quote from Peter Biskind, i found at https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/features/dcmovies/exorcist.htm:

"It is easy to see why people, especially women, detested the picture. It presents a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession, and the men in the picture – almost all of them celibate priests – unite to abuse and torture Regan in their efforts to return her to a presexual innocence. Having Regan thrust a crucifix into her vagina is intended to be a fiendishly inventive bit of sacrilege, but it is also a powerful image of self-inflicted abortion, be it by crucifix or coat hanger. 'The Exorcist' is filled with disgust for female bodily functions; it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to see the famously gross scene in which Blair vomits pea soup as a Carrie-like metaphor for menstruation. Indeed, 'The Exorcist' is drenched in a kind of menstrual panic."

Although I'd associate the crucifix scene with masturbation rather than abortion,and I'm interested in what assumptions that says about me and about Biskind. I worry about the psychology here of this family without a father. Even read as a metaphor, the metaphor is that Regan is suffering because of her missing male parent. The unnatural strength she develops is a sure sign of evil - how dare a mere female be stronger than her (male, elder) betters!

 

Pazuzu, while fiendish, was thought to blow away plague and illness, and (I read) was considered a protective symbol for mothers:

This head was probably suspended close to a woman in labour, for protection against the female demon Lamashtu. A 'bronze Pazuzu', presumably an amulet much smaller than this, is prescribed to be worn for this purpose, and a stone Pazuzu is reported to have been part of a necklace found within a grave. When applied to clothes, bronze fibulae - brooch-like safety-pins - bearing the head of Pazuzu probably protected mother and baby. 

Wheras none of this is in the text, it feels jaw-droppingly ironic to pick this particular power to be the devil in a film already so anti-female. Furthermore, the original 'possession' that inspired the writing of the exorcist was of a teenage boy - so they've gone out of their way to make the film anti-female. It's like, the more reading around this film I do, the more I hate it.

3. exorcisms

Exorcisms kill people. They are a terrible form of abuse meted out on children and adults who have issues that their society doesn't understand; like autism, homoexuality, epilepsy. At the climax of the film, with no prayers left, Karras *literally beats the devil out of a child*. The Guardian collected a few stories a couple of years ago.

When I think of the abuse laid onto children by religious authorities, I cannot see how this scene is considered a victory. So many children have been harmed by misguided and panicked societies. Specifically, so many children have been harmed by catholic priests, who were shielded and covered-up by their wealthy, global organisation.

Philomena deals with a different form of systemic abuse in by the catholic church in Ireland. While I don't think there are many parallels between the films, I think there's an interesting comparison between the support for catholicism in the exorcist which comes from a scary anecdote, and the opposition to the church in Philomena, which comes from an investigation into the now well-documented systemic abuses carried out by the organisation. 40 years that separate the two films have seen an enlightenment take hold in popular consciousness, if this is the direction we have moved in: from trusting the church because our children could be possessed by minor Iranian dieties, to not trusting them because [I can't begin to summarise the horrors here and I'm too upset now to try to finish this].

4. catholic propaganda

I hate how anti-science this film is. Batteries of tests can't find anything wrong with Regan, because she is suffering from a made-up problem. It's a straw man argument, and argh, this hypothetical situation  where science doesn't have all the answers, but CATHOLICISM DOES!

Here's the thing though: Science *doesn't* have all the answers. Science is about uncertainty, and acting on evidence. Religions pretend to have answers, and to psycho-somatic problems, that can be enough.

When it came out, The Exorcist was banned in Turkey, as it was considered 'catholic propaganda'. While I would never support banning a film, they nailed it with that description. The set-up of the film is one that is designed to be a problem that only catholicism can solve, obviously catholicism can only solve fictional problems.

This is compounded because the dvd I watched of the film started with an address from the author (or the director, I can't remember). He said (iirc) that the viewer was free to take their own message from the film, but the intended message was on of a literal fight between god and the devil and the correctness of religion?). This obviously coloured my entire viewing of the film. No wonder I hated it, when it starts with the film-maker being so literal; if a film maker stands up and says 'this isn't a metaphor! this is what i literally believe!' before their work, and that work involves all of problems i've outlined above - then I'm not going to like it.

Ignoring the demonic possession plot line, the actual plot of the film is about the testing of Father Karras' faith in his fictious religion. Now, in any sensible realm, doubt is a healthy feeling, not a weakness. But in the Exorcist, Karras' doubt is framed as problematic and a hole that he needs to go through an arc to escape. Of course, his doubt is eventually demolished by being faced with a supernatural being who seems to know his secrets. Focusing the film on Karras and his very reasonable doubts about his entirely ficitonal beliefs, rather than anything else in the world, like the single mother coping with her teenage daughter's mood swings.

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So against this background, I came across the film The VVitch; I heard various comments in Kermode videos that it was authentic, that it was the best horror film in this century, that is wasn't a horror film at all... all of this led me to dig it out. I rented it from the internet; I watched it; I watched it again the night after; I recorded it off channel 4 and I've watched it several times again since then. I've read everything I can about it and have listened to parts of the commentary track (which I intended to do properly once I've bought a physical copy). 

Without giving plot points away, the set up has parallels to the exorcist, so if youve not seen it, correct that, and then come back here.

The VVitch is about a teenage girl who is growing into an adult in a repressively religious society, just like The Exorcist. However, this is 17th Century New World, her family has left the safety of the village and has ventured out on their own. Each family member is sinful in the impossibly-lofty standards of their religion and the plot can be read in several different ways:

1) it is a story about mass hallunication brought on by Argot, a fungus growing in corn, which may have been responsible for the mass hysteria of the Salem witch hunts;

2) it is a literal story about a family terrorised by a witch in the woods and the actual devil;

3) it is a folk tale, a contextual horror story of the type that New Englanders would tell to each other.

4) it is a metaphor for rejecting religion leading to female liberation.

I love the plularism of takes on this, each one correct in it's own way and not contradicting any of the others.

But of course take 4 is what makes this so resonant with me. Tomasin is essentially a slave to the family, and about to be married off. No-one in the story asks her anything, until she meets the devil who asks "would you like to live... deliciously?", and this is her first choice in the film. The ending is practically an advert for satanism; to me anyway. you're free to see it as a dark ending.