The exorcist is a conservative book. It’s all about fathers and lack of fathers. Regan’s father is out of the picture and clearly doesn’t care about her. He’s in Rome (hint, hint) with his new gf.
Karl the butler is a concerned father trying to help his daughter. He also sits with Regan (in the book he sits in her room quite a lot and is unbothered by the demon). The strange thing is he tells his wife their daughter is dead “to spare her.” Then again, it was a different time. ***
Kinderman tells Chris “I have a daughter myself.” Unlike Regan’s father though, he talks about how much he cares for his daughter and would be concerned for her if she were ill.
Karas has no father. IRL Blatty didn’t either. He and his mother lived in poverty and shame, getting evicted repeatedly. Karas chooses to becomes “father.” People call him father, he represents God the father on earth, and in the end he dies for the child Regan.
Merrin is also a “father.” He explains to Karas how God is our father. Through demonic possession, the devil tries to convince us that we are ugly, filthy, full of eruptions, sores, pus, stench, vomit, diarrhea, illness, insanity and evil thoughts. The devil wants to convince us that God, our father, could not possibly love us because of our sins. But the devil is a liar. Our father loves us all, no matter what.
Regan is an abused child. She has to be tied down, chained to a bed. She can’t be given food. She sits in her own excrement. She is bruised, smacked around, lacerated, molested with a crucifix, flung up and down like a rag doll. She screams in pain and hears pornography uttered by the demon. She humiliates others and is humiliated by her possession. Everything that happens to Regan is what happens to a severely abused child. Her humanity is stripped from her. The devil wants people to reject and mistreat Regan the way he mistreats her. But God says they can’t hate her. “This is my child. You must love and protect her.”
Merrin also gives his life for a child, proving himself to be a father.
So…..do you think Blatty had a father fixation or what, lol? It’s funny how in this book he really shows Regan as being very negatively affected by the divorce and lack of father figure. Chris believes Regan’s acting out got very bad after her father missed her birthday. A psychiatrist in the novel tells Chris Regan may be acting this way out if guilt because she thinks the divorce is her fault. Her father left because he didn’t like her. Maybe she thinks she wasn’t a good daughter to him and she was too close to her mother.
But Blatty was married 4 times, putting his own kids through multiple divorces. Cafeteria catholic!
*** OT- Years after I graduated from HS I found out a guy I went to school with was busted the night of HS graduation coming home from a party with some weed and acid in his car. He got sent upstate under Rockefeller drug laws. His Hispanic immigrant parents were ashamed their son was “a drug dealer” - he really wasn’t. No more than any other HS kid in the 70s who got high - they told their younger children their brother ran away to California and joined a hippie group. Funny thing - there had been a hippie farm near his upstate prison that turned into a Jesus freak commune and a girl from the commune started visiting him in prison, at the behest of their Jesus leader. He married her, converted to her fundy religion and stayed estranged from his family. So…immigrants. 1970s. Shame. Powerful. Everyone who comes to America wants the American success story and it’s painful and shameful when the opposite happens
