Saturday, August 18, 2007

nice day for an exorcism.

"I would say that it was vulgar and shocking, but I don't know if I would actually call it 'scary'. I wonder if it's been built up so much as being so horrifying that nothing could live up to that hype?"

This is a common criticism of "The Exorcist" that I hear a lot, and a truly acceptable one. There was certainly a time when "The Wolf Man" could scare the pants off of anyone back in 1941. Watch it now, and you're asking yourself why a wolf man's only weapon of attack seems to be pushing people over.

When I was very young, I remember when my parents took me to see "The Never Ending Story" at the drive-in. I remember spending most of the time on the floor under the glove box, terrified to look at the screen. It was the giant turtle in the swamp, who referred to itself in the royal sense, having isolated itself for thousands of years, to merely proclaim to one lone visitor, "We don't even care whether or not we care."

I suppose when I was young, a giant turtle in itself might have been quite frightening. But I suppose these days, any fear I have to spare for it would be more or less a cerebral one.

That is more or less my feelings of "The Exorcist," a film I saw in a theatre-setting but once, a few years ago. Much to my surprise, most of the audience was laughing through it. Go a few decades back, and the experience would have been quite different.

"The Exorcist" derives its scare-tactics not from what's actually on screen, but from how you process what you see. The film, itself, never shows its cards as to whether what's happening is really supernatural or not. So what we have then, is simply a story of good and evil. It matters not whether you subscribe such ethical assertions from religion or simply humanistic philosophy.

We read of, hear of, and occasionally see real evil in our world, and we can come to grips with it in our own way. But there seems to be a strong consensus that the evil should be left among the adults, and never subjected towards children. News television always runs stories on "protecting our children from x, y, or z", and we have a general sense of dismay when innocence is subjected to evil, as opposed to a comprehensive adult.

So when evil occurs upon a child, almost randomly, and causes the child to become a vile, unspeakable creature, it not only shakes our notion of a social blasphemy, but causes a ripple effect amongst the rest of the characters and their own notions of good, evil, life and death. The mother, an unbeliever, seeks to protect her child. A priest, battling with his loss of faith in the face of imminent death (his mother), seeks to regain his faith, and becomes a martyr.

Even more importantly, the themes of religion and technology come to light. We see a tortured girl surrounded by metal machines performing x-rays and cat scans. When the mother asks for an exorcism, the priest simply replies, "You'd have to take a time machine back to the middle ages." Science has come to show what once appears as demonic possession can be explained through mental health. Most, believers or not, would not automatically presume insanity to be the result of a demonic host, in the face of enlightenment and technological advancement.

If you've watched a family member deteriorate to Alzheimer's Disease as I have, you probably can relate to experiencing what once was considered to be demonic possession. But science is continually chipping away at it, and it may be a thing of the past in time.

But demons exist in religions. The New Testament tells of Lazarus, possessed by a demon which is cast out and embedded among pigs who jump to their death (not a good deal for the pigs.) Islamic religion tells of Djinns, demons from the desert who perform evil at their whim. Satan, himself, a central character for Christianity, though our understanding of Satan derives more from culture than from the Holy Scriptures themselves. A believer must constantly translate and subscribe good and evil towards themselves, or god, or from Satan, certainly a mental activity I would never wish upon anyone.

How we answer the questions posed by "The Exorcist" is where the true terror comes from. Is evil an idea, or a material object? What it the meaning of life, and death? Am I subjected to celestial discretion, whether for good, or for evil? And if I believe in god, who is the creator of all things, I must believe that evil is created and willingly volunteered upon us by him. Where can I draw the line, then, between god and satan?

If I am a non-believer, I must face my own death. I must also face the fact that the universe doesn't care what I eat, or drink, who I sleep with or what I do in my spare time. If there is any evil in the world, it is from humanity, and not a horned beast underground. But if there is good, it is also from us, and our own minds must create the distinction between the two.

Whether you're a believer or not, you have to answer those questions, and live accordingly, in the face of a world that seems to do as it pleases anyway: war, famine, murder, and terror. And we must deal with the consequences.

1 comment:

Brad said...

I guess for me the thing that came closest to getting me about the movie was who it happened to, but not just that it was a little girl. Same thing with "The Amityville Horror," which I also watched recently.

To me, it's the 'random acts of possession' that I find the most uncomfortable. That poltergeists, if they exist, could inhabit a house I could potentially buy one day and I could be exposed to the pig with glowing eyes. Or, in the case of 'The Exorcist,' that I (or worse yet, my wife or other loved one), could be taken over by a demon, if they exist.

It's that pure house-or-human-picked-at-random-for-possession that I found most disturbing, although not enough for me to lose any sleep over.