Review of William Friedkin's The Exorcist
100% human generated text, images courtesy of my robot
1973’s The Exorcist is a cynical money-grab of a joke played on the Catholic church and a Christian audience, by “New Hollywood” auteur Bill Friedkin.
“New Hollywood” being a dumb term for the period of 1967-1982ish, starting roughly with Bonnie and Clyde, in which naturalistic trends already common in fiction were applied to large budget films. Clyde Barrow has erectile dysfunction, how daring! And such.
Hitchcock derided this movement as producing “kitchen sink” movies: a housewife cleans up after dinner then takes the family to watch a film about a housewife cleaning up after dinner.
By 1973 the general audience had grown weary of kitchen sinks. New Hollywood top grossers of yesteryear like Love Story or *shudder* Midnight Cowboy could no longer compete with B-grade disaster films. And yet - here were artistes, fresh out of Berkeley, turned loose with a mission to “document” the banal, the miserable, the boring, the hateful. Life as it is - as worse than it is - anything but the “life as is ought to be” esthetics of a hypothetical old Romantic. Why, the very concept “ought” has been scientifically invalidated!
Friedkin had already managed to trick the kitchen sink film into something compelling with 1971’s The French Connection. Though “based on a true story”, its strength is in well-crafted action sequences, NOT in Gene Hackman as real-life incomprehensible asshole Popeye Doyle.
The William Blatty novel The Exorcist, adapted here by Friedkin, claims to be loosely based on an actual exorcism from 1949. The actual truth of every documented exorcism, as a New Hollywood atheist like Friedkin is no doubt well aware, is much more tawdry: a pubescent girl’s eruptions of repressed sexuality, molded and encouraged by mentally ill parents and a dirty old clergyman.
Yet the Exorcist plays it (coyly) straight, a clergyman’s version, in which not once did this noble agent of God get an erection while battling an unquestionably real demonic possession. A new-Hollywood cinema verité look and dull character sketches drive this reality home.
The Exorcist is thematically ambitious with a clear message: Mysticism is the only salvation from the evils of Western civilization. The actual “exorcism” occurs late in the film and is fairly short. The most disturbing scenes of horror are when Regan, the possessed girl, is subjected to a couple of spinal taps by a doctor based on shoddy guesswork, with no result except to inflict intense pain on the girl.
The girl murders someone and Western methods of deduction prove incapable of assigning blame, the detective being married to (false) laws of physics which say a little girl couldn’t overpower a large man.
Then our main character, Father Karras, begins to bridge the gap to a supernatural solution, but his faith has been rattled and he no longer believes. He relies on Western psychological constructs like “multiple personalities” to explain Regan’s possession. When at last a true mystic “Exorcist” Father Merrin is brought in, Karras beclowns himself in the film’s pivotal dialogue:
KARRAS: I think it might be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities Regan has manifested. So far, I'd say there seem to be three. She's convinced-
MERRIN: There is only one.
“There is only one.” One being Satan, of course. There is only the battle between God and Satan, in a wider sense. The viewer tries vainly to reconcile his fat capitalist American lifestyle with faith in God, but Friedkin insists there will be no such reconciliation. Atone! Repent! Who knew Billy Friedkin was such a Puritan?
Then, the exorcism itself assaults us with blasphemous language and imagery - which, by the way, was NOT in the novel (Blatty is another actual Christian duped by Friedkin et al.). Innovative use of the word “cunt”. Regan stabs herself in the vagina with a crucifix. [UPDATE: I PURVEY MISINFORMATION, BLATTY’S NOVEL IS ACTUALLY MORE EXPLICIT THAN THE FILM] Why wallow in this depravity?
Some might say: to spice up a boring film. But that’s not what earns you - Billy Friedkin - Best Picture and every other Oscar. Rather, awards and accolades are granted…
…because you’ve winked and nudged your fellow-traveler elites into understanding that this film is a cleverly-veiled fuck-you to bible-belt Christians tired of Hollywood depravity. With Blatty as cover, you’ve repackaged the usual anti-American message - couched as a defense of faith - then rubbed the worst depravity the rubes have ever seen right in their shocked faces. They will be titillated against their will; maybe they’ll wring their hands over voting republican, and they’ll thank you for selling them pornography.
The Exorcist was a massive hit, a successful fleecing of the rubes, but Friedkin and his ilk faded to obscurity in the wake of New Hollywood’s more populist second wave - Spielberg et al. - to initial loathing from the establishment.
Fin.
No. Nope. No.
Friedkin may be pompous, but The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer, and To Live and Die in LA are each in my top 100 movies of all time — with TFC and The Exorcist — depending on my mood — anywhere from 1-15.
Blatty’s DNA is so deep inside Friedkin’s The Exorcist that it needed a cigarette after it was complete. True, the two fought over some of what was implied vs what was overtly said, but the message of the film was one of hope, I’d argue.
As for the characters, I don’t find any of them — down to the doctors and the lab tech who may have been the garbage bag killer who was the inspiration for Cruising — wooden or uninteresting. In fact, they’re really quite layered. Even Regan, in the extended version, is quite complex. The performances are uniformly great: Lee J Cobb is perfect; Jason Miller provides just the right secular-Catholic friction you’d expect from the early 70s, when the counterculture met the religious patriarchy. Max von Sydow and Ellen Burstyn both gave Oscar-worthy performances. And as big of a fan as I am of The Sting, the Exorcist was in my opinion the Best Picture that year.
Friedkin’s almost clinical style — a product of his pedigree as a documentarian — turned what could have been an absurd premise into one that audiences believed.
No. Nope. Can’t stand with you on this one. Friedkin was a prick who used guerrilla tactics to get the shots he wanted. But to his credit, they almost always worked.
A classic film — and one that stuck its eye into the humanist movement and examined the travails and mysteries of having faith.
I'm opposed to Friedkin's style on principle, and I think these sorts of films are overvalued to the extent that there doesn't exist a Romantic alternative in our (intellectual) culture.
The French Connection is best in its class. I will refrain from rude comment on the rest of his oeuvre...