What compels us to visit The Exorcist?

Ah, the good old days, when priests were both human and heroic. Father Karras and crew drink and swear, joke and box--and drive out demons on the side. Even rarer these days, each priest in the film can talk to pre-menopausal women without freezing into a stuttering rictus.

Max von Sydow doesn't ramble on about Marxist eco-feminist paradigms or call for a group hug. And at the end, he doesn't take a Hawaiian sabbatical. He does he duty, and dies. Before that, he personifies an ever-merciful God, loving the real Regan hiding beneath the pea soup and obscenities.

(The media's image of a priest serves as the canary in the Catholic coal mine. As Rev. Donald B. Cozzens points out in The Changing Face of the Priesthood, we've gone from Bing Crosby's manly, relaxed, competent Father O'Malley, to M*A*S*H's wimpy chaplain in just a generation.)

Catholics renewing their baptismal vows reject Satan, and "the glamour of evil." A delicious phrase, and profoundly insightful, because glamour refers to artificial, deceitful beauty; "glamourous" celebrities are merely concoctions of light and lies, secrets and shadow.

Sometimes, even self-deceived Hollywood gets this. Warren Beatty was criticised for casting himself and Faye Dunaway as the rather homely Bonnie and Clyde. "You're just glorifying violence," insisted one critic. "The real Bonnie and Clyde didn't look like that." "But they thought they did," Beatty rightly replied.

As the exorcist repeatedly reminds Fr. Karras, "the Devil is the father of lies." How ironic that Hollywood (the mendacity factory) makes a movie about an atheist actress who's making a movie, who's daughter is possessed by the Devil--and makes it, if not that scary, than theologically sound.

"Say, do you love movies?" the film's detective desperately, hopefully, asks everyone he meets.

You bet I do.

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