Film Dunce is a weekly series in which one of our writers finally succumbs to the lure of a movie that has long been a big part of our culture that they have never seen. Seen through fresh eyes, we evaluate, enjoy and sometimes get bored by these titans of mental real estate.
Even by today’s standards The Exorcist is a gruesome and intense piece of work. But, on top of that, it’s also definitively an art film in its scope and execution. Its grip on form is firm, both stylishly evasive in its editing style and direct and unencumbered in its visuals. The combination of these two opposing forces pulls the viewer from both ends into taffy, and into an experience that feels genuinely supernatural. The direct framing, the deliberate pacing, the subliminally stuttering timing; I try to break it down into its components, but I have a hard time understanding how the film, under the direction of William Friedkin, maintains its unrelenting sense of menace, that perfect balance that it strikes. It’s hard to imagine that this was (for one brief year before being usurped by Jaws) once the most successful film in American box office history.
The Exorcist opens like an Indiana Jones movie, with Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) digging around in the desert of Iraq for a particular, and mysterious to us, religious artifact. The film is beautifully shot, and full of captivating moments, but its camera is uninflected, and somehow flattening. The story begins in process, with Merrin’s search nearly drawing to a close. We watch him speak with other priests, though we don’t understand half of what they’re talking about. We have no frame of reference for their conversations, because the film’s direct approach to the material effectively leaves us in the dark – people don’t speak in exposition. What it works on developing through this sustained sensation is a feeling for what the film will become; the first part is an instruction, on some level, for how to view the second.
The Exorcist preserves the concept of religion as a supernatural thing. It seems like many people regard their faiths as perfectly reasonable explanations for the world, but the more advanced players like Merrin and other scholars, the devout who never stop searching, still regard and practice it as a mystical art. They have the perspective to view it all as magical, something not necessarily to be known, but to be grokked, dig? This is a movie about a feeling, not a physical obstacle – “the presence of pure evil.” The violence in this film, despite the blood and split pea soup, isn’t with the outside world, but with one’s psyche and, to stay within the film’s vernacular, one’s soul. The active weapon in the film is self-knowledge, which the priests equip as faith.
The demon is existential fear. It draws its victims’ minds at all times to the thought of their purposelessness or their mistakes, all the damage they’ve done and how little they have to contribute to the world. The film’s dread stems not from death, but displacement. And so it deliberately displaces us throughout. Aside from the flash frames of scary demon faces and the like, the film consistently, structurally manipulates our sense of stability. Following the Iraq sequence, a title comes up on the screen. “GEORGETOWN” – the title suggests it is giving you information, but the only question you have with a jump like this is “How much later is this?” which the title does nothing to clarify. Further still, we don’t see Merrin again until it’s time for us to see him. The film preserves its own mystery. That whole first chapter is understated, the dialogue indirect. It menaces you with unexplained iconography. All is left unclear, fading out on that last, powerfully epic shot of Merrin confronting the demon statue, pressed against the wind.
To me, it’s the heart of the movie. The rest of the film rests on its impact, and on its carried memory. My main disappointment with this film, then, was with the demon itself. As skillfully constructed, written, paced as its scenes were, the make-up, the obviously dubbed voice, the effects – they just don’t hold up, and the movie trips over these sinkholes a bit. It’s not just the cheesy effects, though, it’s the diluted vision of the monster’s identity, making a little girl say swear words and the like, as if that’s what the phantasmal void of unspeakable evil is up to all day, just a prankster. I mean, it’s a traumatic prank, but you know, it’s a circumstance that doesn’t feel big enough, or isn’t unpredictable enough, rather. Still, there is one particularly horrifying sequence whose effect springs from its breakneck pace and quick editing which still managed to frighten me, but I always found myself feeling the worst and the most uncomfortable, when everything wasn’t being literalized quite so much, and that scene’s strength lies in how difficult it makes it for you to follow its sequence of events.
My complaints aren’t to say that Linda Blair isn’t incredible in her role as the possessed girl, because she is. There’s a scene earlier on when the demon has first started casing the place, so to speak, and it’s clear that it’s kind of dipping its toes in the water without taking over entirely. It’s a prolonged shot over the mother’s shoulder, with her head obscuring a quarter of the frame, so that all we see is Blair listening and reacting, and the number of subtle variants and adjustments she makes, the millions of things she does with her eyes – it’s one of the most amazing single takes I’ve ever seen. She manages to evoke the suspicion of being possessed by a demon while somehow keeping it questionable and subtle. The quiet terror of her starting to ask her mother “uncharacteristic questions,” the fluid shift she makes from “her” persona to another one pretending to be her, it’s just nuts, it’s supernatural, she was possessed.
The rest of the stuff with the monster, except for the amazing final exorcism at the end, which again leans less to the horror side of the spectrum and more to the observational view of intense, esoteric religiosity, feels dated; but I’ve also seen it a million times before actually seeing this movie, so it almost had no chance, I don’t think. Most intended “impacts” fell upon me like a feather, and I was left with my quiet revelations. It’s a bummer, and my loss that I didn’t get to see this movie early on enough for it to have messed me up, but my disappointment in The Exorcism as a scary movie gave way for it to become something else, and that’s a testament to its power.
by Andrei Alupului
