ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: A VERY BLATTY EASTER

John: Hello hello! Welcome back to the Zone Film Challenge! We’ve picked an auspicious time to return here. Happy Passover to our Jewish readers, Ramadan Mubarak to our Muslim friends, and of course; Happy Easter to all the Christians of the world. We decided a holiday special of some kind was in order. We took off St. Patrick’s Day, decided we’d honor our Irish heritage by not doing any work.

Alex: As is our right.

John: But for a holiday with a bit more clout and the beginning of “Season 2” of the column we decided that a giant-size special issue was in order. Now there was the option of just turning up our nose at some Kevin Sorbo joint about dunking on a mean high school superintendent that doesn’t want you praying in school.

Alex: Or we could have watched the Narnia movies

John: We could look at whatever Christian film made 2 billion dollars in the bible belt, or we could seek out something we might actually like. We went with option B. B for Blatty. Now that’s a segue!

Alex: Now you might know William Peter Blatty as the writer of The Exorcist, later adapted into the William Friedkin film of the same name. What you might not know about Blatty is that he was also a two time director. He directed a sequel to The Exorcist in 1990 based on his book Legion and The Ninth Configuration, also known in its original release as Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane.

John: Hell of a title.

Alex: We’ll be looking at both films today and both of them are really singular works that could only be made by a guy with a brain this big and this Catholic.

John: Not just this Catholic, this Jesuit.

Alex: Till the day he dies!

John: And if he’s right, far beyond that!

Alex: What was the Latin stuff that was in the hall at our high school? Semper Fidelis or something?

John: That’s the Marine Corps

Alex: *laughs*

John: In the words of Henchman 21: Semper Fidelis Tyrannosaurs

Before we get too far into the weeds here its worth pointing out that these are in their own way both sequels to The Exorcist. Exorcist III is a sequel set 15 years after the original starring many of the same characters as both the original novel and film. Ninth Configuration is a tangential sequel, fans of The Exorcist may remember that while exhibiting early signs of demonic possession Reagan MacNeil tells an astronaut attending a party at her mother’s house that he is “going to die up there.” That astronaut is supposedly the central figure, arguably, of the Ninth Configuration; Scott Wilson’s Captain Billy Cutshaw

This movie reminds me of M*A*S*H and I do mean M*A*S*H the show instead of the movie because it is written in that same banter-y style. There is some absolute world class banter here, particularly from Scott Wilson but also from Jason Miller. His character throughout the film is attempting to adapt Shakespeare for dogs.

Alex: Jason Miller’s character here is supremely funny.

John: It’s like a 30 Rock bit decades ahead of its time.

Alex: It’s really good. He’s got the one dog he trusts, Sir Lawrence the mop dog, who’s always following him around. Then he has his side producer finding him new dogs. They have the one dog who they want to play Hamlet and Miller looks at it and goes “This dog can’t play Hamlet it’s a woman!” And the producer just goes “We’ll take a license!” It’s funny! Ed Flanders as the other doctor on staff Lt. Richard Fell, he’s really funny too. Has a very dry wit. There’s this mounted boar head prop that they keep using and he walks in and looks at it and goes “I think this boar was a diabetic.” All-timer wisecrack.

John: It has this madcap surrealism to it. Tremendous banter. Extremely funny script.

***

Alex:

William Peter Blatty is troubled by modernity. For Blatty, the modern world’s embrace of secularity has rendered it ill-equipped to handle questions beyond human understanding. His characters; Father Karras, Vincent Kane, Billy Cutshaw and Detective Kinderman are all presented with extraordinary questions that compel them to look to their faith for answers. Each of these men undergo extreme crises of faith, having momentary dalliances with secularity in part due to the pervading question of God’s abandonment in the face of great suffering. In the end, these men find their faith renewed — most often through an act of selfless sacrifice. Blatty lays his cards down clearly; the world is doomed to the forces of evil if men cannot sacrifice themselves for a greater power.

The Ninth Configuration orbits around Col. Vincent Kane, a doctor brought in to help treat patients at a military sanitarium. In the first half of the film, we see the wacky patients butt up against Kane’s placid demeanor. They rant about staging Shakespeare plays with dogs, how much they hate psychiatry, or accuse Kane of being the real crazy one. It’s a very Szaszian institution, playing with Szasz’s Myth of Mental Illness and the notion of the malinger; a person who fakes mental illness for benefits — in this case, getting out of Vietnam. Throughout, Kane locks horns with the most troubled patient, Capt. Billy Cutshaw — an astronaut who ran away from a space launch and has been committed ever since. He is repeatedly hostile to authority, accusatory and cynical. He inflicts his distaste for authority primarily on Captain Kane and their combative relationship reaches critical mass when they debate the moral nature of suicide.

Kane believes that there is a significant difference between suicide, an act of despair, and selflessly giving up your life, an act of grace. Cutshaw sees no difference between the two; he crudely retorts “suicide is when you don’t collect the insurance.” It’s a white-hot argument; Kane’s face, typically stoic, looks and sounds pained as he tries to explain the nuance in the philosophical knot of sacrifice. By contrast, Cutshaw is resolute in his caustic practical hostility. He shouts and fires back with the assuredness of an angry teeanger. The argument cools but we gather a better understanding of what drives these men — and where both lay psychologically. The malinger question is unclouded here, they are not lying for gain, but they both experience significant problems in living; for Kane, the truth is obscured but for the astronaut Cutshaw, his shaken faith has made him feel small when presented with the opportunity to pierce the heavens.

When the film reveals that Kane has in fact been under observation the whole time by the sanitarium’s actual doctor, Colonel Fell, the argument takes on renewed relevance. It is not that Kane believes his answers on suicide are the truth but that he needs to tell himself that they’re the truth. Although he is placed in the role of medical professional, the guidance he is giving his patients is in fact, guidance for himself. It is a performance baked into another performance and in the film’s logic, words and demeanor alone are not enough. His true test of faith comes in his final act, a suicide performed to close the book on his tragic, destructive life and to give Cutshaw a new lease on his life.

Similarly, Detective Kinderman manufactures a placid demeanor in his work to better avoid confronting the questions that must plague him as he uncovers decapitated teenagers, bodies drained of blood, and women stuffed with rosaries. It’s only when the Gemini killings, horrific beyond rationalization, begin that his approach falters. In the recasting from the deceased Cobb to the ornery George C. Scott, Kinderman becomes a more macho, aggressive character. What Scott brings to the role over Lee J. Cobb is a wrath that boils and bubbles over as Kinderman comes into closer contact with a malicious force that he cannot control. The interrogation scenes between Kinderman and the Gemini replicate the dynamic of Kane and Cutshaw’s argument; with the Gemini trying to shake Kinderman’s spirit recalling how Cutshaw tries to undermine Kane’s beliefs.

Exorcist III, being more of a genre piece than The Ninth Configuration, is unable to escape some of the prescriptions of the horror and detective genres. Kinderman’s final battle with the Gemini has him literally shooting the possessed body of Father Karras so that the Gemini cannot use it as a host. It’s a silly ending, about as silly as watching Colonel Kane throw a biker through a window. Both of Blatty’s movies have curiously violent climaxes — and while Exorcist III’s ending was infamously wrested out of his hands by the studio — the connections between acts of wrath and sacrifice often feel thinly drawn. Where Blatty’s duology fascinates the most is watching its author assemble treatises on the nature of faith and mercy. They rarely cohere but the cords he tugs on often go unexamined by more secular filmmakers. Even where I break with Blatty’s conservative Catholicism, I find his interrogation of the limits of human understanding to be careful and thorough.

***

John: Let’s turn the corner and talk about the shorter one of these, the more recent one of these, and the one that is far easier to describe.

Alex: Exorcist III is maybe not as good as The Exorcist but it is a fucking excellent horror film that everyone owes it to themselves to watch. It has some of the greatest shit of all time.

John: Oh absolutely

Alex: Just to come straight out of the gate: that hallway scene with the shears

John: Jesus Christ dude!

Alex: All timer jump scare, one of the best.

John: This movie does a very good job of building a sense of dread and suspense and slow creeping terror. It also has tremendous jump scares! It’s absurd that he only ever made one horror movie and it’s this good.

Alex: The original Exorcist is one of my favorite movies. That movie still sings in ways that no movie has been able to successfully mimic, including this one. Exorcist III takes a different tack to the material and the way it goes about things is really cool! Unlike the first movie which is a medical drama that turns into a supernatural horror film, this movie is a murder mystery that turns into a horror film. This one follows Lt. Kinderman from the original as he’s investigating a rash of serial killings in DC that are similar in style and form to murders that happened a decade and a half ago executed by a man calling himself the Gemini Killer. This sort of transitions into the supernatural element about the demons coming back to seek vengeance on anyone and everyone tangentially involved with the events of The Exorcist.

John: That’s a very good premise for a sequel to The Exorcist. It does feel a bit cheaper though. I felt that part of what made The Exorcist work so well is the pure randomness of it all. There’s never the thing you get in Poltergeist where it’s “this house was built on a Native burial ground!” or “Oh they were doing satanic black magic in the basement!” No, the great howling pit cast out a fishing line, hooked some poor kid, and did all they could to reel her in.

Alex: Exorcist II: Heretic, famously went full-on bananas. Reagan MacNeil has like psychic powers and is being trained by the Vatican or something to fight a psychic war. It is a nutso film. But Exorcist III does the best pulp adaptation of The Exorcist that you can. One of the things that works well here is its tension and the way it builds up its horror. One thing I loved is that you’re never shown the bodies of the murder victims. Instead they’re described in gruesome detail and all the deaths sound horrific.

John: Less is more a lot of the time.

***

John:

You might not consider the Exorcist and its sequels (either spiritual or direct) as works of cosmic horror. This particular genre classifier conjures up images of H.P. Lovecraft’s great deep old ones and things that should not be. More Jeffery Combs growing an extradimensional boner out of his forehead in From Beyond than Linda Blair crab walking and spraying out split pea soup in the original Exorcist.

But in strict genre terms, in what they find scary and in turn use to scare their readers (and in Blatty the director’s case, his viewers), Lovecraft and Blatty may as well be brothers. They’ve both internalized the simple adage that less is more. That is to say; that which we know less about can scare us more. There is a fundamental fear of the unknown present in the works of both men. Or perhaps it’s simply a fear of how little we know. How arrogant we are in thinking it amounts to anything.

If, like Blatty, you want to accept God as the polestar around which the whole of the universe orbits and you still want to make space for science and rationality; you must at some point come across the idea that this universe, near as we can tell, is infinite.

An infinite universe created by an infinite being infinitely wise and powerful, and filled with pitiful finite creatures like us, means an infinite amount of deep, gnostic, godly truth which we can never possibly know.

Infinite unknowns, ergo infinite terror. That’s before you even dip into the idea of evil as a real, tangible, absolute force. The other end of the magnet, an opposite and (God forbid) an equal to the infinite goodness of God.

The Ninth Configuration is, despite rich comedic trappings, a work of cosmic horror in the most literal sense. Scott Wilson plays an astronaut literally horrified at the prospect of his impending space voyage. Cpt. Billy Cutshaw stared down the vastness of the infinite vacuum and blinked. Regressed. Embraced juvenile, edgy hostility, self assured in the meaningless of it all. Better to make a clown of yourself than to admit your own insignificance. Col. Vincent Kane is the other side of that coin, he didn’t look outward, he looked inward. Saw the darkness in his own heart, maybe in everyone’s hearts. He didn’t blink, just stared and stared until he was seeing double. The phony psychologist and his dubiously disturbed patient go to work on each other, Kane invoking all the better angels of our nature and Cutshaw squishing them with verbal fly swatters. In the end Kane can do nothing but become the very case to disprove Cutshaw’s assertion that you cannot lay down your life unselfishly.

I break with Blatty here. I find a profound egotism at the center of all of this business of the redemptive power of sacrifice. It’s all so militaristic, men reduced to masochists seeking a good cause to destroy themselves for. We’re not vikings, crusaders, or samurai. There may be noble ways to die, but death itself will not absolve you.

Still though, I can’t shun the power of Wilson and Stacy Keach’s performances. Kane comes to terms with his own irredeemability and resolves to redeem Cutshaw, if he can. There’s the intended shock, but also a deep shame in Wilson’s performance. You can see it hit him, the realization that someone decided that his miserable life, the one he was so wrapped up in declaring the insignificance of, was worth redeeming at the cost of their own.

Perhaps, if you’re of the opinion that any good cosmic horror needs tentacle monsters, we could better classify Blatty’s work as gnostic horror. The idea of absolute evil as a real thing, angling to drag you down into the pit with it. Banking on your human weakness to make you despair of your own existence. In Blatty’s cosmology evil doesn’t require the inaction of good men to triumph, only their despair.

The Exorcist III can be neatly slotted into this genre category. A grisly whodunnit rapidly evolves into a battle with pure, ultimate evil as portrayed by Brad Dourif in maybe the performance of his life. Blatty demonstrates a natural understanding that nothing he can show us is ever quite so scary as how we can imagine it. He doesn’t need to flirt with an NC-17 rating to tell a story of ingots driven through eyes, organs replaced by rosaries, blood drained and used to paint calling cards on walls, statues of Christ painted in blackface. He’ll just describe it to you in excruciating detail. You’ll scare yourself with your own imagination. A particular favorite recurring shot of mine is George C Scott’s Lt. Kinderman looking under the white sheets covering victims, giving you just the barest tease of what might be underneath. You can’t know what it’s like looking through the eyes or living inside the head of that shabby old homicide detective. What it’s like to stare at the handiwork of ultimate evil.

Are you by chance familiar with the work of Simone Weil? In her masterwork Gravity and Grace, this early 20th century French philosopher proposed (to simplify it dramatically) a framework wherein by the very act of creating reality, a theoretical God would have to forbid itself from ever intervening in the affairs of its creation. Infinite creation necessitates infinite distance from all you have created. God is forever the lifeguard just out of reach of the drowning swimmer in Weil’s cosmology.

I don’t know if Blatty has ever read Weil but I can’t help but see the similarities. If the lifeguard can’t help it’s on us to keep our fellow swimmers from drowning, succumbing to the abyss. They tell people not to do that, you know. That it’s not worth the danger. They’ll panic and drag you down with them. People try to do it anyway. I find it strangely comforting that they do.

***

Alex: I do think that both of these films have deeper commonalities than just their casting choices and creative teams. So Scott Wilson is in both, Ed Flanders and Jason Miller, obviously. George DiCenzo in both. They also have the same cinematographer. There’s some weird things that pop up in both films. The films both have lemon drops featured prominently.

John: Also blackface. Minstrel show stuff in general seems to be Blatty’s shorthand for “I need something very distasteful right here.” Need to get your audience clutching their pearls? Reach for the shoe polish! Certainly not a bad thing to be against but it does point to him being guilty of that mid 20th century tokenism.

Alex: He’s got this habit where he used black actors as a visual more than a playing piece. He does seem to regard minstrelry as one of the most cruel and dehumanizing things you can do to someone.

Both films have this kind of pervasive theological question about what God is up to up there. What’s he doing with his authority? Is he doing anything? Has he just left us on our own? Which is something that Blatty is consistently looking into.

John: There’s this understanding of evil as a real and absolute thing that exists whether it has horns and a pointy tail or not. There’s something Kane says right near the beginning of Ninth Configuration; “I don’t believe evil comes out of madness, I believe madness comes out of evil.”

Alex: It understands evil not as the Devil. It understands it as a force, as energy.

John: If you wanna make a movie about Christianity I would much prefer that you approach that Christianity as something you experience and have thought about and have opinions on. Rather than a product that you are trying to sell me

Alex: It feels authentic. It doesn’t feel stagey. It doesn’t feel as if he’s trying to present what Catholics are or what Catholics should be. He’s using his education and lived experience to communicate his bizarre worldview about what he is experiencing as moral complications. I think that’s what filmmakers should aspire to do. That’s a good instinct for people that want to make films that stimulate the mind. Even Exorcist III, a twenty years late sequel to one of the biggest films of all time doesn’t feel like a product. It feels like it was made for Blatty first and then the audience second.

John: Yeah. I’ll take that. You’re allowed to make masturbatory art. Or wait, maybe not if you’re Catholic.

NEXT WEEK: A Movie Without a Noun in the Title