Wednesday's Interesting Thing
Yeah, pretty much just one thing. And it involves an exorcist.
The greatest trick the devil played was giving us the thirst for an exorcism.
Unfortunately, because the greatest fictional portrayal of such a ceremony happened in the 70s, all we get these days are facsimiles of the same old story.
I can’t say how many times I’ve heard exorcism movies suggest they’re based on true events, but here’s the latest, and it stars Pacino doing some amazing accent work.
As amazing as Russel Crowe in The Pope’s Exorcist? Well, there’s not much that can top that…
Now, obviously to goose the audience and build on the shaky legitimacy of the ritual, any decent exorcism movie is going to toss the seductive bait of “based on a true story.” It’s the crossroads of the debate between logic and the supernatural and on the movie screen, the supernatural can always win (it has better special effects too; hardly a fair fight.
For example, The Pope’s Exorcist is based on what I can only assume is one of the 170,000 exorcisms this dude said he performed. He also hates yoga and suggested that the Vatican routinely had sex parties and the more I read about him, the more I wish the movie was just about him and pushed the exorcism off to the side (or just focus on the Vespa rides), but anyway…
I was gonna kinda leave the whole thing here, with the accent comparisons and move on, but somehow I stumbled down the tiniest, most inconsequential of rabbit holes and yet… it just seems so weird that I can’t not talk about it.
Because, you see, just like all the rest, the big daddy of exorcist films was based on a true story too. But which one?
The Ritual is out here (announcing it right there in the trailer) telling us it’s a movie about the case that inspired William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist. And yet…
I can only find one instance that suggests that. And that instance? It’s a sentence in a description of a book for sale.
Now, I’m not a data forensic scientist, nor do I have oodles of time to dive deep into this non-scandal scandal. I also know wikipedia is not the bastion of credence, however, with a few clicks here and there, it’s somewhat easy to find the story that William Peter Blatty DID base his novel on. It’s the exorcism of Roland Doe.
Am I shocked to stumble across an instance where Hollywood is stretching the truth to make a quick buck, fudging some details with marketing to generate buzz around the bad accent work of an acclaimed actor in what is most likely a terrible movie?
No dear reader, I am not.
I am however mildly curious and (even more mildly) dismayed that we just lap it up. Sure, in the grand scheme of - looks around, wildly gestures at everything - , it’s a stupid non issue. And sure, maybe somewhere there is a mention of Anna Ecklund’s exorcism as being some inspiration behind The Exorcist.
But seriously. If Al Pacino Germanizing his performance of a 1920s exorcism with Patricia Heaton finger wagging at him with disdain can’t get us into the theater, is there even a point to anything anymore?
Alright, that took a lot out of me. I’m still a bit befuddled by the stupidity of it all, so just go out there and catch up on everything that’s out there that you need to catch up on. Stuff like:
The Studio
Andor
The Last of Us
The Rehearsal
Your Friends and Neighbors
The Eternauts
Havoc
There’s a bunch of great shit out there.
Jam of the Day