Therein lies a great part of the film's power: that we are able to have our individual experiences of it which may be divergent. Really, there's several different ways to follow _The Exorcist_ when you're watching it. William Peter Blatty's story and script are really brilliantly crafted, in fact. It's quite streamlined work. There are four parallel stories, and every time I watch the film, it seems to be about a different character. It's Father Merrin's story, that of a lonely quest for knowledge, documentation and driving out the demon from wherever it manifests itself. It's also Father Karras's story - helping  _rescue_ Regan seems like something for which he's been unconsciously preparing for his entire life. It's Chris MacNeil's story - that of a successful actress and seemingly successful mother driven to hysterics by something she can't explain. I find the fact that she's an atheist one of the film's greatest and most subtle dramatic iron! ies. Then, of course, at the end of the day it's Regan's story, that of an "innocent", trusting child corrupted. I mean, she did trust the man with the horse (in my reading of the film, he's the one that passed the demon on to her) and then Captain Howdy.

 

Getting back to different experiences of a film, I think that for me, the value of a film increases when there are enough _ambiguities_ in so that different people can have different interpretations of it, when there isn't a _set_ way to take a film, and by the same token, there are some films that the same person can intrpret differently every time they watch them. Such films hold up to numerous repeat viewings, as they are a fundamentally new experience each time. One such film is Andrei Tarkovsky's _Stalker_.

 

The notion of ambiguities in film is intriguing to me. I was reading an interview with Scott Hicks yesterday on the Australian website Urban Cinefile (http://www.urbancinefile.com.au, it's a great website, with some really penetrating interviews, by the way) where he said that Americans don't like ambiguity for the most part, and he felt compelled to film an extra scene for _Hearts in Atlantis_ explaining who the Low Men where. Perhaps he's right in that viewers that are just looking to switch off their brain and be entertained would get a headache trying to figure out who the Low Men were. In my case, for lack of the extra scene, I would just imagine who they were, and what's more is I have many American friends who would do the same. I understand the criticism of how big studio pictures that are mass marketed often _insult the intelligence_ of the viewer in that everything is neatly resolved in a fairly ironclad way, and w! orse still, screenwriting is often taught in the same way.

 

Wim Wenders once commented that film must refer to life, and not detract from it. I wholly agree with this statement - a film has so much more value when it's not escapist. I value films you have to _work at_ watching, and ones where enough is left to the imagination to allow plasticity of interpretation from viewer to viewer, and viewing to viewing!

 

Getting back to William Peter Blatty, I'm sure at least somebody on this list has seen _The Ninth Configuration_, both written AND directed by Blatty. It's based on a novel of his that is much less well-known than the Exorcist called _Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane_. Now if ever there was a film that is film-philosophy discussion material, this is it! The _endlessly quotable dialogue_ that Leonard Maltin refers to in his (positive) review of the film is mostly the philosophical-religious exchanges between spooked, troubled Colonel Kane (Stacey Keach) and almost equally troubled _insane_ ex-astronaut Captain Cutshaw (Scott Wilson.) Among other things, they get into a Nietzschean  _God is Dead_  discussion. Blatty himself commented on the film that people either find it incredibly pretentious or a tremendous achievement. I'm curious to see what other people on this list thought of it.