After writing what many consider the most frightening book ever published and then scripting the scariest movie ever made, William Peter Blatty spent the rest of his life trying to convince people that The Exorcist was not a horror story but a supernatural detective thriller about the mystery of faith. The film enjoys its 50th anniversary this year.
As a student at Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University in the late 1940s, Blatty heard of a supposed possession that had taken place in nearby Mt. Rainier Maryland (actually Cottage City, Maryland) in which a young boy had been freed from the grip of the Devil by a local priest. “Here, at last,” Blatty would later write, “was tangible evidence of transcendence. If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.” Years later, as a Hollywood scribe (A Shot in the Dark, John Goldfarb Please Come Home), when the market for his comedy scripts dried up, he decided to sequester himself to produce a novel that would harken back to his Catholic upbringing about the existence of God. The result was The Exorcist (1971).
The novel did not, of course, explode like pea soup from Blatty’s churning mind. It took time. He knew that his primary narrative was the possession and exorcism of a little girl–he made the victim a girl to differentiate her from the actual boy–by a priest who had lost his faith and would, by engaging the demon with God’s guidance, have it restored. But he needed something more worldly so the reader would have a story, not a pulpitry. Once he decided that the possessed girl would murder the obnoxious film director, Burke Dennings, it hit Blatty that the reader’s surrogate would be the detective investigating the crime. Now he had to invent one.
Over the years he had made character sketches for a menschy police detective around whom he wanted to build a mystery. This was Lieutenant William Kinderman, long before Peter Falk’s Colombo, as Blatty was thereafter at pains to point out. Once, in the margins of a book called Satan by Frank Sheed, he had handwritten, “Detective—Mental Clearance Sale.” This gelled years later into Kinderman. “I think it was in 1963,” he would write in The Exorcist from Novel to Screen (1974), “the notion of possession as the basic subject matter of a novel crystallized and firmed.”
Like all good mysteries there are several storylines running through The Exorcist: the murder, the possession, the nature of faith, the rivalry between the demon Pazuzu and his old enemy Father Merrin, and who will finish directing “Crash Course,” the movie Dennings was directing when he was killed (left unresolved).
Kinderman, working both diligently and annoyingly, investigates how Dennings might have fallen or been pushed from the bedroom window and down the Hitchcock Steps, that 97-stair flight that runs from Prospect Street to Canal Road in Georgetown. He had to learn how paint chips from little Regan’s bird sculpture got to the base of the steps; where Karl, actress Chris MacNeil’s butler, was going late at night and why had he been exonerated after stealing drugs from his previous employer; who defaced the religious statues at Dahlgren Chapel in a matter akin to Satanists; why did Father Karras once write a paper on witchcraft; and might Reagan have used some of the marijuana he suspects Chris has been smoking?
Blatty created enough red herrings to stock a fishmonger, yet kept all the threads in the air because exorcisms and homicide investigations are separate enterprises. Not all of the herrings made it into the 1973 movie. The two main plotlines don’t even come together until the very end of the story (by now it’s too late for a spoiler alert, so keep reading) when Kinderman knocks on the door of the MacNeill home just as Karras is daring the demon to “come into me” upstairs. Although his arrival looks like a coincidence, Kinderman is actually there to arrest Regan for the murder of Burke Dennings. He has no idea of all else that has been going on in the little girl’s life, and one can only imagine what he thinks when he ascends to Reagan’s bedroom to find Father Merrin dead, Reagan un-possessed and in tears, and then looks out the window to see Father Dyer giving Father Karras last rites on the cold pavement of Canal Street.
The most profound mystery, however, is never solved: the existence of God.
While Blatty posits that, if there’s a devil, there must be a god, a logician would argue that this is the same as saying if there are apples, there must be oranges. It’s a false equivalency. Perhaps Blatty pondered this when he wrote the sequel to The Exorcist, Legion, in 1983.
In Legion, Lieutenant Kinderman has become friends with Father Dyer, just as he had been with Damien Karras. The two men discuss the existence of evil in the world; Kinderman is an agnostic Jew and Dyer, of course, is a faithful Catholic. When Dyer is murdered by a serial killer who, by all explanations, was executed years ago, Kinderman must discover not only the identity of the new killer but how the old dead killer is somehow reaching out from the grave. When Father Karris miraculously appears in the form of a jailed murderer, all of Kinderman’s bets are off, an so are the reader’s.
The novel attracted attention but did not assume the same sales status as The Exorcist. The film that Blatty directed from it (The Exorcist III, 1990) suffered studio interference and was recut. But it already began with one strike against it: in the film The Exorcist Kinderman and Dyer never meet, so how could they be friends in The Exorcist III? In fact, Kinderman and Dyer had met in the original film, only it was in footage that never made it into the final cut: after Chris and Regan leave at the end of the story, Father Dyer watches them go and Kinderman approaches him as he once did Karras offering him free movie passes. This “Louie, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Casablanca-like ending was nixed by director William Friedkin as being one story beat too many. When he gave in years later and sought to add it to a video re-release of The Exorcist, however, the Warner Bros. archivists couldn’t find the old dialogue tracks and, by then, actor Lee J. Cobb, who played Kinderman, had passed, so it couldn’t be restored.
For Exorcist III, George C. Scott took over Kinderman. While the plot was not as linear as The Exorcist, Legion offers a more powerful argument for the existence of a god for whom self-sacrifice is a virtue of religious faith. (This theme is propounded more strongly in Blatty’s 1978 work The Ninth Configuration.) As with The Exorcist, much of the dialogue in Legion revolves around a restatement of philosopher David Hume’s test of logic summarized by asking, If God is all-powerful, then why does evil exist; if He is not all powerful, then why is he called God?
In his many interviews over the years, William Peter Blatty spoke of “the mystery of faith.” It is a provocative, even challenging phrase. Mysteries either have a solution or they do not. Their solutions come from evidence and reason, but the evidence must be persuasive and the reasoning infallible. Using solid detective work, Blatty’s creation, Lt. Kinderman, solved two mysteries of the flesh only to remain baffled by the mysteries of the spirit. By gripping the minds of his readers and viewers, Blatty hoped to do more than capture their minds, he wanted to fill their souls.
__________
