Word: exorcist
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...Detroit The Exorcist has become the scene to make, and no action scene has been as big for the people under 30 in the city since the Woodwarding heyday in 1968. From the look of the line outside the movie you'd think David Bowie was playing. It is an audience of dudes, every kind of dude come to panic in Detroit. You see sparkle shirts next to stretch pants, zoot suits and bodysuits, spangles and sequins and satins, conks and greaser crowns, bouffants and bubbles and blond-wigged blacks and silver-sprayed Afros, tranvestites and Amazons. The action...
THIS IS A crowd different than the one that came to quake at Psycho, different from the bloodthirsty at the bullfights or the gladiator contests, not a lynch mob, not witnesses to an execution. The people at The Exorcist come to get spellbound. This is a trip crowd. It is everybody that turned on to Easy Rider and El Topo, and just about everybody else. The people are looking for cool kicks that let them off clean. And here's what kicks them...
...authority of objective science, however frustrated, would turn to sorcery? How thin, after all, can you stretch convenience and still have people believe that a Harvard-Johns Hopkins-trained psychiatrist-turned-priest just happens to have done research on witchcraft? Since when has superstition invaded the sciences? Since The Exorcist, where superstition is the sense of the world. This is the alchemist's vision resurrected in a historical vacuum...
...People go to the movies for three reasons," Friedkin says, "to laugh, to cry, or to be frightened." But The Exorcist is too framed to be frightening, too mechanical for tears; the only laughter it triggers is defensive. The movie puts a tight lid on your ability to think or feel. It won't let you get close enough to care about it--it is always on the attack. Little Regan just gets filthier and filthier and when she's exorcized the movie has to end because it took all its bang from the fake effects Regan gets so foul...
...back when they are looking for something, be it a vision, an identity, a synthesis of their experience, some sought confirmation of their lives. They go back when a movie excites some inside need they had not acknowledged, when it jars loose a lock on the unconscious. The Exorcist is so ugly that is has to be absorbed unconsciously--and it must have taken hold there, lodged...