Assuming the Exorcist letter is authentic, why would Z consider the Exorcist “saterical comidy”? Why did he feel the need to send a letter about it?
(Apologies if this has been discussed before. I looked but didn’t find a thread.)
How could anyone do anything but speculate about this since the Zodiac has not been found? Just like on other topics…nobody but the Zodiac knows. Hope he is found alive and asked all these questions!
Speculation is useful sometimes. That he didn’t just call it comedy, specifically satire, says something about who he is.
Perhaps The Exorcist subject matter meant something to him. At the time, that movie got a lot of publicity, including local news coverage, for the amount of people passing out and getting sick watching it. People were waiting hours in line to see it.
Well it heavily mocked Catholicism, something a deranged Protestant might enjoy in a satirical sense.
Or Zodiac was a Anti-abortionist… seeing 1970’s youth react to the exorcist whilst being very liberal might be classed as satirical comedy.
Everyone gets that he was being sarcastic, right?
If the devil was sitting there, watching a movie about himself, what would he think? He would likely laugh and say what a joke because nothing on screen can compare. Its all imaginative.
The Zodiac is really no different.
He is sitting there amongst a crowd of people, afraid of and sick by what they are watching on the screen, and he is like – you just don’t know . I don’t think it was as much the movie as it was the crowd and their reactions.
I have no doubts he thought it was a gas.
Soze
Yeah, although I’d add you don’t have to be the devil, or a serial killer to enjoy horror movies ironically. I was one of those teenagers who watched horror movies ironically. As an adult I’m more squeemish, but I won’t say I find Zodiac’s comment entirely unrelatable.
Well it heavily mocked Catholicism, something a deranged Protestant might enjoy in a satirical sense.
Or Zodiac was a Anti-abortionist… seeing 1970’s youth react to the exorcist whilst being very liberal might be classed as satirical comedy.
Thanks for the thoughts so far everyone. The thing that I puzzle over is that satire has a target in mind. What was he intending as the target? He writes it as if it’s obvious but, to me, the movie isn’t particularly easy to connect to satire specifically. He coulda just trolled by saying it was a comedy to him. My best guess has been he intended Catholicism but in the movie the priest ends up as a kind of hero and within the general trolling of the letters, iirc, he doesn’t really come after religion (I’m definitely open to correction on my thinking there).
“If the devil was sitting there, watching a movie about himself, what would he think?”
As a side note, think about how chilling it is that people mighta stood long minutes in line to watch this movie with a real killer of multiple people right next to them?
Perhaps it was just further evidence of his pseudointellectual pretentiousness. The "satire" description doesn’t really make sense.
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As a side note, think about how chilling it is that people mighta stood long minutes in line to watch this movie with a real killer of multiple people right next to them?
That’s what I was alluding to when I said ",you just don’t know". The people there had no clue.
Soze
When I went to see The Exorcist in the cinema when it was reissued 20 years ago, half the audience laughed and other half screamed. Many people read it as a comedy.
Moreover, I always got the impression that Zodiac sees The Exorcist as ‘satire’, because he sees himself as demonically possessed. And since he has lived it, the filmic representation is a joke to him.
But as others have pointed out, its also part of his pseudo-intellectualism; the necessity for him to reference the Zeitgeist, because he’s so desperate to be part of the popular imagination. People queued around the block to see the film when it first came out.
William Peter Blatty, the author of the book, was a Pynchon-style satirist (or so I’ve read). For a long time, I assumed he was a pulp writer, but he was actually a hardcore academic literary type, albeit one who made a good living writing film scripts.
Frequent targets of post-modern satire in the post-war years were doctors and the medical industry. There are a lot of villain doctors (Dr. Benway in Naked Lunch being an obvious example, Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a more well known one), trying to use their power to enforce conformity under the guise of helping the patient. Along these lines, a lot of the medical testing stuff in The Exrocist is quietly satirical – all of these cold, rational doctors trying to deploy scientific reasoning on a fundamentally anti-scientific event. No one is willing to stand up and say, "You know, I think your daughter is possessed." To do that would be to violate the norms of that society. So they just run another test. The essence of satire is using comedy to test the accepted underpinnings of that society. I think you see that pretty clearly in The Exorcist.
Blatty was a Catholic and the idea of the story is that you have this extremely medieval event happening in a hyper-rational secular society, and in particular a hyper-rational secular household. The mom goes doctor-hopping trying to come up with a reason that her obviously possessed daughter really just has a brain tumor or something and to find a doctor who can giver her a pill and make it go away. It’s only when she adopts a more religious, irrational, Medieval and Catholic outlook that she can save her child.
That said, I don’t laugh much. Especially in the last half hour. Which is scary as shit.
Can’t say I ever laughed at the exorcist movie but I can say for certain I wasn’t scared. Never have I found a movie that scared me.
Liked your post above. Thank you.
Soze
Along these lines, a lot of the medical testing stuff in The Exrocist is quietly satirical – all of these cold, rational doctors trying to deploy scientific reasoning on a fundamentally anti-scientific event. No one is willing to stand up and say, "You know, I think your daughter is possessed." To do that would be to violate the norms of that society. So they just run another test. The essence of satire is using comedy to test the accepted underpinnings of that society. I think you see that pretty clearly in The Exorcist.
That’s an interesting and sophisticated reading. Zodiac’s cultural readings are a little off, to say the least. But he is someone that scoffed at the law and deviated from social norms.
1973ish video on the cultural impact of The Exorcist.
