I saw The Exorcist not long ago, probably the bravest thing I have done in a while. The movie terrified me the first time around in 1973, and it did the same fifty years later. This time it got me thinking about possession. It made me wonder if milder forms of possession — no projectile green goo, no head twirling 360 degrees round — might be abroad in American culture now. Alas, there is reason to think so. The Exorcist, you will recall, is about the possession of a twelve-year old girl, Regan, by a demon named Pazuzu. By the time Pazuzu is through with her, Regan has become something of a demon herself. She spits venom in every direction, at her mother, at her doctors, and at her mother’s boyfriend, who in time she murders. Enter two priests — one old, one young — who perform an exorcism on Regan. The effort kills the older priest. The younger priest saves Regan by telling the demon to take possession of him and leave the girl alone. Which the demon does, but at a cost. Pazuzu sends the unlucky priest flying out the window to his death on a set of stairs still known in Georgetown, the site of the movie, as the Exorcist Steps. Good wins over evil, but the price is high. Regan’s possession turns her libidinous. When a group of clueless psychiatrists comes into her room, she elevates her skirt and roars “fuck me” three times in a deep, demonic voice. (Mercedes McCambridge does a wonderful job with the vocals.) Furious at her mother, she rises up from her bed and bellows, “Lick me! Lick me!” Wanting to get at the young priest, whose mother has just died, she screams, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” There’s more where that came from and plenty of it. The last resort for Regan’s mother is to turn to exorcism after the medical doctors have let her down. The doctors are materialist, smug, and rather uncaring. One is not entirely displeased when Regan contrives to grab one of them by the nuts and administer a good squeeze. Suppose, though, that Regan’s mother had summoned not priests, not reductive psychiatrists, but a psychoanalyst — old school, from Vienna, let us say. What might such a figure say about Regan’s possession? He would surely not be talking about demons. More likely he would be talking about some part of her own spirit or psyche that had taken Regan over. To the psychoanalyst, we are an uneasy combination of id, ego, and super-ego: desire, intelligence, and often irrational prohibition, to put it in compressed terms. (The picture has been bitterly criticized, but bear with it for now.) And those elements of the psyche generally exist in tension with one another. The id desires, but the ego and the super-ego do not always approve of its desire. Conflict occurs. In fact, conflict, sometimes mild, sometimes not, is the ongoing state of the human psyche. We want, but we also don’t want what we want, and there begin multiple riddles. For the Viennese visitor, character is conflict. Is it possible for one agency of the psyche to take over and suppress or even temporarily eliminate the other two? One can, I think, be taken over by the id. What we call the id is, in German, das es, which means “the it.” We are all inhabited by an identity-less creature, an it, that wants and wants. Generally, the it is mitigated by the ego and super-ego, but not always. Can someone become identical with her it? This is what happens to Regan, or so our Viennese visitor would say. She becomes all libido (lick me!) and someone on the verge of puberty, as she is, is likely to have libido to spare. Dismiss all the special effects for a moment, and you see that Regan has become all brutal desire. She is identical with it. The movie came out in 1973, and it is certainly a product of its time. What society, or some influential segment of it, was worried about then, and probably not without reason, was the potentially destructive effects unloosed by the voluptuary counterculture. The Washington section of the movie begins with a scene of a demonstration, being filmed for a movie starring Regan’s mother, featuring irrational, chanting students. (Chanting can itself be a form of mild and temporary possession.) The religion of sex, drugs, and rock and roll was scary. What if everyone tuned in, turned on, and dropped out? Or simply went into a Dionysian rage? More to the point, for this movie, what happens when the great sexual unbinding reaches the middle class and the very young? You may need old-time Catholicism to fight it: fire with fire and all that. I have seen two different endings for the movie. In the first, Regan, who has purportedly forgotten everything that has transpired, sees the white color on a priest and, not knowing quite what she is about, jumps forward and kisses him. (Chastely.) In the second ending, there is still the chaste kiss, but the priest goes off to lunch with a hapless detective who has gotten involved in Regan’s case. Church and state unite as a guard against future Dionysian explosions. The Exorcist is of a piece with the renderings, and maybe the reality, of the Manson Family murders and the bloody concert at Altamont. Both events were cast as cautionary tales about the 1960s. (Joan Didion made a career out of this.) It’s not all peace and love, Woodstock magic, and Rousseau-inspired bliss. If you let it all hang out, smoke weed, drop LSD, bathe naked, and chant along with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, “Rules and regulations who needs them? / O throw them out the door,” then Sade himself is around the corner. We unyoke the dark side, as well as the bright. Those who summon Dionysus must understand that he is not only a liberator
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence