A teenaged girl – not the one I was obsessed with – daydreaming on the front steps of her home in September, 1975. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
I got into an interesting discussion recently with two men who were approximately my age dealing with this question: If somehow each of us could travel in a time machine some 45 years back in time to advise our younger selves, what would the advice be?
We all generally agreed that some emphasis on mindfulness – focusing on the moment – should constitute the basis of this advice.
Looking back, I am struck by how teenage boys, in particular, throw mindfulness to the wind. Indeed, I was reminded of that a year or so ago after being served an epiphany regarding a girl with whom I was obsessed in high school.
Someone posted a high school picture of her on social media, and, well, let’s just say that as a result, I was served a cold-water bath. In a split second, I was disabused of every thought, every regret, every bit of self-loathing every sense of inadequacy that I had harbored for decades in the face of her sheer ambivalence regarding me.
I was suddenly confronted with the thought: What did I ever see in that girl – that rather ordinary girl – that resulted in the expenditure of so much psychological energy?
Indeed, the encounter stirred up, however briefly, a measure of frustration and anger as I reflected on how much energy was squandered on her instead of being invested in things that, quite frankly, likely would have contributed to a better me – a much better, more successful and integrated person.
That, as I see it, is one of the tragedies bound up in youth: that so many stakes in life – high stakes – are bound up in the decisions one is forced to make with an adolescent brain and, in the case of teenage males, a testosterone-throttled body.
Incidentally, I was in a discussion with a friend a couple of weeks ago – someone approximately my age – about the loss of libido that invariably comes with one’s 60’s. He raised the question: How would we have dealt with it as teenagers? My response based on years of reflection: “If I knew way back then what I know now, I would have regarded it as a friggin’ superpower!”
Life really amounts to a series of, well, life lessons – all of the things we encounter and learn to deal with, however agonizingly during the first twenty or so years of our lives.
We learn from them – we even profit from them occasionally – but they are no less painful.
This statement, which was offered in this extensive and deeply thoughtful review, pretty much sums up “The Exorcist,” which was released in 1973.
It was indeed very Catholic.
Yet, that was not the impression that many Americans took away from their first viewing of this deeply disruptive film, providing they managed to exit the theater without fainting or vomiting. Indeed, the reaction to this film among many Americans in what came to be known decades later as Red State America was one of disdain if not deep revulsion.
I can still recall very vividly the viscerally negative and fearful reaction to the film growing up as a Southern Baptist. It was perceived as occultic and vile when, in fact, it amounted to a very thoughtful reaction to modernity and all of the complexity and uncertainty it left in its wake. Moreover, it represents a remarkable 50-year-old time capsule, as it, in large measure, was a reflection of the widespread disquiet over the political animosities and social anomie that had been sparked by Vietnam conflict coupled with the perennial fear of nuclear annhilation and a nagging sense that America was losing the Cold War.
As the political writer Rick Perlstein relates in one of his books, when Chris MacNeil tells Father Karras that “There is a thing up there, and I don’t know what it is,” she was expressing a feeling that many Americans shared about the state of the country in 1973.
As shocking as this may seem to some readers, The Exorcist will remain one of my favorite film – a masterpiece that captures the national mood of a rather dark time in history – in some respects, not all that far removed from the one that prevails today.
I am a late baby-boomer who grew up around the screen, television and theater screen alike, but I am also a broadcast-film major who, in addition to a deep passion for broadcast and film works has a decent working knowledge of how these remarkable and, in many cases, highly consequential products in terms of their lasting impressions on cultural and political discourse, have been developed and perfected over more than a century.
One of the most remarlable cinematic achievements is a 1981 German language film titled “Das Boot,” which depicts life on a Nazi U-Boat during World War II and that, like few war-genre films, depicts the terror of warfare, namely, how it unfolded on a German submarine.
It is based on the accounts of Lothar Günther Buchheim, who served as a naval journalist on a German U-Boat. His account, despite envincing a measure of hostility to the Nazi regime, was published in 1943 and in spite of a severe shortage of paper under the original title “Jäger im Weltmeer” (Hunters of the Ocean). It is still available today, though under the title “Das Boot”.
The German submariners’ experiences within these claustrophobic confines are riveting, all the more when they are subjected to a protracted depth charge assault by a Royal Navy ship. In my humble opinion, this segment of the film ranks as one of the most emotionally charged scenes in the history of film-making.
Yet, speaking also as a student of all facets of World War II, I am also struck by the wider context of the film.
The British Royal Navy was inflicting hell on these vessels for good reason.
Indeed, “Das Boot,” however unintentionally, serves to underscore the lyrics of “Rule Britannia!,” especially the part about Britain’s ruling the waves and never being slaves.
That, to me, was every bit as much a lesson of the film as the experiences of the men on that U-Boat: that even though it had a knife at its throat, Britain was drawing on roughly 300 years of experience as a maritime power to compensate for the loss of its continental allies. All the chronic worry and anticipation, punctuated at times by sheer terror aboard that U-Boat, stemmed from Britain’s unremitting and desperate resolve to put its only remaining strategic asset to optimal use.
If there is such a thing as a “Bucket List” film, “Das Boot” is one of them.
I read stuff like this and count myself fortunate that I grew up as a late boomer in the Appalachian South and whose formative influences were a saint of a mother with a simple, straightford evangelical faith, a strong-willed, cynical, closeted agnostic father who played along with Mom’s religiosity to maintain family harmony, and a book-loving great uncle, a believer, though one who instilled me with a love of the Enlightenment and all that Western civilization secured for us.
I have reflected on these influences a lot in the last decade. Each of them, to one degree or another, regarded themselves as being assigned a lot in life, one on which they could capitalize reasonably fully, but only through cultivating a sense of gratitude for what was given to them and only if their pursuit of happiness and self-actualization were governed by sense moral restraint. Anything beyond that would have been regarded as ill-gotten gain – as something akin to a black art.
What I find extremely unsettling as I advance deeper into old age is that these restraints increasingly are being thrown to the wind. There always has been a deep-seated human propensity to possess some or all of what historically has been consigned to God. Masonry – a deep-seated tradition within my maternal family – allegedly evinces a deep strain of this sentiment, and as the article stresses, American symbolism and identity is, thank to our Masonic Founding Fathers, especially suffused with this sentiment.
Speaking as one with a background in the social sciences and Broadcast-Film Communication, the thought has occurred to me that Western culture, even the American expression of it, once possessed elements that served, consciously or unconsciously, to impose restraints on these impulses – limited communication bandwidth serving as one. Yet, technological advances within the last few decades have removed these restraints, and the impulses have been laid bare, especially among younger generations who have used social media outlets such as TikTok to become “influencers,” which essentially amounts in many cases to their becoming spiritual and religious enterpreneurs – prophets of unboundless individuality, among other things.
It’s strikes me as so unfamiliar – so bizarre, so, well, inimical to all of the values I imbibed growing up. Some 30 or so years ago, many of us were gripped by the idea, what proved to he an illusion, that the Internet, which was ultimately enhanced, if not transformed, by the advent of social media, would secure all of the promises associated with the Enlightenment enterprise. People would discuss and debate, and out of these interactions new insights, highly consequential ones, would emerge.
To be sure, that is one of the tangible effects of the Digital Age. Yet, this technology, certainly in its social media expression, also seems to have amplified human failings. Somehow I am reminded of Witness, the autobiographical account of Whitaker Chambers, one who, however reluctantly, ended up standing in the cultural crosscurrents of the Cold War in the early 1950’s.
Chambers, a former Communist Party and Soviet agent, the product of a horrifically emotionally and psychologically deprived childhood, embraced communism while a student at Columbia partly because of the sense of purpose that it instilled in him and so many othet culturally and psychologically displaced intellectuals of his day.
Over time, though, he began to discern how communism not only was embraced by some to supplant conventional religion but even how it stoked a human passiom not only to secure the attributes of God but even to supplant Him entirely.
Chambers recalls being haunted by the Genesis account he learned in childhood describing the temptation of humanity in the Garden: “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
What I personally find remarkable about the article linked in the first paragraph is how it illustrates how this human hunger is now bound by few, if any, restraints, whether in the form of ideology or bandwidth.
It is primal, boundless, passionate, heedless, yet plaintive and puerile.
It is like nothing our species has ever experienced.
Sociology was one of my college majors. It is the butt of jokes, derided as one of the most impractical of college majors. Yet it taught me to see the world and even to think about it in a different way. Most important of all, though, it has instilled me with a keen fascination for society – what makes it work, why it is so prone to so much upheaval and even failure, and why it imposes so much suffering on so many.
We wonder why civilization is accompanied by so much strife and heartache. It should be as plain as day. We live in a fusion of technology, language, writing, mathematics, and Enlightenment-era science, along with a multitude of other things that serves not only as kind of protective layering – an incorporeal exoskeleton but also as an extra layer of cerebral cortex and even as something akin to a beehive.
This contrivance, which has been improvised by humans across eons as a means of securing a viable niche within existence and that supplies its own synergy has enabled us to become the dominant and certainly the most disruptive species on the planet. Yet, in some respects, this incorporeal networked exoskeleton, as I have come to call it, could be likened to a blanket, a rather threadbare one, that by its very nature, isn’t capable of encompassing all of human complexity.
As this recent Aeon article stresses, there are acute differences among us, notably in terms of how we process the stimuli we encounter in our daily encounters. Consequently, this exoskeleton, as essential and as marvelously adaptive as it is, simply can’t can account for all of the stupefying complexity that defines us as a species.
For some reason, I am reminded of the religious mystics among us, those who possess traits that have have equipped them with unique, often compelling views of the transcendent and ineffable. I count my late mother as one of them. This has led me to speculate on occasion about how different life would be if the first monotheistic religion, Judaism, had not evolved into a textual religion, and it is worth stressing that this development was far from preordained.
How much more valued would these mystics be – how much more would they contribute to religious discourse – if Judaism and other religions had not evolved into textual faiths, remaining instead cultic faiths focused largely on sacred places and events?
To be sure, the eventual evolution of Judaism into a textual faith had major implications for the direction that Western Civilization ultimately took. Could this civilization have become as culturally and technologically dense but for the emphasis on sacred texts that the religions of the book ultimately provided?
Perhaps not. Yet it serves to illustrate that the the improvised shell that humans and their hominid forebears began improvising many millennia ago essentially amounted to a bracketing of human endeavor – a reining of of certain facets of human insight and striving that, potentially, at least, could have carried our species in remarkably different directions and may have shaped us in ways that diverged significantly from how we define humanity today in the 21st century.
Winston Churchill posing, in characteristically obstinate form, at age 7.
One of the more clever memes currently making its rounds within social media depicts two elite Romans discussing how a mongrelized language spoken on the periphery of the Empire would replace Latin and Greek as the de facto language of the world. It speaks enormous volumes about the human condition. We can’t fathom how the technological and conceptual breakthroughs of today will be capitalized on centuries from now.
For that matter, the Romans never could have fathomed that the transcontinental United States Interstate Highway System, constructed on a landmass of which they had no knowledge, would be built to conform to the dimensions they established on their own roads to accommodate conventionally-sized carriages.
Yet, they likely would have regarded as even more unfathomable the fact that Latin and what was regarded at the time as the far more erudite language of Greek would be supplanted by a language that evolved in the provincial backwater of their empire.
For that matter, they never could have anticipated that a deeply troubled but profoundly intelligent and perceptive boy, a child of nobility, raised in this once far-flung, strife-ridden region of the empire, would reject the precepts of an elite, privileged education based on the study of these classical languages and their singular texts and, as punishment, would be assigned instead to what was regarded as a inferior education: one grounded in the intensive mastery of this mongrelized language.
Of course, this mongrelized language is English and the troubled boy was Winston Churchill, who regarded this remedial instruction as fortuitous, one that enabled him to carry this mongrelized language to soaring rhetorical heights to save the civilization, Western Civilization, which succeeded and was inspired by both it Greek and Roman antedents. Of course, Churchill was perceptive enough to appreciate that the very strength of the English language stems from its nature as a mongrelized tongue, its Latin elements, brought across the Channel by the Norman invaders, serving to enhance what is regarded even now as the straightforward simplicity of the language’s Anglo-Saxon elements.
Its is this sort of unanticipated mutation and disruption that makes the study of human development – all facets of it – so compelling.
I have always found debate regarding this remarkable juncture in history – humanity’s first encounter with what could be described as a disembedded Earth – quite fascinating.
Was this encounter planned? Of course it was. Governments as powerful and sophisticated as the United States do not leave any facet of a multi-million-dollar scientific undertaking to chance, and the Apollo 8 mission, which recorded this remarkable image, was one special undertaking.
A Planetary Obsession – and Stage
The United States in December, 1968, was embroiled in what had become the most peculiar but consequential geopolitical struggle in history: a “cold war” with the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, in which the ideological systems of both were put on the line.
Adding an extra layer of surreality was the fact that this titanic struggle had become a major planetary obsession, widely reported in media, all facets of the struggle carefully observed and analyzed by academics and media commentators, especially in terms of how this rivalry had been carried into the frigid vacuum of space. The presumption was that one side would emerge victorious, having demonstrated that its system was the most adaptable and sustainable.
Needless to say, from an American and Western perspective, a lot was riding on the Apollo 8 mission, which was hastily improvised after satellite images revealed that the Soviets had positioned what appeared to be a translunar rocket on a launch pad in Kazakhstan.
The Second Most Consequential Manned Space Mission in History
Aside from the Apollo 11 mission’s landing on the Moon, Apollo 8, with the possible exception of the Apollo 13 “successful failure” mission, is regarded as the most consequential undertaking in the history of manned space exploration. The United States, in the face of this presumed threat, felt compelled to stage the first translunar mission in history – and significantly ahead of schedule.
Optics were a major focus of this mission. It had to be choreographed in a way that underscored the singular nature of this mission – the first manned craft to venture beyond Earth orbit into deep space.
Planners could not afford to overlook any opportunity to underscore the significance of this undertaking.
NASA planners had every intention of the astronauts making a picture of the Earth rising over the Moon’s barren landscape. To be sure, the three astronauts – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders – were so caught up in their other assigned tasks that they almost overlooked this critical assignment.
One of the Most Iconic Images in History
What came out of this, of course, was one of the most iconic images in human history: the “Earthrise” photo, in which a blue, luminous Earth stands above the stark gray surface of the Moon. It presented Earth in an entirely different way – even in a radically different context – and it has served to galvanize the sentiment of both the religious and secular among us for more than a half century, underscoring the beauty of an omnipotent God’s handiwork to the former and the fragility of the planetary biosphere, perilously suspended in the frigid vacuum of space, to the latter.
Yet, what I personally find perennially fascinating, speaking as an avid student of both space exploration and the human condition, is the spontaneity narrative that has attached to this image within the last 50-plus years – the perception that Bill Anders was suddenly confronted by this image after a casual gaze through the window, compelling him to record it.
This is not entirely true. Yet, the Earthrise photo is rendered even more compelling by this narrative. And this, one could argue, speaks immense volumes about our species’ cognitive apparatus. We, whether professing religion or unbelief, seem driven to enshroud seminal historical events in mystery.
Dual Takeaways
The religious among us would contend that this deeply seeded penchant demonstrates that we were wired by some higher power to impute a mystical underpinning to everything.
I, for one, am not so certain of this. Still, I recoil at the suggestion proffered by the secular among us that humanity will, in time, bury this antiquated, foolish proclivity to assign everything to some higher power or purpose.
I personally am not convinced of that at all. In fact, I appreciate and even celebrate the human penchant for, well, whatever one choices to call it – a yeaning for the sublime and inexpressible. While I suspect that it is a behavior deeply rooted in our evolution and particularly in a simian genetics, I feel a deep sense of fortune for our species’ having acquired it.
Moreover, I can’t imagine life bereft of the presence of this singularly human trait. It not only defines us but also galvanizes and ennobles us.
We are humans beings significantly because of this trait.
An extraterrestrial under study by a more advanced alien species contemplates the risks of saving McCoy in the Star Trek third season episode “The Empath.”
I think that I have mentioned that one of my favorite Star Trek (Original) episodes is “The Empath,” in which highly advanced extra-terrestrials abduct Kirk, Spock and McCoy with the hopes of imparting their salient human traits and values to a race of empathic humanoids, one that they are considering saving in the face of an imminent supernova that will destroy their solar system.
The episode is endearing in so many respects. I am always struck by the episode’s underlying Christian influences, despite its conveying an overall secular message. There is one particular scene in which the mute extraterrestrial empath is confronted by the virtue of compassion in the face of death. The advanced extraterrestrials have tortured McCoy to the point of death, and though Gem, the empathic alien, has the healing capacity to save him, thereby demonstrating her species’ worthiness for survival, she is confronted by the accute suffering she will endure, along with the real prospect of death.
She briefly recoils, and the psychological agony she experiences is palpable and deeply moving, and as one brought up in the Christian faith, I am reminded of Jesus’ experience in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he agonized over a similar dilemma.
Yet, watching this, I am also invariably overcome with sadness – sadness over what humanity has lost within the almost six decades since Star Trek aired on network television.
Reflecting on all that has transpired since this episode first aired on December 6, 1968, I am reminded of the troubling predictions of Carl Sagan in the 1990’s – his vision of a slothful, indulged, ignorant, morally ambiguous species that he perceived as standing just around the corner. Indeed, the vision embodied in the Star Trek original series of humanity rising to a level of self-mastery amounting to culmination of all the teaching of history’s greatest religious and philosophical sages strikes me as remote some three generations later. This particular episode, viewed through a 21st century lens, almost could pass as a caricature of human beings. Selfless? Undaunted? Worthy of emulation by other species?
In all honesty, the only consolation I derive from any of this is that I am a late-boomer raised at a juncture in history – the post-WWII era – when returning combat veterans were confident that the lessons they acquired from and the post-war order they imposed on parts of continental Europe and East Asia would be instructive and lasting. I am thankful to have been afforded a glance into the promise of humanity. It saddens me that many young people are growing up today bereft of any hope.
Star Trek lives, but I fear, only as a time capsule, as a glimpse from the now distant past of what might have been.
William Shatner in a promotional photo with fellow Star Trek cast members Leonard Nimoy and DeForrest Kelly.
Speaking as one fascinated with the broadcast and film industry, I’ve always found it interesting how differently fans view the entertainment business compared with the professionals who actually act out the roles.
The perspectives, needless to say, are radically different. I was reminded of that recently reading about William Shatner’s ambivalence regarding his role as Kirk. To be sure, landing a role such as this in the ecosystem that existed those many decades ago in Hollywood the 1960’s was an extraordinary achievement. Shatner was one of the legions of actors, extremely talented, promising ones, who settled in Tinseltown with the hope of doing not only what one was trained for and loves fervently but also earning a enough to do it full time. Yet, it seldom works out that way for most actors, and many of them spend a lifetime supplementing their incomes in odd jobs, entirely unfulfilling in many instances.
To be sure, Shatner was a substantive actor before he landed the lead role, having performed Shakespearean roles on stage and acted out a variety other ones on screen. Yet, he also was professional who had to make a living and to support a family, and whatever he thought of the Kirk role, it was first and foremost a job – a lucrative, albeit, a somewhat brutal one, which, among other things required memorizing 50 pages of dialogue for each episode.
To be sure, in that ecosystem at that time, landing a lead in a network series, even one regarded as somewhat experimental and peripheral as Star Trek, was a very big deal. Shatner had ascended to the front ranks of screen actors – and some have speculated that this ascent and the notoriety that quickly accrued to it contributed to the difficulty other members of the cast encountered working with him.
Whatever the case, it’s interesting to consider that in the whole scheme of things, Shatner was one of thousands of young actors struggling to make a living in a profession that for many amounts to a lifetime passion and obsession but that still required work, hard work, an enduring degree of patience as well as optimism – not to mention, a damn good agent.
The German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger
I have spent a lot of time lately reflecting on the way we perceive existence around us and the 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s idea of authenticity, relating this to my own idea of our living in what I have come to characterize as a “networked human exoskeleton,” a largely incorporeal one which, as I see it, amounts to a fusion of all human improvisations and achievements over hundreds of thousands of years.
It has culminated in the scientific-technological society we inhabit today and that, as Heidegger argued, detracts significantly from our ability to live authentically.
While I admittedly should make an effort to drill deeper into Heidegger’s philosophy, based on what I do know of it, I struggle with his idea of the importance living authentically in a society that is entirely the result of our own improvisation. To be sure, we can take a hike in the woods, and while this may serve among many as a reminder of the very temporary and tenuous niche we and our species as a whole occupy within existence, I can’t help but be reminded of how much these woodlands have been altered by humans in a myriad of ways – through the clear-cutting and replanting of trees, which results in the radical change of biodiversity of the area, as well as through the introduction of invasive species into it.
Even in walks through the wilderness, I am reminded of the ways that human activity even interferes with our efforts to he mindful – to rely on encounters with nature to separate ourselves to the degree possible from the all of the cacophony that we have set loose on this planet. To be sure, though, that was one of Heidegger’s arguments: It is exceedingly hard to separate us from this cacophony.
I also struggle with the calls of Heidegger and other eminent thinkers, such the late Aldous Huxley, for imposing a new stewardship over technology, warning us of the insidious ways that it has diluted human individuality and stewardship over nature. We can’t extricate ourselves from our exoskeleton – all the improvisations and achievements that make us human – any more than bees can separate themselves from hives or termite mounds.
Kevin Kelly, one of the world’s leading writers and thinkers regarding the implications of technology has written about the dilemmas faced by Ted Kacynszki, the Unabomber, a deeply disordered man, though profoundly intellectually gifted one also an outspoken and implacable foe of technology and the threat it poses to human autonomy. Yet, as Kelly stresses, investigators of Kazcynsji’s Luddite refuge in the woods revealed the extent to which even he had grown reliant on technology, apparently without being scarcely aware of it.
This exoskeleton – this fusion of many things, notably including techology, language, writing, mathematics and Enlightement-era science – is the result of how we and our hominid and hominin forebears improvised to acquire a foothold within existence. This fusion accounts in large measure for what we see and how we see it. To be sure, part of what we see see is the result of cognitive machinery passed on by our remote reptilian, mammalian and simian ancestors, but the improvisations and achievements wrought by this highly complex exokeleton that we inhabit have allowed us to see in a way that no other species on Earth can.
Through our exoskeleton, we have been able to tease out facets of existence and to order them in ways that elude other intelligent species. Consequently, we have created a reality that has become so scientifically and technologically nuanced across eons that we struggle to understand and come to terms with much of it.
Indeed, one of the major challenges of the present age is the struggle to curate the immense reservoirs of information that our exoskeleton has generated, certainly within the last century. During one of the most desperate struggles in history, World War II, some of humanity’s most gifted minds began developing a concept that first emerged roughly a century earlier through the efforts of British polymath and mathematician Charles Baggage, who conceived, remarkably from scratch, the idea of a programmable digital computer. During the war, Allied scientists began employing this concept, perfecting it along the way, not only to decode classified German military codes but also to manage the vast amounts of information generated through the prosecution of a war across multiple continents.
This technology, as innovations that grew out of warfare are apt to do, now pervades mass culture, disordering it in a multitude of ways, creating disruption that invites more techological innovation to contend with all the complexity bound up in human life. This has led some of the world’s leading thinkers – Noah Yuval Harari and Henry Kissinger, among them – to perceive acute risks in our species’ reliance on this technology even to undertake the most mundane tasks.
They fear that this reliance conceivably even could lead to the supplantation of our species as the dominant presence on this planet. And the first stages of this could occur very soon, perhaps as early as five years when artificial intelligence reaches a level in which it assumes the reins of decision making and, consequently stewardship. In a real sense, this would mark the end of human history.
Dispatches from the Cusp 
A Remarkable Fifty-Year-Old Time Capsule
“It’s a very Catholic film…”
This statement, which was offered in this extensive and deeply thoughtful review, pretty much sums up “The Exorcist,” which was released in 1973.
It was indeed very Catholic.
Yet, that was not the impression that many Americans took away from their first viewing of this deeply disruptive film, providing they managed to exit the theater without fainting or vomiting. Indeed, the reaction to this film among many Americans in what came to be known decades later as Red State America was one of disdain if not deep revulsion.
I can still recall very vividly the viscerally negative and fearful reaction to the film growing up as a Southern Baptist. It was perceived as occultic and vile when, in fact, it amounted to a very thoughtful reaction to modernity and all of the complexity and uncertainty it left in its wake. Moreover, it represents a remarkable 50-year-old time capsule, as it, in large measure, was a reflection of the widespread disquiet over the political animosities and social anomie that had been sparked by Vietnam conflict coupled with the perennial fear of nuclear annhilation and a nagging sense that America was losing the Cold War.
As the political writer Rick Perlstein relates in one of his books, when Chris MacNeil tells Father Karras that “There is a thing up there, and I don’t know what it is,” she was expressing a feeling that many Americans shared about the state of the country in 1973.
As shocking as this may seem to some readers, The Exorcist will remain one of my favorite film – a masterpiece that captures the national mood of a rather dark time in history – in some respects, not all that far removed from the one that prevails today.