You Must Tear Out Her Dark Heart

 “You Must Tear Out Her Dark Heart!”

- Pazuzu 

Exorcist II - The Hertic

( for which The World was Not-Yet ready.....)

A Black Mirror

The fact that Ray is yelling at him and threatening him ( like a Tyrant ) is NOT helpful... he’s turning himself into a halfway suitable host — he can’t possess The Clown (Peter) , The Mage (Egon) or The Soldier (Winston), but Ray he finds he has some affinity with....

Exorcist II : The Heretic — An Apologia and An Explanation, not a Review

I speak a lifelong and devoted lover of The Exorcist, not mere the greatest ‘horror’ movie ever made, but also the finest and most important movie on the subject of Spiritual Warfare ever filmed.

I am, however, also, an unashamed apologist for Exorcist II : The Heretic (for which The World was not-yet ready....)

apologist (n.)

"one who speaks or write in defense of something," especially "a defender of Christianity," 1630s, from French apologiste, from apologie, from Late Latin apologia "a speech in defense"

At the outset, let me say this — put on your David Lynch Glasses.

A film such as this can only really be approached beginning at a firmly pre-conscious level; where it begins to fall apart however, therefore, is that while David Lynch maintains total and absolute authorial control over every aspect of the production (cinematography and sound in particular, in case that not being too obvious), and only picks out and works with actors who he knows and trusts to plumb the depths of their own psyches and the collective unconscious enough to tap into what he wants (even if he very often does not know what he actually wants, or indeed what he is doing until it is done being captured on film).

What happens instead here is that there is a baggy creative looseness (no-doubt excacerbated by John Boorman’s 6 week illness in the midst of principle photography), so the whole thing drifts about alarmingly and looses focus, so your inner-eye and attention is never drawn quite where it is supposed to be for much of the film and the actors don’t really know exactly what they are meant to be doing, so the emotional tone is just all over the map in places.

So when something in a David Lynch film comes across as absurd, tacky or bad, its because (and you can be assured of the fact that) Lynch WANTS it to be absurd, tacky or bad — it isn’t because it just doesn’t work.

And in Exorcist II : The Heretic that isn’t the case — so the viewer, even the most charitable apologist such as myself — is constantly being challenged to decide : is this consciously esoteric and dream-like (as much of the film is, or could take place viewed from the perspective of a dream), or is it just an attempt to do something over-ambitious (such as a man falling off the side of a mountain and his body becoming lodged in a tight rock crevasse) that didn’t *quite* work.

So your brain is constantly being overstimulated, and your mind cannot relax on being immersed within the film.

There are also some horrendous errors of judgement that might have been very easily resolved and made the film less superficially ludicrous and absurd. Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with the hypnotic “Synchroniser” device used to achieve shared states of deep trance, it’s both scientifically and spiritually not only plausible but also very largely accurate — unfortunately it just LOOKS completely silly and ridiculous, with the black and red plastic-rubber ECG headbands, and the various bleeping noises are, again, probably clinically accurate but not cinematically helpful.

With every year that passes, more and more I am reminded, with regard to Exorcist II of the great, untold Sherlock Holmes case touching on the Giant Rat of Sumatra (“For which The World is not yet ready”, notes Holmes).

The central theme and message of the film — one which stands in stark contrast and defiance to that of it’s predecessor, where it was the very randomness and seeming pointlessness of Reagan’s ordeal which is speculated to be the whole reason a point to her being singled out for possession — that it is the purest GOOD souls on the Earth who are singled out BECAUSE the diabolical hordes want to take such powerful spiritual warriors off the board by corrupting them and bringing about their self-destruction) stands as bold a statement of Jungian psychic theory as was ever committed to film.

Jung’s ideas and concepts of The Shadow and Spiritus Contra Spiritum inspired the original founders of Alcholoics Annonymous, first originators of the 12 Step model for personal spiritual purgation of the demon drink, and the many other that followed, via formation of “societies of mutual sufferers” - 

“You Must Tear Out Her Dark Heart” 

Very Excellent, Sound Advice. 

For Which The World was Not-Yet Ready.