by John Hug
Dear doctor, this is (at least) the seventh first sentence for this article.
Don’t worry, this is not going to be a recursive article about the process of writing this very article. That would warrant an eyeroll.
This article is for those authors who wish they’d gone to the seventh, eighth narrative hook before sending that manuscript to their friends. Who knew something was wrong but sent it anyway. Perhaps to exhibit fearlessness, to bravely receive feedback, or to get something out there (goddamnit). Who are perhaps not ashamed, but rather chagrined, that they didn’t see earlier what those readers—with glazed eyes and constrained sighs—saw immediately.
William Peter Blatty, sadly, if he ever experienced this sort of awareness about what had gone wrong in his 1971 seminal work The Exorcist, certainly didn’t feel strongly enough about it to stop him from publishing. And no such feeling stopped him from winning awards at the 1973 Oscars for the corresponding screenplay. Not only that: demonic cinema has been indelibly touched by his imagery of heads spinning around, infernal muttering, and projectile bile.
Nonetheless, I believe The Exorcist is an example of narrative aimlessness, one we should investigate so that we all can better recognize in our own works when the suspense we thought we wrote just isn’t there. I will also give an example from Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining, which utilizes some of the same story elements, to show how King’s usage of “the supernatural at the doctor” demonstrates his superior grasp of tension.
(Spoilers for half-century-old books are incoming.)
There is a lot I could say about what is wrong with The Exorcist. Namely: tumbling perspectives that turn over gradually from character to character over interminable, suspenseless chapters; confusing and uninteresting dialogue; a gaggle of drunk priests who are hard to distinguish; a crisis of faith that just isn’t; a reliance on shock; a prologue that doesn’t really bear on the rest of the story; and a crime subplot that seems forced and is pointless. Ouch. As mighty as these narrative sins are, they are all symptoms of a deeper problem with The Exorcist, a problem which I believe is most keenly felt when Regan MacNeil, a sweet, twelve-year-old girl, is taken by her mother Chris to the doctor(s) as a result of her alarming symptoms.
After an uninformative, vague prologue, the perspective in The Exorcist switches to Chris MacNeil. Chris is an actress, seemingly an A-lister, and a divorced mother of one. She’s friendly with her director, a mercurial drunk. The demonic activity begins in just the second paragraph of part one, chapter one. Chris hears “(a)lien code tapped out by a dead man.” This sound is coming from her daughter’s bedroom. These events escalate through the novel. To Blatty’s credit, the first chapter is great at humanizing the girl. Regan is sweet and portrayed authentically: she dabbles on a Ouija Board with her imaginary friend ‘Captain Howdy,’ seeing nothing of the coincidence her mother does, which is that her absent father’s name is Howard. She likes going out to the movies and the Hot Shoppe for shakes. Her birthday passes and she asks innocently about why people have to die.
Then she starts behaving strangely. She spits on people, pees on the floor, and adopts a heavy usage of the word cunt. She does unspeakable things with a crucifix and ruins an excruciating dinner party, proving, perhaps, that the demon isn’t all bad. Her condition deteriorates until the very end.
Early in this process, Blatty does the thing that all of us writers are trained to do. He’s come up with an excellent idea and some great imagery, as mentioned (though I am a hard-no regarding the perforative geometry of a handheld crucifix as a sexual insertable, certainly for a child). Now, he feels that he must follow the characters where they take him. And as I said, the doctor’s office is a reasonable step. If you were in Chris MacNeil’s position, it’s what you would do.
As an author, you’ve probably done this. Just follow the characters, genius!
Ahem.
Dear doctor, I bid thee consider the expectations of a reader climbing through one hundred pages of psychiatric evaluations, hypnotisms, spinal taps, and so on, after paying $17.99 pre-tax for a book called The Exorcist!
This is where the problem really begins. Yes, I noticed that Blatty’s handling of dialogue was subpar during that dinner party, but every writer has their weakness. And at first, there was nothing wrong with the doctors in the story. They were a backdrop to showcase the escalating supernaturality around Regan’s behavior. When Regan wasn’t in her violently shaking bed, the sweetie was spitting and calling doctors cunts, and so forth.
The problem, as I stated above, is that we didn’t leave the doctor’s office.
Blatty introduces the idea that Regan needs to see a doctor on page ninety-nine (HarperCollins, 2011). Yet Chris MacNeil doesn’t meet Damien Karras, the priest who eventually initiates the exorcism, until page two-hundred and eleven. Considering that my edition is three hundred and seventy-seven pages, that’s about one-third of the book. What is more, there is a significant period where Karras investigates Regan clinically himself. It’s not until the final sequences that Karras has truly accepted that an exorcism is preferable to continued psychoanalysis and neurological procedures.
Now, not all of the pages between ninety-nine and two-hundred and eleven pertain to medical investigations. As I mentioned, there is a boring crime narrative, as well as character development for Karras that isn’t quite the demonstration of a “crisis of faith” I believe Blatty intended. The narrative languishes. The “scary” moments aren’t so much frightening as disgusting. I really suggest you read it yourself (preferably via library card), just for the affirmation that you could definitely do better. Yes, my reading of The Exorcist comes decades after this imagery was fresh and biting, and perhaps time has precipitated my expectations.
But King’s The Shining, a story of equivalent age and possibly surpassing The Exorcist in cultural capital, still gives me goosebumps. Even after reading and watching it more than twice.
Danny Torrance, the five-year-old boy central to The Shining, is not possessed, but is also subject to similar supernatural symptoms as Regan MacNeil. He senses odd things and urinates on himself frequently. And Danny, like Regan, is taken to be examined by a doctor.
At first, King’s and Blatty’s use of the “supernatural at the doctor” do not seem to be comparable. Danny’s doctor’s visit occurs solely in chapter seventeen, which spans about three percent of the novel’s length. That’s still quite a bit of text, considering this is another long-winded King novel, but still, when compared with the twenty or even thirty percent of The Exorcist which deals with various doctors and clinical explanations for Regan’s possession, it really seems as if we’re dealing with a scene on one hand versus a theme on the other. But this is my entire argument.
Doctor’s visits do not a demonological tale make!
King manages to get Danny in and out of the doctor’s office and back to the horror in a far more entertaining manner and in a way that enhances the story, whereas Blatty makes us wait as character after character discovers what we knew the moment we picked up the book and read the title. The reader isn’t given enough evidence to suggest that Regan isn’t possessed; we are never interested in the long-winded psychiatric evaluations about possible diagnoses we know Regan does not have. Shots and medicine, interviews and scans. Even the hypnosis scene doesn’t really tell us anything we need to know. It’s a demon. It’s a demon. It’s a “cunting” DEMON. Deep down, I think that Blatty knew this as he was writing. This is why Dennings, the drunk director, is violently and mysteriously defenestrated, and detective Kinderman is introduced to try and figure out how and why. So what if the detective thinks Regan killed Dennings and spun his head backwards? Prison for life? The demon is threatening an eternity in hell!
By contrast, King recognizes that the reader is after something more in The Shining, and he delivers it from page one.
The first sentence of The Shining is: “Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.”
This, to me, is critically different from The Exorcist’s entry into tension. With Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in the 1980 Stanley Kubrick classic, we’re immediately cast into the icy interview between him and Ullman, our officious little prick. Through this barbed back and forth unfolds the central conceit that is to come. The bad blood between Ullman and Jack, which will only grow through testy phone calls (one of which happens not long after the doctor’s visit), pertains to Jack’s identity as an alcoholic (former, assuredly), and Ullman’s assertion that the Overlook is a place at which wintering from the fall to spring can result in cabin fever, a bad thing for alcoholics. Jack, tongue in cheek, replies that cabin fever is “a slang term for the claustrophobic reaction that can occur when people are shut in together over long periods of time. The feeling of claustrophobia is externalized as dislike for the people you happen to be shut in with.”
Jack takes the job. Cabin fever won’t touch him, he says, because he’s educated and he likes to read. The Shining has begun.
Fast forward to chapter seventeen, when Danny gets his EEG. The reader has already been told about his Shine, as it’s called, via some charming exposition from the Overlook Hotel’s cook, Dick Halloran. They already know that the hotel is malignant, that the wasps rising out of the inert nest were magically re-animated to sting Danny, that hidden within the hotel walls are decades of REDRUM. And though Danny’s doctor is equally as professional as Regan’s and is rightfully concerned about what, exactly, is wrong with him, King uses the scene to deepen the intrigue into the implications of that supernaturality. After a few pages describing perfunctory medical procedure, the doctor changes the subject to the Shine, focusing on Danny’s imaginary friend, Tony. It is not just that we, as readers, know that information from Tony will accelerate the drama with the Overlook Hotel, though that thought does prickle the spine. No, the suspense is created like this:
Danny, of Tony: “I used to hope he’d come every day, because he always showed me good things, especially since Mommy and Daddy don’t think about DIVORCE anymore.” He adds that now, Tony only shows him bad things, things we as readers know pertain to the Overlook hotel. Danny adds: “It’s like I can’t remember because it’s so bad I don’t want to remember. All I can remember when I wake up is REDRUM.”
This is how the supernatural at the doctor becomes literary tension in The Shining. The dark portents of Danny’s supernatural powers don’t confirm the existence of the supernatural, which we assumed from the outset. Instead, this scene helps confirm that the characters, including the hotel itself, are indeed on a crash course of suspicion and dread. And this can be done because the characters are, in fact, in conflict to begin with.
In summary, The Exorcist is an amateurish display of an author doing something we’ve all done; that is, take a good concept and churn it, unsure where to go next. Possibly because the screenplay almost entirely cuts the doctor scenes, Blatty escapes with an Oscar (despite not replacing the theme with much tension). We are unlikely to be as lucky. Just so, it helps to have examples, good and bad, and if you ever feel yourself stuck writing something like the beginning of The Exorcist, I urge you to read or reread The Shining. Perhaps King will help point the way, and both of us can start that eighth rewrite sooner.
