CHAPTER 2
There’s a Demon in My House: Domestic Violence in The Exorcist
The Exorcist was released just after Christmas in 1973, like a horrifying gift wrapped in thick layers of blood, urine, and, famously, vomit. It was released five years after Rosemary’s Baby, and eleven months after Roe v. Wade was decided in the Supreme Court.
Like its Satanic predecessor Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist played an important role in American feminism, working through and signal boosting a major area of activism in the 1970s. Specifically, it showed American audiences what a broad culture of women’s liberation might look like in practice, and how that liberation might both trigger and be imperiled by domestic violence.
As we will see, the film conveys some deep anti-feminist sentiment, suggesting that liberated women might be something American culture should fear, not welcome. But, as the film goes on, its shrill critique of liberated women will be undermined and complicated by a far more blistering critique of the kinds of violence and control that women’s libbers were desperate to eradicate from American culture.
Like Rosemary’s Baby, this ostensibly supernatural horror film forced American audiences to participate imaginatively in the catastrophic domestic abuse of women. As such it, too, stands at the vanguard of American feminist cinema in the early 1970s.
The Horror of the Liberated Woman
Early in The Exorcist, we meet a beautiful woman with short, modish hair, who is writing notes while in bed. Chris, played memorably by Ellen Burstyn, is a young, independent, urban, professional woman—very focused and in control. She also appears to be quite comfortable in her home – her room is slightly messy but very cozy and lived-in.
Suddenly, she hears a rattling sound and looks up from her work. She gets out of bed, looking not afraid but curious, and checks out the house, clad in her bathrobe. She does the very thing that men were traditionally meant to do in such situations – check out the strange noise from elsewhere in the house. It’s implied to the viewer in this early sequence that Chris is single.
After she determines that the sound originates in the attic, she goes to check on her daughter. So, now the viewer knows that this single, working woman is also a mother.
The working mother was a dicey social category in the 1970s: National survey after national survey found that even voters who supported equal rights for women believed strongly that when women were career-oriented, it disadvantaged their children. But that’s not what we see in this film—at least not at first.
When Chris gets upstairs, she finds her daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), lying on top of her blankets with the window open, in the winter. Chris carefully replaces the covers on her sleeping child and then she whispers to her, “Sure do love you,” in a way that conveys comfort, ease, and love.
☐☐☐
She may be a single working mother, and she may swear a lot, but she certainly seems like someone with whom you’d want to be friends.
More than that, wealthy, powerful, dominant, and large of feeling, Chris is a force to be reckoned with. We see her yelling at people numerous times in the film, often with a heavy smattering of profanity. She’s not going to be pushed around by anyone, it’s clear-she is going to make her voice heard, like it or not. She is a women’s libber for sure, with all the telltale markings.
Chris manifests exactly the kinds of social gains that the women’s liberation movement promised to women: She has independence, professional security, personal wealth, happiness, and control over her domestic sphere. And she has a child. Miracle of miracles: She has it all.
But she also manifests exactly the kinds of social losses that opponents of women’s liberation worried about: She’s sassy, she’s domineering, she’s coarse, she’s “unfeminine.” And, although a loving mother, Chris is about as far from the iconic or traditional American mother as possible. She’s not fettered to the domestic sphere but is very much out in the world, surrounded by adoring fans and respectful colleagues. Again, national surveys would predict that her child would suffer from those things. And indeed, she’s about to.
☐☐☐
In her on-screen role, Chris is more of a reformist than a radical, advocating against challenging the status quo too much. In her real life, by contrast, Chris is a professional woman who swears constantly, bosses people around, shoves away the hands of makeup artists who try to make her look perfect, feels no need to apologize for her feelings, and commands respect from all the men around her.
The tension between Chriss on-screen self and her real-life self is pointed:
The film is asking us to think seriously about what we feel about liberated women and what kinds of limits should be imposed on them. Maybe we can tolerate an outspoken teacher who’s not trying to overthrow the system; maybe we feel a little differently about a foulmouthed single mother who doesn’t hesitate to stand up for herself and holler at those around her.
Whether viewers in the 1970s would have liked her or not would have depended almost entirely on what their political stance was on women’s liberation going into the theater. Put bluntly, Chris serves as a mechanism for stress testing Americans’ feminism and their level of allegiance with or hostility toward the women’s liberation movement.
Chris gains more dimensionality a couple of scenes later when she arrives home from work and starts interacting with Regan. We learn that Regan is twelve, charming, sweet, and maybe just a little bit spoiled. She asks in pleading tones if she can have a horse as a gift; rather than saying no, Chris says that a horse isn’t possible while they’re on location in DC, but “we’ll see when we get home,” presumably to Los Angeles.
Whatever we might feel about the dangers of liberated, working women to their young daughters, the bond between them is solid and beautiful.
This warmhearted feeling offers the perfect setup for what comes in their next interaction. Theyre down in the basement, in an area marked out as Regan’s craft room. Chris learns that Regan has been playing around with a Ouija board that she found in the basement and suggests they play together.
Before Chris can put her hands on the sliding device on the board, however, it lurches away from her and toward Regan. Chris looks up, visibly surprised, confused, and a little scared. She concludes that Regan somehow pulled it away from her. Regan says she’s been talking to someone through the Ouija board named Captain Howdy. Chris is curious and mildly concerned about Regan’s play with the board and explores it a bit with her, but, finding nothing obviously amiss, puts it out of her mind. This turns out to be a catastrophic error.
About thirty-five minutes into the film, while Chris is hosting a fancy party, Regan comes downstairs in her nightgown and urinates on the floor.
The urination scene is designed to be shocking: Regan is backlit, and we see a stream of urine rocketing down between her legs, caught in an extreme close-up, so that Regan’s feet fill the screen, the urine splashing loudly on the carpet between them. It is important here to remember the cultural context of 1973 America: Seeing a pubescent girl urinating on the floor wasn’t something that happened in mainstream American films—and it still isn’t.
Pauline Kael’s scathing review of the film in The New Yorker, which ended by musing about the awfulness of the urination scene, noted her shock that the film wasn’t given an X rating. In the film, Chris channels that shock with a horror-stricken expression, leaves her own party, and rushes Regan upstairs to give her a bath and get her back to bed.
In the bedroom, things get dramatically worse, edging decisively into the realm of the supernatural. Regan’s bed shakes violently under her.
Uncontrollably. Inexplicably. The idea of a shaking bed not so subtly invokes the idea of sexual intercourse, but this bed isn’t shaking the right way. Rather than rocking back and forth in rhythm with the movement of lovers, the bed is violently banging and wobbling around, conspicuously out of rhythm with anything Regan is doing. So the kind of sexuality that’s invoked by the shaking bed is violent, nonvolitional, abnormal, and dangerous.
Watching Chris— who jumps onto the bed with Regan—try to still the shaking of the bed with her body, trying to physically shield Regan from danger but being unable to, gestures toward a kind of too-early, too-violent sexual awakening in Regan— which Chris is unable to temper and which will only prove more distressing as the film progresses.
So, we have a liberated single mother with a child whose pubescent body doesn’t behave right. We have an independent woman who loves her daughter but is losing her grip on her domestic situation, particularly as something about her daughter’s body changes right before her eyes. There’s an allegory here-only thinly veiled —about the insufficiency of Chris, as a single mother, to grapple with and curb her daughter’s emergent sexuality, a dark parable about the dangers to children of growing up in a household with a single, liberated mother.
The film is lining up to be a critique of women’s liberation, no matter how beautiful and dynamic Chris may be. Look out, the movie seems to say: Liberated women have libertine daughters.
Regan’s physical and mental health deteriorate rapidly. Chris does what any responsible parent would do: She assumes the problem originates in Regan’s physiology and takes her to the hospital. Regan is not, however, an easy patient. The hospital scene opens with a close-up of Regan screaming and struggling against the doctors, who are trying to give her a sedative injection.
As the needle pierces her arm, Regan spits in the doctor’s face and screams “You fucking bastard!” —the first time in mainstream American cinema that a child says the word “fuck” onscreen.
Chris looks abashed and horrified, unable to believe her little girl has become such a dysregulated, degenerate, and foulmouthed creature. Somehow, despite her obvious adoration for her child, she is not doing a good enough job caring for Regan. Even when the doctors attempt to reassure her that the problem lies in the temporal lobe of Regan’s brain, we can see that Chris doesn’t totally buy it. And it’s not only fear but agonized self-reproach playing across her face.
The Exorcist is starting to feel rabidly anti-feminist, highlighting the dangers of single motherhood, the risks of living in a household run by a liberated woman who can’t keep things in order.
That anti-feminist flavor quickly grows more acrid. After a series of tests Regan endures in the hospital, Chris gets a couple of doctors to make a house call. When they arrive, Regan is writhing around in her bed, convulsing like a rag doll on a string. Eventually, she shouts, “Fuck me, fuck me!” and picks up the front of her nightdress to reveal her genitals to the doctors (though not to the camera).
The implication of the earlier bed-shaking scene is now fully realized: Regan is hypersexual, sexually aggressive, and extremely out of control. She is becoming a nightmare rendering of what many Americans feared women and girls would become in the wake of sexual liberation: lascivious, obscene, and uncontrollable.
Desperate for answers and having exhausted physiological explanations for Regan’s transformation, Chris hires a hypnotist to work with Regan to explore whether there may be a psychological cause for her dysregulated behavior.
When everyone thinks Regan is under hypnosis, she surprises them by grabbing the hypnotist by the balls and squeezing while she pushes him to the floor. We see him fall backward onto the floor in agony-the camera follows him all the way down, from Regan’s point of view. In that moment, Regan becomes an abuser, and the camera forces viewers to enter into her rapacious and aggressive vantage point and to consider sexual vulnerability in men.
Look out, America, indeed: These libertine bitches are going to grab you by the balls and push you down.
But Regan’s tendency toward sexual violence is most acute and most troubling toward herself. In the most famous and most horrifying scene of the film, Regan begins stabbing herself in the genitals with a crucifix, saying, “Let Jesus fuck you! Let Jesus fuck you!” Chris, her face the picture of horror, runs over to try to prevent her daughter from mutilating herself any further. Regan then grabs Chris’s head and shoves her face down to her now bleeding genitals, screaming, “Lick me!” Regan then throws Chris across the room, and we watch her hit the ground-hard—and scream for dear life. As viewers, we are horrified: Regan, a twelve-year-old girl-clearly possessed by an agent of evil and an enemy of Christ—is engaging in genital self-mutilation, attempting lesbian incest, and physically assaulting her own mother.
Roger Ebert said of the film, echoing the sentiments of Pauline Kael, “That it received an R rating and not the X is stupefying.” This film is designed to be shocking. You’re not supposed to feel just a little afraid; you’re supposed to feel scandalized, horrified, harmed, traumatized, and broken open.
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