Everything used to be so much better. . . :

~Reflections on how nostalgia colours evaluative judgements in film reviews~

The following is an excerpt from a paper I wrote in the spring of 2001, as the examination of a course named "Media Criticism". The excerpt (pages 14-22) works as an exemplification of preceding theoretical discussions, and should consequently have a somewhat simple, non-academic language. The text has been (crudely) translated by yours truly, and I'm sorry for any grammatical and/or semantic errors that might occur.

2.  POINT-IN-CASE: THE EXORCIST

William Friedkin’s diabolical horror classic, based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel, is a social phenomenon in and of itself – both nationally [Norway] and internationally. After the american premiere in 1974, reports were released that told of rabid cinema goers who threw up, yelled obscenities and threw objects at the celluloid screen. The myth was additionally propelled by the fact that the nine month shooting period had itself been “posessed” by mysterious casualties and fires.

The Exorcist tells the story of a recently divorced actress and her daughter in a foggy Georgetown, and of how the daughter – Regan – gradually develops demonic features (including the following skills of charm: green vomit, backward speech, masturbation with a crucifix, swearing, distortion of the voice, a 360°  turning of the head, bodily deterioration and the utilization of furniture as lethal ammo).

Prior to this – during the film’s exposition – we have been introduced to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) – exorcist and archaeologist – who has somehow managed to release the Beast itself, in an Iraqi dig. How he has managed, and the link between the two locations in question – is never entirely clarified. As the agnostic mother recognizes the insufficiency of the massive medical apparatus that is at her disposal, she seeks out the Catholic priest Damien Karras in desperation and with a plea of spiritual aid via exorcism.

Blatty’s book had already created controversy within religious circles, but the phenomenon gained a more solid ground as it was presented to a larger audience through the medium of film. The press forwarded “warnings” to the public, and members of the Catholic clergy cried for censorship, but this, obviously, only boosted audience interest, and people seemed happy to spend four hours in line – in skin-numbing snow storm – to let themselves be “posessed”.

In Norway, the film never reached these levels because it got tangled up in ”red tape hell” (no pun intended): “KrF [the Christian Party] and Statens Ungdomsråd [The National Youth Council] tried to keep the film from ever reaching Norwegian shores, but Statens Filmtilsyn [the National Board of Censorship], the city council of Oslo and the cinema director at the time, Arnljot Engh, let it pass, accompanied by an 18 Year Rating [restricted to adults over 18]”, says Trude Lorentzen (Aftenposten 01.12.2001). However, this did not happen untill 1977, three years after the American premiere, and in the meantime the national press had been surfing on the wave of controversy with headlines such as “170-180 exorcisms performed in Southern Norway over the last years”, “Demons preferably exorcised by young girls” (intentionally ambigous?), “One cannot deny that demons exist!” (quote: Bishop Gunnar Lislerud) and fierce attacks from Christian fundamentalists.

2.1 Cursing radicalism – immediately following the premiere

Although the reviewers were not unanimous in their dismissal of the film – neither in Norway nor abroad, most of them were concerned with the superficial treatment of the subject matter and the socalled “speculative tendencies” that resulted in exaggerated mass hysteria à la Orson Welles’ radio broadcast War of the Worlds. This was also the case for film reviewer Bjørn Gravdal in Arbeiderbladet, who – below a cryptic headline, “Djevelen annamme!” (Arbeiderbladet 11.30.77) wrote: 

You have to smile a little  – so this is the film that has caused such a riot within the religious community? With familiar arguments they attack a film, which – the subject matter notwithstanding – comes off as a wellmade thriller and nothing else. 

In other words, Gravdal down-prioritizes the moral criterion and its radius of impact in favour of the esthetic [this refers to a previous discussion]. Jay Cocks in Time expressed it thus in his review ”Beat the Devil” (Time 01.14.74): ”…As used here, the explicitness amounts to not much more than a shill, a come-on”. The main problem for the critics were the explicit violence communicated through state-of-the-art special effects, which were presented at the cost of a more in-depth description of human behaviour. Just as the computer animated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were ”accused” of being the real protagonists, albeit synthetic, of that film, the special effects in The Exorcist were accused of being this film’s only forte. Cocks elaborates: 

It is not the [explicit] scenes in themselves that are offensive, but the uses to which they are put. The Exorcist entirely lacks the challenge and humanity of a film of a vaguely similar subject, Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. If The Exorcist had been invested with any real intelligence or passion, if it had wanted to do something other than promote a few shivers, the explicitness would never have mattered. 

What is advertised for, in other words, is a fulfillment of both the cognitive criterion – through an intellectually stimulating corpus – and the genetic through an intention. What did Friedkin really want to say beyond merely scaring the audience?

 For the same reason, Gravdal dismisses the film’s entire right to exist in the press by the words: “The Exorcist is one big hoax, produced with an apparent deadly seriousness by unserious movie people. Personally, I got myself a nice laugh. And that was it.” As such, he simultaneously dismisses the film’s intensity – an esthetic criterion the film could have survived upon.

 Honourable Pauline Kael wasn’t any more merciful (New York Times 01.07.74):  

…It’s an obtuse movie, without a trace of playfulness in it. A viewer can become glumly anesthetized by the brackish color and the senseless ugliness of the conception /…/  If The Exorcist scares people, that’s probably all it has to do, in box-office terms, and basically that’s all the whole unpleasant movie is designed to do.

 Kael also challenges the criterion of realism by countering Friedkin’s own assertions:”…The movie – religiously literal-minded – shows you a heaping amount of blood and horror. This explicitness must be what William Friedkin has in mind when he talks publicly about the picture’s ‘documentary quality’.” It is interesting to observe that this argument against Friedkin’s reductionistic interpretation of reality is the self-same argument that becomes a banner of pride for todays’ critics, and their nostalgic praise of the film.

 Finally, Kael also questions the film’s genetic legitimacy – Friedkin as a movie maker – because Friedkin had stated how sick he got when he first read Blatty’s book: 

That’s the problem with moviemakers who aren’t thinkers: They’re mentally unprotected. A book like Blatty’s makes them sick, and they think this means they should make everybody sick. Probably Friedkin really believes he is communicating an important idea to us. And the only way he knows how to do it is by surface punch; he’s a true commercial director – he confuses blatancy with power. 

The film received two Oscars (best sound and script) and was a box office success, but achieved – save a few exceptions – little praise from the critics when it was first released. That was a medal it received “post-humously”, from critics haunted by hindsight (bad conscience?) and nostalgia.

2.2 Respecting Renewal – 27 years after the premiere

In september – 2000, The Exorcist was rereleased in theatres – with an enhanced sound track and 11 minutes of extra footage that was deleted from the original version. This did obviously not happen without notice, and new ”glowing” reviews popped up everywhere, in all media. The ”Deification” was, however, not only detectable in the praising language of the reviews, but also through the actual space devoted to the issue. John Chr. Jørgensen has described the changes in the prioritizing of cultural issues in newspapers: 

It is correct that a large part of the cultural material in modern newspapers has moved from the domain of the reviewer to the cultural report. But the material is still reviewed, and as it happens, the collaboration with the report benefits both the material and the readers. The problem of the report enters only when the report replaces the review, or when the reviewer makes himself a reporter, i.e. remains with the account, the synopsis. It is a misunderstanding, both as a report and a review (Jørgensen 1994: 32) 

Both Dagbladet, VG and Aftenposten Aften prioritized such two-page ”reports” instead of regular reviews after the rerelease. Of the national newspapers, only Dagsavisen went for a pure review, and it was – paradoxically – quite negative (and consequently represents an exception to the theory of nostalgia). What they all had in common – except the comments about the extra footage – was the emphasis on background information and contextualisation of the movie, either through newspaper clips of the religious controversies surrounding the intial premiere, “fact columns” about exorcism, excerpts from the original reviews or information about the turbulent production of the film and its sociopsychological impact. There could suddenly be no doubt about the film’s status as epoch making within its genre.  

It is, however, interesting to observe the foundation upon which this honour is based, as it takes as its point-of-departure the very criterion the original reviews questioned – the demand for realism. Liv Jørgensen writes (Dagbladet 12.01.01): 

It is a good film because it takes its story seriously, however fantastical it may be /…/ the horror occupies a highly normal, safe and pretty environment /…/ Filmically, The Exorcist is still stylistically pure and suggestive in its use of light and darkness. The sound is magnificent, the effects are handed out with intelligence – no exaggeration. That’s why they work. We get a lot of film before all hell breaks loose. 

Gravdal, Cocks and Kaels’ objections have obviously vanished through the ”test of time”. Into the film is reinstated a fulfillment of the intentional criterion and it is no longer burdened with the accusation of being one-sidedly speculative. Trude Lorentzen in Aftenposten confirms this in her two-page ”feature” (Aftenposten 01.12.01): 

The film – at least partially – was kept in a documentary-realistic style with focus on the psychological tension. This was repeated as the main argument when, among others, Entertainment Weekly, Total Film and TV Guide awarded The Exorcist ”the greatest horror film of all time” just before the millenium turn-over. 

All of a sudden, the film also received a cognitive depth that the critics in 1973 refused to put into it. Liv Jørgensen remarks, among other things, that “the story contained enough material to touch upon. Some in-depth analyses see the film as a contribution to men’s anxiety for female sexuality, as it is a pubertal girl that is posessed and the exorcists are men in celibacy.”

Furthermore, even the period of release seemed to be put in a nostalgic beauty bath. Susan Wloszczyna in USA Today writes in her review “The Exorcist - True Evil Endures” (USA Today 09.25.00): 

Best of all, seeing The Exorcist again on the big screen is a reminder that once upon a time in a braver sort of Hollywood, the horror genre was not just the domain of horny adolescents stalked by psychos. Terror could be adult, intelligent, artful even. The scares were sometimes cheap, but they weren’t stupid. 

The genetic demand for originality, fulfilled in a time when Hollywood dared to experiment, and put up against today’s standardized genre films, is – it seems – now fulfilled when the film is no longer buried beneath moral and political objections. The somewhat more reserved Lou Lumenick in The New York Post does also identify with this ”innocent” era, in which the scissors of censorship seemed sharper: 

Decades later, only some parts will scare the pants off you – but it’s those parts that make this a scary trip that is worth taking again. It’s not easy to return to the innocence of an era when we were shocked at obscentities (and vile liquids) spewing from the mouth of Linda Blair’s 12-year-old Regan, who is possessed by the devil. 

Wloszczyna, on the other hand, goes so far as to attribute to the film a burning actuality through a new moral/political value: 

The Exorcist, with admirable prescience, mirrors the fears that strike at the core of most parents post-Columbine massacre. No matter how well you provide for them, how well you raise them, how much you try to protect them, you can’t always shelter your kids from harmful outside forces. 

She thus underlines the film’s universality and ”timeless-ness”, a criterion the first reviewers obviously had no way of using, at least not unprophetically.  

The famous film critic Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun Times is not as thrilled about the rerelease, and sees the extra footage as “narratively superflous” and as a mere excuse to rerelease the movie in the first place. He places himself neatly in line with those who praise the film’s timeless-ness, though (Chicago Sun Times 22.09.00): 

I’ve revisited The Exorcist over the years and found it effective every time. Because it’s founded on characters, details and a realistic milieu, the shocks don’t date; they still seem to grow from the material /…/ The movie is more horrifying because it does not seem to be. The horror creeps into the lives of characters preoccupied with their lives /…/ The movie also gains power because it takes its theology seriously.

 What happens in all these cases? Why do the objections of the past vanish? Why are new criteria and measurements of quality added? Why isn’t, for example, the criterion of realism anno 1973 compatible with the criterion of realism anno 2000? 

Without underestimating the many qualities of the film, could it simply be that the explanation lies in The Exorcist’s status as cult film? As I’ve said, nostalgia is a strong, primal force that unconsciously colours the final, evaluative verdict . Whether it pops up in connection to a moral/political, a cognitive, a genetic or an esthetic criterion, it will always overshadow other, equally legitimate criteria. One might ask whether this is partially based on knowledge accumulated in the history of the film, and partially on the ingredients a given film offers, and the way these are mixed.  This latter point is important when I now – briefly – turn to the influence that the cult phenomenon has (had) on the final verdict.

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