3:4:25

E.5th Street, NYC.

“So, we must be careful,’ David said to me, ‘lest we lose our faith—and become possessed.’ He was no longer speaking of the film, nor was he speaking of the church. I carried this somewhat chilling admonition away with me. When I saw the film again, I was most concerned with the audience. I wondered what they were seeing, and what it meat to them.”

-James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

I recently reread Baldwin’s essay again, written in 1975. This passage is from the very end of the book, where Baldwin writes about watching The Exorcist (1973). I worry about this too, all the time. About the terrible things people are hearing and watching and have been seeing and watching for decades. Those things and their power over people have only gotten worse and more total. Rereading Baldwin’s essay since I first read it when I wrote about The Exorcist in my 2019 book, Picture Cycle, which spans 10 years of writing, I now disagree with Baldwin’s reading of the film, though of course it contains a number of important passages about the hypocrisy and emptiness of our fake so-called “emancipated” society.

This is the line from Baldwin’s essay that is most striking and relevant to me today: “[The Devil] does not fool around with little girls: we do.”

This declaration says it all.

Baldwin writes no further on this. But it is enough. Maybe he wrote more and his editors told him to take it out. A successful writer is not the one who rocks the boat too much, or at all these days.

Since I was a child, a little girl myself, I was haunted by something in The Exorcist that I could not understand (the movie was, by the way, constantly on prime-time TV when I was growing up. So were many other very scary movies, like The Shining and The Omen. Abnormal in itself), something that permeated the film. Something real. I later came to refer to the movie as a snuff film. Now I understand what I meant by that. The Exorcist was designed as an Mkultra psyop to program film audiences. It is also about MKultra programming. The painful and extensive medical and psychiatric tests Regan is forced to undergo repeatedly are the most terrifying and illuminating aspect of the film, and the key, I believe, to truly understanding it. The Exorcist is both about and operated by our shadow government. A film that pretends to care about God and that presents evil as purely supernatural. A film that pretends the Devil is the face of that hidden world (Baldwin: “history being so largely his invention”) that had, until recently, been forever kept behind a veil, a veil everything is wrapped up in.

This means: The Exorcist is not about Satan, it is about Satanic ritual abuse (SRA), and that is what why those onscreen medical machines and tests that traumatize Regan and audiences alike are so instrumental to the movie’s methods and techniques of terror, shock, and awe. There is so much more to say about this, so much more that I have unearthed in my research for my book, Time Tells: ACTING.

It is absolutely true, as Baldwin writes, that the Devil—evil—is the loss of faith, the possession and corruption that faithlessness makes us susceptible to and capable of, and the wide celebration of a faithless existence as “freedom.” “The Devil is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself.”