Daddy wasn't there!
There was a power outage this morning, bereft of electricity I was forced to abandon the laptop and play with my dog instead, substituting keyboard taps with belly rubs. In the early noon heat I ate spicy Cheetos while skimming the newspaper and making "witty" comments to myself. I saw an ad for the new Anthony Hopkins demonic possession movie, The Ritual, and my mind wandered to the mother of all demonic possession movies: THE EXORCIST.
Have you ever noticed how The Exorcist, and by extension most demonic possession movies afterwards, usually involve a woman or a girl being the victim of said demonic possession, while the protagonist is invariably a priest, who is always a man? It's usually a byproduct of the “damsel in distress” cliché, but I was thinking about the Freudian psychosexual subtext of The Exorcist, and it hit me like a rotten tomato splatting on a movie.
The little girl in The Exorcist was living with her mother. In the duration of the movie, I do not remember seeing her father at all. Maybe he's away on business, maybe he's dead, or maybe he's in the business of being dead. But the point is, the little girl lacked a father figure. Daddy wasn't there.
So, according to the misogynistic view of women being helpless damsels in distress, what happens next? She gets into trouble. Except this time, instead of the girl finding a bad boyfriend who does drugs or knocks her up, she ends up in the clutches of none other than Satan!
Naturally the mother is helpless against this and must call for the help of men who can be surrogate father figures who will save her innocent daughter. The young priest and the old priest. This is even more significant because, taking Christian symbolism into account, these priests are representatives of God, the greatest father figure of Christianity. The Big Daddy.
The surrogate father figures are now there to try and save the girl from the trouble she's gotten herself into. Like a dad who disapproves of a particularly bad boyfriend, or Liam Neeson killing kidnappers to save his daughter in Taken. This ties in to the fact that earlier in the movie, the girl did not have a father. Her longing for a father figure is what led her astray, into the clutches of drugs, of unwanted pregnancy, of the devil himself!
Anyone remotely familiar with Sigmund Freud will know what an Oedipus Complex is, where the son longs for the mother sees the father as a rival for the mother's affections. Mommy issues. The Electra Complex is the female version of that, where the daughter wants the affection of the father, basically the other way around. Daddy issues.
Now consider the scene where the demon-possessed girl in The Exorcist takes a crucifix and plunges it in between her legs while screaming “FUCK!” repeatedly. Sigmund Freud would have an apoplectic fit with that one. It is a minefield of unresolved psychosexual issues – all originating from the fact that the girl lacked a father figure, and is in dire need of one.
The priests, have to save the girl – but in doing so, they cannot allow themselves to succumb, and they cannot let the innocent child be corrupted. They are the surrogate fathers who have to set their wayward daughter right and, taking the significant Christian symbolism into account, they also represent God who must bring salvation to a corrupted soul. It is up to them to resolve the Daddy Issues of the girl, while maintaining her purity.
So what do they do? They give their lives, and in noble self-sacrifice the young priest saves the girl by taking the demon and jumping off a window in an act of heroic and selfless self-defenestration. The father saves his daughter at the cost of his own life, but in the end the daughter is saved and her purity is preserved. Her issues are resolved because daddy came for her and rescued her from her troubles. Daddy was finally there!
In short, the Exorcist is a metaphor, an allegory, for parental neglect - specifically the lack of a strong father figure - and the dangers faced by wayward daughters and troubled teens. Except the dangers of drugs, rock and roll, or unwanted pregnancy, have been substituted demonic possession.
In a way, it is exactly like Liam Neeson's Taken, with his daughter being kidnapped by sex-traffickers. Except, in this case, Liam Neeson is a priest and the kidnappers are demons.
The movie's themes can be criticized as misogynistic, sexist. Why is it always the damsel who is in distress? Most of the time, women are portrayed as helpless and in need of rescuing, and Exorcist is no different. The mother is helpless to defend her own child, and only men can do it properly.
One also wonders, was the director even consciously aiming for Freudian psychosexual subtexts, deliberately depicting distressed-damsels, Daddy issues and other dilemmas? Or was it entirely a subconscious thing, since hero-men saving helpless-women has already become a cliche, a literary convention, a meme ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist of movies and other works of fiction? Maybe even both?
On reflection, upon reaching the end of this short article, analyzing The Exorcist for not only psychosexual Freudian subtexts but also its religious symbolisms has proven to be an interesting exercise. I'm reminded of another movie, from a similar time, involving parenting issues and problem children. Namely, The Omen.
I wonder if I could do a similar analysis of The Omen, with Damien and his parent issues. Except that little brat killed both his parents, and pretty much everyone else in that movie.
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