I have now ceased my meandering ways and focus specifically on The Great Vision. In part 1, I noted that The Face image is to be associated with Chris. And since we see Karras pass out from a Chevas-Regal-Binge, I noted various aspects that are clearly to be connected with him. Superimposed upon Karras’s dream are images meant for us, but it is true that there are plenty of images that reflect Karras…the face of his mother, his attempt to warn his mother of a danger to her as she emerges from the subway, and the Black Dog. Still, why a Black Dog? This may have something to do with an ancient ritual for driving away Lamashtu…which had to be performed by a Black Dog. And no…not Led Zeppelin. But I linked the Black Dog to the waterspout visible on the ocean behind the dog as he ran like hell to save his own hide, abandoning his master, whom he is supposed to protect. Karras, certainly in his own mind, failed to save his mother…perhaps?

But what of Merrin? I will juxtapose two separate images, which would have eluded just about every viewer of the film in 1973…

The clock on the left is from The Great Vision, whereas the clock on the right is the one in the archaeologist’s office…they are one and the same, and there is no reasoning under the sun that could assert that Karras can see this clock in his dream. He could not…even if Abu’s father Deimon attempted to make that happen...oops! Sorry, that was a spoiler. Superimposed upon Karras’s dream are images meant for us. However, if I may be forgiven for my meanderings, this will now get even stranger. I must admit that I was wrong about a key element of The Great Vision…what? The St. Joseph medal. I now have a new interpretation of that medal that stands outside the methodology I have used for…well…years. It by no means negates my methodology, but it does reflect an element that stands outside of it.

I have stated before that there is only one medal in the movie, and that it belongs to Father Merrin. I was wrong about this. So are there two? Yes. Are there more? That’s a very good question. Did Father Karras have the same medal as Merrin? Yes, and this is one of the things that transcends the way I have interpreted various aspects of the movie. I now believe to understand why this particular St. Joseph medal was used. The thing about this medal is that it is highly abstract. It was made by the famous medal artist and engraver named Denis Fernand Py, and he made a number of wearable medals, and heavier plaques to hang on a wall. I have several of these, and while I think they’re cool, the abstract representation of various saints, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, etc., would not appeal to very conservative people, which would easily include Jesuit priests of the 1970s. What is more, it seems almost impossible that these two priests owned the same abstract medal, much less two priests who finally find themselves together in Regan’s bedroom…don’t take that the wrong way. St. Joseph medals tend to have a consistent appearance, and although there are some artistic exceptions, they are usually not abstract.

There are, of course, some that are more abstract…

And there are some that feature Joseph by himself, without Jesus…

And I found one rather scary looking one…

I have located only 1 medal where Joseph is seated and Christ is on his lap. However with this medal, Christ is standing on Joseph’s lap...

…the thing about the St. Joseph medal in the movie is that Joseph is seated and Christ is lying on his lap, something I would expect more with an image of Mary and Christ…but I may wrong…again…and if you know of a medal like this, please send me a pic. St. Joseph medals often exlude Mary from the icongraphy, although there are variations…particuarly when the subject isn’t Joseph holding Christ per se, but when the subject is the Holy Family. Joseph appears, apart from the medals, one time in the film…

Just before the priest sees the desecrated statue of Our Lady of Grace, he first lays flowers at the foot of the classic Saint Joseph statue, holding Christ without Mary. Now how many medals are in the film? This is the first one…

This is found at the base of the mound, and looks like it is in pretty good shape. Merrin does not recognize the iconography, which we would expect. And, of course, it is not in situ…it does not belong where it was found, and I think the only interpretation is that someone dropped it during an earlier dig…but not too much earlier. Although the film doesn’t indicate how long Merrin had been in Iraq, but when Tom was trying to get the bishop to approve the exorcism, and suggested Merrin, he mentioned the excavation of tombs. During the years 1970-1971, excavations of tombs at Hatra were carried out. So the St. Joseph medal noted above may not have been in the sand very long at all. In fact, it makes me wonder whether Tom had been to Hatra. Merrin took an item from Iraq that was not the St. Joseph medal…an item that someone else wanted so badly that attempts were made to kill Merrin to get it. Then there is a second medal in the Hatra scenes…

I have written before about my Close-Ups-In-The-Exorcist-Are-Always-Very-Important Rule. Here, I no longer believe that these two medals are the same medals…at least until I change my mind. Why? I’m glad I asked. The St. Joseph medal, as made by Fernand Py, came in three forms…

This medal is the goldened version, but it also came in…

…sterling silver. I have the goldened version. There was also a…

…a bronze colored medal, either as a background to the design, or the bronze-look covers everything. I have a wall plaque of the latter variety. However, this form of the medal does not appear in the film. I have found no other version of PY’s St. Joseph medal with this design. Now to line up the relevant medals…

The medal that is found in the sand at Hatra is the goldened version, whereas the medal that Merrin picks up in the archaeologist’s office would seem to be a corroded specimen of the sterling silver medal. If I’m not wrong again, I would say that there are two different medals in the Hatra scenes. If true, then the St. Joseph medal is being used in a symbolic way in the film. Now it is clear that Father Karras has the same medal, which cannot be either of these…meaning there are at least three. It is clearly the case that the version of the medal that appears to belong to Father Karras is not the sterling silver medal in the Hatra scenes. Close-up time!

We get a split-second look the back of the medal, despite the fact that we got an extended close-up of the front of the medal. Now, clearly we would never really see what’s important about the back of medal if we were watching the movie in 1973. And the following is also very hard to spot. Fast forward to Karras’s medal that is seen in The Great Vision…

The medal hitting the…ground? Hmm…I will discuss that shortly. But here, as the medal bounces, we see the back of the medal for only a split second. So what? That’s what Darla said. So I showed her what happens if you turn on the lights…

Look closely…markings on the back. There’s a mark that looks like an “x” and another mark next to it.

I could be wrong, but I do not see markings on the back of the sterling silver medal in Merrin’s hand. The medal on the left is not Merrin’s medal…so now we have three medals. But does Merrin’s goldened abstract St. Joseph medal appear again in the film? One is very tempted to say it does because there are two medals at the end of the film. But…

…it is clear that there is simply too much corrosion that has occurred. You could polish it and make it look a little better, but you could not get it to look like the beautiful medal or medals seen at the end of the film. So at this point, there are three medals, and if Father Merrin also has one of these medals later on, that’s four medals.
But are there four medals? Here I will make a few observations…though they will seem very strange. First, in The Great Image, and I have pointed this out before, but it’s important to point it out again:

Ok, the medal appears to be falling to the floor. So what’s behind it? If it’s falling to the floor, then it must be a pattern on the wall. But…

Ok, forget about Track-and-Field Sharon. Watching the film, or Beta, or VHS, or even watching it dozens of times on your computer, it is very hard to see what is so important in this shot. So…

…there it is. This image makes it easier to compare…

There can be no doubt, the design that looks like it’s on a wall, is actually the design on Regan’s carpet. This indicates that rather than falling to the floor, the medal is being dragged across the carpet. And this helps explain why…

…the chain doesn’t hurtle to the floor…as gravity would dictate. So the medal is actually being dragged across the carpet.
But how many medals are in the The Great Vision? Well, one is a tempting conclusion. Fast forward to the very end of the film…

…Sharon pulls something out of her pocket, but we aren’t allowed to see what it is.

Sharon gives it to Chris, but we still aren’t allowed to see what it is. But Chris will show us…

So what? it’s the St. Joseph medal. The most ready explanation is that after Regan…

…Wait! What’s happening? Well, Karras is trying to brutally murder Regan, and now we see that he’s wearing a medal, i.e. the medal we saw dragged across the carpet in The Great Vision. Regan will pull this off Karras’s neck, and in the mele, she ends up tossing it across the room. So, Sharon found it and later gave it to Chris. This is only partially correct. We must ask the question…why was Sharon searching Regan’s room? I think that there’s a good explanation for that. But as Chris shows us the medal, the eye goes to the shiny bauble in the middle of the screen. But don’t ask what you see…ask what you don’t see. Chris puts the medal in her purse. Leaving the house, Father Dyer is strangely waiting for them. Chris then…

…hands Father Dyer a St. Joseph medal. He will…

…give it back. Now it’s time to play…one of these things is not like the other…

So these are the three shots of the medal at the very end of the film. The first thing to note is that the medal in the middle shot has something that the medal in the shot on the left doesn’t have. And to call attention to this fact, the shot on the right has something that the shot in the middle has, but not the the shot on the left…the chain. When Sharon hands the medal to Chris, we don’t see it. When Chris shows it to us, she goes out of her way to hide what we would expect to be the chain. But the chain isn’t hidden in the shot in the middle, and to point this out, the shot on the right shows us only the chain. I think that the reason we don’t see the chain in the shot on the left is because there is no chain, i.e. the medal isn’t attached to a chain. Going back to The Great Vision…

…the chain is clearly visible…obviously. But this will change…

Side-by-side…

This is very hard to see watching the film, and it took me a couple of years to final see it, but the item on the right is not the chain. It looks like it’s made of leather of some kind. So the chain gives way to the Not Chain, and then when the medal hits what we think is the ground, the Not Chain becomes a Chain again…

So…

Chain…Not Chain…Chain again. And as I noted earlier, the medal on the far right has markings stamped on the back. Why is this important? Because the St. Joseph medal…the second medal that appears in the Hatra sequence is of the sterling silver type, and has no markings on the back, whereas the medal on the right of the above shot does have markings on the back. This would suggest that it is, in fact, Karras’s medal…not Merrin’s. So what does this mean? Well, the reason why Chris…

…strives so hard to keep us from seeing the chain is because this is not the St. Joseph medal with the chain. This medal, of the sterling silver type, has…

…the leather strap. Thus The Great Vision clearly implies two medals…one on a strap, one on a chain. This leads to the conclusion that both Merrin and Karras had the same St. Joseph medal, the one with the chain being Karras’s, and the one with the strap being Merrin’s. Chris already had Karras’s medal in her purse, but Sharon gives her Merrin’s medal. So Chris ends up with two medals in her purse, and since Dyer gives the medal with a chain on it back to Chris, that is Karras’s medal. In addition…

…I may be reaching, but the medal on the left and the meddle in the middle is the sterling silver type. The medal on the right is the goldened version of the medal. This makes, at the end of the film, a parallel to what we see in the Hatra scenes at the beginning of the film…two different St. Joseph medals, one of the sterling silver variety, and one of the goldened variety. We actually see Merrin find the goldened medal, but we only see Merrin looking over the silver variety. If this is correct, then there are indeed two medals at the end of the film, one on a chain (Karras’s) and one on a leather strap (Merrin’s). Merrin’s is the silver variety, and the goldened variety is Karras’s. So in The Great Vision, two different medals are implied. But this raises another question…why does Sharon have a St. Joseph medal in her pocket, i.e. the one on the leather strap, while Chris, at the same time, has one in her purse? That’s where things get interesting.
I think that this provides a valuable clue, and is a shot that is very misunderstood…

…this is at the end of the film. Although Regan meets Father Dyer for the first time, I believe that she already knew…of…Father Dyer. But clearly she is fixating on something. What?

Father Dyer’s collar. Why? I’ve been told that the collar reflects Regan’s connection to either Father Karras or Father Merrin, or both. And that’s certainly possible, but Merrin died without casting the supposed demon from Regan, although the appearance of the Impossible Pazuzu Statue made him sure that what he believed was Lamashtu was in the process of being defeated. And Karras? What did he do? He beat the crap out of her, and then tried to strangle her to death, finally committing suicide. No hero there. I would suggest another possibility…in this shot, Regan is looking to see if Father Dyer is wearing a medal. I will engage in a little reaching again…perhaps, a lot of reaching.
Chris already, at the time Sharon gave her the other medal, had one in her purse. That was the medal on the chain…Karras’s medal. We know that as Karras was attempting to murder Regan, and he would have if he didn’t see his mother’s face at the window, Regan tore off his medal and accidentally hurled it across the room. I think Regan did not really notice what she had done. This medal was lying on the floor where it landed, i.e. over by the wall, and cleaning up the room, Chris found it. She believed, rightly, that this belonged to Karras. Then Sharon found the other medal in the room. But there’s a twist to this. I would suggest that unlike Karras’s medal, Regan knew about the medal on the leather strap. How?

Merrin has died, and fell forward on the bed. We also see Regan off to the right.

The rowdy demoniac is now one cool kiddo….that is to say, her epileptic event is over. Karras was not in the room when Merrin died. But neither were we. We found out that Merrin was dead the same way Karras found out. So what happened in the room when we and Karras weren’t there? I think Regan removed the medal on the strap that was around Merrin’s neck. Then she hid it. And that is the medal Sharon found. Found when? Cleaning up the room? This was done by Chris or the maid, and resulted in the finding of Karras’s medal. So why was Sharon searching the room? I’m glad I asked…

The last thing packed is the…phonograph. That seems rather odd, doesn’t it? The makers of the film wanted us to know that the phonograph was the last thing packed. Why would they bother to do this? Hah! It must be important…and so it is. Who’s phonograph is it?

That’s right…it’s Regan’s phonograph…on Chris’s left. So Sharon has the medal that Regan hid in her room, and Sharon has Regan’s phonograph…a very important phonograph. At the end…

…Sharon tells Chris that she won’t be going with her. Why? Surely it’s important. I’ve written elsewhere about my belief that Regan received a box not intended for her and took the contents of it…which she hid, except for two pieces that are seen in the movie.

This is the best shot of it. Now it is true that Regan has a bracelet that she wears on her left wrist at different times in the film. But she never makes any attempt to hide it from her mother as she does the item of jewelry she’s holding in her right hand. Notice the ring on her finger, and the fact that her fingers are playing with something. The gleaming item is in between the ring finger and pinkie. This is a ring with a chain on it….

…mom has one too…

…a finger bracelet, also called a slave bracelet. I prefer…finger bracelet, since…slave bracelet…has creepy S&M connotations to it.

Notice how awkward the positioning of her left hand is. She is using her left hand to hide the bracelet, which she carries around with her. Regan is not supposed to have this piece of jewelry, and goes to great lengths to hide it. Two more shots:

The finger bracelet is one item that came from the box delivered to the house…the John Dewars & Sons whisky box in the attic with the orange bagpipe player…the basis for the Captain Howdy statue. The second piece of jewelry…

Burke is drunk…imagine that…and picked a fight with Carl. As Chris and Sharon lead him to the front door, Sharon starts rummaging around in Burke’s pocket…Sharon the Pickpocket!

Oops! Sharon dropped it.

Sharon bends down to pick it up.

It is very similar to the one…

…Chris is wearing. But there can be no doubt that Sharon hides this item from Chris. So she is either stealing from Chris, and if Chris was both items, she would realize that she dropped it, or the bracelet came out of the box in the attic.

You’re gonna die up there.

No, she is not talking to the astronaut…this is a misconception. She is talking to Sharon. Regan figured out what the scary noises in the attic were…Sharon on her jewelry quest. Sharon knows about Regan, and Regan now knows about Sharon. During the party, Regan had the bracelet, and when she noticed that Sharon noticed, Regan hid the bracelet in Burke’s coat pocket. Sharon saw, and got it from him, although she dropped it, and picked it up without Chris noticing.
So Sharon and Mary Jo Perrin know about the box, and were searching for the contents of it…the box in the attic with the orange bagpipe player as an icon on the front of the box…which Regan thought was a bird, and was the basis of the Captain Howdy statue she made. The sounds in the attic were not rats or squirrels, and certainly not a demon, they were Sharon, and sometimes Mary Jo Perrin, searching the attic for the contents of the box. I would suggest that Sharon has Regan’s phonograph because she has searched it. She won’t go with Chris because she doesn’t need to…she found the items in question hidden in the phonograph…which were very valuable. She also found the St. Joseph medal when she got one last crack at searching Regan’s room, in the course of which she found Merrin’s St. Joseph medal…the one Regan took after Merrin died and before we and Karras re-entered the bedroom for the last time. Sharon took the medal and gave it to Chris, leaving Chris with two St. Joseph medals in her purse. But the jewelry had been hidden in the phonograph, and Sharon found it.
There is a final comment worth making, or so Annabelle told me. She thought that if the wall was really the carpet, i.e. the floor, then what about the surface on which Karras’s medal fell in The Great Vision? This is where I will show something very strange. Looking at it again…

…this surface is comprised of large bricks and what looks like black mortar. There is no way that this is a sidewalk, or a surface intended for people to walk on. The bricks are raised, which would make it painful to walk on. I have searched the film and studied all the “walk on” surfaces, and did not find any that match. The only surface I found that sort of matches is…

I have shown this statue before…she is Abu bint Deimon. And don’t you just dig her father’s name...Deimon, the Greek word wrongly translated as…demon. If you look at the surface to her bottom right, you will see that the bricks have what appears to be black mortar. That would make the shot of the bricks in The Great Vision an image associated with Merrin, while the medal that lands on the surface associated with Karras. That would make sense, but this statue appears nowhere in the film, although this wouldn’t be the first time that something external to the film is nonetheless necessary to interpret scenes in the movie. I would point out one last strange thing…

This is a shot of the top of the dresser in the little room in Mother Karras’s apartment. It seems strange that the double picture frame appears to have only one photo in it. But that isn’t the case…

…so there is a picture! It looks like Karras pushing someone in a wheelchair. But notice the surface of the wall…it looks very much like the surface in The Great Vision…

…so who is the person in the wheelchair? Abu bint Deimon? Of course not. Still, that is a subject for a later essay.

Is this really that strange? No. The medal associated with the carpet in Regan’s room is Merrin’s medal. But if Karras’s medal lands a wall, and the wall is to be associated with him, then this is an image of Karras’s medal being torn off by Regan and hurled across room, where it bounced off the wall.
But to return to the return to the question…how many medals? The only conclusion must be…four, yes four! Not one, not two…not even…three. Four.
I believe that in the film, St. Joseph and Pazuzu perform a similar role in the mind of Merrin…the St. Joseph liturgy provides a very interesting, one that I have written about in other essays…Terror of Demons. This is an odd title for the otherwise kindly, fatherly, neigh grandfatherly, St. Joseph. This is a more aggressive Joseph. Nonetheless, he is a vital ally in defeating a demon, which Merrin clearly thought he was attempting to do. But more! If Merrin believed that the demon was actually Lamashtu, then Pazuzu would be you’re second vital ally. So in Merrin’s contextualization, he has too undefeatable beings at his disposal, and the combination of the two would be more than a match against Regan’s demon. The sudden appearance of the Impossible Pazuzu Statue confirmed this in Merrin’s mind.
I have been told that I read way too much into The Exorcist…that it’s just a movie. But I think if you count all the clues I enumerated, clues you couldn’t see watching the film, and only visible by a frame-by-frame sequence, then I am right that The Exorcist is not just a movie, but rather a well-executed puzzle. It takes a great deal of study to find these buried clues. Am I obsessed? Darla thinks so, but never listen to Darla…she’s only been right once.