Word: exorcist
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...really wowed me with the whammy you whacked on The Exorcist [Jan. 14]. What the devil got into you? For those who appreciated the film as a brutal but brilliant portrayal of the power of faith in God, I say a hex on you, Jay Cocks...
...anything else. For what they have lost (and the news from Washington doesn't get all the credit for this--you can blame anything from cities of steel and stone and glass that frazzle the feelings of self to the modern predicament) is the sense of connection. And The Exorcist, if anything, depends for its shock upon severed connections. Heavy mechanical cutting dissociates you from the picture. Its edges don't connect, but hang jagged. The lesioned picture leaves you with the sense of a world awry, a broken world whose sense has splintered. It's fun for casualties...
...people were skeptics before Watergate, but they didn't start acting like evangelists until Watergate. Watergate made righteousness fashionable--the country's soul needed saving. But righteousness thwarted turns to wrath. And righteous wrath obstructed creates a pressure to purge. The Exorcist is the picture of a purge. It is bursting with nihilistic aggression. Blasphemy is the whole of little Regan...
...devil, splurging on all the forbidden fantasies: from the bloody masturbation with the crucifix to the near murder of the mother, she de-eroticizes sex Little Regan, moreover, an innocent possessed, is free to do the forbidden. She's a repressed reaction to Watergate. She is its exorcist...
...EXORCIST is a hit in the way that the Sharon Tate killings were. It is perversion as mystery. The characters are treated at such a hostile distance that you are inured to their pain, absolved of all connection with what happens to them. The people leaving the theater hid between their shoulders like the prisoners you see in documentaries of concentration camps. Nobody had gone to have a happy time at the movie. The movie is entertainment for lifers, a trip for the down and out. Kicks were all the audience wanted and cruel kicks they got. They got their...