A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (10 page)

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From the gooey gory midnight show cheese to the highfalutin art-house highbrow. Beware of spoilers. I WILL SPOIL YOU!!!!!

BIO:
Karen Brissette

Tuesday, November, 15, 20 _ _

The Possession
, Fifteen Years Later: Episode 1 (Part 2)

All right, all right, let’s dig into the first episode, shall we? WE SHALL!!!

First, a quick addendum/important follow-up point to the previous blog post about the show’s opening. Besides serving as the patriarchal-breakdown theme of the show (as I already discussed in GREAT detail), the show’s opening explains (without having to spell it out for everyone) how a family would possibly consider allowing a network to broadcast their living nightmare: a teenage daughter going through a particularly nasty, devastating psychotic break, while believing (or pretending, yeah?) she was possessed by a demon, and a stereotypical demon at that. Let me say it simply: The Barretts were about to default on their mortgage and lose the house. They needed cash, and quick! The show’s producers paid them that quick cash for their televised pounds of flesh.

(aside 1: Sixth Finger Productions was a new company headed by Randy Francis, who was a twentysomething venture capitalist [
um, thanks for the money, Dad, gimme more
] and who has since carved out a niche producing direct-to-video fantasy flicks that rip off J. K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other fantasy writers with initials in their names. How Sixth Finger heard of the Barretts’ story, how they knew to swoop in and offer financial salvation, and exactly where all the money came from before the Discovery Channel became involved is still a bit of a mystery. Father David Wanderly, the priest who befriended John Barrett, is the clear go-between for the Barretts and the production company. However, rumors of Wanderly’s involvement with conservative PACs, their monies being rerouted to the production, backroom deals with the archdiocese to keep his parish’s church from closing, and rich and powerful and mustache-twisting Opus Dei members ominously being involved are all iffy hearsay at best, as far as little old me can tell. I’ve found both unauthorized accounts of the show [
To Hell and Back: The Real Story Behind The Possession
and
Possession, Lies, and Videotape: The Dark Angels Behind the Possession
] lacking in the how-the-show-came-to-be
department, and frankly, poorly written overall. Yes, I said that.)

Okay. Enough of that. For realsies this time. Let’s get to it. To the
it
! To the fictional possession of poor Marjorie Barrett, age fourteen.

After the intro, the bulk of the pilot is a string of reenactments, and sets of interviews with the parents and Father Wanderly. If the intro was the opening argument about what was at stake for the soul of family values and patriarchy in America, the meat of the pilot was the show laying out their evidence of Marjorie’s possession by an evil spirit, entity, sprite, demon, impish ne’er-do-well.

The story they present sounds a tad familiar, yeah? That’s because it should.

The Exorcist
(the movie directed by William Friedkin based on the novel by William Peter Blatty) is a 1970s cultural touchtone and phenomenon. Admittedly, it has lost some of its punch, its visceral impact. To wit, aside 2.

(aside 2: I asked the neighbor’s twelve-year-old kid what his favorite movie was and he surprised me by saying
The Exorcist
. I asked him why. He said that, “It was really funny.” I know, the kid is a total psychopath!!!! And put three locks on my doors now!!!! But you get my point. Kids these days, ain’t a’scared by that movie no more.)

But, sheeeeet, when that movie originally came out, it messed people up big-time. Many a critic/academic/smart lady has written about how
The Exorcist
combined the Hollywood budget and art-house street cred with exploitation, and heavy on the exploitation. I mean, people lined up to see the thing because they’d heard about Regan’s potty mouth (literal and figurative!), the crucifix masturbation (fun
at parties, not that I’ve tried it, no), and spinning head (that I’ve tried!!!). It wasn’t the power of Christ that compelled you, but gore, baby, gore! You *Karen wags her finger* shouldn’t be surprised that the lukewarm parade of PG-13 possession movies of the 2000s never came close to approaching the critical or popular successes of
The Exorcist. The Exorcist
was a wildly popular
event
horror film, and one that, unlike its politically progressive/transgressive, indie counterparts (
Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
), just happened to be one of the most conservative horror movies ever. Good vs. evil!
Yay, good!
The pure, pristine little white girl saved by white men and religion!
Yay, white men and religion!
All you need is
love
faith! The triumphant return of the status quo! Family values! Heroic middle-classers battling a foreign boogeyman (the demon Pazuzu was literally a brown-skinned foreigner first glimpsed by Father Merrin in the movie’s opening in Iraq)!

Yes, much of
The Possession
follows the urtext of
The Exorcist
and that of other horror films. At times, the reenactment’s obviously brazen sameness to classic scenes strikes an innate cultural chord (yeah, I’m making that shit up as I go, sounds good though) within us, and in a weirdly reassuring way authenticating what we’re seeing. Other scenes are clever and even subtle enough in their deviations from their antecedents to somehow feel new again. Or their antecedents are obscure enough to feel new, or new enough. Yeah.

Let me break down a bunch of the reenactments:

—Marjorie stands over Merry’s bed, hovering over her sister, which clearly recalls the found footage is-it-a-haunted-house-or-demon-possession movie?
Paranormal Activity
. Both camera angles and lighting are similar. Marjorie is dressed just like Katie, wearing boxers and a tight T-shirt.
The
Possession
spices up the simple dread of hovering over a sleeping loved one with Marjorie pinching her little sister’s nose shut. It adds a layer of sadism that’s subtle and hints at possible greater acts of violence.

(aside 3: Yeah, more politics. Sorry. But it’s just so there and waggling in our faces!!!! The reenactment actress playing Marjorie, Liz Jaffe, was no fourteen years old. She was twenty-three and looked it. Marjorie was still a kid. Miss Jaffe was not. Liz had similar hair color, skin tone, etc., to Marjorie, but she was obviously more physically . . . cough . . . mature. She wore makeup, tight clothing, and in the masturbation scene, no clothing, but oh, she had on a few digitally blurred pixels
to protect the poor audience from her nasty lady parts
. So, yeah, “the male gaze” [please see Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”] is in full effect in
The Possession
at both extremes. The camera ogles a sexualized Liz Jaffe whenever she’s on screen. When the real Marjorie is eventually on screen [at the end of the pilot and in the following episodes], she’s ogled in a different though no less demeaning way. Real Marjorie is an object to be observed, but never too closely as we the voyeurs might find she’s a real teenage girl and actually begin to be concerned for her mental health and general well-being. John Barrett represented the valiant struggle of patriarchy in our decaying, secular, postfeminist society, and Marjorie was the withering object of the camera’s male gaze.)

—Marjorie projectile vomiting all over her family as they watched
Finding Bigfoot
(psst, they never found her!) in the living room was an obvious nod to
The Exorcist
. Maybe not so obvious, this scene is so over the top in its gastric viscera, it recalls the spewing geysers of blood and goo from Sam Raimi’s
Evil Dead
movies (the originals, not the shitty remakes).

—Marjorie’s postpuke, backward crawl out of the living room, away from the family, and up the stairs is the film negative of perhaps the most famous piece of celluloid to be cut from a film: Regan’s contorted “spiderwalk” down the stairs in
The Exorcist
. The special effects in both the show and the movie aren’t convincing and each “walk” scene suffers because of them.

—We get a medley of Marjorie performing contortions and linguistic horrors in the hospital and in her psychiatrist’s office. The inner demon getting its groove on for the benefit of the men (always men) of reason and science in the white antiseptic hospital room just might be the second most stereotypical scene in a possession movie (with the actual clergy-performed exorcism as number one).
The Exorcist, The Rite, The Possession
(the 2012 movie by Sam Raimi, featuring a sneaky little Dybbuk hidden in a Jewish wine cabinet box bought at a yard sale . . . SOLD!), season two of the gory and horny TV series
American Horror Story
, and . . . you get the idea. Marjorie’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hamilton, refused (of course) to be interviewed for the show. Instead we’re treated to creepy witness-protection-type interviews of orderlies, nurses, and office secretaries.

—Marjorie’s midnight screamfest, the jangling camera running down the hallway after Merry, and Marjorie’s wall climb? See
The Last Exorcism
. But don’t see its dumbass ending.

—Dipping briefly into the second episode, there’s the basement reenactment. Marjorie surprises her sister, Merry, down in the basement. Her cold clammy hand lands on Merry’s shoulder. She whispers more sweet
nothings
ramblings, clods of dirt spill from her mouth, cue the eyes rolling white, and then she slowly walks after a screaming Merry up the stairs. Marjorie’s long hair hangs down over her face for most of the scene so that she resembles Sadako, the angry spirit of
Ringu
(or
The Ring
) and other J-horror films.

—Okay, yeah, the masturbation reenactment scene. *Deep breath* In
The Exorcist
, it represents the ultimate blasphemy and proof positive that the girl is possessed by an evil spirit, right? A cute, innocent little girl (wearing a prim nightgown, btw) raving like Tourettic Louis C.K. and jamming Jesus Christ up her vagina so violently she bleeds all over the place. Score one for Pazuzu, and yeah, we’re down that it must be the devil making her do it. So to speak.
The Possession
’s masturbation scene is both more problematic and disturbing. It begins with a camera run from Merry’s POV as she opens her parents’ bedroom door. It’s dark, but we can see Liz Jaffe as Marjorie in profile. She’s on the bed wearing only a small black bra. Digital pixilation boxes obscure her buttocks and her hands. The camera switches away from Merry’s POV to a straight-on, close-up, loving view of Marjorie’s face. The camera pulls back and there’s a series of jump cuts that are so fast we feel like we really
can’t
see much of anything in real time. I’ve watched this scene with countless friends and I’ve asked them what they saw after viewing it in real time and no two answers are the same, until I slow it down. Going frame by frame we see the following: Marjorie biting her lower lip; a shadow on the wall of a bedpost, and can we say phallus?; forearms framing her six-pack abs and navel; open mouth and tongue on her teeth; biceps framing her cleavage; a white inner thigh; blood on white sheets; a wooden cross hanging on the wall; her closed eyes, white forehead, and wooden headboard; a bearded male face covered in blood (hmm, Satan?); a full shot between her legs, dark and pixilated so we can’t see her actual fingers in her actual
dirty lady parts
vagina; the bedpost again, only its shadow is larger than it was previously; her knees together; the wooden cross again, totally in shadow; her feet with curled toes; then finally three different shots of blood on the sheets before the camera returns to her little sister, Merry, but not her POV. After the frenetic cuts we see Marjorie stumbling in the hallway wiping her bloody fingers (also see the locker
room scene in
Carrie
) on the walls and we hear her peeing on the floor, but just in case we don’t get it, Merry says, “You’re peeing on the floor!” (note! Regan peed on the floor in
The Exorcist
but it was in a scene separate from the masturbation scene.) Marjorie says, “I can still hear them. They’ve been here forever!” in a TV-speakers-rattling modulated voice that crosses the Cookie Monster with Wicked Witch of the West and the “help me” man-fly from
The Fly
. The scene ends awkwardly with the camera POV falling to the floor and on its side as though, just like Marjorie, it
has blown its wad
is spent. Marjorie is on the floor, her back to us, buttocks obscured by more pixilation, and Mom and Dad Barrett rush to the hallway and huddle around Marjorie’s body. The camera lingers and its male gaze is conflicted, as it has been during the entire masturbation reenactment scene. It’s both titillated and horrified by the natural expression of a teenage girl’s body.