JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 148 из 359In Bangor, where I hung out in my college days, ayoung man was arrested and incarcerated for replacing the seat of his Levis with an American flag. Some fun, huh, kid.
It was more than a generation gap. The two generations seemed, like the San Andreas fault, to be moving along opposing plates of social and cultural conscience, commitment, and definitions of civilized behavior itself. The result was not so much an earthquake as it was a timequake. And with all of this young vs. old nuttiness as a backdrop, Friedkin's film of The Exorcist appeared and became a social phenomenon in itself. Lines stretched around the block in every major city where it played, and even in towns which normally rolled up their sidewalks promptly at 7:30 P.M., midnight shows were scheduled. Church groups picketed; sociologists with pipes pontificated; newscasters did "back of the book" segments for their programs on slow nights. The country, in fact, went on a two-month possession jag.
The movie (and the novel) is nominally about the attempts of two priests to cast a demon out of young Regan MacNeil, a pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair (who later went on to a High Noon showdown with a bathroom plunger in the infamous NBC movie Born Innocent ).
Substantatively, however, it is a film about explosive social change, a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a movie for all those parents who felt, in a kind of agony and terror, that they were losing their children and could not understand why or how it was happening. It's the face of the Werewolf again, a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale in which sweet, lovely and loving Regan turns into a foul-talking monster strapped into her bed and croaking (in the voice of Mercedes McCambridge ) such charming homilies as "You're going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." Religious trappings aside, every adult in America understood what the film's powerful subtext was saying; they understood that the demon in Regan MacNeil would have responded enthusiastically to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock.
A Warner Brothers executive told me recently that movie surveys show the average filmgoer to be fifteen years of age, which may be the biggest reason why the movies so often seem afflicted with a terminal case of arrested development. For every film like Julia or The Turning Point , there are a dozen like Roller Boogie and If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind .
It was more than a generation gap. The two generations seemed, like the San Andreas fault, to be moving along opposing plates of social and cultural conscience, commitment, and definitions of civilized behavior itself. The result was not so much an earthquake as it was a timequake. And with all of this young vs. old nuttiness as a backdrop, Friedkin's film of The Exorcist appeared and became a social phenomenon in itself. Lines stretched around the block in every major city where it played, and even in towns which normally rolled up their sidewalks promptly at 7:30 P.M., midnight shows were scheduled. Church groups picketed; sociologists with pipes pontificated; newscasters did "back of the book" segments for their programs on slow nights. The country, in fact, went on a two-month possession jag.
The movie (and the novel) is nominally about the attempts of two priests to cast a demon out of young Regan MacNeil, a pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair (who later went on to a High Noon showdown with a bathroom plunger in the infamous NBC movie Born Innocent ).
Substantatively, however, it is a film about explosive social change, a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a movie for all those parents who felt, in a kind of agony and terror, that they were losing their children and could not understand why or how it was happening. It's the face of the Werewolf again, a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale in which sweet, lovely and loving Regan turns into a foul-talking monster strapped into her bed and croaking (in the voice of Mercedes McCambridge ) such charming homilies as "You're going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." Religious trappings aside, every adult in America understood what the film's powerful subtext was saying; they understood that the demon in Regan MacNeil would have responded enthusiastically to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock.
A Warner Brothers executive told me recently that movie surveys show the average filmgoer to be fifteen years of age, which may be the biggest reason why the movies so often seem afflicted with a terminal case of arrested development. For every film like Julia or The Turning Point , there are a dozen like Roller Boogie and If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind .