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Lead Picture
Sunday, October 27, 2019
My son Dom was very young when I took him to see The Exorcist.
Read more on the blog www.existentialautotrip.com
A man with a suitcase, arrives in a house building in the night, with the film's slogan above him while the film's title, credits and billing underneath him.
Warner Bros. - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070047/mediaviewer/rm705487872
Film poster for The Exorcist - Copyright 1973, © Warner Bros.
The blog? A daily three to four-minute excursion into photos and short texts to regale the curious with an ever-changing and diverting view of a world rich in gastronomy, visual art, ideas, chuckles, stories, people, diversions, science, homespun, and enlightenment.
Observing with wit and wisdom, Dom Capossela, an experienced leader, guides his team of contributors and followers through that world, an amusing and edifying conversation to join.
Note that the blog is also the first place that posts the "Hello! my friends," videos and the
“Conflicted” podcasts.
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Commentary
Sunday, October 27, 2019
My son Dom was very young when I took him to see The Exorcist.
I had seen it with my wife, Toni-Lee and we both loved it and probably told him that, whetting his appetite, he a horror movie fan, he, not I, and he had nagged me for weeks to take him to see it.
Not a mistake since very early into the film he pulled my sleeve saying, “Can we go home now?”
When the boys were old enough to appreciate it, the film became a family favorite, so I was delighted when Tucker J sent in his review of the film.
His review is terrific; a lively, fun read appealing to jaded sophisticates and movie buffs as well.
See it within this posting.
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Thursday’s Dinner posted on
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Felt like it.
A burger at the Bristol Lounge.
Alone with my book.
Pretty nice.
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A “Conflicted” podcast
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Chapter Three of Conflicted
The podcasts will go out first on this blog and then on many of the major social media.
Chapter Four to be posted here on Wednesday.
Dom’s website: existentialautotrip.com
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A “Hello, my friends!” video.
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Dom’s website: existentialautotrip.com
Melatonin
A complaint that medical people sometimes don’t see holistically
Dom’s website: existentialautotrip.com
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Friday’s Dinner posted on
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Felt like it.
A burger at the Bristol Lounge.
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Chuckle of the day:
Sunday, October 27, 2019
We eat honey. Chuck Norris eats bees.
The only time when Chuck Norris was wrong was when he thought he made a mistake.
God wanted ten days to create the Earth and sky. Chuck Norris gave him only seven.
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Movie Review
Sunday, October 27, 2019
by Tucker Johnson
The Exorcist
About halfway through the highest-grossing film of 1973, Father Damien Karras pauses mid-prayer, overcome with thought. Karras is a Jesuit priest as well as a psychiatrist, employed by Georgetown University to counsel the other priests. An actress named Chris MacNeil has come to him, desperately stating that something is wrong with her daughter. MacNeil thinks that maybe she’s possessed, even though she knows that can’t possibly be true. Karras quickly dismisses this fear as something that modern time and science has ruled out. The idea of possession is antiquated. As antiquated as the methods of curing possession. But then Karras meets this girl, Regan, and sees that something is most certainly wrong. In church, thinking about all this, Karras speaks to his congregation, and he pauses for just a second. In that heartbeat, while talking about the body and blood of Christ, Karras seems to recognize something about Catholicism—that it is rooted in some ancient religious savagery. His gut or faith or both tell him that only the church’s archaic methods of good can combat ancient mysterious evil. Right away, he goes to his Church superiors and recommends an exorcism.
If you grew up in the Catholic Church, as I did, then you might have spent your childhood thinking of the sect’s rituals as mundane, even boring. Once the immediate horror of consuming your savior’s body and blood becomes the reality of eating stale tasting wafers and sipping bad wine, cracks begin to form in nearly every other practice the Church goes about in the course of an hour on Sunday mornings. But The Exorcist—a movie made by an agnostic director who’d grown up in a Jewish household in Chicago—digs its nails deep into those ancient traditions and finds something truly human in them. Seeing faith and religious rite used to slay a demon and save a child seem like the reasons things like religion exist. Back when life was far more treacherous and so much was unexplainable it seems like humans would need the ability to fight off truly powerful otherworldly evil. We developed icons and rituals to protect the innocent. We believe in their power because we needed to. It’s a beautiful notion.
The Exorcist is a terrifying, hideous, grueling, amazingly good movie, and because of that bipolar nature it’s difficult to nail down exactly why it had the financial success it did. One argument in the movie’s favor is that The Exorcist had a lot of things going for it. It was based on a runaway bestseller; its author, the screenwriter William Peter Blatty, had based his story on a famous tale of an almost-certainly-faked exorcism in St. Louis in the ’40s, and he’d sold the film rights before the book had even been published. Director William Friedkin was coming off of The French Connection, an instant classic action thriller that had won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Still, it was a grueling, troubled shoot that led to a grueling, troubling movie. On top of all that the studio decided to release the film on December 26th, 1973; just in time for the holidays. And yet despite its subject matter or its appearance to the world the day after Christmas The Exorcist became a cultural phenomenon.
In an alternate universe The Exorcist would have starred both Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, the studio’s first choices for the roles that ultimately went to Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller. Friedkin didn’t want either of them. He offered the Chris MacNeil role to Audrey Hepburn, but she’d only do it if she could shoot the movie in Rome as she had just moved there. The list of starlets continued with Anne Bancroft who had just gotten pregnant and could not commit to the role and landed at Jane Fonda called the script a “piece of capitalist rip-off bullshit” Instead, Friedkin ended up making the movie largely without A-listers and none of the leads were especially glamorous. Ellen Burstyn had been nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1971’s The Last Picture Show, and Von Sydow had already appeared in nine of the eleven Ingmar Bergman films he would appear in over his career, but Miller was a total unknown, a playwright who’d never acted on screen before. And the story goes Friedkin auditioned hundreds of girls before he found Linda Blair.
Friedkin was an infamously horrible asshole on set. He injured both Burstyn and Blair during the possession scenes by jerking them around with stunt wires. He flat out lied to Miller by assuring him that the stream of projectile pea-soup vomit would hit him in the chest, not the face, so that he could get Miller’s authentically disgusted reaction. He also upset Catholic crew members by slapping Father William O’Malley (a real priest playing a fictional one) in the face before filming one particularly dramatic scene. He even built the bedroom set in a freezer so that he could see the actors’ breath which was far more important than comfortable working conditions.
The troubled production cost the studio double what they had originally budgeted and all up the film cost about fifty-four million dollars in today’s money. So, The Exorcist was already hobbled by the time it got in front of the executives at Warner Bros and the initial test screenings didn’t go over too well. What the studio heads saw was a vile, expletive filled, genuinely disgusting final product and due to a fear the film would flop released it in less than thirty movie theaters the day after Christmas in the hope the film would come and go with the holiday season. They were surprised as anyone when the film wound up being a smash hit. People braved the elements standing in line for hours to see the film that was rumored to have caused audience members to faint, vomit, and in the most extreme cases cause heart attacks and miscarriages. No matter what the truth the rumor mill worked for the film’s popularity. It wound up being the highest grossing R rated film until 2017, a forty-four-year stint at the top. It was even nominated for Best Picture as well as nine other Academy Awards. Not to shabby.
There have been plenty of takes on why The Exorcist was so popular. The Watergate scandal had taken over the news across the U.S. right when the film was released and at some level the American people were ready to see as story about corrupted innocence. Another angle paints the film in an anti-feminist light. In the film the girl hits the age of puberty and almost immediately turns into a fluid spewing heretic who screams curse words and mocks religion. Her mother is single and isn’t a woman of any religious faith or tradition. So, what does she do? She turns to the clergy to help bring Regan back to the side of good. Viewers would never admit that these were driving forces behind going to see or even enjoying the film but it’s not a hard leap to make when people are boiled down to their most primal drives and beliefs.
The easiest excuse of all though is that The Exorcist is a great film. A film’s legacy becomes clear when the years after its release are filled with homages and parodies. The story of a little girl needing to be saved is gripping and it hits most people on a visceral level. Friedkin became infamous for how he treated his actors on set but none were treated as poorly as Mercedes McCambridge, the voice of the demon whenever it spoke through Regan. McCambridge had quit drinking and smoking before playing that role, but to get the right haggard intensity in her voice, she drank whiskey, chain-smoked, and ate raw eggs. She recorded her parts while tied to a chair at Friedkin’s insistence. Condoning the director’s behavior isn’t something anyone is prepared to do but by putting his actor’s through the ringer he was able to get raw, believable performances that the film may not have to its credit if another person had helmed the project.
Yet despite all the reasons listed above what’s most striking about The Exorcist is how traditional a movie it really is. Not in the anti-feminism read but more in its core story mechanics. In The French Connection is really an out of control cop who endangers civilians, shoots an unarmed man in the back, fails to capture the film’s villain. In The Exorcist, by contrast, two Catholics priests sacrifice themselves to save a little girl. The Church hears what’s happening with this demon and they immediately volunteer help. The film may have blood, vomit, and shock value, but it does not represent the counterculture of 1970’s cinema. We learn that Chris MacNeil is in Washington to shoot a film about student demonstrations but the one scene we see her shooting in the movie within the movie has her telling the students not to shut down their school. Later on, MacNeil calls the film she’s working on “The Walt Disney Version of the Ho Chi Minh story”.
The Exorcist also shows a pretty clear distrust for modern science. When Regan is first possessed her mother takes her to the best medical experts she can. Friedkin depicts the hospital as nightmarish. Regan sprays blood during a standard blood test. She’s forced to lay inside a hulking buzzing scanner that works without any empathy towards the child’s situation. Psychiatry is no help either. In the film the field professionals do finally recommend exorcism as an option but almost in the same breath, dismiss it. They call it a practice that “has been discarded except by Catholics who keep it in the closet as a sort of embarrassment”.
It is those very same Catholics who then must come to the rescue but the men they send are as troubled as Regan. Father Karras lives in near poverty and has just witnessed his mother die a terrible death. Father Merrin has already had experience with demons but is old and weathered and knows his time is almost up. But the two of them go head to head with ancient evil and defeat it though it takes both of their lives in the process. The Exorcist seems progressive, but it’s definitely built on tradition. It has trust in institutions. Modern movies do too but those institutions aren’t real. They’re the Avengers. They’re Hogwarts. They’re the Rebel Alliance. Humans want to trust institutions, but history has given us too many reasons to distrust the church, the police, the government.
Film historians tends to look upon the 1970’s as an era where young directors challenged the handed down wisdom of older generations. Those historians are right to do so and that shift in thought produced some groundbreaking and lasting works of art, including The Exorcist. There’s just nothing jaded about The Exorcist. Instead, cynicism would arrive later. Just over a decade after the film, for instance, another blockbuster would do very different things with demonic possession. When an ancient evil takes over the body of Sigourney Weaver in 1984’s Ghostbusters, it’s mostly an excuse for Bill Murray to be funny. That’s all the time it took for a terrifying cinematic spectacle, a sincere confrontation with old and unnamed things, to become a joke.
A tip o' the hat (U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, 1924) after signing an Indian treaty
Sly devil that he was.
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Acknowledgements
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Thanks to Tucker J for his terrific review of The Exorcist.
Thanks to Funny Jokes for today’s chuckle.
Thanks in general to the Microsoft team at the Prudential Center for their unflagging availability to help with a constant flow of technological problems.
Always thanks to Wikipedia, the Lead and the Thumbnail sections of the Blog very often shaped from stories taken from that amazing website. They are truly worthy of public support.
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Good Morning
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Why do I go to horror movies?
They horrify me out of my pleasant complacency.
But now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your Taeyeon