[EXOSPECTIVE] THE EXORCIST SEASON 1: "THE SOW" • DIS/MEMBER

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This serial column revisits The Exorcist television series. Conceived by Jeremy Slater for FOX and starring Ben Daniels, Alfonso Herrera, Geena Davis, and Alan Ruck, the show ran 2016-17 and was generally well-received by critics and audiences. DIS/MEMBER returns to the show in the context of a new Exorcist franchise film, seeking insight on what made the show work and why it’s lesser-known than its film counterparts. All screencaps sourced from Kiss Them Goodbye.

It’s Mother, Bernadette tells a police officer at the head of investigators–cops and journalists alike–camped outside her cloister. The officer has erroneously referred to her as “Sister.” In episode eight’s opening scene Angela Rance has also claimed her status as mother… and had it flung against her by Casey’s demon. “The Griefbearers” calls every errant chicken home to roost, from the growing tension between Marcus and Tomas to the Rances’ frenzied family relationship, but most specifically the show’s preoccupation with and depictions of motherhood. After all, what does saying “I’m her mother” mean in the context of demonic possession?

In some mythologies, a human woman is the mother of demons. This matrilineal theme suffuses The Exorcist, particularly once Chris MacNeil has re-established herself in her daughter’s life. If so-called worldly sins of pride, vanity, and avarice visited themselves on the young Regan, which sins of Angela’s have nested in her daughter? The demon’s big reveal likely landed differently in 2016; in a post-feminist United States not yet reeling from the Trump years, abortion as character development tasted synthetic.

Now, though, I’m not so sanguine. The dismantling of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 2022 served as a fresh reminder of the country’s one-note character. And within the world of The Exorcist, for a seemingly-devout Catholic like Angela, abortion is a cut-and-dried sin. Yet even in the show’s black-and-white universe, the metaphor persists: abortion as preventive measure, not to save the life of the mother but to prevent another version of herself entering the world. Casey’s demon calls Angela “the sow,” and from there focuses its poisonous barbs and lures on her failings as a mother, Casey’s status as a daughter. Couching Angela’s character in her motherhood is reinforced by a kiss between her and Henry, the first physical affection we’ve seen them display–an intimation of passion, once, a whisper of who they are beyond parenthood.

Most horribly, Angela is shown the child she once was, the demon visible to her as Captain Howdy when it descends on the Regan of her past. Her presence in the room with Chris and Regan calls to familiar questions often presented to adults who were once traumatized children. Who is the parent you needed? Can you be that parent to yourself now? Can you free your child, or yourself, from the cycle of trauma?

Among wild boar litters, competition for a sow’s milk is fierce. Within The Exorcist‘s demonic array, there’s something about Angela they particularly seek.

So absorptive are the scenes involving Angela that Casey’s freedom feels startling, when it arrives near the episode’s mid-point. Yet threaded throughout “The Griefbearers” are reminders of the show’s many other concerns. For one thing, Father Bennett is alive! He retreats to the Moveable Deceased for assistance, hilariously, and tips off the police regarding the bodies inside Tattersal Landscaping. He also tips off his archbishop, a move the audience may feel unsure about.

Kurt Egyiawan is always great as Bennett, bringing a cosmopolitan cool and elegant charisma cloaking his mysterious background, not to mention that matchless side-eye. He knows, at least, that Chicago’s demon problems don’t begin and end with Casey Rance. Parallel to the big-picture Catholic Church intrigue Bennett represents runs two visions of priesthood. Marcus and Tomas’s clashes have grown more frequent, spurred by the demonic milieu in which they’re immersed. It worms its way in, Mother Bernadette warns them, with the sense that she shouldn’t have to be reminding them of this.

It’s one thing for Henry and Kat, unfamiliar with demonic machinations, to be susceptible to its taunts. Perhaps Tomas, new to the exorcism game, is also still learning. But Marcus, of all people, should know better. The fact that the priests’ barriers are down suggests, according to the show’s worldview, some inkling of desire. Who among us has not been exhausted to the point of surrender? The truest and deadliest temptation is the dawning belief that letting go of your burden of care might in fact be easier.

Thus, the simple joys experienced by Marcus and Tomas after the fact carry a sour tinge. It’s difficult for the audience to trust this Marcus, laughing in a tavern with Tomas as a bluesy rocker belts. With two episodes left in the season, we know the departure of Casey’s demon can’t be the whole story. But it’s necessary for the characters to linger a moment, drinking beers (Catholic clergy drinking alcohol will never not be weird to this viewer) and ribbing one another. Marcus’s love of music, even his love of his profession, shines through accumulated grime and the bar’s low lighting. We don’t try to convince people to join us in our love if we ourselves don’t want to live.

Most crucially, we don’t take steps toward our own happiness without believing a hand is reaching from the other shore. Seeing Marcus flirt with a man in the bar, even in the swiftest fragment, was major news for Girl Internet in 2016. It’s pure Marcus, then, that he’s cockblocked by a news report about an assassination plot against the Pope. A smash cut to Father Bennett confirms what the audience likely already suspects: the assassination plot, if there is one, is coming from inside the house. Once more we’re left on a Bennett cliffhanger, as two stooges in the employ of Cardinal Guillot (Torrey Hanson) stuff a bag over his head.

It seems that the Catholic Church’s rot reaches to the highest echelons. When the cardinal asks for the names of those people Bennett considers still loyal to the church, we’re prompted to wonder what a church is, if not the people of its body. Similarly, when Jessica’s husband comes to confront Father Tomas in his chapel, the question of persona, personality, and personhood rears again. Jessica once invited Tomas to a place where she wasn’t married and he wasn’t a priest; now, her husband repudiates any such possibility by refusing to punch a priest. Tomas removes his collar, calling back to the scene of Marcus helping him put it on.

But Jim (Andrew Rothenberg) refuses to fight on Tomas’s terms, instead threatening to have him defrocked. Perhaps it’s possible to reach a place where you’re not married, even when you are married. But Tomas is a priest regardless of what he wears, until such time he chooses to abandon it himself. As we’ve seen with Marcus’s excommunication, the office of exorcist is one that resides in the heart. Bennett is able to parse “the church” as something more than an apparatus for abuse, or a clerical hierarchy, perhaps something even beyond a particular theology.

The subplot of Tomas’s affair, not directly related to the main plot, brings the episode full circle as Henry, Kat, and Chris discuss their immediate future and what will happen to Casey now that she’s home free. If she was a good girl before, now the police want to talk to her. If she was a dutiful daughter before, now she’s the reason her family is moving to Canada. Yet we still have no idea what Casey herself thinks or feels about all this. Give the people what they want, Casey’s demon leers before its quintessential head-spinning moment, and what an audience always wants is a girl in abjection. Or is it a mother’s ultimate sacrifice? In all things, the dissolution of personhood pressed onto women and girls, made metaphor in The Exorcist‘s world by the notion of demonic integration.

Is it possible for parents to commit apostasy?

As Angela sorts through her house with Chris, she muses that it’s hard to figure out what to take and what to leave. A neat analogy for emotional baggage if there ever was one. There’s a lightness to her that at first we attribute to the overwhelming relief she must feel. Her daughter is returned to her; her family is once more whole. Then, so seamlessly it’s stomach-turning, the lightness slips into cruel humor. Will this hurt the resell, she wonders, referring to the mess upstairs and Casey’s name splashed through the news.

She pokes at Chris’s attempts to bond, hammering home the final nail with one word: “stinkpot.” An affectionate term for a naughty child–appropriate, now that the roles have reversed. The child who became her own mother now exerts final power over the adult, by twisting Chris’s neck and throwing her down the stairs to make it look like an accident. So desperate was Angela for Casey’s life that she seems to have made that ultimate sacrifice. It’s not just the visual horror of the moment that leaves a sour residue in the viewer’s throat, but the vision The Exorcist offers of motherhood… a heavy and complicated vision of one of the cornerstones of American culture and control.

We have known that demons, like matter, are never destroyed. It was always going to be Angela.