[EXOSPECTIVE] THE EXORCIST SEASON ONE: "AS FAR AS IT GOES" • 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 new Exorcist franchise films, 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.

At the bottom of every Exorcist property is a reminder and a question: the title is The Exorcist, not The Possessed. How and why are these stories about the people who perform exorcisms, rather than the people receiving them? The most obvious transformations in any possession movie are the bodies and souls overtaken by demons–yet OG Exorcist and the television series provide a focused lens on what it takes to become an exorcist. It seems that clergy status may not always be required. In “Three Rooms,” season one’s denouement, all characters are haunted houses and each of them, in their own way, serves as exorcist for another.

Room one: the Rance family home, where Angela holds her husband and children captive. Room two: the warehouse where Brother Simon (Francis Guinan) and Maria Walters (Kirsten Fitzgerald) have brought Marcus and Father Bennett. And then there’s room three, where Tomas and Angela’s minds are trapped… or hiding. This inner room, a dreamscape full of highly personal torments, reflects and magnifies the show’s theme.

It’s in this room where souls are won or lost, where transformation happens. It’s only correct, then, that Tomas encounters a figure that looks like Marcus, his unwilling and erstwhile mentor–a literal black-hat bringing the younger priest his final challenge. This entity, who goes unnamed, is the closest we’ve seen to the true Adversary, the one who tempts, not a lesser demon who’s all tricks and flash.

Brother Simon’s demon is one of the latter, a showman at heart, a hack who resorts to pain in order to get what he wants. Rolling the dice on two case-hardened priests like Marcus and Bennett is a loser’s game. Despite Simon’s torture, they resist the vocare pulvare when it’s unleashed; for her part, Maria is affronted. When Simon casts her aside for a final time, a sense of foreboding clouds the air as thickly as the ash still seeking its host.

Like any good confessor, Marcus senses what’s at Maria’s core, and uses it against her. Renfield, he names her, taunting and goading her, donning the language of casual misogyny familiar to any woman who’s made it as far as Maria has. In this scene, he plays the role of the Marcus in Tomas’s head, a cruel tempter. Similarly, Pazuzu speaks through Angela in the cadence and terminology of rapists and victim-blamers. From 1973 onward, The Exorcist has been interested in toying with gender, its representation and reproduction, subverting certain mores and expectations.

In 2016-17, progressivism was reeling from a series of national blows. The Trump presidency was the most obvious… but the voting behavior of white women was a much-discussed factor. Demon-wracked Angela mimics the language and gestures of conservative power, presaging tradcath weirdness years before the fact. She’s a Stepford Wife if the Stepford Wives weren’t just mind-controlled but actively evil. As far as Maria’s concerned, it is narratively affirming to see her deepest nature come to the fore at last. She’s always been more deft than Police Superintendent Jaffey (Tim Hopper), more subtle than Brother Simon, but playing by the book and being left behind because of it.

The audience’s sense that she’s finally about to ascend (descend?) to the heights of Earthly demonic hierarchy echoes the journey Angela is undertaking. For the two women to get what they want, a tunneling must take place, a winnowing-away of everything that is not them, a rejection of everything that does not align with their deepest desires. Their humanity is what’s at stake; Maria abandons hers, and Angela reclaims hers.

I’m you, says the devil with Marcus’s face to Tomas. But if the worst of our selves is Satan, then the best of our selves is God.

In facing the greatest temptation–to give in–and recounting his sins, Tomas frees himself to return to the fight. Yet this recounting is a confession given to the demonic entity, an interesting inversion of the usual mode. If physicians cannot heal themselves, perhaps exorcists similarly cannot purge themselves.

It may be humility that eases Tomas’s path to his calling, but it’s ego that comes to his rescue at the last; there is no one present to confer the title “exorcist” except himself. As with Maria, he has come to his true self only through knowledge of evil. And regardless of Angela’s lifelong antipathy toward Pazuzu, still their relationship is an intimate one–perhaps more intimate than those she has with her family.

Throughout the first season, Angela has kept Henry and her daughters at a remove, struggling to find a middle path between complete honesty and running away. In the season’s culminating episodes, possessed!Angela displays the stroke-and-slap of abusive parenthood. See how wonderful things would be, if you’d just obey. Her words and actions are Pazuzu’s externalized, his battering of her soul turned on her daughters, a trauma cycle the demon is bent on keeping alive. A contingent mother’s love is offered, and when rebuffed, violence appears: Henry’s arms dislocated as he repeats I love you to his children, the words a simple mantra. A hammer spun as you would a Coke bottle, the winner’s reward not a kiss but broken kneecaps. Attempts to turn the family members against each other don’t succeed, and Tomas’s exorcism is bolstered by another simple mantra, the Lord’s Prayer.

The Rances are given an opportunity to flee, to cut their losses and abandon someone they’ve been told, over and over, is beyond saving. It’s possible it would be simpler to believe Angela is gone, to grieve her as we do one dead. Throughout the season, the Rances’ private family trauma has reified the demonic plan taking shape in Chicago, until the two story-lines intersected.

In theory, Pazuzu is invested in the demons’ plot to take down the Pope (whether through assassination or possession is unclear). Yet despite his posturing with Brother Simon’s coterie, despite holding a room in thrall and asserting dominance over the other possessed muckety-mucks, at heart Pazuzu is a one-woman devil. Angela is his obsession. Little pig, he calls her upon discovering the secret room at the bottom of her soul. Where before she was “the sow,” the protective mother, in her heart of hearts–known only to herself and her demon–she’s still a girl. The notion that a kernel of that girl has slipped Pazuzu’s grasp is infuriating… and opens the door to his defeat, as Maria’s pride and rage opened her to fulfillment.

The Exorcist season one’s story began with Casey, and from one angle it ends with her, as she discusses her possession with Father Marcus. Never one to rest on comforting lies, he tells her the truth: not every person who’s experienced possession recovers. But Casey has the comfort of knowing her story isn’t solely hers; The Exorcist, after all, began with Regan.

In this way, the show challenges other cherished American assumptions, that our pain can never truly be understood, that the authors of our existence–our parents, our gods, ourselves–cannot imagine us not in pain. “Three Rooms” offers the Rances closure the world at large may not receive, as Maria Walters and Superintendent Jaffey forge ahead with their plan. “Three Rooms” finds the priests re-baptized in blood, re-committed to the difficult path of teaching and being taught, the exorcist’s path.

Thank you for sharing this retrospective with us! DIS/MEMBER will return to The Exorcist for season two’s essay series in 2025.