The Exorcist
Feb. 22nd, 2014 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinBefore I start, a disclaimer: I have never read the book. In the course of this discourse I will touch on points that, for all I know, are handled much better in the book than either the film or the recent radio adaptation. I'm sorry! Maybe I'll read it someday, but it'll have to go at the end of a very long queue.
The film adaptation of The Exorcist is one of those cinematic touchstones that I didn't catch until relatively late, for someone in the business. I finally got around to it one summer when I was unemployed, putting it on the kitchen TV while I did the washing up on a fresh sunny morning. I acknowledge watching it in such circumstances is not exactly giving it the best chance, but I was still a little disappointed that the supreme scariness of The Scariest Movie Ever didn't transcend the context. When I heard Radio 4 was doing an audio adaptation I was curious – radio can be much more compelling by requiring the listener's participation in the storytelling, creating the images in your head to accompany the supplied audio. Being required by the nature of the medium to project yourself into the story, if it's done right, can be much more involving than passively consuming a story delivered to you without having to do any work. It's a little surprising there isn't more horror on radio, considering how well-suited the medium is for a genre that lives on audience involvement and withholding information.
The radio airdate rolled around, and thanks to the time difference I was listening at work on a sunny afternoon ... but I did turn the volume up and stay focused through the whole thing, wanting to give it a shot. As a radio drama it was pretty good, but it still wasn't scary; in fact, it wasn't scary in exactly the same way the film wasn't: it was a story about scary things, told in a non-scary way.
Lovecraft does this well. The matter-of-fact journalistic way his stories are told throw the surreal cosmic horror into greater contrast. But even then, at least for me, his stories aren't so much scary as, well, horrific – 'scary' implies actual fright, and Lovecraft for all his horror doesn't speak to the hindbrain. Needless to say, mileage will vary, and I'm sure he's provided nightmare fuel for thousands, but the concept of ancient tentacled beings of pure malevolence doesn't give me the heebeejeebees without a lot of care given to presentation. Going by my experience with The Exorcist, I suppose demonic possession falls into the same category.
This is not to suggest I am difficult to scare. Something as simple as a patch on a wall that keeps reappearing no matter how many times it's painted over will freak me right out. Aliens are good, too – I almost never have nightmares, but if I ever wake from a dream in fright it's almost always one with UFOs in it, and I could not sleep at all after seeing Signs. An audio documentary on the theory that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was secretly replaced put the wind up me in Grade 8, and a Radio 4 doc on finding out who was buried in KV55 gave me such a bad case of the creeps while working late one night I had to put upbeat music on the speakers in my cube, something which, if you know me, I never do. (I still get the willies thinking about that one. So of course I have just looked it up on Wikipedia and done it again. Why.)
I suppose the difference is that the stuff which really gets to me, be it fiction or nonfiction, quietly plants an idea in my mind like the spore of a fungus, then steps back and lets it do its thing. When I think back on scary movies, what I most remember is the silence. 'Found footage' horror films like Blair Witch and Paranormal are frightening in their simplicity: the rawness of a single camera and a lot of time with nothing happening removes the comforting distance of artifice.The Exorcist, on the other hand, throws 'scary' at you like the ticks of a clock. It's just as horrifying ten minutes in as at the climax, there's no suspense, and whether it's in the dialogue or the phenomena all the scares lie in the shock factor: the shock of an innocent young girl saying those things, of sacrilege and desecration, of multiple voices coming from one person, of pea soup vomit and 360 head turns. The horror of the idea of a malevolent force taking power over someone is drowned out in the ensuing cacophony.
The problem with relying on shock value in 2014 is that there are very few taboos left to break, and the ones in The Exorcist aren't them. Does masturbation with a crucifix even register in a post-Piss Christ world? Religious symbolism, and religion itself, have been stripped of so much social currency, have been the object of subversion, rejection, parody, and ridicule for long enough that sacrilege has almost lost its meaning. Being broadcast on Radio 4 doesn't help the audio adaptation either – people bemoan the airtime given to religious figures but in my experience, outside the tiny reserve of Thought for the Day and occasionally Beyond Belief, Radio 4 lounges in an atheist milieu. To assume everyone is secure in their secular humanism and then expect them to be terrified of devils is a little disingenuous. We've all heard Old Harry's Game; Satan is a snarky misanthropist doing his job, not an entity of unfathomable evil.
A further element mitigating the fright factor of The Exorcist is the knowledge that these words are not actually coming from the nethermost pit of Hell but from a writer somewhere, be it the author of the book or the dramatist who adapted it. With this knowledge, the depravity of what the 'demon' says is tainted with a nagging suspicion someone's having a lot of fun being as shocking as possible and trumpeting what he can get away with. Well done, writer(s), you found a context that gives you a free pass to say anything you want! I could understand if people were attracted to this story because it says the unsayable in an id-gratifying vicarious way, but that doesn't make it scary, and it's always the scary that people go on about.
All the swearing, violence, and filth, I think, actually end up detracting from what could be a far deeper meaning to the story. Again, I haven't read the book, and my memory of the film is not what it could be, but in the radio play at least, outside the localised demonic possession, there's murder, drug abuse, poverty, a failed marriage, implied sexual abuse, and institutional homophobia. All the pyrotechnics of the sensational A-plot distract us, and possibly the writer(s) even, from the potential of contrasting the fight with 'the devil' against the evils humanity inflicts on itself. The deeper story as it stands seems to want to be about Fr Damien's crisis of faith, but the thing is so preoccupied with the A-plot this is not developed in adequate depth. Doing so would mean cutting down on the screeching horrors; while that may make for a better, more compelling story (and possibly a more genuinely frightening one as we'd care more about the protagonist), people want the pea soup and the funny voices and the swearing. Now, it's entirely possible the book is more 'about' these things than either of the adaptations – books are sneaky like that – and it's possible the radio dramatist wanted to go that route as well, but the drama department said 'Oh, The Exorcist, yes, you're going to make that really really scary, right? We'll give you free rein to be as shocking as you like, now go scare their pants off!' and then he felt compelled to compromise his ambition ... but that would be awfully disappointing.
So we ended up with a couple hours of flailing loudly in the direction of shock, with the Radio 4 Twitter feed going 'OMG isn't this SCARY?' almost as if it knew it wasn't, resulting in something which felt overall like a very competently-produced missed opportunity. I don't think I can blame it all on the California sunshine.
While putting together notes for this, though, something floated up which I was not expecting. Perhaps the genuinely shocking thing about this new adaptation of The Exorcist is that all the priests are presented as basically good, if flawed, human beings trying to do their best. None of them turns out to be a paedophile or involved in Church corruption or a raging bigot or anything. How deeply subversive! How on earth did this make it on the air? Maybe all the caterwauling was a smokescreen to slip the truly shocking content past the censors ...
The film adaptation of The Exorcist is one of those cinematic touchstones that I didn't catch until relatively late, for someone in the business. I finally got around to it one summer when I was unemployed, putting it on the kitchen TV while I did the washing up on a fresh sunny morning. I acknowledge watching it in such circumstances is not exactly giving it the best chance, but I was still a little disappointed that the supreme scariness of The Scariest Movie Ever didn't transcend the context. When I heard Radio 4 was doing an audio adaptation I was curious – radio can be much more compelling by requiring the listener's participation in the storytelling, creating the images in your head to accompany the supplied audio. Being required by the nature of the medium to project yourself into the story, if it's done right, can be much more involving than passively consuming a story delivered to you without having to do any work. It's a little surprising there isn't more horror on radio, considering how well-suited the medium is for a genre that lives on audience involvement and withholding information.
The radio airdate rolled around, and thanks to the time difference I was listening at work on a sunny afternoon ... but I did turn the volume up and stay focused through the whole thing, wanting to give it a shot. As a radio drama it was pretty good, but it still wasn't scary; in fact, it wasn't scary in exactly the same way the film wasn't: it was a story about scary things, told in a non-scary way.
Lovecraft does this well. The matter-of-fact journalistic way his stories are told throw the surreal cosmic horror into greater contrast. But even then, at least for me, his stories aren't so much scary as, well, horrific – 'scary' implies actual fright, and Lovecraft for all his horror doesn't speak to the hindbrain. Needless to say, mileage will vary, and I'm sure he's provided nightmare fuel for thousands, but the concept of ancient tentacled beings of pure malevolence doesn't give me the heebeejeebees without a lot of care given to presentation. Going by my experience with The Exorcist, I suppose demonic possession falls into the same category.
This is not to suggest I am difficult to scare. Something as simple as a patch on a wall that keeps reappearing no matter how many times it's painted over will freak me right out. Aliens are good, too – I almost never have nightmares, but if I ever wake from a dream in fright it's almost always one with UFOs in it, and I could not sleep at all after seeing Signs. An audio documentary on the theory that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was secretly replaced put the wind up me in Grade 8, and a Radio 4 doc on finding out who was buried in KV55 gave me such a bad case of the creeps while working late one night I had to put upbeat music on the speakers in my cube, something which, if you know me, I never do. (I still get the willies thinking about that one. So of course I have just looked it up on Wikipedia and done it again. Why.)
I suppose the difference is that the stuff which really gets to me, be it fiction or nonfiction, quietly plants an idea in my mind like the spore of a fungus, then steps back and lets it do its thing. When I think back on scary movies, what I most remember is the silence. 'Found footage' horror films like Blair Witch and Paranormal are frightening in their simplicity: the rawness of a single camera and a lot of time with nothing happening removes the comforting distance of artifice.The Exorcist, on the other hand, throws 'scary' at you like the ticks of a clock. It's just as horrifying ten minutes in as at the climax, there's no suspense, and whether it's in the dialogue or the phenomena all the scares lie in the shock factor: the shock of an innocent young girl saying those things, of sacrilege and desecration, of multiple voices coming from one person, of pea soup vomit and 360 head turns. The horror of the idea of a malevolent force taking power over someone is drowned out in the ensuing cacophony.
The problem with relying on shock value in 2014 is that there are very few taboos left to break, and the ones in The Exorcist aren't them. Does masturbation with a crucifix even register in a post-Piss Christ world? Religious symbolism, and religion itself, have been stripped of so much social currency, have been the object of subversion, rejection, parody, and ridicule for long enough that sacrilege has almost lost its meaning. Being broadcast on Radio 4 doesn't help the audio adaptation either – people bemoan the airtime given to religious figures but in my experience, outside the tiny reserve of Thought for the Day and occasionally Beyond Belief, Radio 4 lounges in an atheist milieu. To assume everyone is secure in their secular humanism and then expect them to be terrified of devils is a little disingenuous. We've all heard Old Harry's Game; Satan is a snarky misanthropist doing his job, not an entity of unfathomable evil.
A further element mitigating the fright factor of The Exorcist is the knowledge that these words are not actually coming from the nethermost pit of Hell but from a writer somewhere, be it the author of the book or the dramatist who adapted it. With this knowledge, the depravity of what the 'demon' says is tainted with a nagging suspicion someone's having a lot of fun being as shocking as possible and trumpeting what he can get away with. Well done, writer(s), you found a context that gives you a free pass to say anything you want! I could understand if people were attracted to this story because it says the unsayable in an id-gratifying vicarious way, but that doesn't make it scary, and it's always the scary that people go on about.
All the swearing, violence, and filth, I think, actually end up detracting from what could be a far deeper meaning to the story. Again, I haven't read the book, and my memory of the film is not what it could be, but in the radio play at least, outside the localised demonic possession, there's murder, drug abuse, poverty, a failed marriage, implied sexual abuse, and institutional homophobia. All the pyrotechnics of the sensational A-plot distract us, and possibly the writer(s) even, from the potential of contrasting the fight with 'the devil' against the evils humanity inflicts on itself. The deeper story as it stands seems to want to be about Fr Damien's crisis of faith, but the thing is so preoccupied with the A-plot this is not developed in adequate depth. Doing so would mean cutting down on the screeching horrors; while that may make for a better, more compelling story (and possibly a more genuinely frightening one as we'd care more about the protagonist), people want the pea soup and the funny voices and the swearing. Now, it's entirely possible the book is more 'about' these things than either of the adaptations – books are sneaky like that – and it's possible the radio dramatist wanted to go that route as well, but the drama department said 'Oh, The Exorcist, yes, you're going to make that really really scary, right? We'll give you free rein to be as shocking as you like, now go scare their pants off!' and then he felt compelled to compromise his ambition ... but that would be awfully disappointing.
So we ended up with a couple hours of flailing loudly in the direction of shock, with the Radio 4 Twitter feed going 'OMG isn't this SCARY?' almost as if it knew it wasn't, resulting in something which felt overall like a very competently-produced missed opportunity. I don't think I can blame it all on the California sunshine.
While putting together notes for this, though, something floated up which I was not expecting. Perhaps the genuinely shocking thing about this new adaptation of The Exorcist is that all the priests are presented as basically good, if flawed, human beings trying to do their best. None of them turns out to be a paedophile or involved in Church corruption or a raging bigot or anything. How deeply subversive! How on earth did this make it on the air? Maybe all the caterwauling was a smokescreen to slip the truly shocking content past the censors ...
