GROSS/64 1973 - The Exorcist and Catholic power
The mystery of faith
In which I try to connect the everday evangelism of a 1970s small-town priest with the will to power of present-day elite Catholics via 1973’s top-grossing Hollywood movie.
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
THE EXORCIST, director WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; cast ELLEN BURSTYN, MAX VON SYDOW, LEE J. COBB, LINDA BLAIR; production WARNER BROTHERS, 1980, 122 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.
The Exorcist isn’t a horror movie, it’s a strident Catholic evangelical text. A combative sales job for Catholicism from a moment when the faith was terribly fragile and uncertain of itself. Pauline Kael, who hated the film, said it was “the biggest recruiting sergeant for the Catholic Church” since Bing Crosby’s dog-collar pictures (I’ve written about one of those here: Going My Way: a hymn to capital in the city of labour). The film’s muscular priests send the demon packing and heroic Father Karras (Jason Miller), a modern priest who initially doubts the reality of possession, ultimately sacrifices his own life in saving Regan’s (Linda Blair), as a good priest should.
When The Exorcist was released I was ten. My parents weren’t believers but they were from Irish Catholic backgrounds and, consequently, they were never going to be allowed to fully escape the church. Using some kind of baptismal radar the priest from the local church located this nominally Catholic family and, one evening, just showed up on the doorstep wondering why he’d never seen us at St Joseph’s.
This priest became a regular guest. He’d come by on a Friday evening and drink Jamesons and eat my mother’s ham sandwiches for the rest of the night, all the while arguing - loudly but with good humour - with my dad about his atheism.
It wasn’t what you’d call Socratic. I mean my dad hated religion and this priest was a conventional clergyman with not a radical or unorthodox view in his head. But he loved to argue with my dad. He’d pitch God’s love for us all, Christ’s sacrifice and so on. Dad would stick to his approximately Dawkins-level disdain for the irrationality of faith and his suspicion of the church as a backward and corrupt institution.
What I understand now is that our priest must have known there’d be no movement in the old man’s position but he evidently thought there was something worthwhile in the dispute itself, in the honest labour of trying to convert the unconvertible. He was doing his job, fighting the good fight, one non-believer at a time.
The Exorcist’s priests are in the same game. They’re acting on their obligation to save souls, doing their sacrificial duty. One of them actually dies in the saving but this is essentially routine work for a Catholic priest: the most basic gift of the priest to his flock.
The movie was released less than ten years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council - Vatican II - the multi-year colloquium that was meant to update and future-proof the Church. In the early seventies the Catholic Church is still basically quivering with nerves about its new identity - as a modern, liberalising institution that had just dropped the bulk of its medieval bullshit.
My dad was anti-faith but he was also, as many people radicalised by Communists in the thirties and forties were, anti-clerical. He had a common-sense argument: the priests did the work required of them by the owner class, keeping the working people down, but it was more complicated than that. The Catholic establishment was in the middle of a kind of strategic withdrawal. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) had redefined Catholicism’s posture toward the modern world.
The old Catholic church claimed jurisdiction over everything - the state, education, sex, art, thought and action. But Vatican II’s reformers wanted dialogue, freedom of conscience, an accommodation with secular democracy. Dignitatis Humanae - one of the 16 declarations of the council - declared that the state mustn’t coerce belief - it should be arrived at by choice, like buying a car or something. Gaudium et Spes - one of the other declarations - suggested the Church might learn from the modern world as well as just preach at it. It was a kind of peace treaty with the liberal hegemony.
To the traditionalists this treaty looked a lot like a surrender, though. Within a decade, they’d claim, the results were obvious: empty seminaries, abandoned convents, folk singers at mass, priests wandering the streets without their dog collars, the collapse of clerical prestige. The Church that had once disciplined kings was now struggling to discipline its own bishops.
It was into this context that The Exorcist, a film about Catholic sacrifice - incidentally made by an agnostic Jew whose most recent film was a thoroughly sacrilegious crime thriller, was released. In the story this ancient belief stuff collides fully with the thoroughly material business of being a movie star and of making a movie - Regan’s mother is a hard-bitten professional, her conversations in the sub-plot about the practicalities of shooting and the stresses of divorce set off the antic business of possession going on upstairs in the girl’s room, where the literal devil is present, are the engine of the thing, its source of tension.
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