CaptainHowdy.com The #1 Exorcist Fansite Since 1999
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Nice use of music – it’s hard to go wrong with Goldsmith, eh. Also it helps support the “Merrin regains his faith” scene. Not only that, it has a certain melancholy which fits nicely with Badalamenti’s main theme.
That’s basically how I remember it, too. The book even briefly theorizes that it was the deceased aunt’s spirit that was behind the manifestations. Additionaly, it theorizes that the aunt, while introducing the kid to occult stuff, may also have been molesting him. If memory serves, the book doesn’t follow up much on these two ideas.
I really don’t understand the originating question, “why did he jump anyway?”…
Karras jumped because (whether rightly or mistakenly) he thought that the way to get the demon out of the MacNeil house for good was to take it out the window with him: ” I won’t let you hurt them – you’re coming with me!” is not the cry of a man who has any illusions about the consequences of jumping out the window with the demon inside of him. He will smash the shutters and jump – and if he is killed in the process, so be it: Regan and family will be safe.
This is why I find Blatty saying that Karras hopes there will be “a net out there” irrational and incoherent.
First, Karras doesn’t really have time to think ahead that far.
Second, had he been thinking about the jump, he’d be a moron to think that he could possibly escape without horrendous if not fatal injuries.
Third, if Karras was really the highly logical person the novel presents him as being, he would not be likely to fantasize about a “net” – whether physical or metaphorical – to buffer his fall.
Fourth, a “net-hoping” Karras contradicts the “man for others” type of compassion he has manifested throughout the book: throughout, he gives himself utterly to others, no matter how it hurts, regardless of the consequences. To have Karras, at the very end of his life, and as his very last act, suddenly turn cold, calculating, and avoiding toward his own compassionate impulses, vitiates the Karras that Blatty has so skillfully etched – as well as introducing an obtrusively gratuitous venality to this saintly character.
If Blatty really said that Karras was hoping for a net, I can only think that Blatty was having an incautious moment, and made a verbal faux pas.
Nice points. As you say, poltergeist theory is frequently based on adolescent trauma, which could have been involved in this case. Certainly, this “etiology” is invoked in other cases, such as the Bell Witch incident.
Good find… especially nice to see stills from that movie he made about the priest helping the poor (can’t recall the title).
I thank you for the good wishes but I must confess I am a primitive… I don’t have cable service! Maybe “after my ship comes in” (Titanic probably)… But when it comes up elsewhere, I’ll probably take a look at it.
