THE EXORCIST AS COUNTER-COUNTERCULTURAL PARABLE:
In many ways, [Exorcist author William Peter Blatty] was a man of his times, and those times were confusing. In the summer of 1969 (the summer of Woodstock and the Tate-LoBianca murders), as he was holed up in a Lake Tahoe cabin, hammering out the first draft of The Exorcist on an IBM Selectric typewriter, America was in the midst of cultural and political upheaval—the arrival of the Pill, the rise and demise of the hippie counterculture, the Stonewall riots and the beginnings of the gay rights movement, the Women’s Liberation movement, and the rejection of puritanical attitudes towards sex and marriage. The liberalization of abortion laws by the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade would follow the publication of The Exorcist by two years—the same year William Friedkin’s film appeared in US theaters.
By that time, Blatty had already spent about a decade toiling in that most godless of trades, the Hollywood film industry, where he wrote screenplays, most of them sex farces, which is hardly the kind of work you’d associate with a devout Catholic. His second marriage was already on the rocks, and he was writing a novel that would soon become a film that earned the condemnation of the Catholic Church. Clearly, he wasn’t anybody’s idea of a family-values conservative. But if his id was in charge of his Hollywood playboy lifestyle, his superego seems to have been firmly in control of his literary imagination as he cranked out The Exorcist over nine months.
Notwithstanding the Church’s reflexive condemnation, The Exorcist is a deeply religious novel in which Catholic priests play the most heroic roles, martyring themselves to save the life of a little girl who isn’t even Catholic. (In 2011, the publisher brought out a 40th anniversary edition that had been lightly revised by Blatty to, among other things, make it more Catholic-friendly; if you plan to read The Exorcist, I recommend finding the original.) And, although the book is a cautionary tale about the harm that divorce can do to children, it is not a call for an end to all divorce, nor is it an argument against women in the workplace.
Although the demon inside of Regan accuses Chris of bringing about the divorce by putting her career ahead of her marriage, Blatty indicates that this isn’t the case. He portrays Chris as a loving mother and wife, who still hopes to reconcile with her husband. The divorce is clearly the result of Howard’s fragile ego and his inability to handle his wife’s success. Just before they begin the exorcism, Father Merrin reminds Father Karras not to speak with the demon, warning him, “Especially, do not listen to anything he says. The demon is a liar.”
Nevertheless, it is Merrin who makes the clearest plea for Americans to reconsider the idea of ending their troubled marriages.
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