The Army was shooting American college kids protesting about the Vietnam war. Hippies, once tolerated, found themselves tarred with the same brush as Charles Manson, the cult murderer who made shaggy hair, sex and drugs synonymous with brutal killing and pagan sacrifice. The death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Festival in 1969 had left a generation of flower children wondering what had happened to all the peace, love, and understanding with which they were going to save the world. Even the government was unraveling inexorably, as President Richard Nixon became increasingly implicated in a string of suspicious, even criminal subterfuges. By late 1973, the presidency was on the brink of collapse, the walking wounded from Vietnam were everywhere in evidence, and the only thing America was exporting was paranoia (p.8).

tender time not unlike Regan’s similarly transitional pubescence – begun while out of work as a writer of the kind of Hollywood trifle rapidly going out of style at the time. To the extent that his story was inspired by a newspaper article he had read while a student at Georgetown University – another turning point in his life – and set on that same campus and its environs, the writing reflects a certain going-back and a re-education on the same site where many other revolutions were simultaneously taking place.

Reading his account of writing and shepherding his work to the screen in WILLIAM PETER BLATTY ON THE EXORCIST: From Novel to Film (Bantam, NY, 1974), one is struck by the almost messianic undertone to Blatty’s striving, as though in an effort, fueled by fears of obsolescence, to identify with a drastically changing world, he had taken that world’s cares upon

The use of a term like "project," however, especially when talking about the movies, is a considered one. It’s a cornerstone concept in psychological theory, and The Exorcist, despite having pushed the technological envelope of horror filmmaking as had 2001: A Space Odyssey science fiction five years earlier, is primarily a psychological drama (as again attested by all those twisted heads), and

bears analyzing thusly. For, from Merrin’s early discovery of the detached head of an icon and the film’s ensuing visual emphasis on similarly decapitated statuary, to the inexplicable stopping of a clock, the film plays out as the dream of a likewise "disembodied" consciousness taking place in no specific time frame, its fragmentary, often non-sequitur structure representing the associative flow of a slowly disintegrating ego craving re-integration.

As outlined by analyst Marie-Louise von Franz in her 1978 volume, PROJECTION AND RE-COLLECTION IN JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY (Open Court, London, evidently inspired by the sudden prominence of exorcism and possession in the popular culture), this "projection" is the process by which a mind, faced with perceptions about itself that it finds unapproachable

firsthand whether because the material is too shameful, embarrassing, incriminating or even complimentary, buries these perceptions in the unconscious; the unconscious, then, being indisposed to such reticence, finds some other way of dealing with the material, "projecting" it onto some external person or thing. The recipient of these projections thus often finds him- or herself variously ridiculed, criticized, demonized or idolized, sometimes even driven out of the subject’s life or consciousness, as in the tradition of the scapegoat. By externalizing its concerns in such a manner, the mind can then address the material in a disguised form of objectivity, resulting in either some overt form of action, as is often the case in situations involving racism, sexism or homophobia – examples of projection, all – or in considered analysis.

In analysis, the subject acknowledges the projection, deals with it, and reintegrates the material into the personality – "re-collecting" it. This process of recognition Franz terms "reflection," as suggested in the climax of the myth of Medusa, the gorgon whose gaze turned humans to stone (the psyche frozen in stasis) until being fixed in the mirrored interior of the hero’s shield – the recognition of

Some poeple are more natural receptors for others’ projections than others. Toni Wolff, Jung’s contemporary, in fact, reserved one of her four feminine

personality types for this character, which she termed the "mediumistic" woman. As described by Irene Claremont de Castillejo in her book, KNOWING WOMAN: A Feminine Psychology (Shambhala, Boston and London, 1973; p.67), this type "is permeated by the unconscious of another person and makes it visible by living it. She may pick up what is going on beneath the surface of the group or society in which she lives, and voice it." One might say as much for the "medium" of film, as well.

Possession, Franz avers, can be read as a form – or result – of projection, exorcism being the withdrawal of one’s imposed misconceptions. In young Regan, a sweet but basically bland figure caught at a transitional moment, the film and its audience find an

points out), for the hero instead of the adversary, the experience of watching – of "going to see ‘The Exorcist’" – becomes itself a catharsis, an ejection of whatever negative elements the spectator may have brought to the theater.

...Assuming that what has invaded the personality is evil. As sociographer Wade Davis characterizes possession in so-called primitive cultures, it signifies, not an invasion, but "the return of the spirits to the body" (UTNE READER, July 1999, p.61; emphasis mine), in keeping with The Exorcist’s own contention of a dis-spirited world separated from God. Franz supports this in Jungian terms also, indicating ghostly possession especially as the visitation of a "lost" spirit – meaning, the complex, or network of signs and associations underlying the pathology – uprooted from the unconscious in order to be "found," or acknowledged by the consciousness. In the instance of demonic

possession, the material is seeking to be "‘religiously’ taken into account" (Franz, p.114), to be recognized and accepted by the soul.

As the term "demon," from the Greek daimon, originally indicated not a necessarily evil spirit but also a divine one, a genius, the force may then be seen as neither positive nor negative, but merely conditional. (The connection between daimon and Damien, as well, should not go unnoticed: as recipient of a projection, Regan is in fact "possessed" by her project-or, Karras.) With the gradual insurgence into the pop-cultural mainstream of such mythical figures as Sinbad, Jason, Ulysses and Hercules in the films of the fifties and sixties (themselves the descendants of such mythological forebears as Gog, Gorgo, Kronos, Behemoth, the Ymir of 20 Million

All this floating anxiety then finds its locus in the disillusioned character of Father Karras, whose last name comes from the Greek charis, root of the term charity, and whose first name, Damien, evokes, as Blatty has it in the novel (Harper Paperbacks edition, p.334), "the name of a priest who devoted his life to taking care of the lepers on the island of Molokai. He finally caught the disease himself." Reflective of Catholic Blatty’s own avowed career dilemma, Karras is suffering a crisis of faith localized in the figure of his ailing, impoverished, immigrant mother, the real-life center of Blatty’s 1973 memoir, I’LL TELL THEM I REMEMBER YOU. For Karras, Regan’s possession indicates the real presence of spiritual forces in the world, enabling him to finally realize his potential – the name he was born to embody – and to exorcise his own demon of despair – the specter of the diseased mother, a similar foreign presence he could

not help. From the evangelistic tone of Blatty’s writing and other public pronouncements we assume a similar effect for him as well, the in-spiration he was looking for after a life of fluff-writing coming in the form of a demonized young woman. When the identity of the inhabiting presence progresses from "no one" to "Legion," it’s the advancement, in Blatty’s private world, from anonymity to celebrity via the same earthly "vehicle."

Chief of all demons, however – who often started life as other cultures’ deities before being reinscribed by ascendant religious systems as other-than – was Lucifer, whom the presence inside Regan at one point claims to be. The story of how this so-named "Bearer of Light" became relegated to the underworld via hubris and jealousy over God’s omnipotence is familiar; it’s also, however, a fairly apt description of the repression of psychic materials, malignant to the ego, into the unconscious underworld – another source of illumination buried under layers of suspicion, ignorance and misunderstanding. How this devil gets projected back into the world, then, can be equally enlightening.

In the novel (p.248), Blatty refers to a book employed by Karras in his research on exorcism, "a green-bound volume called SATAN, a collection of articles and Catholic position papers by various French theologians" – a real book which seems to have been a primary reference for the author himself. (SATAN makes occasional reference to both Blatty’s concept of despair as primary sin and the Baudelairean-derived maxim that the devil’s greatest trick is in making people believe he doesn’t exist, as well as picturing and postulating on the obscure figure of Pazuzu; many of Regan’s symptoms, also, appear to be modeled on cases cited here.) Published by Sheed and Ward in 1951 under the editorship of Père Bruno de Jesus-Marie, O.C.D., before the Second Vatican conferences of the following decade modernized many of the Church’s positions, it’s a wide-

ranging assortment stretching from forceful statements on the factual existence of its subject, through various psychological considerations, to studies of his representation in Milton, Blake and Balzac; it resolves with a chapter on perhaps its real subject, Adolf Hitler, with no mention of the Church’s recently acknowledged complicity in this latter manifestation’s brief dominion on earth.

(Indeed, the Nazi Occupation of the authors’ homeland is perhaps a clue to the prominence of Possession among their subjects therein.)

Read from the detached perspective of a non-believer, some of the more literal-minded essays in the book come across as object lessons in projection. How else to account for the depth of detail and analysis on a figure on whom there is no material evidence and no scientific validation, only the often feverish and emotional theorizing of a coterie of, after all, some of the most repressed individuals in modern society (many or all of the essays being written by members of the Catholic clergy), denied the same earthly plenitude as reportedly tormented their subject? This Satan then becomes equated with ambiguity (Charles Moeller, p.xxiii), rebellion (Joseph de Tonquédec, S.J., p.44), matter, desire and anarchy (Henri-Charles Peuch,

In the film’s portent-laden, In-the-Beginning prolog (reminiscent of 2001’s "Dawn of Man" similar, with "primitive" – Iraqi – people toiling in the desert under the watchful eye of the cosmos), paleontologist Father Merrin (Blatty also once considered a career behind the cloth) discovers the head of an icon of Pazuzu, emerging like some leftover piece of psychological material – the complex – surfaced in dreams, or the buried consciousness of the dreamer arising to inspect itself. (In one of Friedkin’s interpolations on the Blatty, he

To begin with Regan herself, we may ask why such a person would either accept these horrors upon herself, become a target of others’ projections, or even – the true believer’s viewpoint – be accessible to the visitation of actual evil.

In considering the first possibility, one must take into account the conditions of her life at the time. She is, again, at the threshold of adolescence – meaning, she is ready to exorcise the specter of her own childhood and take

The maturity toward which Regan is inevitably drawn must appear ominous and unfriendly to the young girl: the gorgon of responsibility crouching at her door, the burden of sexuality similarly in the offing, the inscrutability of adult behavior awaiting. And considering the grown-ups inhabiting her sphere of

As an object of others’ projections, the case has been made frequently enough elsewhere for all such demon-child stories (The Exorcist followed quickly by such offshoots as TV’s "Bad Ronald," It’s Alive, The Omen, Devil Times Five, Who Could Kill a

Child?, To the Devil a Daughter, Carrie, "The Death of Richie," The Night Child – even those deprogramming movies of the early eighties like Ticket to Heaven and Split Image – and a host of other, more explicit rip-offs such as Beyond the Door and Cathy’s Curse, all predated by The Bad Seed, Village – and Children – of the Damned and The Other) as expressing parental fears of the emergent power of youth culture, though the film itself, as indicated, does much to suggest these children as only acting out the foibles and dysfunctions of their elders. Because of her author’s – hence, prime "projector’s" – avowed midlife issues, however, one might wish to regard Blatty’s own motives for creating such a character and for putting her through such ordeals as he does.

To start with, the name he has chosen for her is a reference to KING LEAR, as acknowledged in the novel in Chris’s thought that "she had almost named her

of I’LL TELL THEM....) It does, at least, hint at a recognition of the world as governed by an insane God, if one at all, analogous to the similarly omniscient "author" possessed himself by an irrational distrust of the Good Daughter and whose withdrawal of that paranoid projection brings about the end of the maelstrom. (His choice of Pazuzu – hailing from the same Middle Eastern origin as Blatty’s Syrian-Lebanese ancestry – as the occupying demon also carries a whiff of misogyny, as this figure was a consort of Lamia, one of the early forms of Lilith, Adam’s willful, apocryphal first wife.) It’s also likely, however, that Blatty simply couldn’t resist the pun in the name, as the book and film both came together under the California governorship of Ronald Reagan, the former Democratic president of the Screen Actor’s Guild long since "possessed" by conservative values (his own head-turning experience) in what has always been a famously liberal town. By bringing Hollywood to Georgetown – where

Carol J. Clover, in her 1992 work MEN, WOMEN AND CHAIN SAWS: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), offers several insights as to what should make Regan such a channel for other’s realizations of themselves. In a chapter on this and other occult films, Clover considers the feminine nexus of so many of these features in terms of their femininity itself: their possession of an additional "opening" to their male counterparts, the vagina and vulva that serves as both an entry and an exit for life, a yonic portal to worlds unknown; for men, at least. Regan is "open" to interpretation, as to projection, a conduit for all the world’s ills to be reflected in one perceptible location. (With the film’s 2000 reissue this motif finds extra resonance as an opening on to a new age, as demonstrated in such contemporary "portal" films as Being John Malkovich, The Ninth Gate, and Sliding Doors.) The girl’s deflowering suggests her own opening to such influences, the image itself projected onto the motif of her uncloseable bedroom window (the irreversible sexual maturation), which Clover notes provides an entrance for the unceasing draft Kinderman warns is "a magic carpet for bacteria."

Theologians and mythmakers since at least the creation of Eve have regarded women and their "portal" in similar terms to Kinderman’s as an entry point into the world for evil, as Regan serves in this story and as is made explicit in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. SATAN, to its credit, is not uncritical in its assessment of the Church’s historical attitude toward women and the consequences of those doctrines during the Inquisition and other, equally colorful, chapters from its past (see, especially, Emile Brouette’s essay there on "The Sixteenth Century and Satanism"), though it does try to pass the bulk of the blame on to its Protestant colleagues. (Significantly, Friedkin’s conception of actress Linda

pages to brother Mike, seven to Maurice, and to his sister Alyce, three paragraphs.) Eve’s painting as the first temptress, inspired by the phallic Serpent, sheds particular light on another of The Exorcist’s set pieces, the prostration of Regan before the snake-phallused statue of Pazuzu; when the scene abruptly cuts back to the priests – as though it hadn’t really happened at all – the whole segment plays out as the inelegantly edited fantasy of at least one of the Fathers present, of the eroticized female bowing before his own iconic (unrealized) sexual potency.

Since Pazuzu was the personification of the disease-carrying southwest wind, one sees Regan’s possession as a sort of seeding, a profane conception from the impurity wafting through her portal from the site where

studios chestnuts as Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, when the words "help me" appear in relief on her belly like the "Homo, fuge" that materialized on Faustus’s arm it’s an indication that something needs to emerge from that womb, the characters gathered about her to enact its exorcism in fact there to aid in its delivery. This is precisely what Karras does when drawing the presence out of her in the ending, midwifing the spiritual birth of her own next generation cleansed of the body-paranoia of his repressed old order.

In Regan, Chris sees the offspring of her own atheist values, her separation from Howard reiterating her separation from God, creating a matriarchal household consisting of herself, Regan, secretary Sharon and Swiss housekeeper Willie Engstrom (old, harried husband Karl Engstrom the only

devil invading the corpus of the home and setting up the later defenestration of other not-the-Father, Karras. The nascent Women’s Liberation which was certainly the theme’s touchpoint must have appeared to such representatives of the patriarchal Church as Merrin as a replay of the similar rebellion which characterized Satan in their eyes, whose fall was reportedly brought on by a likewise "desire for self-sufficiency" (Farrell; SATAN, p.13). Barbara Creed, in her 1993 THE MONSTROUS-FEMININE: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, London and NY), reads the penultimate dressing of mother and daughter in the same black garb as is worn by the shock-effect Iraqi crone in the film’s prolog as indicative of a unified threat against this old order, a point of view representative of the work’s generally reactionary reputation in the theoretic community. Though I think she misreads the text – the crone she describes seems peripheral to the shock,

embedded in a carriage abruptly crossing Merrin’s path and only one of several, dissimilar portents; all the characters in the closing are dressed in black, besides, in mourning for the two dead priests – such a consideration of the work’s feminist paranoia may not be

unwarranted…which isn’t to say that it’s written in black and white, either.

While Chris’s reluctant film-within role, which Blatty describes as "a psychology teacher who sided with the rebels" (novel, p.14), sets her up as another descendant of that famous instigator of anarchy, Eve (she is featured, in the novel, in her one production sequence inciting students to tear down their administrative building; in the Friedkin, she’s shown trying to quell those forces), her academic discipline as well as sympathy with this uppity faction suggest a desire to comprehend the forces welling up in society as well as in her daughter. She is Blatty’s – and his audience’s – conduit to an understanding of the conditions threatening to both of their complacency. By the same token, her name is evocative of the Christ who bore similar nonconformist sympathies and who, like Chris, was famously torn between the

role assigned him by God (as she her director, in the novel) and his own earthly concerns (as she her more conservative). The conflict in her character suggests at least that Blatty may have been similarly torn between his own better judgment and the paranoia of his day, the story a working out of his dilemma to its amicable resolution.

Even if Creed were right, however, about the ending, Regan and Chris, in adopting the style of dress of what has been presented as

the book gives no indication that his head has been wrenched in the doing – Friedkin deliberately obscures scrutiny of its position in the film, encouraging speculation – Karras’s fall down the same set of stairs as claimed Dennings implies a form of correspondence, at least, so that we may understand that his head has been figuratively, if not literally, turned around.

Whatever the suggestion of corruption in the MacNeil household, the ultimate point of the story seems to be that this exalted image of divine masculine authority – false, weakened, or lacking in every instance – must be eliminated before order may be restored to the world. And, in fact, more than restored, this order has been furthered: a real revolution has taken place, or will. The film’s original closing moments, where Karras’s fellow cleric Father Dyer is pictured pondering the abyss below the steps outside Regan’s bedroom window,

There’s another instance in which steps feature profoundly, however: Karras’s dream of his recently deceased mother in the crowded, unfriendly

Friedkin’s framing of the sequence with the device of the St. Joseph’s

experience of the mother then is bracketed by the appearance, in surrogate only, of the absent father (last seen by Blatty in real life

descending into a subway) whose "fall" the son is doomed to replicate. Fitting, then, that this medallion (which Regan rips off of Karras’s neck before the priest immolates himself, he defenseless without it), symbol of the stewardship and responsibility Blatty Sr. had forsaken, should find its way from the hallowed earth to Father Dyer’s pocket via Chris, who doesn’t need it – she has already proven herself as a parent. It’s a reminder of the distance he, as all his fellow men and wearers of the cloth, have to go before finding his own "earliest grace." The film’s dream is its dream – its mission, its intention, its goal for itself.

Before departing with her mother, however, Regan, who reportedly has no recollection of any of the preceding events, does something curious: she kisses Father Dyer on the cheek. The gesture is ambiguous. On the surface, it would

As concerns Blatty and his own mother, the kiss comes across as something similar. According to the novel (p.324), Merrin – the name a derivation of Maerin, the Northern European goddess also known as Mari, or Mary – was renowned among his colleagues for his interpretation of faith "in terms of science, in terms of a matter that was still evolving, destined to be spirit and joined to God." Substitute "matter," which many theologians have associated with Satan, for its cognate mater, however, and you see the philosophy as in fact a hopeful prognosis for Blatty’s own mother’s wayward soul. Drawn in I’LL TELL THEM… in benignly demonic terms as a similar trickster – variously thieving, lying, and provoking in order to lend her children a better life – this

In an age of director’s ascendancy perhaps passed with the demise of the director’s director, Stanley Kubrick, and the reissue of such a creation as this, where the author has finally claimed, for better or worse, "possession" of his work, perhaps a reappraisal is in order, after all. The more you know about Blatty and his efforts – once you get past the self-importance of his motives and the desperate need to be liked that oozes out of so much of his prose – the warmer and more personal his and Friedkin’s cold and off-putting piece of film becomes. Giving yourself up to it, as to any external reflection of oneself, can take some sort of effort, but can yield, at the same time, some kind of benefit, some sort of revelation.