The exorcist and its cultural impact on horror cinema

Exorcist -- What constitutes the human self, apart from the human body?

One of the most disturbing aspects about the film "The Exorcist" is the question the film provokes regarding what constitutes the human self. Over the course of the film, a demonic force possesses a seemingly innocent child named Regan. Regan's character changes as a result, altering her original demeanor and the viewer's initial assumptions about her character and what she represents in the narrative. From a kind, agreeable girl, Regan turns into a child who tells an astronaut that he is going to die up in the sky at her mother's dinner party. The once healthy prepubescent suddenly cannot control her bowels, but she can throw her mother across the room with her sheer force of will.

In a film that did not validate the existence of the supernatural, Regan would be seen as mentally ill, and indeed many of the girl's early symptoms mimic that of a child who is suffering from a delusional mental illness like schizophrenia in the real world. Parents of severely disturbed children must also confront the fact that the child they felt such a strong bond with is now behaving in a socially unacceptable, alien manner, and cannot even show affection towards their parents in a way that the parents are able to recognize as normal or human. And like Regan's mother, the cure for frightening behavior in a once normal child can be elusive.

The girl's mother is forced to deal with the problem of how to contain her child so Regan does not hurt herself or hurt others. Eventually, the girl is strapped to the bed. The mother is forced to treat the girl she gave birth to as if she was an enemy in her own home, and she is frightened to solicit outside aid, until finally she solicits a priest. The girl lashes out at her mother and attempts to hurt her mother in a way that she never did before, because of her illness. In some ways, this mimics the behavior of many ordinary adolescents coping with puberty. When a child exhibits a particularly rocky transition from childhood to adulthood, the parent often feels that the child he or she once knew well has suddenly changed. The parent cannot facilitate the child's liberty, because the parent knows the child is no longer worthy of his or her trust.

The girl's behavior also parallels someone at the end of life, suffering from dementia or loss of consciousness, as the girl's memory and frame of reference are changed because of the inescapable nature of her condition. She is no longer capable of taking care of herself and functioning in a normal way, nor can her parent have a secure hope that this phase will pass, and the child can be healed. Who is this person I once knew, is it the person, or the illness? The body looks the same but the behavior and character, what society calls the self, is altered.

Regan's mother wants her daughter 'back.' She wants to be able to relate to her child once again, and predict her child's behavior. In essence, she wants her child's sense of self to become as it once was, before the child became ill. The cognitive dissonance of seeing a body that vaguely resembles her child, however wasted and ill, but does not act or speak like her child is almost worse than seeing her child die.