from "Why 'The Exorcist' Endures" by Mark Judge for The Russell Kirk Center
1) The film endures because the atmosphere it depicts has become our own. The point—often lost even four decades later—is to convince human beings that we are animalistic and not worthy of God’s love.
1) The film endures because the atmosphere it depicts has become our own. The point—often lost even four decades later—is to convince human beings that we are animalistic and not worthy of God’s love.
2) To convince us of this, the demon in the film most frequently attacks others in vulgar sexual terms, even raping the victim, a young girl named Regan ...
In the book, Father Lankester Merrin (explains) the demon’s target is not the innocent girl ... The target “is us.”
In the book, Father Lankester Merrin (explains) the demon’s target is not the innocent girl ... The target “is us.”
3) He continues: “I think the point is to make us despair, to reject our own humanity ... to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; unworthy.” The demon, as Fr. Merrin notes, “knows where to strike.”
4) No one who was alive when The Exorcist was released the day after Christmas in 1973 will forget what the cultural atmosphere in America was like, and how the film detonated like a neutron bomb. The United States was in the middle of a cultural revolution.
5) The country was trying to extract itself from Vietnam, the Watergate story was blowing open, and the sexual revolution was at hurricane force. In January 1973, Roe v. Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court.
6) It wasn’t long before abortionists and their allies were comparing young humans to lower life forms, including, yes, pigs ...
Amidst the drugs, scandal, rock and roll, and moral collapse of the 1970s, "The Exorcist" announced ... some evils that are timeless and don’t change.
Amidst the drugs, scandal, rock and roll, and moral collapse of the 1970s, "The Exorcist" announced ... some evils that are timeless and don’t change.
7) Unlike William Blatty and "The Exorcist" director William Friedkin, (moviemakers today) seem unwilling to concede that evil strikes at us in our most sacramental and personal space—our sexuality.
8) To do so would be to concede that a gnostic separation of the soul and body, a willful confusion about the meaning of sex, and a degradation of female sexuality has been part of the liberal cultural triumph of the last forty years. And Hollywood is not about to indict itself.
9) ... it is still not the wars or geopolitical battles or natural disasters or espionage that marks our era as evil. It is the degradation of ourselves as spiritual beings, a degradation that takes the form of sexual assaults, both physical, spiritual, and putatively humorous.
10) Sitcoms are a 20-minute series of sex jokes. Journalists go on talk shows and giggle about how a nickname for the Tea Party sounds like a sex practice. A recent online video ad ... features ... young girls shouting out the f-word in defense of abortion and same-sex marriage.
11) ... having become convinced that we are indeed soulless, rutting animals, and encouraged by the culture that this is a good thing, we look to "The Exorcist" like a mirror. The truth holds us rapt.
@ThreadReaderApp unroll The truth holds us rapt.
