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CHASING HELL: The Films of William Friedkin (original cut) Kim Nicolini When most people hear the name William Friedkin, they think of The Exorcist, his notorious 1973 blockbuster film about demonic possession. The Exorcist put Friedkin on the mainstream cinematic map, so when people think of his films, they tend to think of young Linda Blair puking pea soup and abusing herself with a crucifix. But Friedkin’s films, including The Exorcist, are less about the anatomy of young girls coming of age and taking the devil inside their bodies and more about the masculine landscape, the geography of men and the demons that are internalized and externalized through their characters. Sure, The Exorcist is about a girl’s demonic possession, but it is also largely a film about a man – Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller) – struggling with his own personal demons and going through his own hell in regards to his faith, his relationship to his mother, and his identity in general. Karras is the real tragic figure in this film, and it is no surprise that the film leads him to a tragic end while the young girl walks away fairly unscathed with no memory her hellish days when the devil occupied her body and her bedroom. The real possession takes place within Karras’s tormented psyche. Many see The Exorcist as an outsider in relation to other Friedkin films, especially those of the 1970s and 80s. But actually, The Exorcist fits right in with Friedkin’s other mid‐career films which portray variations of masculine identity crisis within a landscape that comes pretty damn close to Hell on Earth. The French Connection (1971), Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) all show men whose internal hell is materialized through the external world and the geography they occupy. Friedkin’s men fight, steal, die, deal, kill and chase each other as they try to outrun their own demons and master their identity in a world of hellish chaos. The Exorcist shows a very literal battle between good and evil, but Karras’s doubt in his faith, his guilt over his mother, and his desire for the young Regan’s mother Chris muddies his identity as a vehicle of God. Not to mention that when he’s not working as a priest, he’s running around a track and boxing to stay grounded in his masculinity. Questioning faith and showing the murky line between good and bad, law and crime runs through all of these films. Cops are corrupt racists who shoot sympathetic criminals in the back (The French Connection). Counterfeiters are workers doing their job while police are egotistical, sexist, violent and corrupt assholes (To Live and Die in L.A.). A terrorist, embezzler, assassin, and robber become tragic anti‐heros (Sorcerer). The leather‐clad BDSM gay scene in underground New York looks hellish, but really it is the Ivy League privileged frat boy who is the “evil” killer (Cruising). The cop who hunts him (Al Pacino) goes through a massive identity crisis questioning his own masculinity and sexuality while on the “hunt” for the killer. The hunt resides at the heart of Friedkin’s films in which the men are on a perpetual chase. They’re chasing demons, drug dealers, counterfeiters, money, murderers, and each other. This snippet of dialogue from To Live and Die in L.A. captures the essence of a Friedkin chase in a nutshell: Guy 1: “Man, why are you chasing me?” Guy 2: “Why are you running?” Guy 1: ““Cause you’re chasing me.” Men are always on the run, never entirely clear who they are running to or from. They are caught up in the chase for the sake of chase. The plot is inconsequential as men chase each other for illusory drugs (French Connection), fake money (To Live and Die in LA), or for sex and murder (Cruising). Friedkin’s Sorcerer (his 1977 adaptation of the Henri‐Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic Wages of Fear) embodies the epitome of the chase at its deepest level of insanity. Four men (an embezzler from Paris, a church robber from New York, a terrorist from Israel, and an assassin from Mexico) find themselves living in exile in the epicenter of hell, an unnamed village in the Dominican Republic, and landscape soaked and dripping with oil pumped out of the earth and running through pipelines. A massive explosion at a drilling site sends bodies flying and littering the landscape with tragic bloody and charred gore. The disaster brings the four men together when they are hired to drive trucks filled with nitroglycerin across a treacherous landscape with the intent of putting out fire with fire – blow up the site of the explosion to stop it from burning. The body count in this movie is astounding. Bodies drop in visceral gore as men chase money and each other. Blood spills through car wrecks, suicides, murders, and explosions while the four men try to escape the inescapable (their fate being caught in the endless loop of the meaningless chase). They travel through an insane vision oil‐soaked, rain‐drenched, blood dripping hell only to face the meaninglessness of their lives. As all the men drop dead except for the desperate, battered and delusional Roy Scheider, he drives the truck mumbling “Where am I going? Where am I going?” The answer is clearly nowhere, the same destination of the other Friedkin films. The French Connection (1971) and To Live and Die in LA (1985) sandwich Sorcerer (1977), and both movies are “landscape films”. They are about the landscape of men chasing each other within an urban landscape. One set on the congested streets of New York and the other in the smog‐suffocating geography of outer Los Angeles, they are both movies about traffic. Drug trafficking, money trafficking, literal car traffic – the men in these movies are always chasing each other through and getting stuck in chaotic traffic. Both films feature amazing centerpiece car chases – one on the streets of Brooklyn under the elevated subway tracks and the other driving the wrong way on an L.A. freeway. In between the critical chases are no end of “minor” car crashes, cars stuck in traffic, crushed cars, junkyard cars, and cars being disassembled and blown‐up. Men drive cars through city streets, aqueducts and freeways. They drive at night and drive during the day. They run down people and garbage, chase trains, chase drugs, chase money, and chase each other with no end but the chase itself. The cars, the streets, the chase are the glue of the movies as men chase each other through a grid that circles on itself like a closed circuit that keeps shorting out and starting over but to no end except the end. In his chapter on The French Connection in his recently published memoir The Friedkin Connection (HarperCollins Publishers, 2013), Friedkin writes: “The chase” is the purest form of cinema, something that can’t be done in any other medium, not in literature nor on a painter’s canvas. A chase must appear spontaneous and out of control, but it must be meticulously choreographed, if only for safety considerations. The audience should not be able to foresee the outcome. It helps to have innocent bystanders who could be “hurt” or “killed.” When I see vehicles in a film whipping through deserted streets or country roads, I don’t feel a sense of danger. Actual high‐speed chases take place in big‐city traffic or on crowded freeways. Pace doesn’t imply speed; sometimes the action should slow to a crawl, or even a dead stop. Build and stop, build and stop, leading to an explosive climax . Whether he’s on horseback, behind a wheel, or on foot, the chase must be a metaphor for the lead character: reckless, brutal, obsessive or possibly even cautious. Not only is the chase a metaphor for the lead character in Friedkin films, but it is also a metaphor for Friedkin himself and his particular brand of adrenaline‐producing filmmaking in which he chases the impossible to make great films. In his mid‐career films, Friedkin doesn’t just depict men on the chase in a fictional setting. He actually behaved like one of his characters as he shot film the literal streets, jungles, cities, and towns (in New York, Los Angeles, Georgetown, Mexico, Israel, the Dominican Republic). He only shot on location and incorporated the literal physical and human geography into his films. In doing so, Friedkin projected the interior of his characters onto the exterior of the real world. The mechanisms of shooting the movies often blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, just as the boundaries between good and evil are blurred in his movies. The infamous chase scene in The French Connection is an example of Friedkin’s obsessive filmmaking process. When he was disappointed with the original shoot, Friedkin took a camera into his own hands, got in the car and filmed the scene with the driver going 90 mph for 26 blocks straight down Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn without any permits to shoot the film. There were no street closures, no “extras” on the “set.” In fact there was no set. There was Friedkin, three cameras, a driver, and a cop in the back seat in case they ran into any problems. There was the real traffic and real pedestrians on the streets and sidewalks that Friedkin and his crew dodged as they sped down Stillwell filming. During this shoot, Friedkin could have easily been one of the characters in his films.

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