What am I rambling on about! What was I rambling on about? Darla…get step-mommy’s Ritalin. Wait…I remember!
Meet Owsei Temkin, medical historian. I know someone who would have liked to meet him…
That’s him. He does have an odd look about him, at least at the moment. He also has the honor of being one of the very few people who ever met Jesus of Nazareth. And his story is told very differently in the gospels. I will start with Mark:
When they came to the other disciples, they saw a large crowd around them and the teachers of the law arguing with them. As soon as all the people saw Jesus, they were overwhelmed with wonder and ran to greet him.
“What are you arguing with them about?” he asked.
A man in the crowd answered, “Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit that has robbed him of speech. Whenever it seizes him, it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not.”
The New Testament is chock full of demons being blamed for this, and blamed for that. So nothing is too surprising in the verses just quoted. And so we have another miracle that revolves around a Metaphorical Ego Te Absolvo. Now Mark is usually preferable when other gospels relate the same accounts. In this case, Matthew is much better…
When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and knelt before him. “Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He is moonstruck and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him.”
Ah, yes…so much for the disciples. It’s too bad that Mary Magdalene wasn’t present, I’ll bet that she could get it right. But notice the difference…Mark says that the boy is possessed by a demon. And it is very interesting to say the least that this Supposed Demon seems to be intent on physically destroying the boy. That reminds of this…
How long do you plan on staying inside Regan?
Until she rots, and lies stinking in the earth.
Now I have to say that Regan didn’t think enough before giving her answer. Karras could then say…if you want her dead, why didn’t you hurl her through the window before you were put in the straps which, to break free from would be a…vulgar display of power? He could also ask a question that Regan would have difficulty with…
So you’re saying that you won’t leave until Regan’s dead. What if you are in the straps for a year? 5 years? 10 Years? Decades later, will you still be whining about the straps, and being intent on Regan’s death, you’ll just lie around in bed…waiting?
Still, Regan’s response implies that the Supposed Demon is intent on destroying its host. This is certainly the case in the novel, but in that case, Jamie’s revenge is to be obtained by slowly destroying the Piglet to hurt the Sow. That is not the case in the movie. But Movie Regan’s answer is strangely congruent with what the man tells Jesus about his son…in Mark. In Matthew, the father says nothing about possession by a spirit. Instead, he tells Jesus that his son suffers from a malady called…Moonstruck. But then, due to the inability of gospel writers to understand that illness has nothing to do with demons, they pivot…
“You unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was healed at that moment.
Here the redactors decided to give us their habitually dunderheaded exposition of Jesus’s words. Note that Christ does not mention a demon. It is the redactors speaking in the third-person who mention a demon. In reality, Jesus simply healed a young boy. Of what? Being moonstruck. And so the moon is being blamed…not a demon! And here we have another very interesting thing to note. The words “lunacy” and “lunatic” are of course derived from the Latin word luna…the moon. Sure, wolves …
…howl at the moon…but roosters crow at the bedouin…sorry…when they see the sun. In the past, mental illness was believed to be connected with the cycles of the moon. But being a lunatic suffering from lunacy is not being…Moonstruck. In this case, the moon goddess Selene was believed to exact vengeance on people by striking them with Moonstruckism. Actually the role of the moon in the malady suffered by the Moonstruck Boy goes back into the recesses of Mesopotamian history where the god of the moon, Sin, was believed to be the culprit. But in Greek mythology, the goddess Selene was the culprit…
And what is the vengeance wrought by Selene? It is, of course…epilepsy. Connecting both with the moon turns people with epilepsy into lunatics…in a manner of speaking. At the time of Christ, many believed that epilepsy was caused by demons. However, Christ did not, and he treated the moonstruck boy for what ailed him…epilepsy. It was the gospel redactors who were too superstitious to blame this condition, along with anything from a stubbed toe to metaphorically having three heads…on anything other than demons. What the father described was his son’s convulsions during an epileptic seizure. The version in Mark, which in its earliest form said nothing about a demon, does add other details that may, or may not, provide additional help in understanding the story. And so in 1971 Temkin published the second edition of a book that would become synonymous with changing perceptions of epilepsy…
What is the situation in The Exorcist? Dopey Doctor and His Specialist Side-Kick are convinced that Regan suffers from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I have noted elsewhere that there is a huge lacuna…not luna…lacuna, a big gap in the story. Regan is at the doctor’s office. But we don’t know why. We don’t know what’s wrong. We’ve seen nothing thus far to indicate a problem. There is an advantage to this…by not seeing any symptoms, we can’t have any preconceived ideas about what her malady is. The doctor begins by deciding that it is…
…Disorder of the Nerves. It’s charaterized by hyperactivity, a bad temper, and problems concentrating on your math homework. And so the correct pharmaceutical protocol is…Ritalin. However, he adds a caveat…her symptoms could be an overaction to depression. What reaction would qualify as not being an “overaction” to depression in a twelve-year-old girl? Now Dopey Doctor seems to have everything messed up. If Regan is hyperactive, something that she has not shown the slightest indication of being, then that is a totally separate thing than depression. He finishes by saying that depression is out of his field. True! Depression is something for a psychiatrist…and if Regan has BOTH disorders, then she is a rather sick young girl. But does he offer a referral to a psychiatrist? No! Let’s see what the Ritalin does. Except in some of the weird drugs discussed earlier, amphetamine is not used as an anti-depressant. So Dr. Klein is incompetent. If he suspects depression, then he should make his referral and gracefully…bow out. But as is seen in the aftermath of the spider-walk scene, even when he has referred the case to a hypnotist, he insists on being present in Chris’s home for the Hypnosis Session From Hell. Now I must say that being a mental health professional is very hard. One must get oodles of expensive education, then lots of practice. How do I know? I was told so by three eminent psychiatrists…
Yes! Doctors Ziller, Zeller, and Zoller. And they told Darla, who told me, that you don’t need hypnosis, Thorazine, or tiki-heads to make someone all better. Their prescription?
…take one good pie fight and call them in the morning.
Still, Dopey Doctor seems to be a bit Burke Dennings-ish…he just won’t go away. It may be that he has a thing for Movie Star Chris.
My daughter’s not depressed.
Ah, yes! Time for denial! Psychiatrist Chris MacNeil…all Regan needs is a good pie fight. Wait! I know! Chris played a psychiatrist in a movie she starred in. Maybe she lost the main role in The Three Faces of Idiocy to Joanne Woodward! Still, that is a normal enough reaction from a parent…denying that their kid has a problem, not getting them the help they need, and then denying responsibility for what ends up happening. Then the doctor mentions the fact that Regan brought up her parents’ marital situation. All by herself? No…she was probably asked. And I think this is brought up to create the impression in the mind of the viewer that Regan is upset by the separation of her parents. But that isn’t the case, as I have shown in previous essays on this website. In the Night-Before-Regan’s-Birthday scene, Regan has a copy of Photoplay magazine that deals with the night that Howard walked out. Regan seems rather jubilant about this edition of the magazine. When Chris asks why she has it, Regan replies…because I like it. Mother and daughter go on to talk humorously about Regan’s birthday. Regan tests Chris on the subject of Burke, Chris insists that she will always love Regan’s daddy, and then the subject is dropped. The next day, Howard fails to call Regan on her birthday. Regan overhears Chris fuming about how Howard doesn’t give a “shit about her.” She seems rather upset. And she is…but not because Howard didn’t call. The fact is that Regan is the one who doesn’t give a shit…about Howard, and though Regan is upset, it is not for the reason that the viewer thinks. Regan wants her parents married, but separated…with Howard in Europe being just fine. Dr. Klein, in probing Regan for something to justify calling her depressed, hits on the one thing, parental separation, that most people would accept without question, as likely to cause depression in a child. But…they’ve never encountered a child like Regan.
On the subject of children the like of whom you’ve never encountered…Marybelle told me something interesting. Of course, local law enforcement…who now know me by name…told me to keep Marybelle locked in her room…without the straps. I have no idea how…
…she escaped…I mean…slipped past me. But before she did. Well anyway, she read how I wrote in another essay that I apologized to Chris for being unfair, indeed…wrong…about her. Marybelle said that I was a wimp and should have stood my ground. She said that Chris was not the person she seems to be. Well, she started out that way…but having your 12 year old daughter attempt to crush you to death with her big oak dresser…well that might make you a little nervous having her around. And now you know why I bought Marybelle a dresser that sits closer to the floor. It might make you think…I’m stuck with her for years! I can’t turn my back on her for one minute! Now Chris knows how I feel…as I always endeavour to keep Darla in front of me, by about five feet. Regan might, at any time, make another attempt at Directed-At-Chris-Homicide. And there can be no doubt that at least as late as the exorcism, Regan was still angry at her mother…
Normally, I engage in a little bit of self-censorship and use clever aster***s to prevent the reader from seeing words that they might find objectionable. Well, not in the above shot…as*hol*! Just kidding. What Regan said is very angry in nature. The question raised here is whether people are misunderstanding the scene. Many believe that the demon is speaking about Regan…So Regan is, gramatically speaking, the direct object of some rather naughty verbs. But…that is wrong! This is the shot that immediately preceeds Regan’s inappropriate tirade…
Karras is closing the door to prevent Chris from entering the room. And so we now know the real identity of the direct object, gramatically speaking, of Regan’s naughty verbs…and clearly, Regan is still rather angry at her mother. So I guess one might wonder…just what is a mother to do? How do you get Regan out of your hair and thereby assure that you will not die under a piece of the…
…furniture of your child? Oh, you think that sounds stupid…do you?
Great…now I don’t remember where I was. Oh, yes! How do you get Regan out of your hair and thereby assure that you will not die under a piece of your child’s furniture? Chris’s answer to that question is actually a down-right diabolical one…and just how diabolical…truly diabolical…will be the subject of my next essay. But it is not…kill her! Her answer may fall back on a little move pulled by Sharon, and with the same person. Still, at this point, that would be a digression.
But what of Dopey Doctor? Well, he completely misses what happens in the office on the day he met Regan MacNeil.
Time for an EKG…
So we’re off to the races.
Let the epileptic episode begin!
Regan becomes unaware of what’s going on around her…she’s not being rude…she has simply become unaware of the doctor’s presence. Can you feel this?
I don’t feel anything.
Well, of course she does. And finally snapping out of her State of Unawareness, she responds with a puzzling answer…one that simply makes no sense. One of the symptoms of epilepsy in a child is suddenly saying things that don’t make sense, which is clearly the case here.
…temperature time. And he explains how it works.
I don’t want it!
Actually, doctor, Kiddo is pretty smart, and doesn’t need your help to read the display on your fancy thermometer. Regan displays Confusion of Intent, thinking that the doctor is offering her the fancy thermometer. But she also becomes angry and aggressive. I think that this is a case of Directed Aggression, a symptom of epilepsy in some people.
And we end the episode with Postical Wandering. This often marks the end of an epileptic episode, and involves the person wandering aimlessly, and apparently without awareness of their surroundings. In children, this can be very dangerous, since they can fall down the stairs, or walk out into the street. What the first visit to the doctor shows is an epileptic episode from beginning to end.
And we all fall down!
Now there is a little bit of cheating. It is well known that it is much easier to control somebody’s perception of something they’re seeing by music…and sounds. You could play sad music, which will instantly induce them to contextualize what they see as sad. Or you could do the opposite with happy music. In The Exorcist, there is a sound that is used that I can’t really describe, but it may be the sound of Electric Insects, from Night of the Electric Insects, which appears on the soundtrack to the movie, and is performed by the Philharmonic Orchestra. And what it does is mislead the viewer by its scary nature. It seems to play at this point in the film to lead the viewer to see something diabolical in Regan’s perambulation...it isn’t postical wandering…surely it has something to do with a demon.
Chris, during her party, lost track of Kiddo. She finds her upstairs in bed. Oh, that all twelve-year olds went to bed so readily without being cajoled. Now Chris ends up waking Regan. As the movie plays out, Regan suddenly waking up can result in problems. Why? Because in Juvenile Epilepsy, an event can be set off suddenly if the child is awakend abruptly. She hears people downstairs, and so she heads downstairs…
…a demon has nothing to do with this. She is at the beginning of an epileptic episode, and has lost bladder control, which is not uncommen during an epileptic event. Chris takes Regan upstairs to take a nice warm bath…
As happened in the doctor’s office, Regan has become unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings, staring straight ahead, seeminly at nothing. And she is completely unresponsive to Chris. This is exactly what happened with Dopey Doctor. Chris tries to get an explanation for Regan’s threat directed at Sharon, but she gets no response. This is common with Juvenile Epilepsy.
Mother, what’s wrong with me?
What a cute-as-a-button-face! And what an interesting nightdress! Having officially become a Nightdressologist, I am uniquely qualified to say that Regan’s nightdress is pretty cute. Regan is now interacting with her mother, who tells her to take her pills and all will be fine. Chris leaves, the hall lights flicker, and Regan who has just fallen asleep, is awoken by the Noises in the Attic, which sets off…
Chris decides to go along for the ride…
As I just said, when Regan wakes suddenly, bad things ensue. Now what is actually happening in this scene? Regan has already told Chris about her bed shaking…in the Blue Nightdress Yellow Pillow Cases scene, Regan told Chris that her bed was shaking. And so it is here in this scene. But the action is seen through Chris’s eyes…and she is taking the “bed shaking” seriously…as Karras will do during the exorcism…she has contextualized it literally. Within the Artificial Reality, what is really happening is that Regan is lying on the bed…having convulsions…serious ones, and Chris has jumped on top of her. And no one has yet explained to me why a demon would bother shaking a bed anyway. If we take Chris’s contextualization literally, then we miss what is really happening…violent convulsions…the shaking of the bed isn’t what it seems. It is a Replacement of Facts in the mind of Chris, and ultimately Karras. A demon? Remember that Regan spoke about her bed shaking…
…before we get the feeling that there is a problem. Being in bed with Mom prevents the convulsions happening. Why? There are psychological triggers at play, and Regan’s health situation, which would have come about anyway, was speeded up and the switch was flicked, caused by the feelings elicited by the Noises in the Attic. At some point prior to the party, Regan figured out what the Noises in the Attic were, who was causing them, and why Sharon was up there in the first place.
The Sow is Mine scene. It is here that we learn about Regan taking Thorazine…and then lying in bed in her nightdress all day instead of keeping current with school work, making clay beasties, etc. There is something very wrong with the adults at this point. But Chris calls the doctor, who brings along his Temporal Lobe Lesion Wizard Side-kick, and makes a housecall…imagine that! When we first get a look into the bedroom…
Then…
The Editorial Control Board and Committee Against Humor That Is In Poor Taste have banned popcorn jokes…and underpants jokes…so I will have to make do without them. It is very important to remember that neither the doctor, nor the specialist, see anything they haven’t seen before. And that means that what is happening in the Artificial Reality is not happening in the Artificial Reality. We see Chris and her Replacement of Facts. What is happening is that Regan, probably after waking up, has gone into an epileptic event, and is having convulsions.
The eyes roll back in the head, another common manifestation that occurs during an epileptic event. This will happen again during the exorcism…
Of course, the best thing about…
…this scene is that we get to gaze with wonder at the second mortgage in Regan’s mouth. Now for…
My thoughts on this shot…but first I would point out something interesting! In part 1, I referred to Elizabeth Money-Money-Sin-And-Misery Knapp, she too claimed to be possessed, and witnesses stated that she spoke in a demonic voice without her lips moving…and her throat would swell up like a balloon. Why do I get the feeling that the makers of the The Exorcist read about Ms. Knapp? And not intending to engage in a little inappropriate humor, it would appear that Elizabeth Knapp was history’s first…
…demonic ventriloquist’s doll. Maybe someone should give the demon a wine-skin. Actually, the swelling in the throat is meant to indicate something important…during an epileptic seizure, the muscles in the chest can contract dramatically…so much so that it may feel, momentarily, that you can’t breathe. This can even cause the heart to stop for a second. And when that happens, this happens…
True…very few people say…Keep away, the sow is mine…during an epileptic event. I noted earlier that saying nonsensical things is a symptom of Juvenile Epilepsy. However, that is the not case as far as Regan’s announcement goes. I took the position in another essay that this is an expression of her ownership of her mother…which is now threatened by the presence of two adult males. What is important here is one of the deal-sealers when deal-sealers seal the deal on demon possession. We’ve all seen movies where a demon talks, and rather than having a lilting voice like Judy Collins singing, Send In The Clowns…they have a deep, spooky sounding voice. And thus when we hear Regan yell…Keep away, the sow is mine, and…fuck me! surely we are hearing the demon! I’ve always wondered why a demon would scream…fuck me! Maybe he wants to get laid! Actually, if you pay close attention, Regan’s voice is not consistently the deep scary voice we think we hear. The pitch changes from a deep voice to a high-pitched screech…then back again. The voice is not uniform. Why? Well, I think it is directly linked to the immediately preceding shot. When an epileptic fit begins, there is a serious contraction of the muscles…as I said earlier. This affects the chest, and then proceeds into the throat where the vocal chords tense up. This results in the person, if trying to speak, forcing air through the contracted vocal chords, producing a distorted voice. As the person continues speaking, the vocal chords loosen up and her voice will, at some point, return to normal. I think that the difference of pitch, with apparently two different voices, is due to the contraction and partial relaxation of the vocal chords as they return to normal. So it would seem that in the Sow Is Mine scene, we are seeing and hearing different symptoms of different types of epileptic events. But there is one more…
Regan displayed Directed Aggression toward the doctor when she showed Confusion of Intent after failing to understand why he was showing her the changing display on the thermometer. In this case, Regan also displays Directed Aggression…which tends to be Non-Goal Directed, meaning that the person will lash out at objects or people within striking distance for no apparent reason. But, the person does not go in pursuit of someone or something to hit. In this case, the doctor, deciding to give Regan a shot to tranquilize her…as if Poison-Thorazine wasn’t enough…stepped up to her and was in striking distance, and paid the price for it. But this was really the third instance of Directed Aggression and the doctor. Here is number 2…
Fuckin’ bastard!
This naughty exclamation has a second little gift from Regan in it…she spits in his face. She is, obviously, being restrained in this scene, otherwise she would have lashed out more physically. In fact, this spitting incident will be repeated in two other scenes…
As I’ve noted elsewhere, vomit was a key part of the fiction spun around Anna Eklund, or aka Emma Schmidt, where she produced large amounts of bodily fluids…vomit…and, I’ll leave it there. And for some reason, disgusting bodily fluids is common to Demon-Possession Stories…in the case of Annaliese Michel, she was said to have begun drinking her own urine…a claim that I do not believe is true. And I’ve always been confused as to why demons would have an awful-bodily-fluids fetish. Since I’m in a nut-shelling mood, I have to say that Superstitious Christians who believe in demons have always been bifurcated on the role of the Demons They’ve Created Out Of Thin Air. When rock music is attacked, the Paranoid Ones claim there is an intrusion of Satan and his minions into the music because this offers access to millions of youths…more than millions…it allows an invasion into the basic foundation of youth sub-cultures. Rock bands tend to be cool and sexy…they strive to mirror youth conceptions of what glamour in their music should be. Except for a few exceptions that prove the point, these rock performers don’t look like Regan MacNeil…facial wounds and buckets of vomit. And so a strange sort of weird nonsense emerges from the fears of fearful adults who have nothing that can compete for the hearts and minds of young people and, or so I believe, if they did…they still wouldn’t make the effort to compete. Why? Because they feel they’re entitled to the loyalty of young people…and it’s that simple. Thus they categorically lose a war they never fought. When the 70s offered young people cool things like Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, which bridged the gap between the cool, but hedonistic, world of rock music and something higher that ultimately looked to God, the old folks attacked these productions as too modern, too youthful, and too lacking in ancient elements that will NEVER interest the young, and which the oldies themselves don’t understand in the slightest. So they accept the construct of Satan and, despite all the Bible Thumping, Pounding, and Weaponization…it is the Church of Satan who would have to explain to them that the being in question is The Satan, thereby depriving the unknowing, unstudied, and ignorant of their view of just who the fictional character really is…one who carried out a specific function before God with no concern about whether you like Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Alice Cooper, or Judy Collins…or maybe you like all four…they couldn’t care less. Perhaps they likes Mozart. Oh, no! All you fans of classical music are being seduced by the Prince of Darkness! Still, where is the appeal in looking like, acting like…Regan MacNeill…where is all the cool glamour? There isn’t the slightest thing that young people would find appealing in her beyond a character in a movie who did have a penchant for lashing out at the adults around her. Cool! But she’s gross. Do you believe idiotic things like the notion that demons enter the world through Ouija boards or Magic 8 Balls or even…John Dewar & Sons whisky boxes…or that demons try so hard to get into our world and when they finally do…they urinate on the floor and vomit. And! The voices on Karras’s tape give the appearance of arguing…Give us time! Let her die! Which is it? So a bunch of demons came through the Ouija board, infested Regan (the Latin term for possession is…infestatio), peed on the floor, vomited, then got strapped to the bed, whining and fussing about it…and…to top it all off…weren’t even sure what the plan was! One thinks this…and one thinks that. Not very bright…and if The-Misunderstood-The-Satan is fighting a war against God, he has no chance of winning if Regan’s dunderheaded goofball demons are what he’s relying on. In fact, this collection of Spirit-Being-Morons should have lost the war millennia ago…certainly Gabriel, Michael, Jeremiel, and Metatron wouldn’t make the same stupid mistakes and would have won this war already. You can’t have this Bifurcated-Inability-To-Make-Up-Your-Mind cake and eat it too. Sexy or disgusting? Cool and hip, or revolting? If you held a poll and asked young people if they liked vomiting as an activity…I’ll bet you can guess their answer. Gee, Mom…can I look like Regan? No! But we’ll get you a pretty pink nightdress with blue flowers on it. So get it straight, and try ending your Bible Illiteracy lest you get bested by a bunch of Metaphorical Anton Levays.
So within the Artificial Reality, did Regan vomiting on a grand scale into Karras’s face actually happen? Let’s see what happens when she gets a shot at someone else…
…look how close Merrin is to Regan…surely she will give a Karras-Type-Projectile-Vomiting-Lesson to the Good Father. But no! All she can do is spit in his face. Isn’t that what she did to the doctor? So, did she lose her Prolific Barfing skills? We must reconcile what happened to Karras and what to the doctor and what happened to Maren-Merrin, and given Karras’s repeated Chris-Like-Distortions-Of-Reality…his Substitution-of-Facts skills…we must conclude that Regan was only able to spit in someone’s face…be it the Fuckin’-Bastard-Doctor, or the Most Noble of Priests, or even Karras himself. In fact, if we take these three happenings, and we conclude that spitting is a very easy thing to do, whereas summoning up a stream of vomit from one’s stomach and heaving it at someone is far more difficult to do, then we can ask the question…who was there? When Regan spit in the face of the doctor, Chris and the nurse were present. When Regan spit in Merrin’s face, Karras was present…and although he is often an unreliable witness, he was nonetheless there to ensure that all we saw is a perfectly normal, albeit icky, face spitting. Only with the Projectile Vomiting scene is only one person present…no other corroborating witnesses. And it is certainly the case that during the remainder of the exorcism, Regan is not able to bring up enough spit to repeat her Saliva-Attack …
Merrin remains well within spitting distance from Regan, but she does not spit in his face again. Why? We know that she’s having a problem with dehydration…and she simply can’t spit again at the moment. She’s left unable to do much more than…
…and spit-free.
Still! I would classify the act of spitting in someone’s face as Directed Aggression. In all three scenes, people were within striking distance, but Regan was restrained. So we end with Directed Saliva Aggression. Any other examples of Directed Aggression?
I have discussed this scene at length, arguing that Regan is reversing The Sow Is Mine scene. She also decided to kill Chris…for Chris’s disloyalty to her…in something that she heard her mother say to Detective Kindermann. Voices downstairs woke her up. And there are several incidents of what happens when Regan is woken by voices downstairs…the Party…and the argument between Sharon and Chris that led to the Spider-Walking-Girl- attraction. But Regan’s attempt to kill Chris consisted of shoving the chair in front of the door to keep Sharon and Willi out, and then trying to push her dresser over on Chris…but it was too heavy…and so Chris survived to live another day. But when Regan clobbers Chris with a smash across the face, this took place only because Chris stepped up to her, placing her well within striking distance.
The Animal Magnetist begins his circus-show.
Following some howling and growling and an offensive smell, the psychiatrist, who has bought into Chris’s Three Farces of Eve idea, asks…who are you? But he stepped up to Regan, and is well within range. Regan suddenly realizes this…
So…
It is hard to make out, but she is now attempting to neuter the psychologist. A castrated boar is no threat to the sow! Or the piglet’s possession of the sow. Again…Directed Aggression because someone comes within range. A final example…
Karras is now in striking distance. Regan’s attempt to kill Chris by pushing over the dresser, and Chris employs all of her Substitution of Facts skills by simply blotting Regan out of the action, making it look as if the chair and dresser move by themselves, is not Directed Aggression. Hitting Chris in the face was, but the scene with the dresser is a calculated attempt to kill her mother.
I will now indulge in a momentary digression, seeing how the Digression Prevention Committee is out to lunch. I noted earlier that the eyes rolling back in the head is fairly common in juvenile epilepsy. I would now like to combine that with something that is by no means fairly common in juvenile epilepsy…levitation. Regan supposedly levitates once in the movie…during the exorcism. In this regard, we see a parallel with the Anna Eklund Exorcism Farce…except Anna would actually hover in the corner. Sure. But I would suggest that within the Artificial Reality, Regan does not levitate at all.
The sequence begins with Regan’s restraints breaking…and they give the appearance of having been cut through prior to the beginning of the exorcism.
The eyes rolling back in the head happened once before…the Sow Is Mine scene.
In that scene, this is followed by Regan standing up on her bed. It is obvious that we are looking down on a girl lying flat on her bed, just as in the earlier scene…we are looking almost straight down from an overhead position.
The only thing that has really changed is that the camera angle shifts to a side view…without this, we would not know that Regan appears to be levitating. And she keeps her arms outstretched as if she were still strapped to the bed.
It should be noted that Merrin and Karras are considerably further away from Regan than when the exorcism started, when they were only a few feet away.
Now it seems to me that Merrin is looking straight down from his vantage point…toward the mattress. If Regan is actually levitating, then Merrin is looking in the wrong place.
Merrin continues looking down at the bed, and not the girl floating up from it. Now the shot changes…
Regan obscures our view of Merrin, although it is clear that Karras is looking straight down at the mattress as well. This clearly indicates that Regan is on the bed, and never left it. And! He has a rather disturbed look on his face. Merrin has temporarily lost his holy water bottle, something that I think is vital to understanding what happened to the exorcist. Strangely, a different bottle of holy water mysteriously appeared on the little table to the left of Regan’s bed…from the vantage point of Merrin and Karras. Then we are distracted by a strange shaking of the room, momentarily losing Merrin’s view of Regan. I will discuss this shaking of the room in another essay. But I will state that the shaking of the room is, as I’ve said, rather strange, since it appears as though the entire room is shaking. I could launch into a spiel about how strange it is that the supposed-demon can suddenly be willing to engage in a bunch of vulgar displays of power, but not previously. I could also raise the question…what purpose does it serve? But I will do neither. What I will emphasize is how strange it is that…
…the power of the demon to shake the entire room results in the destruction of the lamp to Regan’s right (our left), but the lamp on the table to Regan’s left (our right) remains standing. So while the entire room appears to shake violently, the destructive results of that shaking effect only the left side of the room. This little table is very close to the bathroom door, which someone will kick shut with such force that the door splits down the middle. So I think that any discussion of the apparent shaking of the room must account for this strange situation.
…the shot shifts back to Regan’s levitation as we look down on her, not exactly a bird’s eye view, but rather…if we were looking down on her from Merrin’s perspective. And her arms remain in the same position as they are when we clearly see her lying on the bed, wearing her restraints.
…a close up showing Karras, but without including Merrin. So it is through Karras’s eyes that we are seeing the action in this shot. This type of close-up on Karras has been used with other not-so-supernatural events going on during the exorcism, including the levitating of the bed, the appearance of Mr. Yucky Face, and the head-spin. The only odd thing that Merrin saw was the flickering of the lights in the room. If these things were really happening, then we should see a response from Merrin. But we don’t…we get close-ups of Karras.
Notice how one of the two priests appears to be looking in the wrong place. Karras is looking up…but Merrin is not. He seems to think that Regan is still on the bed.
This is an excellent illustration of what I’ve been saying…Karras sees Regan levitate to her highest position in the room, but Merrin continues throwing holy water on the bed. Now for something sneaky, which turns out to be not so sneaky…
This is not what holy water is supposed to do during an exorcism…ripping up the victim with caustic holy water is rather pointless. And given the Good Father’s liberal use of holy water, if the above shot was caused by holy water, then Regan should be cuts to shreds by now. But more to the point…
…there is already a wound there. Merrin is throwing holy water down at the bed, not up in the air. And Regan already has a similar cut on the outside of her right leg…the view in the above scene is the outside of her left leg, where Merrin is standing…
….it is an angry cut, which Merrin’s holy water cannot be causing based on where he is standing. So it would seem that there is a cut on the outside of both legs…there is also bruising, which is to be explained by…
Merrin is apparently dead, Karras does his fake, ridiculous trying to revive Merrin gimmick, which I think was intended to turn Regan into an alibi, and then she laughs. Karras then attacks her, and tries to kill her. But as the shot shows, Karras’s left leg has become tangled up in something hanging from the end of the bed-frame. What is it? A leg restraint, which we have not seen before now, and is the explanation for the bruising around Regan’s lower leg and ankle, along with the two cuts. So the cuts are not made by battery-acid-holy-water, after all. This is really no different than the…
…nasty gash on Regan’s left forearm, which clearly has been caused at the IV insertion point, by what is known as the spike, and has created a laceration as a result of all the pulling and tugging.
Again…Merrin would seem to be looking in the wrong place.
This is an excellent shot for contrasting how Merrin is looking in one place, and Karras is looking in a different place. And although it appears that Merrin is looking up in the immediately preceding frames, the camera angle has shifted to slightly below the men’s heads.
And another…
I think these close-up shots were intended to draw attention to the fact that Karras and Merrin are looking in two different places.
Now the vantage point shifts back to an overhead as-though-Regan-was still-lying-on-the-mattress shot. The camera work attempts to create the illusion that Regan is now slowly floating back down to her mattress.
The camera angle shifts again, making it unclear as to what Merrin and Karras are looking at.
At this point, the camera has shifted again…no longer looking at the priests from behind. Clearly Merrin is looking down at the bed, but Karras is looking straight ahead.
This is, of course, the position in which Regan began this scene, lying on her back on the mattress, with her arms stretched out after the wrist restraints broke.
I think the best explanation of the scene does, unfortunately, exclude the levitation trick. When the restraints broke, Regan sat up up on the bed, but then her eyes rolled back into her head, and she fell back down on the bed. It is virtually impossible to stand up when the eyes do this, and standing on the bed also means balancing since the bed is not a firm surface, even if it’s a firm mattress…which is better for your back. She recovered as Karras tied her hands together, and she was thus able to give him a good…
…clobbering. Epileptic events that feature Regan-Style-Eyes-Rolling-Back don’t last more than 20 – 30 seconds, as Karras learns all too well when Regan throws in a little Directed Aggression to boot. I would continue, but I see members of the Digression Prevention Committee returning from lunch. I hope it wasn’t with Tlazy! Digressions aside, there are a few more elements that are very important to this episode of the Shadow Among Us serial essay. And I will take a look at those in part 3.