Dappled Things, Saints Peter & Paul issue, 2025
I. Discernment
At the 1974 Academy Awards, tuxedoed host David Niven prepared to introduce Elizabeth Taylor to announce the year’s Best Picture winner. “If one reads the newspapers or listens to the news,” he said in his exquisite, Received Pronunciation English, “it is quite obvious that the whole world is having a nervous breakdown.” Thirty seconds later a streaker ran across the stage.
But was it a nervous breakdown the world was having, or something darker? Either way, its proximate cause may have been one of that night’s Best Picture nominees, The Exorcist. The first horror movie ever nominated for the award, it lost to The Sting, and the two films could hardly have been more different. The Sting is a lighthearted look back at pre-World-War-II America, featuring Scott Joplin’s wonderfully playful 1902 Ragtime song “The Entertainer.” The Exorcist’s theme, “Tubular Bells,” sounds like a beacon of impending doom. And while 1974’s Best Picture winner is not well remembered today, The Exorcist feels more relevant than ever, a big bang from which our present culture has expanded, parts of it as frightening as the movie.
Audiences began lining up to see it in droves after its December 26, 1973 release. Many left before the film ended, some on their backs. People fainted, vomited, and in New York a woman was said to have miscarried. I was six years old at the time and living in tiny Waldo, Arkansas, and though I wouldn’t see it for years even I remember the frenzy. No other movie in my lifetime has produced such a visceral reaction. It arguably transcended not only its genre but cinema itself.
Catholics, who had been consulted heavily during production, seemed to be of two minds. They disparaged the film’s violence and sexual grotesquery while lauding its spiritual seriousness and portrayal of two Jesuit priests as heroes. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops gave it an A-4 rating as “morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations.”
Protestant leaders, on the other hand, recoiled. Billy Graham, the closest thing Protestantism had to a pope, called it “spiritual pornography.” As for the secular world, Roger Ebert was deeply impressed with the film’s craftsmanship, awarding it four out of four stars. But he could hardly believe it had not been rated X. “Are people so numb,” he wrote, “they need movies of this intensity in order to feel anything at all?”
He didn’t know nothing yet. The years since The Exorcist have seen an explosion of extreme sex and violence onscreen, which have recalibrated audience tolerance levels and rendered the original’s effects mainstream by today’s standards. Nonetheless, for me its frights still hold up, and have even gained a new dimension. The movie was eerily prescient, like a crystal ball through which those 1970s audiences had glimpsed America’s future, that of their children and grandchildren, and freaked out…
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