The Exorcist

My wife and I rented The Exorcist a couple nights ago. I hadn’t seen it since I was about 10, and even then I don’t think I ever saw all of it. So anyway, I have no idea if it was the new “version you’ve never seen” version because she brought it home from the video store, and all I had was the disc. I’m thinking not, because the disc itself was nothing fancy. Double-sided, movie on one side, special features on the other. The movie itself had a long rambling introduction by William Friedkin which I watched about 30 seconds of. So actually I can’t really say if it was long and rambling, but all indications were that it was going to be so I skipped it.

Hold on, I feel a brief digression coming on.

OK, so it was a double-sided DVD. These are rare, but they always confuse me. The disc is shiny on both sides instead of shiny on the bottom and screen-printed on the top. In tiny little letters near the hub, one side is marked one thing (typically “movie” or “wide-screen”) and the other something else (”special features”, “full frame”, etc.). But because both surfaces are shiny read surfaces and because I’m not a fucking moron and know that DVD’s and CD’s are read from the bottom, my instinct is that the side marked “movie” should be in the tray facing down, i.e. the actual read surface containing the movie is marked “movie”. Of course then I realize, “no, most of the world is fucking idiots” and insert the disc in a position that is to my mind upside-down. Of course this is the way it works.

OK, so back to the movie.

The movie was moderately scary and of course it contained about 40 seconds of Mike Oldfield’s awesome Tubular Bells, which will be forever be known as “The Theme from the Exorcist” by people who think the markings on double-sided DVD’s make perfect sense. Given that Tubular Bells clocks in at almost almost 49 minutes, it has become widely known as “The Theme from the Exorcist” based on about 1.4% of it being used in the movie. Anyway, Tubular Bells rules and I highly recomend it, though it can be slightly hard to find.

But anyway, watching this movie got me thinking. Not about faith and good and evil and all that shit. No, it got me thinking “Could this movie be made today?” I’m thinking definitely not with an R rating, probably not at all. Observe.

In 1973, a movie containing a scene of a 12-year-old girl repeatedly stabbing a crucifix into her bloodied crotch while saying “Let Jesus fuck you!” over and over can get an R rating.

In 2004, a movie featuring simulated oral sex by anatomically-incorrect puppets can’t get an R rating. How far we’ve come.

Now even though I never believed in ancient religious mumbo-jumbo, there was a time when I wasn’t a complete skeptic of all things paranormal. During this time, I always found demonic posession stories intriguing. They always talked of the posessed person being able to speak and understand hitherto unknown languages, contort themselves into bizarre positions, and of course perform the obligatory feats of telekinesis. A couple years ago I saw a “documentary” on the always reliable Discovery Channel about a boy that was exorcised in the 1940’s, and they claimed some pretty remarkable shit happened. Supposedly this was the case that The Exorcist was based on. Seeing the movie again made me decide to look this up and see just how much of it was bullshit. Imagine my complete lack of surprise to learn that all of it was.

Here’s the article. It’s very long but well worth it.