The Exorcist: Repression And The Meltdown Of The Family
Tony Williams describes the undercurrent in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist by writing, “In an era of recession, oil embargoes, the debilitating effects of Vietnam, and crisis of confidence in presidential leadership, cinema provides an ideological answer by invoking a traditional enemy - Satan (107).” Everything terrible that occurs in our lives, by Christian standards is the work of the devil. It is never the work of humankind, we could never be that horrible, it must be the devil working through us. Human’s represent a duality between good and evil, if we can recognize something to be good or an action that we have to be right than we must have known wrong or evil within our lives. We are light and dark, we are the shadow and the ego, we are the id and the superego, we are heaven and hell, yet we cannot admit to this. The Exorcist can be interpreted as a lashing out on the family structure. Ragan played by Linda Blair has no father and an actress mother who is sleeping w