| Horror
Movie Index
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The Exorcist, 1972, directed by William Freidkin.
Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow, Jason Miller, Lee J. Cobb. The Shining, 1980, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd, Joe Turkel. I was having a conversation with someone on an internet message board last week when the subject of The Exorcist and The Shining came up, or rather, the fact that I dislike both of these movies. To most self-described fans of the horror movie, this seems like a pretty heretical position to take on two of the best known and well respected pillars of the genre. These are the arguments I laid out in support of my position. I am foregoing my usual synopsis of the films. If you have an interest in this argument, you've probably already seen the movies in the first place. The Exorcist is something of a problem for me for several reasons: I will be the first to admit that it's extremely well made. It has impeccable performances, a landmark editing scheme, and one hell of a big scary idea. But, at a fundamental level, I think the movie makes a crucial error in the way it approaches "scaring" the audience. For the first half of the movie, Friedkin and company do a surgical job of ratcheting up the dread. It's subtle. In the second half, it's NOT subtle. The turning point is the spinal tap operation. One critic at the time noted that once you show a little girl having a spinal tap operation, you can pretty much have your way with them, and I think The Exorcist abuses this license. From this point on, it shocks for the sake of shocking, where in its first half, its shocks seem part of the organic whole of the movie. For example: the scene where Regan is standing in a puddle of her own urine is scary on a number of levels. First, it plays up to a fear that all parents have in social situations: is my child going to embarrass me in public? It couples this with the fear that there is something wrong with the child. Finally, it couples this image with a progression of enigmatic occurences that are remarkable for their ambiguity--what IS wrong with Regan? And why can't modern science explain it? In other words, it's an organic component of the film to that point. Now compare this with the imfamous scene in which the possessed Regan masturbates with a crucifix. This scene is grotesque out of all proportion when weighed with the way the film has progressed. At this point, the movie has abandoned ambiguity in favor a particularly Manichean good vs. evil theology, it has abandoned the horrors of modern medicine, and it has abandoned subtlety. This scene doesn't play to any specific fear that anyone actually has; it is blasphemous for the sake of blasphemy because blasphemy at this level shocks without context. The first half of the film used scalpels, if you will, while the second half of the film used baseball bats. As a formal structure, it's not all of a piece. More than this, though, I think the movie is particularly reactionary, both socio-politically and in the context of the genre at large. As a socio-political document, the parallels to the upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies should be immediately self-evident. Chris McNeill's life represents the middle class, the status quo; Regan turns into a foul-mouthed, sexually profligate grotesque who challenges the very fabric of traditional "family values" (to use the neo-conservative lexicon). The Exorcist literalizes the notion that those crazy kids are driving the country to hell in a handbasket. The solution to Regan's rebellion is the forcible acceptance of Jesus and the Church, which seems a particularly forceful anticipation of the role of the religious right in subsequent political discourse. It's also a rejection of science, which is shown to be impotent in the face of Regan's predicament, in favor of superstition. The filmmakers have carefully slanted the material so that the audience accepts this, in part by pitching the alternative to salvation at the hands of the Church in such hysterically grotesque imagery. In a lot of ways, The Exorcist reminds me of those comic book religious tracts produced by Jack Chick, only on a far grander scale. But even with big Hollywood production values, the message remains the same. To some extent, The Exorcist is exactly the same movie as Mel Gibsons controversial Passion of the Christ, with the same plot and the same willingness to brutalize the audience, though Gibson's movie starts with the blunt instruments and has a more compelling depiction of Satan. In the context of the horror movie itself, this is the living end of the Hammer formula, in which the monster corrupts traditional values and the Savant puts things right, only this is the Hammer formula coupled with a willingness to gross out the audience. It flies in the face of the radical, cautionary horror movies that emerged in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. In retrospect, I might even be inclined to mark The Exorcist as the exact point where the liberalism of the sixties youth revolution turned on itself and started to evolve into the Reagan (heh) Revolution and neo-conservativism. ---------------------------- As for The Shining: I think it's an incomprehensible muddle. There are individual images in the movie that tickle something deep in the hindbrain--I'll grant it that--but as a narrative, as a movie it makes no sense whatsoever. And it's poorly acted, to boot. While others might laud Jack Nicholson in this movie, I thought he was terrible. He starts crazy, so it's never a question of the hotel, or cabin fever, or whatever driving him there. When he leers through the door and mugs "Here's Johnny," the movie has crossed into high camp. Shelly Duvall's "whiny girl" performance certainly doesn't help things, since it marginalizes her character in comparison with Nicholson's scenery chewing. Kubrick's dominant image in the movie is the gigantic topiary maze, and it's apt, because the narrative is lost in a maze, and it doesn't have an exit, regardless of the final shot of the photograph (a shot that seems to be pulled out of the filmmaker's ass for all the connection it has to the rest of the movie). One would think that a movie with a maze as its dominant image would shed some insight into the twisted psychological states of its characters, but you would be wrong in this case. To an extent, I think the movie is deliberately obscurantist for the sake of obscurantism--an argument that is somewhat bolstered by Kubrick's choice of imagery. If obscurantism IS the point of the movie, one has to ask whether that is a laudable intention in the first place. Just because the filmmakers meant to do it doesn't mean that it IS a good idea. And in spite of the austere formalism of the film, The Shining is not above plagiarizing other sources for its images. The creepiest thing in the movie is the shot of the twin ghost girls that want to play with Danny ("forever, and ever, and ever"), but this is an image that comes at third hand. It had already been used by Fellini in the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead, and HE stole it from Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill. Kubrick merely doubled your pleasure. Stephen King has suggested that the film plagiarizes Kubrick himself, that the Overlook hotel one finds in Kubrick's movie is an offshoot of the rooms at the end of 2001, or maybe vice versa. Mind you, I formed most of these opinions long before I ever read the novel on which the film is based. For a long time, I avoided the novel because I thought the film was so poor. When I finally DID read the novel, it merely added to my list of complaints: as a literary adaptation it is a complete failure, changing the tone, incident, and point of the source material beyond all recognition. Finally, I will admit to a certain amount of resentment towards the movie based on the conviction on my part that its high status is due to unreflected auteurist hero worship rather than the quality of the film itself. If the film had been made by any other director, I seriously doubt it would enjoy the same level of popularity. But, of course, Kubrick directed it, so it MUST be a masterpiece.... |