Page 66 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

Witches (continued from preceding page)
In Stoker’s own tale of gender horror, when Lucy Westenra (her name means “light of the west”) is finally lost to evil, she transforms into a terrible anti-mother, like the three witch-brides of Dracula— Jonathan Harker calls them “weird sisters,” after the witches in MacBeth—New Women who lust after nothing more than to bite little children’s necks
and lap, lap the beautiful rich blood. One wonders whether QAnon faithfuls, breathlessly asserting that Hilary Clinton is a Devil worshipper who harvests adenochrome from toddlers’ blood, have been at all aware of earlier puritanism waves, or how they have expressed themselves in panic.
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To understand what a visit from an exorcist meant— what having the Jesuits cancel fourth period classes, line students up silently in the chapel, and await a man who was a specialist in Satan—it’s necessary to recognize both the political character of the original ground-breaking film and the turbulent world in which we received it. Roe v Wade, the destruction of which would become a half-century hunger of the right, was first decided in January of ‘73, the very year The Exorcist exploded. The decade that fol- lowed—the deadline for ratification was 1979 before President Carter moved to extend it to ‘82—was the era of ERA. That still-unrealized amendment had made it past the senate, the number of divorces was vaulting higher, and a new, Ms. Magazine America was struggling to emerge, one who basic premises, includ- ing the notion that “women,” as a popular bumper sticker of the decade read, “are people,” had never been fully accepted.
That divorced mothers, and not a Ouija board, is the doorway through which deviltry invades the Ameri- can home is a slim but distinct aspect of Blatty’s 1971 bestseller, touched on most chillingly when Chris MacNeil wonders whether “Captain Howdy” could be child-speak for “Howard,” her absent husband:
The child had loved her father deeply, yet never had reacted visibly to her parents’ divorce. And Chris didn’t like it. Maybe she cried in her room; she didn’t know. But Chris was fearful she was repressing and that her emotions might one day erupt in some harmful form. A fantasy playmate. It didn’t sound healthy. Why “Howdy”? For How- ard? Her father? Pretty close.
In Friedkin’s adaptation, the connection is drawn more starkly. We watch young Regan suffer as she overhears mom’s phone-call rage at dad, who can’t even remember her birthday for Christ’s sake, oh,
circus my ass, he doesn’t give a shit. Don’t tell me to
be calm, God damn it! I’ve been on this fucking line for twenty minutes! No amount of single-woman inde- pendence—Ellen Burstyn plays Chris MacNeil, an actress rich enough to be bunking on Prospect Street with multiple housekeepers and a nanny—can fix the family values problem. Captain Howdy whispers that mother doesn’t love father any more, and is going to marry her director Burke Dennings instead, whom demon-Regan then murders by twisting his head around and pitching him out a window. The whole first act walks the line between being a story about supernatural menace and one about domestic crisis.
Just as with Dracula, though, a broader anxiety exists here, of which backlash against feminism is only the most salient expression. In the early stages of the film, there is a bit of metatheatre. Chris MacNeil is herself filming a movie, one that involves a raucous campus demonstration, complete with big card- board signs that read things like Military Out and Help Eliminate Lying Pigs. The “activists mob,” in the modern parlance, want to tear down a building, but their specific beef—military, police, draft—doesn’t really matter; the image is an all-purpose one. This is traditional America vs change. MacNeil runs up and takes charge. Order! Order! If you want to effect any change, she hollers into a bullhorn, you have to do it within the system!
The film has been recognized by some critics, nota- bly Jennifer Moorman, as expressing a reactionary social message in that line, but for most viewers, overwhelmed by the parade of gag-reflex moments that follow, it’s worth pausing to note that there is a political battle being waged in this movie at all. We watch the contest in the bedroom between the old- school authorities—orthodox, conservative, male— and the adolescent girl who is pissing and puking at them, but it’s a microcosm of the one out there, in the street.
Young people are changing, full throttle, in frighten- ing ways. The soul of the nation is at stake.
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For the Jesuits who ran our high school, that cold, windy afternoon was nothing short of celebrity day. Other people came through from time to time for inspirational speeches: a retired police captain who warned us against drunk driving; an heroic, Karl Mauldin-style priest who ran a tough-love campaign in urban centers like Baltimore and Philly, and drew zealous applause when he described using gang tactics to force drug dealers themselves back out of
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