CaptainHowdy.com The #1 Exorcist Fansite Since 1999
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As to the third question, it demands, in its rhetorical form, the answer “yes.” Miss Kael tells me, in effect, that I must reject the picture or admit that my head is screwed on backward. I’m not altogether sure about my head, but I am sure that Miss Kael is in no position to judge. And I am concerned that she chooses this intellectual and moral forum for judging the movie. Why does she, as judge of this picture, care how I choose to screw on my head, granted I have a choice?
I don’t know, having seen the picture once, whether I accept it or not. It was a grinding and harrowing experience, but an engrossing one, too. I admired the skill of the director and camera crew, the effective acting and the hideous triumphs of the makeup artists. And I was not offended by the crude vulgarity of the manifestations. Literature, if nothing else had done it, would have prepared me to expect crude human meanness and obscenity in the efforts of an evil force to wound and frighten humans. Graham Greene, in one of his short stories, expressed the inability of an evil will to be more frightening to a free and perceptive eye than is a lighted pumpkin. The free and perceptive eye can be found, in “The Exorcist, only in the older priest, seen not only as saintly and infirm, which is all Miss Kael can perceive, but also willing to face evil unafraid, like Chesterton’s Father Brown. The old priest dies in the exorcism, but he is not frightened. Everyone else in the picture is.
Miss Kael sees them all as fitting into juiceless stock roles, but I judge that for once she misses some important points. She cannot see any revelation or expericne of ultimate personal motives, as we find in any character touched by Shakespeare’s imagination. Mr. Blatty is no Shakespeare, indeed, and a failure to convey any ultimate human experience would certainly flaw the movie fatally, as it seemed to me Mr. Blatty’s book was flawed. But even about that I’m not so sure now. It may be that the movie, more than that book, gets its harrowing impact from the reusal to analyze openly and make clear the motivations, not however denying or excluding those motives. Ellen Burstyn’s portrayal of an actress caught in a situation for which nothing in her natural charm or her professional training had prepared her, her constantly frustrated and stifled efforts to bring her normally adequate defenses into operation, her eventual ambivalent acceptance of and adjustment to the inexplicable, seemed to me a triumph of good acting, directing, camera-work and editing. Miss Kael says there is no indication that either Mr. Blatty or Mr. Freidkin has any feeling for the little girl’s helplessness and suffering, or her mother’s. I can only guess that something shielded [Miss Kael] from the agony of suffering that Ellen Burstyn, presumably working with Director Friedkin on Author Blatty’s material, conveyed to me.
Perhaps “The Exorcist” will never be classed with the “Last Tango” as a great movie, but I suspect that if it is not, its rejection will not be on the basis of the mechanical and vulgar horrors that so offend Miss Kael. Those strike me as effective in somewhat the way the Huysman-horrors are effective in Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian” and “Salome”. They reveal or at least suggest some basically stupid and malevolent force operative in human affairs. And they can do more than scare, if one has eyes to see. But I’m not really in a position to say that “The Exorcist” achieves even this minimal value. Certainly I do not aim to do what Miss Kael tells us one of the Jesuit actor-advisers did for the reviewers of the movie, and “enrich” anyone with assurance of high moral achievement in the film. I can say, however, that I found a certain human depth in “The Exorcist”. How much the depth that I found owes to what I brought to the movie, including, it may be, a desire to have my Church look good, I cannot at the moment clearly judge. But I am sure, at any rate, that there is more to this movie than Pauline Kael was able to find.
[Robert Boyle, S.J., is a member of the English Department at Marquette University in Milwaukie.]
THE END
He certainly articulated his feelings well. Though I don’t agree with all of it, it was projected clearly. Thank you for another good read. You’re full of them. 😉
You’re welcome, Blizzi. It’s obvious that “America” represents the liberal end of Catholicism. Conservative sources seemed to diss the film because of its scatological content, or to literalistically embrace its “documentary” treatment of the demon as a real being.
Liberal Catholic writers tended, like “America”, to support the film in the sense that they felt obligated to support free speech and literary license, but were nonetheless uncomfortable with any hint of supernaturalism. Hence their references to “dark forces” instead of actual demons, and their emphasis on coming to grips with internal/subjective evil while keeping as much as possible to an agnostic position on external diabolical evil…
Anyway, next weekend I might post one or two more… I’m running out of contemporary articles, plus I tried to post the most relevant and interesting ones first…
by Robert Boyle
Part One
Can Catholics Accept ‘The Exorcist’?
In the “New Yorker” for January 7, Pauline Kael addresses three questions to American Catholics, concerning their presumably unified reaction to “The Exorcist”: “Others can laugh it off as garbage, but are American Catholics willing to see their faith turned into a horror show? Are they willing to accept anything as long as their Church comes out in a good light? Aren’t those who accept this picture getting their heads screwed on backward?” My answers, as an individual American Catholic, are “yes,” “no” and “probably not.”
Among those “others” who can laugh off the garbage, Miss Keal, I presume, includes herself. But her laughter in the “New Yorker” review has no happy ring. Mixed with her conviction that the picture is cheap and sensational, offensive to taste and to piety, is her fear that Catholics, as they used to do in “sunnier days” with the saccharine lies of “goind My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s”, will accept these bouncing beds and cascading vomits in their zeal to make their Church look good.
There is, to my ear, a pleading note in these questions, urging [American Catholics] not to let the doctrines we perfumed with Disney-water and Bing Crosby now look good to us in Halloween filth. She wants us to tell those Hollywood sensationalists not to turn our faith into a horror show, apparently by not “accepting” the movie. But I cannot, even at the urging of the critic who revealed to me new insights into the history and art of the film in her classic treatment of “Bonnie and Clyde”. I cannot, because, even though I am an American Catholic, I like to see my faith turned into a horror story.
For example, among novels I like James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, almost best of my second 10. There, my faith is foully abused and perverted by the sole character operative in the novel. And Jesuits are portrayed as unfeeling, amoral monsters, dedicated to stifling their personalities in order to become blind organs of a great sinister Power. It fascinates me to see my faith operative in a person who finds its most satisfying operation in the Black Mass of his febrile villanelle.
Should Miss Kael think, though, that I ought to reject this movie because – unlike “Portrait”, which depicts the faith of a literary character – the movie actully seeks to convince me that the faith I am living is a horror show, I still could not do it. My faith, as I can grasp it, does include the elements of which horror shows are made – human evil, fear, pain, superhuman evil and malice, and retribution. That is only the negative aspect of my faith, to be sure, but then, as I can observe “The Exorcist”, the movie does not exclude the positive aspects; it includes them at least by suggestion. The old priest, though he does die, seems to me in his fearless confrontation of evil to come through more nobly and satisfactorily than does Hemingway’s “Old Man” confronting “them.” And the young priest-psychiatrist, whose sacrifice of himself musters no feeling in Miss Kael, does nevertheless offer himself, if from extremely mixed motives, and expresses his love and hope with the pressure of his almost lifeless fingers. The movie does not directly treat the positive aspects of my faith, as Joyce’s “Portrait” does not either. But, like St. Teresa, I value visions of hell when I can get them vicariously. So I cannot condemn “The Exorcist” on the basis offered in Miss Kael’s first question.
As for the second question, I am not willing to accept anything merely because it makes my Church come out in a good light. I will not defend the burning of Bruno, nor will I tolerate Bing Crosby as the ideal priest. But then I will not welcome the “New Yorker’s” movie list when it paraphrases one of Miss Kael’s sentences to tell me that “it is religious people who should be most offended by this movie.” I did not graciously accept instructions on how I should judge and feel from [Catholic magazines] the “Wanderer” or the “Sunday Visitor”, and I see no reason why I should be grateful and delighted that the “New Yorker” has undertaken to supply moral guidance for religious persons.
In any case, I was not offended by the movie, and I do not judge that this is to explained on the grounds that I am fanatically determined that my Church must look good. It did look good in the movie, even if only in sharply defined conventional terms. And that did not displease me, since I judge from my own experience that my Church can look good in more complex reality. I was positively pleased with the way my Jesuit brothers were depicted, and precisely because that depiction did accord with my own notions about the life I have experienced – the pains and frustrations touched upon as well as the dreams and satisfactions; the brotherly concern expressed, among other things, in the stolen Chivas Regal; the quiet effort to help others, to distinguish as well as possible the ingenuity of diseased humans from the crude manifestations of evil powers.
Miss Kael, becuse she is not interested in the reflections of Jesuit life in the movie and not doubt because she knows nothing about it, can dismiss these touches as “the jocular bonhomie of the Jesuits.” But she might have seen, had she looked with the interested and informed eye she took to “The Last Tango in Paris,” an artistic depiction of Jesuit life that, in its humanity and its sincere, if fallible, effort to face up to evil, provides an illuminating contrast to the inhuman construct that Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus so vividly projects. In short, the movie has at least some minor values that anyone could respond to.
End Part One
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