For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Ephesians 6:12
I meant to write on this topic in 2023 for the fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Exorcist. Now seems the right time to return to it.
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The Exorcist was released at Christmastime in 1973, even if it was hardly a Christmas movie. I don't remember the winter of 1973-1974, but by accounts it was cold and snowy. That didn't stop people from going to the movie theater to see The Exorcist. I remember there was a lot of talk and some controversy over the film. I think the talk far outweighed the controversy. The Exorcist was a national event in a way that may no longer be possible in America now that we live in atomized cultures. It seemed like everyone wanted to see The Exorcist and to talk about it afterwards.* I remember that my parents went to see The Exorcist. I remember that afterwards they were silent about what they had seen. They must have been very deeply affected by their experience. If you have ever seen The Exorcist, you must know why.
We as children were not allowed to see it, but children hear and listen and seek out knowledge about things forbidden them. It was as if something had happened in another room of the house. It's as if we had heard muffled voices, snippets of sentences, cadences and tones, but never the whole thing. We wanted to know what it was all about. We talked about it ourselves in our very limited knowledge. We listened to every rumor.
I watched The Exorcist years later. One of my first thoughts was this: My parents went to see this movie. They were old-fashioned Catholics, shocked and embarrassed then by things people don't even think twice about now. And yet they went to see The Exorcist, either in late 1973 or early 1974. I'm sure they wanted to see what the talk was all about. But maybe they wanted to see something more.
Despite all of the shocking, disturbing, disgusting, and frightening scenes in The Exorcist, it is, I think, within the worldview of Catholicism, for it says that God is real and powerful and that he intercedes in earthly affairs. It says also that there are demons in the earth and that they wish to do us harm. They wish to turn us from good, to exploit our weaknesses and doubts so as to turn us from belief in God. The Exorcist says that we are engaged in an eternal conflict between good and evil. And it says that the Catholic Church leads in that conflict, with its priests as its foot soldiers. It's no wonder, then, that my parents would have seen The Exorcist. I believe that it would only have affirmed their beliefs, despite--or maybe because of--all that it is. Depictions of the fight against evil cannot be bland. They must be shocking. They must shock us awake and into vigilance, resolve, and greater faith.
The author of the screenplay for The Exorcist was William Peter Blatty (1928-2017). Born ninety-eight years ago almost exactly to today's date, he was a devout Roman Catholic and the son of Lebanese immigrants. In 1971, he wrote the novel The Exorcist, in which he cast (pun partially intended) the ancient, Asiatic, pre-Christian god Pazuzu as the demon that possesses the body of a twelve-year-old American girl. There is much in the novel that is not in the movie adaptation. Some of that involves searching in books for possible answers to the deadly serious problem at hand. That same kind of searching happens in weird fiction, for example in the opening of "The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, Nov. 1931). In reading that part of Blatty's novel, I found that discussions of books can actually be an exciting and interesting part of a work of fiction. That's a good thing to learn for lovers of books and for people who write fiction.
Pazuzu was an actual historical deity, represented by Babylonians and Assyrians in the first millennium before Christ. I don't know when belief in Pazuzu would have faded away, but it's clear that Christianity and later religions would have displaced belief in Pazuzu and other old gods. The Exorcist begins with a sequence in the Iraqi desert: an archaeological dig would seem to have exhumed Pazuzu.** Or maybe that was only a symbolic exhumation, for the way for the return of the old gods would have already been opened by then. By the early '70s, the sea of faith--to mix metaphors--had already long before begun its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." (There are winds in the original stories of Pazuzu, in that beginning sequence of The Exorcist, and in Matthew Arnold's poem, from which I have drawn my second metaphor.) Significantly or not, the possessed girl's mother in The Exorcist is an atheist. Perhaps by her disbelief she opens the door--to return to my first metaphor--to the entry of an old god, long in exile. Again, despite all of its obscenities and bodily horrors, The Exorcist subscribes, I think, to a Catholic worldview. Again, by watching it, my parents and people like them would have been affirmed in their beliefs.
Blatty's sequel to The Exorcist, entitled Legion, was published in 1983 and again adapted to film. His title of course comes from the biblical account of Jesus' encounter with a man possessed. When Jesus asks the demon's name, it replies: "Legion." In an act of exorcism, Jesus casts the legion of demons into a herd of swine, which rush off a cliff and perish in the sea. That casting of possessing demons into the bodies of others is echoed in the climactic scene in The Exorcist in which the demon Pazuzu is cast into the body of the young priest, who throws himself out of the bedroom window, thereby killing himself, sending away the demon, and leaving the girl once again herself. I'm not sure what to make of the young priest's making of himself one of the Gadarene swine.
Old gods have returned to earth. I have written before on this topic, thus the title of today's entry. You can read what I wrote, dated September 29, 2023, by clicking here. In The Exorcist, the old god Pazuzu is recognized for what he is. He is not welcome and in the end is sent away. That was more than fifty years ago. Now, because we so easily give into depravity and our own worst desires, the old gods are invited back into our midst. My parents and people like them are gone. There is nothing in their place. The good God is gone, or dead according to observations by Friedrich Nietzsche and Flannery O'Connor, leaving the old ones to fill the vacuum left with his withdrawal, more accurately our driving him away. Moloch is perhaps most welcome of all of the old gods: we daily make sacrifices of unborn babies, infants, and children to him. There are others of course. Read on . . .
Murder has approached our family three times in recent years. The man involved in one of those cases is also alleged to be involved in Odinism. Odin was of course a Norse god, in other words, a pagan and pre-Christian god. Christianity did away with the old gods and all of their demands and tolerance for human sacrifice, child sacrifice, animal sacrifice, abortion, infanticide, ritual mutilation, bestiality, cannibalism, and other horrors. Thank God. But in turning away from belief in God, we turn ourselves back to those and other horrors, back to the pre-Christian past. We shouldn't wonder at all that people of today do the things they do. Why would it be otherwise? I wonder when we might turn back again, not to the old gods but to the One God that preceded and banished them.
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*Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune loved The Exorcist. Martin Knelman of the Toronto Globe and Mail hated it, describing it, among other things, as "fascist." Some things never change, I guess: in 2026 as in 1973, if you don't like someone or something, or disagree with him or it, just call him or it "fascist" and that disposes of your problem. Nothing is required on your part and you can dismiss opposing ideas and the people who hold them.
**There are similarities between the opening sequences in The Exorcist and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Both take place in silent and arid wildernesses. Both involve encounters with artifacts representing gods or godlike entities. Those gods or entities become influences upon humanity, for better or worse. Remember that Jesus went into a desert wilderness, there to encounter and to be tempted by Satan. Jesus stayed strong, resisted the influence, and sent him away.
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
I never thought I'd say this, but I think you're being unfair to fascists :-)
ReplyDeleteI agree that describing THE EXORCIST as fascist is bizarre, but too many people confuse fascism with Naziism and while the Nazis were fascists, that doesn't mean that all fascists are Nazis.
Put simply, fascism is "a far-right, authoritarian political ideology emphasizing extreme nationalism, a powerful central state, a single dictator, militarism, and the suppression of opposition, prioritizing the nation or race above the individual and opposing democracy, liberalism, and communism."
There are many countries in the world today that fit that definition (ironically "communist" Russia being one of them) and there are large groups of people in your country and mine who are similarly inclined. It is unfortunate that fascism has such pejorative connotations and no replacement term has appeared to replace it (without the Nazi baggage).
Personally I am opposed to fascism, but that's a personal choice and doesn't mean that all fascists are "evil" or "wrong" - simply that they have a different set of priorities to my own. I would prefer to live in a liberal, democratic, society but we both live in democracies and if the majority decide (as they did in Germany) to elect a fascist government then we have to live with it.
Hi, Phil,
DeleteIt's easy to dismiss people who throw around the word "fascist," but I think the use of it in some cases is more subtle than in others. I don't know what Mr. Knelman meant when he called The Exorcist "fascist," but it could have something to do with violence, authority, conviction, and tradition, as opposed to liberalism or modernism (possibly also supernatural or mystical versus scientific or reasoning). Like you say, it seems bizarre, but maybe it's not as easy as all that.
I guess not all fascists are equal. Franco is classed as a fascist, I guess, but he wasn't Hitler. Likewise for socialists on the left. Bernie Sanders is one, but he's a clown and definitely not Stalin, who would probably have had him shot.
I differ with the idea that fascists are right wing, but that's neither here nor there. I think the operative parts of fascism are absolute exercises of power, extreme applications of force, and opposition, as you wrote, to both liberalism and communism. And as always, we should remember that fascism, at least in some of its forms, is socialist. It is also in at least some of its forms irrational and as such not easily explicated.
The old saying is that people get the governments they deserve. Or maybe another way of saying that is that the state is the expression of the general will. If democracy is valid, does that mean that people have a right to vote themselves into tyranny and oppression? Maybe so. Another saying is that you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out. I guess this is just the wheels of experience and history turning and turning . . .
Thanks for writing.
TH in a remote location.