Just Like Witches At Black Masses (Or: Flowers In Hair Replaced With Horns)

Dis-possessed

"When I first saw [The Exorcist] I was pissed off because I saw it as a return to the ancient views about the Devil and the Catholic Church: part of the nostalgic disease of the 1970s, and a reactionary one at that. When I saw it a second time it was with a San Francisco clinical psychologist...who immediately saw the movie as an allegory. And that enlightened me. People flock to the movie because it is a therapeutic experience. We are all possessed -- by our addictions, our loves, our attachments, our habits, our unconscious, our guilts, our needs, our possessions, our social roles -- and they talk through us. We vomit out our bullshit. We all want to be exorcised."

-- Jerry Rubin, "I am Regan, you are Regan,"

Village Voice, May 2, 1974

"...We weren't so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. I remember when we went to see The Exorcist that Christmas in Philadelphia: we were so freaked out, we had to go watch The Sting afterwards to take our minds off it. Even then, we all ended up sleeping in the same hotel room, because we were scared out of our minds. It's funny, because years later Linda Blair -- who played the satanic kid in that movie -- ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out. She even went out with Ted Nugent once. But she wouldn't go near me.
Not a fucking chance."

-- Ozzy Osbourne, I Am Ozzy

"They just wouldn't fuck off, those satanists. I'd walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they'd be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. So one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang 'Happy Birthday.'
They weren't too fucking happy about that, believe me."

-- Ibid.

New Maps of Purgatory

Since Phil's Carl's yet to pipe up with his unpacking of Zardoz, I thought I'd kill off a few lower-tier candidates in the meantime. So here's a random selection, in no particular order...

Logan's Run (1976)

We've seen the future and it's a shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. And yeah yeah -- it's better to burn up than to fade away. Effectively what we have here is the previous decade's generational war slogan of "Never trust anyone over thirty" extrapolated in to an extreme, resulting in the dystopic dénouement of the premise for Wild in the Streets.

Yet how humbling, how Romantically fatalistic -- in this, the year of the American bicentennial -- to see the nation's capitol as ruins, strewn with vines and all sorts of flora, patinaed by the elements to which they've returned. And Sir Peter Ustinov's wrinkles are a marvel to behold and to touch; the very embodiment of nature itself, if not of the authority and experience so thoughtlessly discarded by the cult of youth.

But nevermind the ageism angle, because Richard Pryor has the last word: "Looks like white people aren't counting on us being around."



Rollerball (1975)

The excesses of empire, sans vomitoriums. Key concept: Blood sport.

Westworld (1973)

The excesses of empire, alternate take. One of the advantages of this empire being that -- artificially, and merely for the sake of leisure -- one can colonize the past. Key concept: Hostile objects.

Phase IV (1974)

Effectively this borrows a premise that was put forth some years earlier in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that the human race is overdue to make an developmental leap, and that it need help from an outside party -- of extraterrestrial origin -- in order to take that next step in its evolution. And as in 2001, it puts that thesis across in a confusingly oblique way.

Exactly what the nature of this impasse might be, who can tell? But noted that the mathematician believes that everything can be quantified in numbers, and the ants -- in their own way -- prove him correct by demonstrating the power of collectivity. But don't look to a movie that pilfers much of its "action" from a nature documentary for any sort of clarity or coherence.

Silent Running (1972)

In which Deep Ecology meets deep space. With all plant life on earth being choked off by (we're to assume) pollution, Freeman Lowell would sooner kill a man than a tree. This of course is bound to stretch the borders of pathos for most viewers, as much as the plot stretches those of scientific plausibility. For starters: The spaceship survives a passage through the rings of Saturn with all but the most minor of damage. Which is ridiculous enough to start with, exponentially moreso when you note that the spacecraft bears the American Airlines logo.




Day of the Dolphin (1973)

Directed by Mike Nichols, directly following the warm press he'd received for Catch 22 and Carnal Knowledge. The only interesting thing is about this film is that Nichols took the project after (reputedly) Roman Polanski was slated to helm the project. But Polanski, who was dealing with the aftermath of Sharon Tate and his unborn child's murder at the hands of the Manson clan, decided that making a screen adaptation of Macbeth was more suited to his mood at the time. Discuss.

The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

With which the director, having missed out on a pile by turning down the first film in order to make Zardoz, doubles back and tries to recoup his losses by agreeing to tackle the sequel.

Should we be surprised to learn that the forces of the Prince of Darkness directly link back to the heathen hordes of the "Dark Continent"? Or should we be more surprised that, in a supposedly more enlightened age, such a plot twist was expected to go uncontested?

No matter. The result was universally ranked as one of the decade's worst films. Still, between its gloriously unenlightened post-colonial confusion, its jumble of popular paranormal phenomena, and its bizarre efforts at glamorizing its pubescent female lead, it's also one of decade's most perversely & hilariously enjoyable movies.

Synchronicity

Although the Seventies saw the rise of J.G. Ballard as the bête noire of British fiction, they also saw a revival in the fortunes of a previous enfant terrible of the literary world. Colin Wilson, a working-class autodidact from Leicester, had risen meteorically in the 1950’s as the author of "The Outsider", a biographical examination of the visionary impulse within Western art, and had fallen just as quickly, as a series of highly public sexual escapades and a realisation that some of his ideas were deeply idiosyncratic saw him being dropped by the gatekeepers of Hampstead literary life like a hot pentacle.

Wilson’s response to personal and professional ridicule throughout the 1960’s was to release a torrent of work, both factual and fictional, encompassing biography, philosophy, detective fiction and science fiction. Voluminously well-read, he enlisted the ideas of such varied thinkers as Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jung and Abraham Maslow to support his central idea; a kind of anti-existentialism that posited that reality is what we experience in "peak moments" of involuntary visionary wonder, rather than the listless banality that we experience in our daily lives. Although this idea has a long history in Eastern mysticism and Christian esotericism, Wilson went further in speculating that the task of human consciousness was not to mediate and interpret reality, but to narrow and compress it, to block out rather than gather in.


Following the social ructions at the end of the 1960’s, the Seventies, perhaps not coincidentally, saw an explosion of what we would now call Fortean phenomena: UFO sightings and abductions, poltergeist hauntings, appearances of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. In 1971, Wilson published "The Occult", which fortuitously coincided with this deluge of psychic arcana, and revived interest in his work, but perhaps the strangest and most perplexing adventure he became involved in was documented in the book he co-authored with "cryptozoologist" Ted Holiday, "The Goblin Universe".

Holiday was convinced that the Loch Ness Monster, along with other denizens of what he called "the phantom menagerie" such as the Yeti, the mystery big cats of the English home counties and extra-terrestrials, were not real creatures, but what he called "thoughtforms" - manifestations of the human collective unconscious that have a tendency to form when certain highly charged locations are visited by highly sensitive individuals. Holiday, who claimed to have seen Nessie on several occasions, regarded these manifestations as being irretrievably evil, the product of the more grotesque aspect of whatever unknown power organises the universe.

In 1973, in what Wilson considered to be a dangerously reckless move, Holiday enlisted a Presbyterian priest by the name of Donald Omand to accompany him out onto the water to exorcise the loch. Although the exorcism passed off without apparent incident, within a few days Holiday and his accomplices were to encounter a bewildering array of bizarre phenomena, including mysterious flashing lights, and sudden tornados that would shake the walls of their homes before abating in seconds. Holiday himself would come across one of the notorious "men in black" while attempting to investigate an alleged UFO landing site. It was to be a fateful meeting - he would suffer a heart attack at exactly the same spot a year later. As a keen student of Jung, he himself would observe: "Synchonicity and the forces that control it never give up".

In an unusual postscript, in 1983 The Police would record this song, which would seem to have a curious resonance with Holiday’s account. Any literal connection would be impossible though - Holiday completed his manuscript just before his death from a second heart attack in 1979, and the book itself wasn’t published until 1986, meaning that at the time the song was written no-one other than Holiday’s mother and Wilson would have known his full story.