Screaming Yellow Zombies

THE UGLINESS of The Exorcist (directed by William Friedkin) is calculated for cheap thrills. It pounds at you mechanically with the punch of a tank. It soaks below the conscious level into the bloodstream and anesthetizes feeling. Senseless in its conception, emptied of anything to care about, the movie does its dirty work on the stomach and the nerves. And, down deeper, it can cast your world into a limbo of doubt.

But The Exorcist must be what people want. It must have tapped some starved mood of the public. For it has already become a happening as heavy in the air as the last Stones tour, a mandatory movie experience. In Los Angeles the mob turn-out set off a traffic jam that slowed down half the city; the scramble for tickets at the box office sparked off a riot; the theater reported an average of 23 vomitings and fainting fits per performance, and promptly jacked up the admission price. And although a crew of nurses was hired to help the sick and security guards to herd the crowds, and extra movie showings were scheduled, the authorities, citing the movie as a riot hazard, still intervened and forced the theater to distribute other prints of the movie throughout the Los Angeles metropolis. Then all these other theaters took similar precautions and met with similar over-population and stomach punchiness problems.

In Detroit The Exorcist has become the scene to make, and no action scene has been as big for the people under 30 in the city since the Woodwarding heyday in 1968. From the look of the line outside the movie you'd think David Bowie was playing. It is an audience of dudes, every kind of dude come to panic in Detroit. You see sparkle shirts next to stretch pants, zoot suits and bodysuits, spangles and sequins and satins, conks and greaser crowns, bouffants and bubbles and blond-wigged blacks and silver-sprayed Afros, tranvestites and Amazons. The action is not in getting into the movie as much as it is in getting off on the movie together, in concert. And the getting off means a wisecracky hysteria, a grab your neighbor and howl with a mad mock raspy relief, as if coming down off some wild nightmare ride of your midnight hour. There isn't a quiet minute of the movie. You hear waves of "Jeesus, man, I can't believe that action. I mean can you dig that dis-gusting motherfucker!"

THIS IS A crowd different than the one that came to quake at Psycho, different from the bloodthirsty at the bullfights or the gladiator contests, not a lynch mob, not witnesses to an execution. The people at The Exorcist come to get spellbound. This is a trip crowd. It is everybody that turned on to Easy Rider and El Topo, and just about everybody else. The people are looking for cool kicks that let them off clean. And here's what kicks them off:

Twelve-year-old creamy-skinned, apple-cheeked Regan (Linda Blair), daughter of a famous actress divorcee (Ellen Burstyn) living in the heart of Georgetown society, is possessed mind and body by the devil. Her face grows bloated, crossed by pusfilled lesions; her eyes become cat's orbs that crawl back in her head; her skin swells and turns a swamp color; her hair gets sticky and snaky; her voice comes out the croak of a just-cured male mute; convulsions contort her body and it flips like a wounded crocodile's tail; she drools green gook when she is not squirting vomit (pea soup) into the faces of the psychiatrists and priests who come to treat her. Before the guests at her mother's dinner party she urinates on the carpet; she smashes a psychiatrist in the groin; strapped to her bed she makes drawers open and windows crash and the furniture move in murderous assault upon her mother; she rotates her head full circle. And best of all, she masturbates with a crucifix, jabbing it into her bloodied vagina with great thrusts of her torso, and when her mother rushes to grab the cross from her she slams her mother's head down into her bloody mess, yells a stacatto "Eat me, Eat me, mother," and grins a bloodied wicked grin.

NOBODY IN THE audience seemed to care much about the rest of the movie. During the narrative they replayed the best action bits for each other to make sure they'd got it, and fidgeted. And the investors are lucky that nobody studies the rest of the movie. Because there is nothing to it--it is all mindless filler, padding to launch the action. The movie's high is in the special effects that ran up the movie's budget from 4 to 10 million dollars as Friedkin kept mashing up more vomit effects into his vomit movie. He must have gotten carried away, which is lucky for the investors. What a good gamble they made, those wizards, when they guessed that people would want to get sick at the movies. Maybe they noticed that people also stock up on T.V. dinners, dash-board Jesuses, dead-baby jokes...

MADE WITH the technical advice of three Roman Catholic priests, the movie broadcasts the superior power of the Catholic Church to rid the world of evil. The Church must be running out of devout. Still exorcism is spare stuff for so heavy a message, especially when it is left at loose ends. The history of the devil spirit, for all the attention he gets, is a mystery. You don't know why the devil picked on little Regan. You don't konw why the two priests die. You don't even get told how an exorcism works. It's a shoddy movie.

It's also framed. The doctors and the shrinks who prove powerless before the problem of possession, are trustees of an irrelevant authority. "What bullshit!" the mother explodes at their diagnosis. So they suggest exorcism. But what doctor, what authority of objective science, however frustrated, would turn to sorcery? How thin, after all, can you stretch convenience and still have people believe that a Harvard-Johns Hopkins-trained psychiatrist-turned-priest just happens to have done research on witchcraft? Since when has superstition invaded the sciences? Since The Exorcist, where superstition is the sense of the world. This is the alchemist's vision resurrected in a historical vacuum.

"People go to the movies for three reasons," Friedkin says, "to laugh, to cry, or to be frightened." But The Exorcist is too framed to be frightening, too mechanical for tears; the only laughter it triggers is defensive. The movie puts a tight lid on your ability to think or feel. It won't let you get close enough to care about it--it is always on the attack. Little Regan just gets filthier and filthier and when she's exorcized the movie has to end because it took all its bang from the fake effects Regan gets so foul that you go home feeling laundered like a golden girl. You also feel laundered in muck. People must be hard up for highs, or bored, or both.

BUT NOBODY goes to a movie six times over just to get banged, briefly, out of boredom. People go back when they are looking for something, be it a vision, an identity, a synthesis of their experience, some sought confirmation of their lives. They go back when a movie excites some inside need they had not acknowledged, when it jars loose a lock on the unconscious. The Exorcist is so ugly that is has to be absorbed unconsciously--and it must have taken hold there, lodged in.

The movie says that devilish forces plague the world that can pick on the powerless and corrupt them unawares. The world is a conspiracy of sinister unknowns; it is out of joint, gone haywire, batty. The primacy of the exorcism plants confusion and doubt everywhere. People are slaughtercalves of the powerful and the powerful cannot be identified. Nothing can be known for sure, nothing can be taken on faith, for the devil travels in disguise. It's life as hallucination.

Which, when you get down to it, is not too different from the way the world looks on the evening news. Only there it is the government that appears a maze of fraud and deceit, its machine a mystery run by mad men. Watergate has given even greater cause to conspiracy theory; it wrecked public trust in the powerful, spotlighted sin among the elect. But not, for many, brightly enough. Nixon could be neither caught nor convicted. And a lesson was that nothing in the government is what it says or appears to be. Now nobody believes that the Energy Crisis is for real, but they can't be sure, and much less are they sure who to blame for it. They can't take anything straight. And doubting generates feelings of impotence, of innocence abused. A movie which warps the world into a grand Ouija board confirms for them the world as revealed by Watergate. The mindsets are made for each other.

THIS IS NOT to say that people, having lost a sure faith in the American system, suddenly start believing that the world is haunted. Rather, they'll believe that it's haunted as much as they'll believe anything else. For what they have lost (and the news from Washington doesn't get all the credit for this--you can blame anything from cities of steel and stone and glass that frazzle the feelings of self to the modern predicament) is the sense of connection. And The Exorcist, if anything, depends for its shock upon severed connections. Heavy mechanical cutting dissociates you from the picture. Its edges don't connect, but hang jagged. The lesioned picture leaves you with the sense of a world awry, a broken world whose sense has splintered. It's fun for casualties of a holocaust, or hellfire, anxious all the time.

Now people were skeptics before Watergate, but they didn't start acting like evangelists until Watergate. Watergate made righteousness fashionable--the country's soul needed saving. But righteousness thwarted turns to wrath. And righteous wrath obstructed creates a pressure to purge. The Exorcist is the picture of a purge. It is bursting with nihilistic aggression. Blasphemy is the whole of little Regan's act.

She assaults all the "pillars of society," church and family, law and science (she doesn't, of course, mess with the market). The movie is a spitting on all the sacred social relationships, a fiend's snarl at god and man. She renders authority helpless--the doctors, cops, shrinks and priests, guardians of the public health, safety and conscience, she defiles. Little Regan, this bright-eyed and blossomed-cheeked twelve-year-old darling, terrifies and tells off the whole straight, established, grown-up world of the movie. She is a hell's angel and a devil's child, a naughty devil at that. She is also a she-devil, splurging on all the forbidden fantasies: from the bloody masturbation with the crucifix to the near murder of the mother, she de-eroticizes sex Little Regan, moreover, an innocent possessed, is free to do the forbidden. She's a repressed reaction to Watergate. She is its exorcist.

THE EXORCIST is a hit in the way that the Sharon Tate killings were. It is perversion as mystery. The characters are treated at such a hostile distance that you are inured to their pain, absolved of all connection with what happens to them. The people leaving the theater hid between their shoulders like the prisoners you see in documentaries of concentration camps. Nobody had gone to have a happy time at the movie. The movie is entertainment for lifers, a trip for the down and out. Kicks were all the audience wanted and cruel kicks they got. They got their feelings stoned and their fears teased and their nerves knocked cold. They got turned on to a total turn-off tune-out of a movie. They must be desperate, of bored, or both.