Page 65 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

let, into which she had poured lighter fluid. She was burning it.
That image has stayed with me all my life. It hadn’t been enough to chastise her daughter for reading corrupting material, as one might have chastised a son caught with Playboy wedged beneath the mat- tress. It wasn’t even enough to take the paperback away and throw it in the trash. The decency-minded Mrs. MacCabe had removed it from child, then
from house, and then, not able to remove it farther, crouched on the concrete outside to splash a cooking skillet with kerosene.
This wasn’t a punishment; Carolyn wasn’t even present. Nor was it a public display, like the crowds of appalled protesters who must already, at that time, have been picketing this movie’s first screen- ings downtown.
I saw her face. She was scared. ~
The visiting priest, we were told, had been a key con- sultant on the controversial film, making sure every- thing depicted was true to the ritual. Father would be arriving next week at Gonzaga, a series of tall- windowed, century-plus-old buildings assembled out of red brick and imitation Grecian columns, huddled tightly into the North capitol Street area and origi- nal enough to the neighborhood still to have its own 19th century church and bell tower. After his talk, we would be allowed to ask a limited number of ques- tions, either about the making of the thing, or about the cultural and indeed theological issues on which it touched. We should take some time to reflect, be- tween now and then, on what we would like to know.
All such politely worded admonitions were for naught. We were teenage boys at this point, and
all anyone wanted to ask about was that one scene, easily among the most shocking moments in 20th- century cinema. We did not know exactly what the possessed Linda Blair in the movie was supposed to
be doing, but cringing lay teachers deemed it “mas- turbating with a crucifix.”
It’s actually nothing like masturbating with a crucifix. In the film’s most assaultive moment, it’s an image of a 12-year-old child stabbing her own vulva, a bloody self-rape that does not even resemble rape so much as genital knifing. “Let Jesus fuck you,” the demon voice growls, a line I find difficult to write even in 2024. It’s a sequence that produces abrupt, whirl- ing nausea in the viewer, a spasming of brain and
gut in unison. Unlike the affected shock art of, say, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, this moment isn’t even trying to offend you. It actually is offensive.
In the real world, child actor Blair is simply holding a box between her knees and pounding the crucifix into it. The fact that, as she has said in interviews, she did not entirely know what her character was supposed to be doing adds to the eyeball-searing effect of this action. Her arm motion is pitiless, mechanical; she makes no obscene, tongue rolling gesture, as a wom- an in a heavy metal video might. Not since Dracula, written during the New Woman scare of the 1890’s, has horror so completely encapsulated both the brazen assertion of female sexuality and the frantic attempt to punish it at once.
This connection is more than a passing one. When Bram Stoker penned his grue shocker, women in England were pushing back against what histo- rians call the Cult of True Womanhood, with its cardinal virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submission. The rabble-rousers on the other side were beginning to cut their hair, wear flat-soled shoes, express opinions; they wanted to escape the shackles of marriage and motherhood, get politi- cal and get jobs. To the men who disdained them, these New Women were degenerates, covertly thrilling in their assertiveness, but ultimately dangerous. Within the novel Dracula, the transfor- mation of innocent Lucy Westenra into a writhing sex-thing in her bed is both a pure expression of male panic at changing female agency and a largely unnoticed predecessor to The Exorcist, much of whose impact, when it first screened, lay in its nightmare depiction of second-wave feminism. The link is recognized in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, whose depiction of Lucy coiling and tonguing the aghast heroes gives a clear nod to Friedkin’s film. In case the point needs driving home, Coppola writes in a scene later where she projectile vomits on them.
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