Popcorn and Circuses: Carnage Or Carnival?
from The Blood Poets, by Jake Horsley
Look
out at your children
See
their faces in golden rays
Don’t
kid yourself they belong to you
They’re
the start of the coming race.
—David
Bowie, “Oh, You Pretty Things!”
It seems interesting to note the fact that the three most successful
(commercially) and influential (creatively) devil movies of the period—Rosemary’s
Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen—all have for their devil: a child. In the first case, it’s an unborn child, in the second, an adolescent who is possessed by and therefore
“becomes” the devil, and in the
third, a young boy who carries the mark of the beast, and appears (judging by
all the “omens,” which really amount to a series of gruesome and
ingenius deaths) to be the antichrist himself (a slightly different archetype
to that of Satan, admittedly, but all one and the same in Hollywood). Just what
is it that makes our children so terrifying to us? It would seem that these movies are telling us that the
irrational, destructive force that so threatens us is not only something that
comes from within us (as do our children), but som
ething that Nature herself
has ordained must—naturally—supercede us. These children are our
replacements, making their “evil”—the fact that they wish or
intend to destroy us— simply their natural, designated function. These
children (“Children of the Damned,” making us the damned), like the devil himself perhaps, are only what Nature (or
God) intended. Our horror then is both entirely founded and utterly pointless,
even absurd, and finally self-destructive, for these fears—by making the
object fearful—fulfill themselves. They are as senseless, finally, as a
man running from his own shadow who thereby slams straight into a brick wall.
In both The Omen and The Exorcist, there is no way to fight the devil directly (even less so in Rosemary’s
Baby, where the devil is literally inside the heroine), so the only option is to adapt to the new
circumstances, and pray to survive them. Robin Wood writes in his essay
“The American Nightmare” (Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan), “somebody asked what had become of the American Family
Picture. I suggested Night of the Living Dead and The
Exorcist. I might have added Rosemary’s Baby.” He might also have added It’s Alive and The Omen, and, in a slightly different sense, The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes (in
which films the family itself becomes the monster, reflecting the Manson
drama). What these films give us is not the conventional family drama
(obviously) but the dramatic deconstruction (or plain destruction) of the
family. This occurs once some unknown and incompatible new element (the child-devil) enters into the family, and, from the very
foundation upward (the fruit of the union, no less), proceeds to undermine,
contaminate, and subvert it. This notion (as Wood makes plain) is profoundly,
radically political (as well as being social/psychological) in its
implications—and I draw attention to the fact not to get lost in the
implications, but only to suggest that these films speak of, or for, a
collective anxiety within the family structure.
By extension, then, this paranoia can be found in American society at large.
There is a profound unease and foreboding, a feeling that “all is not
well in Denmark,” or in the American home, but that (far from the simple
survivalist dilemma of Straw Dogs) this
trouble is right at the heart of the household, and not, as we might fervently
desire, lurking in the shadows outside.[1]
I think this is the basic appeal—and the effectiveness—of
both The Exorcist and The Omen. They give us a horror that cannot be escaped, either by boarding up
the windows or by fleeing into the forest. It’s a horror that is
inseparable from ourselves—a horror that, as Colonel Kurtz made plain, is us.[2]
*
I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us. . . .
the observers.
The Exorcist is a thumbscrew of a movie, a ruthless and unflinching treatment of a
genuinely nasty subject: a sweet, virginal girl is, for no good reason (the
film gives us a few hokey pointers which amount to little) possessed by
“the ancient force of evil,” the Devil, to you and me. She takes
unaccountably to vomiting green bile, spinning her head around like a pepper
grinder, speaking in a hoary male voice, and (the showstopper) masturbating
with a crucifix. All of which is presented to us with a kind of brutal realism
that was doubtless considered quite “revolutionary” at the time.
Even today few horror films have topped The Exorcist for sheer bad taste, though many have tried.[4]
What’s particularly disturbing and even repulsive about the film
is that (unlike later gross-outs such as George A. Romero’s films and
Raimi’s Evil Dead series) it maintains an
utterly serious, earnest, almost “devout” tone throughout. Iis it
possible that Friedkin (the director, working from the book by William Peter
Blatty) actually believed he was giving us a thoughtful, cautionary tale of
demonic possession for the education (and edification) of our children? Who
knows? What he’s actually doing, however, is cynically exploiting our
most morbid fears and our worst tendencies towards voyeurism and masochism. The
film plays on roughly the same urges that force us to pick our scabs or play
idly with infected cavities, and it’s all done with undeniable skill and
proficiency. Like The French Connection (though
this film is more spotty), The Exorcist is
such a solid, masterly bit of film craft that we may find ourselves captivated,
even while we are internally recoiling. But it tries our patience—and our
stomachs—far more than The French Connection, because Friedkin’s professionalism is far less appropriate for
a gothic horror “romp” than for a crime thriller. There’s no
humor in the film, not even an attempt at it, and I doubt if one could possibly
have less fun at a horror movie than Friedkin provides us with here.[5]
The film has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It was one of the
first ever “roller coaster” movies, but it’s hardly something
to take your kids to. It is in fact one of the very few movies I would be
tempted to call immoral (Silence of the Lambs was
another, and for similar reasons). While making gaudy, sordid
“entertainment” out of its subject, The Exorcist asks us to applaud it—and its makers—as an
“adult” inquiry into “the Nature of Evil” (or
whatever). But the filmmakers don’t demonstrate the slightest
understanding of (or interest for) “Evil”; all they have to show
for themselves is a devastating lack of taste.
For a horror movie, there can be no worse sin than pretension, and
that’s what The Exorcist
suffers from (it makes us suffer for its sins). The
Omen, on the other hand, is
blessedly free from any such
pseudo-sincerity—it’s a shamelessly schlocky yarn, and it manages
to be both entertaining and reasonably frightening at the same time.
Unfortunately, it suffers from another of The Exorcist’s failings—a regrettably mainstream, big-budget handling of what
should ideally be a lowbrow (and low-key), downscale, good, cheap thriller.
(Amateurishness can often save a
horror movie from being sunk by its own intentions: I far prefer Romero’s bargain basement epics to The
Omen, and even Larry Cohen’s odd little nightmare
movies seem more lively and inspired than most “blockbuster”
equivalents.) In Rosemary’s Baby,
Polanski put the big budget to good use, and he concentrated on making a tight,
slick and fine-looking film, with little or no special effects and no major
stars. In The Omen, the director, Richard Donner
(the man behind Superman and the Lethal Weapon films) piles one gory special effect on top of another, has a full
orchestra soundtrack, and gives us two “straight” (and how!) A-list
movie stars (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick) to mince and gasp their way through
the material, with all the apocalyptic fervour the occasion seems to demand.
(Doesn’t Donner know that people generally go numb when things get truly awful? And that, as a general rule, the less
the actors react to the horror, the more we will?)
The Omen is a packaged product, like The
Exorcist, aimed directly at the public, with certain
specific effects and ends in mind. It gets these effects, all right (the film
is genuinely “shocking”) and it achieved its end (it was a
box-office smash—one of the biggest-grossing horror films of all time),
but it loses something essential in the bargain. The Omen may not be pretentious, but it’s certainly pompous; it’s
contrived, and nothing in it has any spontaneity or freshness; there’s no
real filmmaking going on here, either—it’s a connect-the-dots
scream-machine of a movie.[6] Of course, according to formula, everyone in the movie gets killed,
except the child himself, who, being the child of the devil (i.e., the
antichrist) has ways and means of looking after himself. And the devil takes
care of his own, naturally: at the end of the film, Damian is taken under the
wing of the president and the first lady (his deceased father was a state
senator), and the implication (the most subversive one in the film) is that the
antichrist is just naturally drawn to the White House, where of course his
diabolic nature can come fully to fruition!
The sequels to the film were superfluous at best (devoid of redeeming features) because the ending here says it all—that just as the devil infiltrates himself into the all-American family, and thereby destroys it (his innocent smile doing nothing to hide the empty black stare of his eyes), so he may go on to do the same with American society, and, by inevitable extension, the entire human race. It being, after all, a race which has engendered this devil with its very own loins.
[1]. The Exorcist is actually a more reactionary
version of the family drama, because the family it presents is already
dysfunctional when the “evil’ invades it. The mother Chris MacNeil
(Ellen Burstyn) is a single parent, and, as Pauline Kael writes: “we may
not know why the demon picked on Regan but we’re tipped that that broken
home—the first step to Hell—gave the Devil his chance”
(“Back to the Ouija Board,” Reeling, p. 250). In The Omen, Damian is adopted, and his true
mother is actually a “dog” (or so we’re given to understand:
when Gregory Peck tracks down his mother’s grave and opens the tomb, he
finds the remains of a hound). Still, whether the “sin” let the
Devil in through the back door, or whether the Devil brought the sin along with
him through the front, it’s all one and the same in the end.
[2]. The line “We have found the
enemy and it is us” effectively sums up the sub-genre of the American
Family Horror Film.
[3]. From the
novel, by William Peter Blatty. (The line was never included in the film, though
probably appeared in Blatty’s original screenplay, which Friedkin
immediately rejected.)
[4]. Pauline Kael wrote of the film: “the movie may be in the
worst imaginable taste—that is, an utterly unfeeling movie about
miracles.” “Back to the Ouija Board,” from Reeling, p. 249.
[5].
The only parts of the film I enjoy are the dull, expository scenes involving
the grizzled cop (Lee J. Cobb) plodding about investigating, and the scenes
with the Jesuit psychiatrist/priest Damian (Jason Miller), which are so expertly
handled they seem like documentary footage. (Also, there is an admittedly
effective build-up of tension and dread in the early scenes, using one of the
most basic horror movie devices imaginable: weird sounds from the attic.)
[6]. I admit
that when I first saw the film, at about seventeen, it blew me away. But I
wouldn’t even want to sit through it now,
not even for a refresher course. It’s filed away along with a million
other “childish things.”