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Evil Against Evil’: the Ap Rabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin's the Exorcist Larrie Dudenhoeffer Kennesaw State University, [email protected]

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Evil Against Evil’: the Ap Rabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin's the Exorcist Larrie Dudenhoeffer Kennesaw State University, Ldudenho@Kennesaw.Edu Kennesaw State University DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University Faculty Publications 1-2010 ‘Evil against Evil’: The aP rabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin's The Exorcist Larrie Dudenhoeffer Kennesaw State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/facpubs Part of the American Film Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, and the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Dudenhoeffer, Larrie. "‘Evil against Evil’: The aP rabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin's The Exorcist." Horror Studies 1.1 (2010) 73-88. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HOST 1 (1) pp. 73–88 Intellect Limited 2010 Horror Studies Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/host.1.1.73/1 LARRIE DUDENHOEFFER Kennesaw State University ‘Evil against Evil’: The Parabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This essay examines and deconstructs three sets of antagonisms in William Friedkin’s radical evil The Exorcist (1973). It argues that the film describes its own narrative conflicts as dedifferentiation a thematics of ‘evil against evil,’ so as to de-ethicize the moral violence of those recontextualization metaphysical dogmatisms that compete over the ‘souls’ of others. It then re-couches narrative space the one-sidedness of scientific and religious orthodoxies, which damage in similar taut-ontology ways Regan MacNeil, one of the film’s main characters, as another variation of this ahistorical fantastic thematics. Finally, this essay suggests that The Exorcist surveys certain sociopoliti- cal tensions, thus commenting, in its video and theatrical re-releases, ‘timelessly’ on US tensions with its own counterculture and with the Middle East. The film ‘transcends’ such mutually destructive tensions in its dramatization of ‘sacrifice,’ though without taking this term in its soteriological sense; ‘sacrifice’ rather involves the reduction of these thematics to Regan’s flesh—involves reversing their anagogic tendencies—so that this flesh at once re-emerges as the site and the template of the film’s narrative contestations. 73 HOST 1.1_art_Dudenhoeffer_073-088.indd 73 1/2/10 12:14:26 PM Larrie Dudenhoeffer If you’re asking if I believe in the Devil, the answer is yes – yeah, that I believe. William Peter Blatty, deletion from The Exorcist (1973) Our difficulty in believing in the – for want of a better word – political inspiration of the Devil is due in great part to the fact that he is called up and damned not only by our social antagonists but by our own side, whatever it may be […] Political opposition, thereby, is given an inhumane overlay which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized intercourse. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953) Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recog- nizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise. John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938, original emphasis) INTRODUCTION The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), with its 2000 anniversary reissue, seems more relevant than ever since the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The film sets its introduction in Nineveh, where Father Lankester Merrin, clergyman, archaeologist, and some- time exorcist, unearths an image of the demon that menaces 12-year-old Regan MacNeil later in the film. The relic seems out-of-context to Father Merrin, much as tales of exorcism and demonic influence seem out-of- context for twentieth century Washington, D.C., where actress Chris and Regan MacNeil live at the time of the film’s action. Father Merrin scru- tinizes the artefact, and then offers us a summary of the film’s theodicy: ‘evil against evil,’ an inscription on the artefact that Merrin translates. This moment, and its redefinition of terms in the traditional ‘good versus evil’ formula, sets the ideological tenor of the film’s narrative, making Father Damien Karras’s sacrifice at its conclusion meaningful as a transcend- ence of this formula. The Exorcist favours sacrifice over confrontation as a moral stance, arguing that confrontation creates mutual antagonism with morally, socio-culturally, and epistemologically disastrous results. It identifies ‘good versus evil’ as an ultimately ‘evil against evil’ relation- ship of terms, thus forcing its audience to rethink its confidence in its moral, political, and medico-religious views. The Exorcist thus functions as a parable that teaches us the value of sacrifice on a transnational scale; a lesson valuable for Americans at a time when Muslims and Christians war with each other while calling each other ‘evil’ in an attempt to invoke divine sanction for their actions. Unfortunately, most criticism of The Exorcist ignores, misreads, or glosses over the film’s revaluation of ‘good and evil’ nomenclature. In fact, most criti- cism sees the film as a reaffirmation of these dichotomous terms: a develop- ment indicative of and responsible for our culture’s 1980 and 2000 oscillation to conservatism, which reduces the complexities of two wartime eras, the sex- ual revolution, and the emergence of new wave feminism to a more accessible 74 HOST 1.1_art_Dudenhoeffer_073-088.indd 74 12/22/09 7:13:07 PM ‘Evil against Evil’ formula (one with a causative scapegoat in the Devil’s influence on our children). As Mark Kermode argues, [The] solutions The Exorcist appeared to offer were oddly reassuring for those who longed for a return to an absolute moral order. For here on screen was a clear-cut struggle between good and evil in which priests, policemen, good mothers, and devoted sons fought a righteous battle to release rebellious, parent-hating children from the grip of a lustful, all- consuming devil. (Kermode 2003: 9–10) The language Kermode uses to describe the Devil – ‘lustful’, ‘rebellious’, and ‘all-consuming’ – associates ‘evil’ with the sexual, political, and generational iconoclasm of 1970s’ counter-culture. In contrast, the language Kermode uses to describe ‘priests, policemen, and mothers’ associates ‘good’ with ‘order,’ a sense of righteousness, and reactionary thinking. The language The Exorcist uses, though, recasts these forces as narrow, destructive, and ‘evil’ in their inimicality. Although Mark Jancovich seems to detect this strain of revaluation in the film, he nevertheless carries Kermode’s interpretation of the film further, decrying its remarkably crude conservatism which distinguishes it from more gen- eral developments in the genre. It does present the forces of order and chaos as being indistinguishable from one another within the modern world, but it does so specifically to establish the need for traditional forms of religious authority. […] The modern world is presented as a kind of permissive hell which is now open to the invasion of demonic forces, especially since the Catholic Church has given up the concept of evil and come to rely on sociology, psychology, and psychoanalysis. (Jancovich 1992: 93–4) Kermode and Jancovich, in their inaccurate assessment of the film’s conserva- tism and moral reductiveness, enable the film to subsume their criticism as an example of ‘evil against evil’ confrontation; since these men resort to a formula they fail to identify the major shortcoming of the film – the ‘evil’ of its political fallout as they see it. The Exorcist, though, in its first scenes, oversteps this criticism, instructing its audience to resist any dogmatist evaluation of its content, cultural work, and resonance. Jancovich’s criticism, though, informs other distillations of the film’s sub- text into easier-to-take forms. Allison M. Kelly, for example, sees The Exorcist as a tacit recuperation of the audience’s faith in scientific authority, envi- sioning Father Merrin as the ultimate father figure: one that satisfies Regan MacNeil’s Oedipal search for one and otherwise mitigates the disruptiveness of non-traditional family structures: Behind the scenes of vomiting, levitation, guttural insults and rotating heads in The Exorcist lies a much deeper threat: the demon might be manifesting itself because of Regan’s family situation: a bitter divorce, a deadbeat dad […] and a career-obsessed mother. (Kelly 2004: 64) This specimen of criticism more than resembles Jancovich’s reductive take on the film’s moral commentary; it reaffirms as salutary conservative modes 75 HOST 1.1_art_Dudenhoeffer_073-088.indd 75 12/22/09 7:13:07 PM Larrie Dudenhoeffer of thinking and organization to thus make the film defensible – a form of ‘tough love’ for the audience, our culture, and its characters. It enlists science to neutralize the film’s challenging ‘evil against evil’ theodicy, even though the film clearly makes medical and psychiatric examination seem as invasive, fetishistic, and torturous as demonic influence – or anything else in the closets of Catholic doctrine. It ignores once more the film’s critique of strict allegiance to a set of extremes, whether ‘good or evil’ or ‘faith or science,’ as sympto- matic in any case of a mutually destructive opposition. Of course, we cannot ignore The Exorcist’s critique of scientism, as we cannot likewise narrow our focus to the film’s construction of faith and spirituality. Robert F. Geary, though, in shifting away from Kelly’s analysis, falls into the temptation of couching an ontological discussion of the film in dichotomous terms: The Exorcist is a work about deep horror, about the lure of a nihilistic sense of meaninglessness which arises from human suffering and death and can break the human spirit.
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