Jenny Watches the Exorcist, by Emma Stough
in her sleepless room with the shades drawn and a bowlful of neon peach rings. Blue TV light is radioactive, but after years of exposure, Jenny’s skin has grown a thick, radio-proof layer. It is gummy to the touch.
Jenny remembers sleep like a matchstick remembers flame: quick and devastating.
The archeological dig at the beginning of The Exorcist is the scariest part of the movie because every single cast member was buried alive. Well—wrong film.
The archeological dig at the beginning of The Exorcist is the scariest part of the movie because of that stone creature and how it seems, at first glance, to be more or less the height of a real man. It even has the eyes of a real man. And the priest—future exorcist—sweaty, covered in sand and dirt, squares up to face the stone devil, foolishly, briefly, looking right into the dead stone eyes.
And in the background: Big red ball sun. Is this about to be an all-American baseball movie?
Jenny likes creature features. As a kid she made a miniature cardboard town and collected ants from the sidewalk for population; they stomped through cardboard streets, monsters of her own making.
Jenny puts the peach rings on like real rings and she is engaged ten times over. The TV light bleeds out from its square confines in squiggly blue waves. Pulsing against her gummy skin.
Conceivably, every actor in The Exorcist is a real actor, and so the mom, playing an actress within the film, is doing a double-excellent acting job. That’s twice the acting.
Jenny tried to make movies with her ants, but their unions were resistant, their demands too many. She spent hours—unending, dreamless—planted on her stomach, watching their brazen descent from cardboard to carpet to wall to the tips of her fingers, up her arm. Who is your God? she asked as they disappeared beneath her shirtsleeve. Have you no devil to fear?
Jenny’s observations:
Little girls born in America are well-mannered (prior to possession).
The American medical system is full of guys who are totally willing to do a bunch of complicated procedures on a child who says “cunt” to them repeatedly.
Is this film about parenting, the devil, or both?
Everyone has all the same diseases: Insomnia, possession, indoctrination, childhood.
Possession is a bureaucratic process in the Catholic church.
Exorcism, like sleep, is scary, cold, and unfamiliar.
Jenny is out of peach rings and there lies the priest at the bottom of the stairs, concrete blooded beneath him.
A picture of Jenny’s childhood home: two-story blue-sided. Three steps leading to front porch, three flowerpots on the right, three flowerpots on the left. Easy and familiar shapes. Inside, the shadows of things, the quick black dart of whatever unfelt memory, the slow march of ants from her bedroom out into the house.
Jenny thinks the picture of the house is a prison in which her good sleep is jailed. She thinks if she walked up the steps, crossed the threshold, creeped up the stairs, pried open the bedroom door: she would find herself asleep, unbothered, blue with rest.
At the end of the film, Regan, good as new, waltzes out of the house in matching hat and coat, and her mother is telling the only not-dead priest that her daughter doesn’t remember anything, anything at all.
Jenny thinks forgetting is more complicated than that. What out-of-body experience—especially one so biblical—doesn’t leave a stain?
Jenny is also run-out-of-her-body: Where there might be rest, a chasm (where there might be a soul, the devil). Some girls are happiest in shade-drawn bedrooms, made up of their own undoing.
What Jenny thinks the epilogue looks like:
Regan returns to California and gets a horse just like her mom promised and the sun yo-yos up and down in its regular yellow and orange and pink and it seems like things are going just like they should, just like childhood, but somewhere between the school dances and family vacations and quiet moments reading next to a window, Regan feels something inexplicable rapping down deep inside, pinching at the shape of her inner-self, the cluster of organs keeping her alive; and though she doesn’t remember peeing unselfconsciously on the floor in front of party guests, doesn’t remember scurrying down the stairs backwards, spider-like, doesn’t remember her head rotating impossibly in full 360s, she still feels sometimes, if only briefly, a sluice of the old voiceless pain, something like being rinsed over—silently, brutally, constantly—in a thin coat of blue paint.
Emma Stough is a Midwestern writer with work out or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Third Coast, Pidgeonholes, and Foglifter.