[EXOSPECTIVE] THE EXORCIST SEASON 1: "FALLING AND FALLING" • 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.

Any zero hour approaches through a static haze, a sort of equilibrium born of the knowledge of impending doom. Episode five’s fugue state is amplified and drawn out, agonizingly, in episode seven, “Father of Lies.” The preceding episode’s brief glimmer of hope is slammed back to the grave as the audience sees that, instead of arriving home, Casey is still in the demon’s grasp. Yet it appears that there’s no such thing as bad press, at least not for the Catholic Church. Throughout “Father of Lies,” The Exorcist toys with notions of hierarchy and God-playing, knowledge and sacred falsehood.

The series’ interest in modern media, and what that means for old institutions and ancient evils, comes to the fore with scenes of nationally-broadcast interviews, throngs of local reporters, and even an Enquirer-style rag. The secular news cycle is mirrored by the Church’s internal concerns. Father Tomas’s superiors laud the way he’s brought the community together in troubling times; St. Anthony’s is packed to the ceiling with new congregants. But Tomas himself isn’t so sure. Ultimately, the church might not care if its numbers are juiced due to tragedy–whether those fresh believers will stay after the tumult has died. But the more tangled Casey’s situation becomes… and the more deeply Tomas becomes intertwined with Jessica… the less Tomas trusts himself, or the notion that truth is something unchanging.

Truth’s Overton window spins wildly from scene to scene and character to character. Father Marcus displays impatience with Tomas’s reluctance to lie to the Rances; it’s clear he finds Tomas a little too cute to commit to the reality of either truth or exorcism. Casey’s own body has begun to betray horrific truths of rot and decay. Maggots crawl from her wounds, and she can barely move, let alone speak.

Her perspective, her subjective reality through the camera’s eye, has been lost for many episodes. Per The Exorcist‘s established parameters, Casey and her demon are one being. Perhaps worst of all, Mother Bernadette’s position on the truth has veered far from Marcus’s. During an argument over whether Casey can be saved, Bernadette says the quiet part out loud: that her abbey’s policy is to euthanize possessed people who have–to Bernadette’s eyes–experienced total demonic take-over. If Marcus finds Tomas’s adherence to honesty twee, it’s clear Bernadette finds Marcus’s aversion to God-playing equally twee.

For the audience, this argument prompts consideration of Christian hair-splitting. How many steps removed is euthanasia from exorcism, anyway? We might suss out that Marcus is trying to avoid further blood on his hands stemming from another failed exorcism. But it seems that the exorcisms of this universe are a case of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t. Bernadette’s theology focuses on saving the possessed person’s soul, no matter the cost to their body. Marcus seems to hew to the school of “God helps those who help themselves,” permitting Casey’s soul to be taken from his hands only at demonic gunpoint. By this juncture in the show, it appears that his own soul is staked on the salvation of Casey’s.

Meanwhile, the pursuit of truth continues on all fronts. It’s a bit wild to see Trump-years television confront in real-time the post-truth era. In 2016, viewers still had a notion of the Internet as “forever,” in terms of preserving truths we might wish to forget or proving that something had happened. In 2016, the average Girl Internet TV fan remembered Weekly World News, The National Enquirer, and so forth the way Kat does–as bastions of hysterical unreality (Bat-Boy Marries In Vegas!). It was pure X-Files conspiracy theory to posit that perhaps the check-out aisle tabloids were hawking truths The Man didn’t want you to know about. To the press outside the Rance home, Chris MacNeil claims, “There’s nothing wrong with Casey except that she isn’t here.” This pronouncement situates the nuclear family as the only safe harbor, rather than the locus of demonic possession and shadow history.

The Exorcist universe has always been interested in interrogating the family: what family is, who is included in the definition, whether the family should be upheld or demolished. Whether this interrogation succeeds is different in every property. Later, in naming her daughter Angela, Chris affirms her place in the family’s narrative, perhaps her acceptance of how Angela reacted to the possession of her youth. Yet it’s that possession that seems to propel the events taking place, even years later. Revenge, Marcus names Casey’s possession. All are agreed there’s no reason for a demon this powerful to possess an anonymous teenage girl, to ravage her into oblivion. As Tomas resents the necessity of his lies to the Rances, Marcus believes that bringing Angela to her daughter would give the demon what it wants most.

There’s nowhere for Angela to turn, it seems: inside her house are questions from her family, a universe of eggshells to be walked on and a disastrous television interview; outside are reporters, rubberneckers, and most damning of all, the family of one of the EMTs Casey killed. Within Angela’s world of pain and uncertainty, one thing is indubitably true–that people are dead now who would be alive, if not for Angela’s daughter. She’s beginning to understand the situation not only from her own memories, but from Chris’s perspective as well. It seems there’s the pain of lived experience, and the pain of witness. Confronted with these truths, her feelings of motherly powerlessness twinned with her memories of Chris’s, she vows to do better by Casey… if fate permits it.

There’s a tense interplay between the truth of The Exorcist‘s interior world (where demonic possession is real) and the roles of nonbelievers (like Kat) or outside observers (like the media) within that world. When a reporter asks Chris why Casey wouldn’t just come home, the audience remembers the trillion-and-one answers to that question offered by real girls across the world. In this way, The Exorcist works convincingly on both its own terms and metaphorical ones.

Whether the audience should derive more impact on the real-world metaphor or the fiction’s ramifications is a question only viewers can answer.

More truths are revealed as Father Bennett interrogates the Pope’s Chicago visit as plotted by Maria Walters’ planning committee. Like flipping a stone to reveal writhing worms, he probes further into Maria’s relationship with the Friars of the Ascension… and her husband’s financial status. It seems that the Walters’ defunct landscaping business has contributed a lot of money to the Friars. Bennett is tugging on the strings attached to the papal visit; one yank too many, and the entire enterprise might unravel.

What’s more, he seems familiar with how one might plan an assassination. Later in the episode, when he visits Tattersall Landscaping in pursuit of answers, he’s shown to have more command of mano-a-mano combat than the average priest (note: the author doesn’t know any priests). After discovering a building empty of everything but the ashes of the vocare pulvare ceremonial corpses, he’s jumped by two of the possessed. During the fighting, he uses not just physical combat skills but ultimately, the tools of an exorcist. Just who is Father Bennett? The camera lingers uncomfortably long on this question as it’s posed visually, leading the viewer’s mind in directions we’d rather not travel–yet another reminder that in this world, there’s no specific profile for possession, no aspects that make one person more susceptible than another.

“Father of Lies” culminates in all our main characters on the brink. They’ve been in a holding pattern for the episode’s duration: Marcus refusing Bernadette’s belladonna; Tomas sacrificing more of himself to exorcism, Church, Jessica; Angela’s belief in her daughter’s survival crumbling through her fingers. She winds up in the shower fully clothed as Henry tries to talk her down, desperately relaying memories of times she knew, for a certainty, that Casey was okay–and admitting, in the manner of confession, that she no longer feels a connection to her daughter. Tomas confesses similarly… but picks a dangerous ear. After an altercation in a drugstore, he finds himself with no one to call but Maria Walters. Not a great speed-dial list! He confides to her things he probably shouldn’t, ideal tools for a manipulator who’s literally on the side of Satan. He’s already taken her money, situating the Church within her laundering operation; now she’s in possession of parts of his soul, truths that sound small but contain legions.

He’s falling and falling, a condition Chris MacNeil has seen before in priests past. If you fear you’re losing yourself, your self becomes more difficult to recognize. If you’re staring possession in the face, that face might start to seem familiar. If you admit you’ve been shaped by demons, your audience might search for evidence of it. Tomas’s confession mirrors Angela’s, perhaps uncomfortably so for those viewers of religious stripes who’ve been told I don’t recognize you by a loved one.

“God has my hands,” Marcus tells Mother Bernadette, and waits for a Hail Mary. It arrives in the form of Angela. No longer willing to mistake kindness for compassion, Tomas has brought her to see Casey. Whether proof of life or proof of soul, the truth will always get out.