| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
The Version You’ve Never Seen
The devil his due
Genuinely-disturbing horror with a topflight cast that delivers the genre goodies while leaving the religious, political & ethical issues largely untouched.
The characterization is deft and to the point; the style, scientifically-spooky, combined with excellent musical scoring choices that successfully mimics the way Stanley Kubrick used the best of music already composed. The Devil is characterized as a rebellious child who knows how to get under your skin via your fears; eg, orificial swearing & exploitation of guilt.
The problem here is that the demonic-possession plot is not worth worrying about because it is little more than fundamentalist nonsense. Whites possess only a nodding-acquaintance with their own demonic natures (which would have made for a much better film) and so have produced a disturbingly-evasive movie about the disturbingly-banal nature of the evil inherent in White culture. Unlike The Devils, this movie wallows uncritically in the sickness represented; making one wonder how sick White people really are in real life to have made such a bizarre movie.
The film is afflicted with a pious ambiguity that seeks to hide its true desire and to evade the complacent evil in all of its characters. Also, with a typical White hypocrisy born of years of practice: The Exorcist is desperately compulsive, precisely in the terror of its unbelief in its own pseudo-Christian premiss. The tail-wagging-the-dog SFX are meant to suggest reservoirs of courage, devotion & nobility, qualities with which the film is not in the least concerned, despite the movie beginning, superbly, in Iraq; effectively exploiting the uneasiness one feels when touched by the energy of distant gods and the spirit of the terror which informs the Christian-pagan argument.
The star of this movie is Satan; strangely underestimating everyone else here. His concerns are limited; his methods unsubtle. The movie is not concerned with damnation, an abysm far beyond the confines of its imagination, but with property, with safety, with capitalism, with the continued invulnerability of a certain class of people & the continued sanctification of White history as the only truth. A history Whites dare not scrutinize too closely for fear of it being as truly scary as this film is not.
The student uprising in the film (the leading lady is an actress starring in a campus-set movie) perfectly shows the dichotomy in White culture between ethical compromise and the truth. One line of dialog suggests the students should work within the system; neatly balanced by another, which suggests that the political perceptions of this film-within-a-film are more truthful than the satanic-possession story we are watching. This sets the stage for an alleged story of evil that never really touches on it; hence, the abject dependence on special effects to entertain the audience while distracting them from any analysis of real evil in the real world.
The mother runs away from the mysteries now being confronted by her growing daughter in horror at the demonic possession with all the apathy of the American middle class, reassuring herself that nothing she has done, or left undone, has irreparably damaged her child; who will grow up, therefore, to be as healthy and as wealthy as she. Almost analogous to the maturing of Whites into a culture which will suppress their humanity in favor of White supremacy - the unnamed evil here.
Along with the Christian fundamentalist mumbo-jumbo of levitating beds and discontented furniture, there is the young priest, tormented by guilt throughout; Satan ruthlessly playing on this. Satan also plays on the mother’s guilt concerning her failed marriage, her star status, her ambition, her relation to her daughter, her essentially empty, hypocritical & unanchored life: Her female emancipation from unreliable men. This uneasy and terrified guilt is the subtext of The Exorcist, which it cannot ever exorcise because it remains unconfronted.
The film is most terrifying for what it evades - along with its mindless and hysterical banality. It pretends to offer-up an encounter with the abyss of the human soul: That moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. America (the only country to have perpetrated two genocides in such a short span of time) certainly knows more about evil than most. Yet, this devil needs no dogma, nor any historical justification; history being largely his invention. But, the real Devil does not levitate beds or fool around with little girls: We do.
Ultimately, it is the story of a Roman Catholic priest - and his crisis of faith - that makes the whole thing watchable. The priest is more possessed by (his own) demons than the exorcee; giving the Devil (& this film) its limited dramatic power since, without something positive to believe in, we are all tempted by the devil.
A highly-entertaining movie, by virtue of its superb direction and high-quality acting which, nevertheless, manages to trivialize evil in its masquerading as genuine horror, to tell a story lacking in genuine substance, purpose or imagination.
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