Hypnosis in The Exorcist: Chapter 2 Part 2 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
The Exorcist (1973)
Perhaps the earliest theory of hypnosis deemed it a form of possession by some god
or demon. This, alas, is its guise in The Exorcist, which demonstrated cinema’s
psychological impact, by increasing “possession” in the United States. Appearing
at about the same time as the movie, T. K. Oesterreich’s factual study Possession,
Demoniacal and Other agreed with The Exorcist that, in civilized countries,
possession was quite rare, while exorcism was almost entirely limited to the Catholic
Church. Oesterreich devoted over three pages to modern Catholic exorcism, about a
page to spiritualist, and a tiny paragraph to “right wing” Protestant (Oesterreich
199-202). Today, however, one of the most common features of Protestant televangelist
programs is the story of some New Age cultist possessed by a demon and subsequently
saved by Protestant Fundamentalist exorcism (or, as it is now more often called,
“deliverance ministry”).
“[A] very frequent cause of possession is the sight and company of possessed persons. This at once furnishes explanation of epidemics…. Exorcising priests were particularly exposed to this ‘infection,’ and scarcely one of them escaped it completely” (Oesterreich 92). Closely observing someone in trance tends to transmit the trance (with Erickson sometimes hypnotizing himself to hypnotize a client). The current epidemic resembles a snow-balling effect beginning with The Exorcist, book and film, with the latter seding more patients to psychiatric care than the former (Bozzuto 141). It continued through countless imitations including two sequels as well as supposedly real cases publicized by fundamentalists, newspaper tabloids, and so on.
That The Exorcist had a hypnotic effect is not a coincidence. The director, William Friedkin, has admitted deliberate use of the most notorious hypnotic technique in cinema, the subliminal image:
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The first time I ever saw subliminal editing was in Alain Resnais's wonderful documentary Night and Fog where he had these beautiful, colour traveling shots of the former killing grounds of the concentration camps in Germany, now overgrown with weeds and restored to nature peacefully. And as these languid shots were going by there would be quick intercuts of black and white footage of the corpses that had been found in these places. That seemed really profound to me when I first saw it, and that was my influence for the use of subliminal shots in The Exorcist. All of them were there to reproduce an effect like memory….What I was trying to do with the subliminals in The Exorcist, the clearest, soundest idea that I had in approaching that film, was to explore the notion that two different people, Father Merrin and Father Karras, who were in different parts of the world, had had experiences, or memories, or dreams, or nightmares, that had brought about a synthesis between them. (Quoted in Kermode 48-49) |
Friedkin’s admission does not mean that subliminals dominated the
film. In Sexploitation, Wilson Bryan Key charges that horrifying images, too
brief to be noticed consciously are interpolated in many scenes. This appears to
be an exaggeration. Mark Kermode's frame–by–frame examination of the celluloid did
not corroborate Key's allegations, except for the well–known repetition throughout
the dream sequence of a demon face too briefly to be fully recognized (Kermode 45).
What Friedkin’s subliminals demonstrate is that he was trying to have an unconscious
effect on the audience with any means possible; most critics missed this (consciously
at least). The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies, for instance, contends: “There
is all the difference in the world between a film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
which treats significant themes in fantastic guise in a way that can be recognized
as aesthetically shaped and distanced, and a film like The Exorcist, whose
underlying themes are no less significant but which treats them with a heaping-up
of shock-effects and uses a deliberately nauseating naturalism of presentation” (Hardy,
Milne, and Willemen 48).
This description is only partly accurate. It correctly notes a lack of distance—i.e.,
a successfully established rapport, which enhances the shock of graphic imagery,
but it perceives “naturalism” where Friedkin was actually expressionistic. In the
prologue, for instance, as Father Merrin walks unsteadily through the streets, the
hand-held camera photographing him also shakes. The device is like the distortions
of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), shaped by the undependable perspective
of one of its characters. Likewise, the audience hears an odd buzzing that Merrin
presumably hears as well, but is not necessarily an objective part of the world.
However much American fundamentalists disliked the film overtly, they seem to have derived from it an intensified conviction that the devil is invading bodies and only Christ can exorcise them. On its surface, the film has quite the opposite message. Pazuzu (evident in the prologue through close-ups of his idols) has no visible effect on the crowds of Moslems bowing in prayer to Allah. In contrast, the Christian Merrin seems susceptible, growing ill during the prologue, and dying during the exorcism. Father Karras offers himself for possession. Before becoming an exorcist, Karras’s work consisted almost exclusively of psychoanalyzing a few Jesuits, as if the Catholic church’s staunchest order were in the midst of a spiritual crisis.
The Babylonians made little apotropaic images of Pazuzu and survived him thereby. From a secular background, Regan succumbs easily. Implicitly, modernism (even that of educated priests) may weaken faith and open one to the non-human powers, while unreasoning beliefs—in any religion—hypnotizes into a staunch faith that guards against demons. Lacking this, the United States of America (indeed, the very capital thereof) is vulnerable to an outbreak.
Stylized patterns bring the audience into the world of Regan, a young girl under psychiatric treatment. For instance, the camera mounts the stairs slowly to Regan’s door before each incident (Kermode 42). William Peter Blatty, author of the book and of the academy–award–winning screenplay, intended the demon to be objectively present, modeled on long-standing Catholic traditions (Blatty 20). From Friedkin’s perspective, however, the electronically modified voice of Mercedes McCambridge represents part of Regan herself. The incongruity of his psychologizing with Blatty’s theological script contributes to the disorientation of the audience.
Adding further to this confusion, Blatty makes much of his script a mystery filled with red herrings. In the first of these, to account for the noises, there is a hunt for rats in the attic, fruitlessly. Second, a small group of images concern children rebelling against authority, as if Regan might be faking the phenomena as a prank. (Her name comes from one of the undutiful daughters in King Lear and her mother acts in a movie about student rebellion.) Nevertheless, the only strain in her relationship to her mother turns out to be the possession itself. Third, the doctors diagnose a temporal lobe disorder as the cause of her aberrant behavior, yet cannot find actual evidence of such brain damage. Finally, the malevolent being fails to fit the stereotype of possession provided by the Catholic Church. It cannot tell the difference between unblessed and holy water, and its strange sounds are not really a foreign language but English played backwards. (This provided another opportunity for Friedkin to expose the audience to subliminals, in this case backmasking.)
Father Karras continues to think that Regan is faking, long after such a view is untenable given what he has seen. Disposing of these red herrings proves the phenomena supernatural in the context of the film. In Friedkin’s hands, these red herrings become a disturbing labyrinth joined to such unexplained images as dogs fighting near the statue of Pazuzu, or, in Father Karras’s dream, a dog running and an amulet falling. The overpowering special effects of the possession are made more compelling by the spectators’ being opened to the surreal.
The money shots of Regan floating in the air, turning her head three-hundred-sixty degrees, or vomiting in priests’ faces might at first seem to be explained easily in Christian terms; however, they happen regardless of the Christian ritual of exorcism. Similarly, Regan has been playing with a Ouiji board—seeming confirmation of fundamentalist association of possession with New Age practices. Instead of summoning Pazuzu or Satan, however, her board contacts an innocent-sounding “Captain Howdy” (in which Kermode hears an echo of her father's name: Howard). Father Karras almost fits the cinematic stereotype of the Bad Priest, who loses his faith, drinks, but finally redeems himself though heroic self-sacrifice. Complicating this cliché, much evidence including testimonials by his superiors, portrays him as a superior priest. A police inspector assumes that any diabolical murder must be the work of a priest. Father Karras treats this bizarre assumption as quite normal, as if everyone knew that the clergy were falling apart, driven mad by science and other challenges to traditional faith.
Certainly Karras sacrifices his life, but in a very un-Christian manner. He stops the exorcism prematurely, losing faith in the Christian ritual and asking to be possessed. When the almost inevitable occurs—the spirit tempts him to murder Regan—Karras leaps from a high window, risking the mortal sin of suicide. (Blatty, however, shows Karras still alive and still possessed in Exorcist III, 1990—a situation prefigured by a final scene of the The Exorcist in Blatty’s script but cut by the director.)
The Exorcist is certainly not the thoughtless presentation of any pat dogma. Sources of Blatty’s original book include the records of a 1949 exorcism, a school assignment in college given by Father Thomas Bermingham, S.J., Georgetown, and later researches into religion and psychology (Blatty 3–25). Among other things, the movie reflects tensions within Catholicism. The church scenes had to be shot in an Episcopal church because the minister of the first building chosen, Pat Sullivan, S.J., objected to Catholic cooperation. Other Catholic clergy, nonetheless, participated willingly (Travers and Reiff 25).
As such a mutually critiquing interplay of traditions, this Golden-Globe-winning film qualifies as an ota, but ultimately a reactionary one, terrified of the unconscious from which it comes (like so many Frankenstein movies, e.g., Forbidden Planet (1956), with its warning against “monsters from the id”). Ostensibly, The Exorcist suggests: protect America from invasions of foreign influences, stemming from demonic, non-Christian countries.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 2 Part 3
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