What a cute little kid, despite a few marble limbs that broke off. Behold the infant…Plutus. The rather formidable lady is Tyche, the goddess of destiny. And that’s quite a title. In ancient Greece, Tyche was seen as determining the destiny of each city-state. So there were lots and lots of Tyches, as it were. But only one…Plutus. Plutus? In the teachings of Christ…Plutus appears in a different manifestation. He is Mammon…the visible manifestation of corrupt greed. And as Jesus made clear, you can’t serve God and Mammon…they are mutually incompatible with one another.
Indeed! How hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God! It’s unfortunate that besides an affinity for violence, nonetheless, Christianity has historically proven quite adept at combining violence and Mammon and somehow ending up with what they believe is God. I say that with the understanding that the Living Christ did not found Christianity…he did not found any religion. His followers refused to accept a radical removal of all mediators between God and man, and soon herded themselves around clerics of all shapes and sizes…some quite respectable, others not so respectable. Father Merrin was certainly in the first category. Mammon soon got a second lease on life. Plutus was the Roman god of wealth, and when he slept at night, perhaps his head was full of the Dreams of Avarice.
I begin this essay on a somewhat interesting note, if you’ll excuse the pun…
I know what everyone is thinking…please do not start with the Backwards Talking Regan and Recorder Tape Magic Karras. Too bad…it is relevant when it comes to the subject of, shall we say…sound generating devices and The Exorcist. Neigh! Or is that…nay? Well, it doesn’t matter since horses like Regan. Oh, that came out wrong, well...right, but in the wrong direction.
Of course I can recognize a castrated horse when I see one!
How much music is there in The Exorcist? Not very much. But you are backwards head and shoulders above…sorry…just about every other totally cool movie soundtrack music when you have Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which is almost as iconic as any dozen shots from the movie. There was also…
…yes, that was the song playing in the bar when Karras was speaking with Tom, President of Georgetown University. And I will discuss this in another essay in this, hopefully…final..series of essays on the interpretation of The Exorcist. Well, my interpretation. And it’s fortunate that there are so many priests in the film, since I must confess that I have, in all my Ramblings about the movie, excluding my comments about the novel…at least until I’ve finally realized how wrong those comments probably are. I have been wrong about so many things…and so many characters. I was wrong about Regan in so many ways. And! It is with indescribable joy that I can now say that I no longer believe that Regan ever experienced sexual abuse. In fact, she was not abused in any way, by anyone. That was a key part of the interpretation of the film that is found in many essays on this website. I now recant that position. The only instances of abuse in the film are perpetrated by Regan, and the only character to experience sexual assault was Chris, and it was Regan who did it. Actually, I should qualify that…when Regan screams…Lick Me! Chris is not doing any such thing, but she did end up with a view of Regan I’m sure she would have preferred to have not seen. I was wrong about Chris…and to no one do I owe a greater apology than to Father Dyer, who I now believe is one of the true heroes of the story. So to Father Dyer I offer my heartfelt apology. Bless me father for I have sinned! I think. Chris turned out to be far more clever than I thought. And Sharon…I suppose, as a Rambling Man Rambling On and On in Tom and Damien’s Bar and Grill…forwards, thankfully; I paired Sharon up with Dyer in some incomprehensible way that I always figured I could refine a bit more later and make it make sense until, in making it make sense, it made less sense than the nonsense I made before. But, alas! I find myself quoting another amazing character in another amazing film…You said, I didn’t know what was real anymore…and I said…I did; but I was wrong, I don’t know what’s real anymore either. Wrong’s not such a bad thing to be, and if that’s the price of being just a little bit right, eventually, then it’s worth it. After all, it’s the not the real things that are really interesting anyway.
Now if the subject is that of…sound generating and recording devices, than we find ourselves in the very heart of Ego Te Absolvo. A very desperate Chris was desperate to save Regan from…a demon? No…Chris frantically attempts to save Regan from the consequences of the bizarre death of Burke Dennings…which I will be addressing in another part of this essay series. And with a little help, she was able to navigate Karras, who is in the final stages of the Complete Collapse of His Psyche, into a most genius end-game. Regan’s first meeting with Karras went disastrously; she did almost everything wrong. In attempting to correct the mistakes of the first meeting, she succeeded in providing one of the best exchanges in the movie…
What an excellent day for an exorcism.
You’d like that?
Intensely.
But wouldn’t that drive you out of Regan?
It would bring us together.
You and Regan?
You and us.
Having forgone the stupid claim to be the Devil…whose real name Regan doesn’t seem to know, and who would certainly get out of the restraints if She Were He or He Were She, Regan suddenly shifts to wisely leaving out names and titles of this entity or that entity, names she doesn’t seem to know anyway.
True, Regan doesn’t. But as I will comment on further in another episode, the chap pictured above would have made a far better choice for the starring spirit-entity role than the wrongly maligned Lamashtu-Hating Pazuzu. Even so, Baphomet was not, strictly speaking, really a demon, although the Church of Satan adopted him in their iconography, and so that is the popular conception of the demon-like descendant of the Real Baphomet of the Order of the Knights Templar. Regan had her motto, and Mr. Goat Head had his; Solve…coagula is a principle in alchemy that means…break things down so you can build them up. That is, at least on the surface, a very undemon-like thing to say.
Break things down and leave them that way ‘cause it’s fun!
I guess that’s more demon-like, throwing in a few Vulgar Displays of Power for good measure. If Chris had been a bit more clever, she could have said to Regan…Ok now, Sweetie, tell the priest you’re Asag or Beelzebub or Molech. But it would result in the same problem…those pesky restraints. And Chris knew nothing about these guys anymore than any other candidates for the Demon-Possession Saga that was about to begin.
Still, Regan goes with the far more haunting and vastly more effective…us. This allows Regan to capitalize on the fact that Karras is slowing coming to believe that what is in Regan is a manifestation of his own mother, and thereby Regan can worm her way into the mind of the Demon In Karras. And if Regan has realized that an exorcism may work with demons, but it is virtually certain that it won’t work with…us, then let’s go right ahead with the exorcism. But! She then promptly makes another series of mistakes that, or so one might assume, would kill the whole demon-possession endgame hatched by Chris. Karras tells the bishop that he doesn’t really believe it…believe what? The demon-possession thing…but the Return of Mother Karras is another thing all together. Following the first meeting with Regan, Chris fishes desperately for dead-bang symptoms of demonic possession. Karras can only remember one…speaking in languages not known or studied. The languages thing is good, although it is a plant with some potential thorns on it. A famous German Catholic mystic, formidable at very least, and indeed, highly influential, is…
…Therese Neumann, a lady mystic in need of better make-up advice. And like Regan, she had a flare, nonetheless, for putting on a show…
Therese, finding herself in a state of religious ecstasy, heard four languages. Once she had returned to our, far more boring, world, she knew Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic…the four key languages for serious study of the Bible. Now she has been accused of being a fraud, but not of being demon-possessed...well, as far as I know. That said, if you think Regan MacNeill overplayed her part from time-to-time, Therese may have done so as well…
Oops! well, he did use the stage name…Alice. I meant…
No! Not Michael Myers, who, in a two part essay on the movie Halloween, another film that most people have completely misunderstood.
Well, so much for Therese Neumann.
Of course, Regan would prove to have commonalities with another demon-oriented person…
And…
…and so…
Hey Regan…can you play bass? Hey, Gene! Can you do this?
It looks like kiddo’s got you beat!
Of course, one can go out on the internet and read mindless statements about how Regan had a demon because she could speak languages she couldn’t have known…
La Plume De Ma Tante
Bon jour
And that is a very impressive mastery of French…n’est-ce-pas? She knows two whole phrases she learned in school! I suspect that almost all human beings living in the Western World, even those who know less words from a foreign language than Regan, know the phrase…bon jour. The pen of my aunt? Demonic, for sure. What? That happened to be the name of a 1958 musical, and it became a children’s song. Paste the following link into your browser…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yijz7_z7KE
La Plume De Ma Tante! Means the pen of my aunt! La-la-la-la!
Mirabile dictu
Ego te absolvo
She knows two whole little Latin phrases she heard at school. Mirabile dictu means, if I may render in common-speak…pretty cool!
Wow! Quod nomen est mihi? Or so Karras asks. Ah, what is my name? How easy our Latin expert could have said…Father Karras! But alas, she can’t answer one of the first Latin phrases you learn in Latin 101. Instead we find out what Karras’s full name is…
Father Damien Bon Jour Karras
I thought Mother Karras was Greek. At the end of the movie, Karras hears Regan suddenly start muttering in modern Greek. That would be impressive, except Karras heard her doing this in his mother’s voice, after having visually transformed Regan into his mother…
Sorry…Regan can’t speak modern Greek either. Now the phrase, Ego te absolvo is not impressive. This would have been impressive…
Ok, kiddo…that’s a different matter altogether. I suspect that Regan was attending a catholic school, and heard some priests talking about the Prayer of Absolution. And she could remember three words…ego te absolvo…which are now three very famous words indeed. Karras was given a tape that Regan and Chris made for her father. There are no foreign words, medieval catholic prayers, or anything backwards at all, on that tape. So we know she speaks English! And having learned only about the speaking-in-languages symptom of demon-possession, Chris calls Karras to tell him that, oddly enough, Regan is now speaking foreign languages. Imagine that! The only sign of demon-possession that Karras could share with Chris mysteriously came to pass. So, another tape…
And Karras was resoundingly disappointed by 5 words of Latin and 2 French expressions. But he was far more impressed when Regan made another blunder. Believing that Karras tossed holy water on her, apparently not knowing the difference between holy water and tap water, which we can fairly expect the Devil or one of his Savage Minions to know, she proceeds to howl, growl and gurgle...
Karras has what he needs to make up for the lack of foreign languages, by making his very own Tape Backwards Talking Regan Backwards Talking tape. And I have determined that Regan was also a fan of the Allman Brothers…
The sound tech tells Karras that the voice on the tape he made is talking backwards. We also hear the strange sounds when Karras plays the tape backwards in his room. There is plenty of nonsense sounds, but we can not make out any words. In the novel, Karras hears…
Marin, Marin karras be us let us…danger. Not yet {indecipherable} will die. Little time. Now the {indecipherable}. Let her die. No, no, sweet! It is sweet in the body! I feel! There is {indecipherable}. Better {indecipherable} than the void. I fear the priest. Give us time. Fear the priest! He is {indecipherable}. No, not this one; the {indecipherable}, the one who {indecipherable}. He is ill. Ah; the blood, feel the blood, how it [sings?].
Karras asks…who are you?
I am no one. I am no one.
Then Karras asks, “Is that your name?”
I have no name. I am no one. Many. Let us be. Let us warm in the body. Do not {indecipherable} from the body into void, into {indecipherable}. Leave us. Leave us. Let us be. Karras {Merrin? Merrin?]
In the novel, Karras listens to the tape backwards, scribbling down what he hears. And not only does what he hears make absolutely no sense, and there is a mystifying disagreement within the sounds as to whether the first person singular (I), or the first person plural (we) is understood, there is nothing more than verbal rambling. I think that it is telling that the word…indecipherable…keeps appearing over and over again. I thought about this for awhile and my thoughts told me:
Sifteen dansger {indecipherable} glibby die yet no ah! Hellava {indecipherable} {indecipherable} skyman cleaved bettr voids priesssssssssst lil {indecipherable} blood we die no nobette dog bestter {indecipherable} {indecipherable} {indecipherable} etc.
And so you see! I knew I understood it all! And I was offered a record contract! My new Heavy Metal band is about to record a thrash-metal version of…La Plum De Ma Tante.
Now I will not go into depth about what has been described in many essays on this website published under the Rubric…The Devil Made Me Do It, which chronicle the accusations made against rock musicians that they were planting backwards messages in rock songs that the subconscious mind would then play forwards within the forward moving lyrics. In some instances, this was actually done…first, in the Beatles’ song…Rain. But it is simply the case that when vocal utterances are played backwards, the mind will attempt to turn nonsense into sense, and the listeners will think they are hearing something in the nothing. The best illustration of this occurred during the trial of the hard-rock band Judas Priest, when the lead singer would play something backwards on a tape player after telling the court what they would hear. Then they heard it and it became a game that all rather enjoyed playing. In the novel, Karras then reads about some rather goofy weirdness involving Carl Jung and Occult Phenomenon that makes even less sense than Karras’s listening to gibberish over and over again until he started hearing what he thought were English words that formed long strings of supposed words that amount to nothing. Indecipherable? Karras’s mind couldn’t turn certain parts of the nonsense into nonsensical sense. A copy of the supposed movie script also says…
Give us time! Let her die!
Apparently the demonic entity is having an argument with itself, seemingly about chronology. When Karras asks how long the entity would remain in Regan, the answer is…until she dies and lies stinking in the earth. So there doesn’t seem to be an Inner-Demon disagreement about chronology as far as that response is concerned. If I were Karras, I would ask…if you wanted Regan to die, then why didn’t you kill her before you were put in restraints?
I am no one! I am no one! He is a priest!
Now, the novel was published in 1971, and the movie was released on 12/26/1973, which is only a couple of years difference. Yet the supposed demon couldn’t remember in 1973 what it supposedly said in 1971:
Fear the priest! (1971) vs. He is a priest! (1973). I like how in 1973, the entity foregoes the use of the contraction (He’s a priest), which goes along nicely with my theory that demons would use more formal English when talking backwards. And this part of the 1973 tape I really dig…
Uoy era ohw…Who are you? This is Karras’s voice.
Now the script supposedly says…the lab director throws a switch and the tape starts again, in perfect English. When we hear the tape in the background when Karras is playing it in his room later that night, the howling, growling, and gurgling sounds nothing like PERFECT ENGLISH. This is important. If Karras thought that he was hearing something sensical when listening to the tape backwards, that’s one thing. But we hear the tape too, and no one can claim that we are hearing PERFECT ENGLISH. This qualifier supports the idea that Karras is hearing something that is not there, which is perfectly consistent with the various auditory and visual hallucinations that he experiences in the film. And what a game! Listen to the tape as Karras is listening to it without reading what is supposedly being said, and you will hear gibberish. Listen again after reading what is supposedly being said, and you will hear it! But you don’t, and Karras didn’t either. Perhaps the lab director should have put Rain on the tape player, and played it backwards. At least in that case, there would be real backwards English. In fact, the claims about backwards masking on rock albums came a bit later, and I have no doubts that the supposed backwards English in the novel and movie helped fuel the Rantings and Ravings of Religious Idiots about the messages supposedly placed backwards on rock albums being, for the most part, Satanic in nature. The 70s and 80s were a time of absolute paranoia on the part of Evangelicals who finally realized that they could not compete with popular culture as far as winning the allegiance of American youth. But, or so I would say, they never made an attempt to compete, because they felt that they shouldn’t have to compete. The youth of America should have, in their opinion, lined up, all on their own, at the Door of the Evangelical Cultural Church. Could they compete? Yes…Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar did actually penetrate the otherwise non-religious and unevangelical culture of the youth of America. The interesting thing about that is the fact that any number of Christian leaders were highly critical of those two productions because the presentation of Christ was not orthodox and not consistent with their arcane beliefs. True, Jesus was presented in a modern context, and that’s why youth found Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar attractive. So the message…we don’t have to compete, and if competing involves modernizing Christ and adapting him to the REAL WORLD that young people live in, we won’t compete! When that is your belief, then all you can do is point your finger and attack youth culture as coming from Satan or from some Demonic Entity that can’t even agree with it’s itself…I mean…it can’t agree with themselves. But as to the latter, you’ll have to ask Father Karras about the Demon’s, or demons’, ability to know how many of itself…themselves…it is, or, they are.
It is true that the gospels relate the story of Christ’s encounter with a man that the locals believed was demon possessed. When Christ asked the demon’s name, it replied…
“My name is Legion, for we are many.”
That is from Mark 5: 1-20. However, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew found this confusing…how could one man be possessed by more than one demon? He changed the story so that there wasn’t one demon-possessed man (per Mark and Luke), but two demon-possessed men! Why the change in number? More than one demon surely requires more than one demon-possessed man. Still, there are claims elsewhere in the gospels of Jesus exorcising numerous demons from different people, which, in its most objectionable manifestation, was derisively applied to Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, whose names, besides that of Mary Magadalene, you probably don’t know because a male-dominated religion found it troubling that those responsible for bankrolling the activities of Jesus and his disciples, among whom Mary Magdalene was the most important, were three women, and that without them, Jesus may have spent most of his time making chairs, and Peter and Andrew catching fish, so as to earn enough money to simply survive. And that would have meant having little time to radically recast the nature of the relationship between God and the human race He created. So one person not only had more than one demon that merited exorcism, that same person had all manner of health problems at the same time. In reality, the culture in which Christ lived believed that health problems, including, especially, mental health problems, were the result of demons. The fallacy of this, as far as the validity of my comments is concerned, can be no better grasped than in the case of the Moonstruck Boy. But I have gotten ahead of myself, seeing how that story is the basis for the multi-episode essay titled The Falling Sickness, which I am still finishing. I will state that my interpretation of the story of Legion in Mark is problematic only in so far as one believes that it is historical. I have published my view elsewhere on this website that it is an allegorical story, and that the many demons making up Legion represent the various nearby townspeople, whose sins were metaphorically dumped on one poor man. But I will go no further on this point, except to say that if the nonsense on the novel tape and the movie tape were made to show that the demon realized it was demons, then it would seem more likely that rather than the Devil, or the far more disturbing…us, it…I mean…they…could have called itself…I mean…themselves…
LEGION!
And as we know, Regan developed a very real, but exaggerated in the mind of Karras, vomiting problem. So if the offending demonic source were Legion, then…
…Regan could have simply vomited Legion out of her tummy.
Where was I? I may have digressed a little bit. Right!
Oh, course there was other music in the movie…
Welcome to Father Dyer’s Night Club! Now it isn’t easy to make out the words of the song they’re butchering, but as it turns out, it is a song from 1926 called…Down on Thoity Thoid and Thoid. Hey! Karras doesn’t need to make his own tape! All he needs to do is record Father Dyer and His We Can’t Sing Troupe…Thoity Thoid and Thoid? They’re singing in a strange, otherwise unattested demonic language! Actually, the song is…Down on Thirty-third and Third, written by Ben Ryan. It’s just sung in a local New York street dialect. Now…I wonder why they are singing this song, seeing how The First Missionary on Mar’s Show-tune Hour could feature any number of more well known songs? Could there be a secret joke? The party is the last time we see the hapless Burke Dennings, and we know that his death, by accident or murder, is not far off. Ah!
Folks buy pianos for one dollar down, then wait with sticks,
For the guy to come ‘round;
Gawd help collectors when they come to call;
Three flights of stairs is a hellava fall!
Yes! And the stone stairway outside Regan’s window is a hellava fall too!
Hey, this kid’s got talent!
Yeah! I’ll offer her a three-record deal!
What about a tour?
Sure, I think we’ll play Rome first.
Being a big Rock music fan, and having followed Regan’s career from the start, I remember her early days. There was the ballad…
“Captain Howdy Says My Mommy’s Ugly”
Then there was her first song to make the Top 20…
“Keep Your Fingers Away From My Goddamn C**t!”
Not to mention the chart-topper…
“Hey, Man! See My Underpants!”
And so it was that she formed her new band…Regan MacNeil and Her Demonic Orchestra, and she soon became famous for a more intense form of Rock and Roll. Her first platinum hit…
“I’ll Punch Your Face!”
And Father Karras and I caught her performance of…
“Give Us a Kiss, Priest!”
Now I was sitting in the tenth row. But Karras wanted to get a taste, if you will, of the performance up close…
Of course, a rock star like Regan knows that live performances are vitally important to establishing and keeping a fan base. And wow! Can she perform! This is Regan performing her Number 1 smash hit, and soon to be a classic, F**k Me! F**k Me! And like any good arena anthem, the lyrics should be simple, so the fans can sing along…
F**k Me! F**k Me!
F**k Me! F**k Me!
F**k Me! F**k Me!
F**k Me! F**k Me!
F**k Me! F**k Me!
We love you Washington D.C! Good night!
Wow! That’s Rock n’ Roll! And you should’ve seen the back-stage party!
Always striving to improve her live performances and create memorable fan experiences, here she performs her other single called, L**k me, L**k me!
Hey, Baby, Baby!
Here it comes! [then, guitar solo]
L**k me, L**k me!
L**k me, L**k me!
L**k me, L**k me! [then, short drum solo]
There’s no doubt that she’s on the cutting edge of the Rock Music business! Who could forget classics like…
…Your Mother S**ks C**ks In Hell! You Faithless Slime!
But then there’s my favorite, that oldie-but-goodie…
Stick Your C**k Up Her A** You Mother-Fu**ing Worthless C**k-S**ker!
With a special dedication to Father Merrin, of course!
She was also the pioneer of head-banging Heavy Metal…
Gee, I wonder if she had any fun?
You might say that Regan really puts her heart into it…among other things. She also attracts the best musicians…
Pazuzu on drums!
Abyzou on back-up screeching!
And during her career, Regan broke a lot of records, as it were…
Duck! Well, I guess Chris wasn’t so lucky…
Lying on the floor is Chris MacNeil’s latest single, “What A Lousy Mother-Daughter Moment That Was.”
Now where is all this going? Give me a moment, I got distracted. Oh yes! Sound devices.
So Chris has a turn-table, receiver, tape player, and some records…records that are not lying in pieces on the floor of Regan’s bedroom.
And Sharon has a radio, with headphones and, or so it would seem, a listening device in kiddo’s bedroom. I doubt the Rolling Stones would be more entertaining than the exorcism upstairs. Perhaps Sharon had a two-way radio that allowed her to communicate with Detective Kindermann, who was apparently hovering outside, and who suddenly appeared at the door at just the right moment.
By the time you get to the end of the movie…most people are exhausted; mentally, emotionally, religiously, and even…theologically. You’ve been shocked, offended, horrified, etc. So it is easy to miss things that happen at the end, several of which are of vital importance, and being exhausted, you miss the significance of them. And here is one…
Where do you want this?
What is it?
Phonograph.
Storage.
And into storage it goes…dumped in a box, and covered with paper. It is worth pausing on this. We do not see anything else in the house being packed up. Only this phonograph. And Chris doesn’t recognize it. The only thing that we see getting packed up for the move is the phonograph that Chris doesn’t recognize and Sharon suddenly appears with as Chris is heading out the door. It is hard to believe that this isn’t very important. I believe that this phonograph is the conclusion of the Sharon-Oriented Storyline that began in the first scene of the film showing life at the MacNeil residence. Of course, this phonograph is not Chris’s stereo, nor is it Sharon’s radio. And it is certainly not Karras’s magic tape-recorder, or the more specialized equipment we saw at the Georgetown University Sound Lab. So whose phonograph is it? A closer look at it…
So it is, or so it would seem, a phonograph in a black case with silver along the two halves where they meet when it is closed. Ah!
And there it is. It’s Regan’s phonograph, along with her records, some of which were fortunate enough to not get smashed during one of her killer performances. A slightly different look…
Now I will say that I looked and looked, and then, not finding the phonograph that Sharon stuffed into the box, I looked some more. And I didn’t find it. But then I did! But there is no way a viewer of the movie in 1973 would ever have been able to notice the phonograph in Regan’s room, since it is shown only for a moment, and the viewer’s eyes will go to, as the makers of the film well knew, Chris’s bloody face. But even if you did catch a fleeting glimpse of the record player, there would have been no way to realize that the very last thing that was packed for the move, something Chris didn’t recognize, and something that, for some reason, was in Sharon’s possession, was the record player from Regan’s room. The makers of the film obviously meant to indicate that this phonograph is key to unraveling the Sharon-Oriented Storyline in the movie…one that connects with the other character-oriented storylines in the movie, and one that I think intersects significantly with the death of Burke Dennings. No, I may be insane, but I’m not ready for the Berringer Clinic and Foundation yet! It’s not as if I’m acting like a witch-doctor or someone from a primitive culture…
…well, except for Saturday nights. Besides, that’s not me…I swear!
Room 302 is available, I think.
Whatever. At any rate, I am not saying that Burke died as a result of Regan’s phonograph. But, when seen in hindsight, perhaps he did. Why didn’t Chris recognize her daughter’s phonograph? And notice that when Sharon says…phonograph, she doesn’t say…the phonograph; and she doesn’t say…Regan’s Primitive Culture Phonograph. The makers of the film dangle it in front of us before packing it away in a box. Surely it isn’t important. Ah! Every scene is important…as is this phonograph…THE PHONOGRAPH, as I would put it. Take a good long look at it and, before reading this crazy little essay of mine, you didn’t even notice it…who cares? Just pack up Regan’s phonograph. But why show us this at all? Why not show us Sharon stuffing some other thing of Regan’s into a box as Chris, not to mention Regan herself, are about to leave? If I’m right, then I would offer the suggestion that the reason why Chris didn’t recognize Regan’s phonograph is because…she had never seen it before. She didn’t buy it for her, nor had her father. Why? Because Regan found it in the attic. The attic where the Bird Box is, or…was, depending on whether Sharon stuffed it into a crate headed for Los Angeles. No; Regan found it during one of her trips Up There. Ok, no biggie. Why does Sharon have it? After the Crucifix Scene, when just about everything had been removed from the Padded-Cell-Looking-Room, it went with all the other things. But I think there was a good reason that Sharon took Regan’s Attic Phonograph. I think that Sharon, after a long quest, having her Dreams of Avarice dancing around in her head like sugar-plums, came to a strange finality. The phonograph from the attic. And so we conclude the Great Sharon Adventure. Will Sharon go with Chris? She says…no. Hmmm. Well, I suppose it’s confusing to start with the conclusion without a good look at the beginning…or the middle…or the middle moving from the beginning and hurtling toward the end. Where did they store all the things they removed from Regan’s room?
…in the attic, of course! The rat-free attic where Chris made a very strange journey at the beginning of the film. And while she was Up There, she came very close to ruining the movie. Almost. But how valuable can a phonograph be? Dreams of Avarice from a kid’s record player? Well, I suppose that depends on the rest of Sharon’s story, and so we must go back to the beginning for that. And that’s exactly where I intended to go. But I must admit, I got a lot of enjoyment from writing this essay. After all, I’ve always been a lover of beautiful music…
