The Exorcist (1973)

directed by William Friedkin

Oscar Mardell

On Wednesdays, between 6 and 7 PM, I teach an English lesson to an Iranian man in his early forties—a software programmer who goes by the name of Richard.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. For starters, Richard’s real name—the name given him at birth—is Reza. When he first arrived in New Zealand, he took “Richard” at the suggestion of his (Pākehā) landlord who insisted that “Reza” was too difficult to pronounce—that the rolled R, the alveolar trill which features in Te Reo Māori names such as “Rangi” or “Rawiri” (or, indeed, “Reo” and “Māori”)—was too much to ask of his anglophone (co-)hosts.

“English” is also a misnomer: what I actually teach on Wednesdays is not that innocent. Though my only intention is to assist Reza, we both know too well that our real “Learning Outcome” is assimilation. I am, at best, a well-meaning component in the vicious machine by which cultural—in this case, linguistic—difference is expelled from immigrant groups (to say nothing of indigenous ones); another bastard landlord insisting, “kindly forget your home—make yourself a tenant in mine.”

What’s more, Reza speaks wonderful English. This isn’t as condescending as it sounds: I don’t just stoop to concede that his English is “Functional” or even “Fluent;” his English is awe-inducing, sublime. After Farsi and Arabic (to say nothing of C++, Java, or Python), English is Reza’s third language, but his command of its wild irregularities, of its serpentine grammar and sprawling vocabulary, is sounder than my own, and a source of no small envy on my part. Yet Reza insists that he is a novice, that he cannot really speak English, that he’s unable to articulate himself within it.

To complicate things, I cannot teach English. Officially, I am qualified, and have some six years’ experience, as an English Teacher. English is also my first language, my mother tongue. Yet I too am a novice, am also unable to articulate myself in English, let alone lay claim to the right to say to another speaker, “This is how we do it.”

Perhaps this is English’s fault. Some 80% of its words are foreign imports: it is, for the most part, a Wunderkammer of plundered exotica, a collage of tongues that I don’t understand. And I’m seldom more conscious of this than on Wednesdays. Inevitably, some Farsi loanword—”assassin” or “candy” or “spinach” or “pajamas”—will appear in the conversation, and Reza will grin with bemused recognition, as if to say, “What’s this doing here?”

Or perhaps it’s because I lived in Wales before I lived in New Zealand. In both countries, English is ubiquitous, but only because it was imposed—because indigenous languages were violently (albeit, not completely) expelled from the landscape. In either home, my mother tongue is both the local and a foreign language. I am a barbarian where I am understood, an intruder where I fit in. Whatever the origin of Reza’s self-doubt, it operates as a form of politeness: as a means of legitimizing the dubious authority I’ve come to possess; that is, of paying rent.

Wednesday, then, looks less like a “lesson” and more like mutual therapy, like two grown men attempting to relieve each other of Imposter Syndrome. But only Reza’s is the genuine case: he can speak English but he thinks that he can’t. Mine is entirely fraudulent: I can’t teach English and I know that I can’t. I don’t really have Imposter Syndrome: I am simply, truly, an imposter.

*

Wednesday, then, looks a lot like The Exorcist (1973). The film opens among the ruins of Hatra, in Nineveh, where an excavation is being led by Father Merrin. He’s asked to inspect the discoveries: lamps, arrowheads, coins, and an amulet with an image of St Joseph engraved in it. At the latter, he grins with bemused recognition, then remarks, in Arabic:

غريب

The English subtitles render the comment, near-literally, as “This is strange.” But Merrin, as William Blatty pointed out, “is in fact saying words to the effect of, ‘What’s this doing here?’” Later, we see the same amulet (or else a replica) around the neck of Father Karras’ mother, an elderly immigrant from Greece. Critics were quick to note the discontinuity—to ask how the amulet got from Iraq to New York; but in doing so, they merely repeated Merrin’s original question, “What’s this doing here?”

William Friedkin’s response was that he’d included the amulet to “add resonances”—and indeed, the displacement motif has echoes elsewhere in the film. When Chris finds Regan in her bed, for example, she asks, “What are you doing here?” When she discovers her Ouija board in the garage, “Where’d this come from?” And part way through the exorcism itself, Father Karras asks of Merrin, “Why this girl?” declaring, “It makes no sense”: what, in other words, is a spirit unearthed in Northern Iraq “doing here” in Washington? Before it’s about a specific possession, or plundering from the Arabic world, The Exorcist is about dislocation more generally, about agencies that are strangers to the spaces they inhabit.

Karras is no exception. His opening lines are these:

There's not a day in my life when I don't feel like a fraud. I mean, priests, doctors, lawyers, I've talked to them all. I don't know anyone who hasn't felt that.

Imposter Syndrome, Karras explains, is common to just about all in authority. If you suffer from it, it’s usually because you deserve that authority, seldom because you don’t. But Karras has particular reason to feel like a fraud: he’s left his mother alone in New York. No real priest, his thinking goes, would do such a thing; and he, therefore, is no real priest. What this logic ignores, however, is that Karras has moved away precisely for the priesthood, that he’s implored his mother to accompany him so that he can provide for her, that it’s not his pride but her tenacity that keeps the two apart. Having lost one home, Mrs Karras, it seems, is loathe to relinquish another: “This is my house,” she insists of her Brownstone apartment, “and I'm not going no place.” As a result, her son is convinced that he’s just a pretender, that he too has “no place” among the Jesuits in Washington.

But Karras isn‘t the film’s only pretender. Before we hear him speak, we see him watching Chris MacNeil perform on the set of a film called Crash Course—a feature she later describes as “the Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story.” Her implication is clear: she’s not an agent of the Revolution but of its collapse into spectacle, of the process by which the thing itself is conflated with its representation. If Karras recognises himself in MacNeil, he isn’t wholly mistaken. Later, we see him consecrating bread and wine—performing the rite by which, for Catholics, those things are transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ. The idea that this is just a performance misses the point. Here too, the thing itself is conflated with its representation. And no one knows this better than the Demon. When Karras sprinkles what he claims is Holy Water over Regan’s bed, the Demon writhes in agony. Karras later discloses that it was ordinary, unblessed water, and posits that Regan might just be pretending to be possessed, but this, too, misses the point. While it stands in for Holy Water, it is Holy Water: the representation, here, is the thing itself. If Karras suspects that Regan is only acting, it’s only because he’s forgotten the power of his own performance.

So how can Karras’s doubts be expelled? What will assure him that he isn’t merely an actor? The University President attempts exactly this, telling Karras, “You're the best we've got.” But Karras’ response makes it clear that this approach will be useless:

Am I really? It's more than psychiatry, and you know that, Tom. Some of their problems come down to faith, their vocation, the meaning of their lives, and I can't cut it anymore. I need out. I'm unfit. I think I've lost my faith, Tom.

The key word here is “think.” Karras attributes his trouble to his waning belief in God, but this is a misdiagnosis, as far off as the doctors’ claim that Regan’s illness is simply physiological: the cause of Karras’s trouble is his waning belief in himself. What he needs, therefore, is an encounter not with the One True God, but with the consummate performer, the ultimate imposter—the Demon himself. Only he can cast out Karras’s demons. Only he is the titular Exorcist.

What, then, is the mark of the beast? The sign of this ultimate imposter? When MacNeil tells Karras about her daughter, she asks what evidence the church would accept as “signs of possession.” Karras responds immediately: “speaking in a language that she's never known or studied.” But the Demon makes it hard for Karras to ascertain if this is happening. First, he peppers his speech with Latin (“mirabile dictu,” “ego te absolvo”), and with French (“bonjour,” “la plume de ma tante”)—but an English speaker hardly needs to have “known or studied” these languages in order to use these expressions. Then he speaks what transpires to be English—except in reverse. Does this qualify as “a language” that Regan “has never known or studied?” Or is it simply a perversion of one that she has? Where, in other words, do we draw the line between the organic speech of the autonomous individual, and the strange tongues that emanate from the possessed?

*

I’ve never “studied” English. I simply acquired it through the course of my childhood. Nor have I ever “known” it, mind. It remains, somehow, a foreign tongue. I can speak it, but whenever I do, I am, in a sense, possessed: my words are never just my own, but other people’s from elsewhere. “My profit on’t is / I know how to curse”: when I speak my mother tongue in my adopted country, as in my motherland, I only insult it; even when I profess my deepest reverence for these places, I only say, “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell.”

I cannot promise Reza a home in this foul language. Perhaps I can cast his doubts out with my blasphemies. Perhaps I can prove that its permanent residents are homeless.

True, but also that they are inhabited, more squatted in than squatting; that more is done in them than they are ever doing here.

Oscar Mardell lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where he teaches English, French, Classical Studies, and Art History. His poetry and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Berfrois, 3:AM Magazine, and DIAGRAM. He is the author of Rex Tremendae from Greying Ghost and Housing Haunted Housing from Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers.