Cinema, Religion, and the Return of the Repressed
"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table . . ."
Ever since T. S. Eliot heralded a new way of seeing the world by comparing the evening sky to an etherized patient in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, . . . or since Stephen Dedalus, that "fearful Jesuit" of an artist, stood in contrast to the doctor, Buck Mulligan, in Joyce's Ulysses, . . . or since Dick Diver, the psychiatrist, standing on the cliffs above the French Riviera, made the sign of the cross over the sun-drenched revelers below him in the final scene of Tender is the Night, the writers, poets, and artists of the twentieth century have examined the ways in which the doctor -- particularly the psychiatrist -- has replaced the priest as an authority in people's lives.
Since those "moderns" began their dissection of this melancholy epoch, there is little question of the victory of the doctor over the priest. It is the doctor whom we turn to when something goes wrong with our bodies or our minds. It is the psychiatrist who provides us with the therapeutic model of morality, of ethics, and of grief that reigns supreme in our culture; we are exhorted to live, to love, and even to grieve in a way that will make us feel good about ourselves. We are either "okay" or "not okay" based on the state of our psychological health. We are devout worshippers in the Temple of Self-Esteem, and we do eager penance for the sins of co-dependency, or addiction, or inadequate "boundary" formation.
This apparently healthy state of affairs, however, has created its own "dis-ease" -- a disease, to use the psychiatric lingo which has become so familiar to us, caused by the repression of the impulses which the banished priest or minister used to "treat." For all the ersatz spirituality on display in the Self-Actualization section of our local Border's, we have become entirely unaccustomed to devoting serious attention to the state of our souls.
And that's where The Exorcist and, to a lesser extent, Equus come in. Those two great works of the 70's (I refer to the film and the play, respectively) represent serious attempts, not only to take stock of the twentieth century's rejection of the sacred, but also -- especially in the case of The Exorcist -- to provide counter-narratives to that rejection. They each recognize, and attempt to convey, the truth of Leszek Kolakowski's observation that "[t]o reject the sacred is to reject our own limits. It is also to reject the idea of evil, for the sacred reveals itself through sin, imperfection, and evil; and evil, in turn, can be identified only through the sacred." These works explore what has become of evil in an era which has rejected the sacred, and what has become of our impulses toward the sacred in an era which rejects the notion of evil.
Peter Shaffer's Equus presents the dilemma of psychiatrist Martin Dysart, who feels profoundly ambivalent about his treatment of a young man named Alan Strang, who -- in an apparently psychotic episode -- has blinded six horses. Dysart's ambivalence is expressed, partly, in dreams in which he envisions himself as a mask-wearing priest in ancient Greece, who -- along with his acolytes -- sacrifices children, one after the other, by cutting them open and studying the patterns their entrails make as they land on the stone floor. In his dream, Dysart fears that his incipient doubts about the value of these sacrifices will be discovered by his assistants and that he will be the next to be sacrificed. Dysart's dreams, of course, make explicit the connection between priests and psychiatrists and suggest that the latter have not transcended so much as merely replaced the former. For Dysart, the mystery of human individuality and creativity and the ineluctable yearning toward the sacred are uniquely ill-suited to dissection by doctors of the mind:
"A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs--it sucks--it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all--just those particular moments of experience and no others--I don't know. And nor does anyone else."
What brings Dysart up short about the case of Alan Strang is the young man's passionate devotion to a god of his own making -- Equus. Contemplating the best treatment for Strang, Dysart struggles with his own demons. He is tormented by his inability to account for Equus, to explain the mystery of his creation and the magnetizing of particular moments of Strang's experience that produced this strange god; and he fears that, in "curing" Alan Strang, he will kill the ineffable and supremely creative impulses that have transfigured the young man's existence (in ways both terrible and beautiful).
For all its power, Equus finally founders -- if only slightly -- upon the tendency to romanticize mental illness, even while it warns against that tendency. It's clear that, for all his creative religious urges, Alan Strang is a very sick young man, and it's almost unconscionable to justify the pain he experiences as merely the price he pays for a more transcendent mode of experience. Dysart finally refuses to accede to such justifications (and good for him). While the drama itself acknowledges that there are ways of seeing the world, of being in the world, that psychiatry cannot account for, it ultimately cannot (or can only very obliquely) imagine that alternate way of being arising from anything other than the solitary individual psyche.
Which brings us to The Exorcist. There is no question of mental illness here, or rather the question is certainly raised, but it is rejected by the main characters and refuted by the brutal and horrifying facts of Regan's affliction. The movie quite explicitly contrasts the "priests of the body" and the "priests of the mind" (I'm stealing phrases from Madman of Chu, who is as big a fan of this movie as I am) with the priests of the soul, and -- like Dysart's priest dream in Equus -- it accomplishes the contrast in such a way as to make the medical and psychiatric examinations appear ritualistic, rather than by presenting the priest as a psychiatrist manque.
Let me amend that -- there is an element of the failed psychiatrist in The Exorcist, and it appears in the person of Father Damien Karras, a Harvard-John Hopkins-educated Jesuit priest and psychiatrist who has begun to lose his faith. Part of the compelling drama of the film is produced by Father Karras' gradual realization that it is precisely in his role as priest -- and not as psychiatrist -- that Regan MacNeil needs him. That dawning realization culminates in Father Karras' brief discussion with Father Merrin (who is going to perform the exorcism, with Karras' assistance), in which he attempts to inform Father Merrin of the three demonic "personalities" manifested by Regan. Father Merrin, an old-school knight of faith, cuts him off with a terse reply: "There is only one." In other words, there is only one devil, Father Karras, and our mission, ordained by God, is to go in there and kick his ass. Our mission, Father Karras, is not to analyze the personalities of the devil, but to save that little girl from the torments of hell.
As Father Karras stands at the bedside of Regan MacNeil shouting "The power of Christ compels you!" he experiences a moment where "the sacred reveals itself through sin, imperfection, and evil," for it is exactly that moment in which he fully regains his faith. He does so by seeing, with his own eyes, that the afflictions of the soul are real, and that they cannot be cured by the power of man alone.
Postscript: My husband and I saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose this weekend. The movie inhabits a kind of no man's land between Equus and The Exorcist. While it is undeniably creepy, and certainly respectful of the religious worldview, it can't rise above the limitations imposed partly by its hybrid form. Since it is part horror movie and part courtroom drama, it seeks to contrast the fact-based epistemology of the courtroom with the suspension of disbelief, the gesture toward "possibilities," of the horror genre. It ends up taking on the agnosticism of its main character (the defense lawyer played by Laura Linney) in such a way that the competing worldviews of the courtroom and the religious believer seem strangely watered down. It treats demonic possession as a possibility opposed to the possibility of mental illness. The Exorcist and even Equus treat the realm of the sacred (whether it arises from within human beings or from something outside of human control) as a fact which stands in opposition to the fact of mental and bodily illness. The clash between the opposing facts in those works resonates more forcefully than the clash of possibilities in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It is a good movie, and it deals with issues that moviegoers rarely see treated in typical Hollywood fare (which accounts for the applause I heard at the film's conclusion), but it comes close to treating those issues in typical Hollywood fashion -- by flitting across the surface of its prevailing themes. The movie makes the point that, by the standards of the courtroom, its priest-protagonist is a criminal, but by the standards of a certain religious worldview, he is a hero. My problem with that approach was in its seeming inability to present the starkness of those two possibilities -- he is either a very despicable criminal or a very great hero. I think there ought to have been a way to preserve the ambiguity without obscuring the nakedness of the contrast. What if the priest-protagonist of this movie were to ask himself -- a la the character of Dr. Treves from The Elephant Man -- "Am I a good man, or a bad man?" I don't require that The Exorcism of Emily Rose answer this question for me, but I prefer that it acknowledge that the answer is not both/and but rather either/or.
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table . . ."
Ever since T. S. Eliot heralded a new way of seeing the world by comparing the evening sky to an etherized patient in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, . . . or since Stephen Dedalus, that "fearful Jesuit" of an artist, stood in contrast to the doctor, Buck Mulligan, in Joyce's Ulysses, . . . or since Dick Diver, the psychiatrist, standing on the cliffs above the French Riviera, made the sign of the cross over the sun-drenched revelers below him in the final scene of Tender is the Night, the writers, poets, and artists of the twentieth century have examined the ways in which the doctor -- particularly the psychiatrist -- has replaced the priest as an authority in people's lives.
Since those "moderns" began their dissection of this melancholy epoch, there is little question of the victory of the doctor over the priest. It is the doctor whom we turn to when something goes wrong with our bodies or our minds. It is the psychiatrist who provides us with the therapeutic model of morality, of ethics, and of grief that reigns supreme in our culture; we are exhorted to live, to love, and even to grieve in a way that will make us feel good about ourselves. We are either "okay" or "not okay" based on the state of our psychological health. We are devout worshippers in the Temple of Self-Esteem, and we do eager penance for the sins of co-dependency, or addiction, or inadequate "boundary" formation.
This apparently healthy state of affairs, however, has created its own "dis-ease" -- a disease, to use the psychiatric lingo which has become so familiar to us, caused by the repression of the impulses which the banished priest or minister used to "treat." For all the ersatz spirituality on display in the Self-Actualization section of our local Border's, we have become entirely unaccustomed to devoting serious attention to the state of our souls.
And that's where The Exorcist and, to a lesser extent, Equus come in. Those two great works of the 70's (I refer to the film and the play, respectively) represent serious attempts, not only to take stock of the twentieth century's rejection of the sacred, but also -- especially in the case of The Exorcist -- to provide counter-narratives to that rejection. They each recognize, and attempt to convey, the truth of Leszek Kolakowski's observation that "[t]o reject the sacred is to reject our own limits. It is also to reject the idea of evil, for the sacred reveals itself through sin, imperfection, and evil; and evil, in turn, can be identified only through the sacred." These works explore what has become of evil in an era which has rejected the sacred, and what has become of our impulses toward the sacred in an era which rejects the notion of evil.
Peter Shaffer's Equus presents the dilemma of psychiatrist Martin Dysart, who feels profoundly ambivalent about his treatment of a young man named Alan Strang, who -- in an apparently psychotic episode -- has blinded six horses. Dysart's ambivalence is expressed, partly, in dreams in which he envisions himself as a mask-wearing priest in ancient Greece, who -- along with his acolytes -- sacrifices children, one after the other, by cutting them open and studying the patterns their entrails make as they land on the stone floor. In his dream, Dysart fears that his incipient doubts about the value of these sacrifices will be discovered by his assistants and that he will be the next to be sacrificed. Dysart's dreams, of course, make explicit the connection between priests and psychiatrists and suggest that the latter have not transcended so much as merely replaced the former. For Dysart, the mystery of human individuality and creativity and the ineluctable yearning toward the sacred are uniquely ill-suited to dissection by doctors of the mind:
"A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs--it sucks--it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all--just those particular moments of experience and no others--I don't know. And nor does anyone else."
What brings Dysart up short about the case of Alan Strang is the young man's passionate devotion to a god of his own making -- Equus. Contemplating the best treatment for Strang, Dysart struggles with his own demons. He is tormented by his inability to account for Equus, to explain the mystery of his creation and the magnetizing of particular moments of Strang's experience that produced this strange god; and he fears that, in "curing" Alan Strang, he will kill the ineffable and supremely creative impulses that have transfigured the young man's existence (in ways both terrible and beautiful).
For all its power, Equus finally founders -- if only slightly -- upon the tendency to romanticize mental illness, even while it warns against that tendency. It's clear that, for all his creative religious urges, Alan Strang is a very sick young man, and it's almost unconscionable to justify the pain he experiences as merely the price he pays for a more transcendent mode of experience. Dysart finally refuses to accede to such justifications (and good for him). While the drama itself acknowledges that there are ways of seeing the world, of being in the world, that psychiatry cannot account for, it ultimately cannot (or can only very obliquely) imagine that alternate way of being arising from anything other than the solitary individual psyche.
Which brings us to The Exorcist. There is no question of mental illness here, or rather the question is certainly raised, but it is rejected by the main characters and refuted by the brutal and horrifying facts of Regan's affliction. The movie quite explicitly contrasts the "priests of the body" and the "priests of the mind" (I'm stealing phrases from Madman of Chu, who is as big a fan of this movie as I am) with the priests of the soul, and -- like Dysart's priest dream in Equus -- it accomplishes the contrast in such a way as to make the medical and psychiatric examinations appear ritualistic, rather than by presenting the priest as a psychiatrist manque.
Let me amend that -- there is an element of the failed psychiatrist in The Exorcist, and it appears in the person of Father Damien Karras, a Harvard-John Hopkins-educated Jesuit priest and psychiatrist who has begun to lose his faith. Part of the compelling drama of the film is produced by Father Karras' gradual realization that it is precisely in his role as priest -- and not as psychiatrist -- that Regan MacNeil needs him. That dawning realization culminates in Father Karras' brief discussion with Father Merrin (who is going to perform the exorcism, with Karras' assistance), in which he attempts to inform Father Merrin of the three demonic "personalities" manifested by Regan. Father Merrin, an old-school knight of faith, cuts him off with a terse reply: "There is only one." In other words, there is only one devil, Father Karras, and our mission, ordained by God, is to go in there and kick his ass. Our mission, Father Karras, is not to analyze the personalities of the devil, but to save that little girl from the torments of hell.
As Father Karras stands at the bedside of Regan MacNeil shouting "The power of Christ compels you!" he experiences a moment where "the sacred reveals itself through sin, imperfection, and evil," for it is exactly that moment in which he fully regains his faith. He does so by seeing, with his own eyes, that the afflictions of the soul are real, and that they cannot be cured by the power of man alone.
Postscript: My husband and I saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose this weekend. The movie inhabits a kind of no man's land between Equus and The Exorcist. While it is undeniably creepy, and certainly respectful of the religious worldview, it can't rise above the limitations imposed partly by its hybrid form. Since it is part horror movie and part courtroom drama, it seeks to contrast the fact-based epistemology of the courtroom with the suspension of disbelief, the gesture toward "possibilities," of the horror genre. It ends up taking on the agnosticism of its main character (the defense lawyer played by Laura Linney) in such a way that the competing worldviews of the courtroom and the religious believer seem strangely watered down. It treats demonic possession as a possibility opposed to the possibility of mental illness. The Exorcist and even Equus treat the realm of the sacred (whether it arises from within human beings or from something outside of human control) as a fact which stands in opposition to the fact of mental and bodily illness. The clash between the opposing facts in those works resonates more forcefully than the clash of possibilities in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It is a good movie, and it deals with issues that moviegoers rarely see treated in typical Hollywood fare (which accounts for the applause I heard at the film's conclusion), but it comes close to treating those issues in typical Hollywood fashion -- by flitting across the surface of its prevailing themes. The movie makes the point that, by the standards of the courtroom, its priest-protagonist is a criminal, but by the standards of a certain religious worldview, he is a hero. My problem with that approach was in its seeming inability to present the starkness of those two possibilities -- he is either a very despicable criminal or a very great hero. I think there ought to have been a way to preserve the ambiguity without obscuring the nakedness of the contrast. What if the priest-protagonist of this movie were to ask himself -- a la the character of Dr. Treves from The Elephant Man -- "Am I a good man, or a bad man?" I don't require that The Exorcism of Emily Rose answer this question for me, but I prefer that it acknowledge that the answer is not both/and but rather either/or.
posted by Kate Marie | 9:34 AM | Permalink
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5 comments
5 Comments:
KM, I feel unqualified to write after reading your posts.
It's been years since I saw and read Exorcist, and I barely remember seeing Equus as a play more than 20 years ago. But it is sad to know that so many do not believe in evil or the devil. Personally, I don't pass holy water without blessing myself and I've got a tiny bottle of Lourdes water at home for emergencies, thanks to grandma.
Do you know that only a couple of years ago Pope John Paul II had to stop during a Mass and perform an exorcism on the spot? Ugh. Gives me the creeps.
I will probably post another reply when I find the 30 minutes to read that :-).
I will relate one story. When I was reading the Exorcist in 1973 I was up at 2 am reading from the only light in the house. Just when the devil started to speak (in italics in the book), the light went out.
I didn't sleep too well that night.
And for a little humor. . rent Repossessed. . a satire on the Exorcist with Leslie Neilson.
Thanks for the kind words, CIV. I'm ashamed to admit that, child of the television age that I am, I have never actually read The Exorcist. I've been planning to read it, though. I'm worried that it'll be scarier than the movie -- scary books usually are scarier than scary movies.
And it *is* sad that people don't seem to believe there's such a thing as evil anymore. I must admit I have a hard time with the idea of demonic possession, but I certainly appreciate the fact that sometimes it's our souls (and not our health or mental well-being) that are in jeopardy. And I like it when movies like The Exorcist acknowledge that.
Which brings me to Stewdog's comment. That's the kind of stuff that creeps me out, man.
Kate Marie,
I was on the fence about seeing "Emily Rose" but you've persuaded me it is worth a watch. The Madwoman and I snuck out for a movie on her birthday (we came back to a Munchkin serenade on the answering machine which we thoroughly enjoyed, b.t.w.) and caught a cute movie- "Just Like Heaven." We went in with very low expectations (always a good move) and were pleasantly surprised. I mention it only because one scene had a priest chanting "The power of Christ compels you" while the ghost of Reese Witherspoon looks on petulantly. The depth and breadth to which "Exorcist" has permeated our cultural idiom stands testament to its greatness.
Madman, as long as you go in with low expectations, you might find it interesting. As I said, it ain't no "Exorcist." I wanted, by the way, to scan your drawing of "The Eggorcist" for this post, but I can't find it! You'll have to do another one.
Yes, "The Exorcist" permeates not only big-ticket cultural items like Reese Witherspoon movies, but tiny little everyday interactions in which stressed graduate students get drunk at parties and start chanting "the power of Christ compels you!" at absolute strangers. Sadeeq loves to tell that one. Come to think of it, though, who is more in need of an exorcism than a graduate student in the humanities?
Glad Madwoman enjoyed the Munchkin serenade!
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