Regan is the most obvious victim of torture and abuse in her own home. But Chris, too, is imprisoned in her own home, being tortured. Furniture is thrown at her, she’s hit, she’s pushed, she’s thrown. She’s forced to commit sexual acts with her own child. Like Regan, Chris is being battered in her own home. Even as it brutally meditates on the potential dangers of the Liberated Woman, The Exorcist offers a blistering exposé of domestic violence as a phenomenon in American life.
One might object that what we see in the film is not really domestic violence (in the traditional sense of “wife-beating,” or even “child abuse”), because it’s the daughter who’s doing it, not some evil husband. But remember, this daughter is possessed by a demon—a demon described in the film as “a very powerful man.”
Okay, so a powerful, male demon has taken hold of Chris’s home to brutalize her and her daughter. Sounds a little more like domestic violence now, right?
Domestic violence was pervasive in American culture in the 1970s, and was supported by Anglo-American law and Christian ideology, both of which understood it as a man’s job to keep his wife and children in line. This was the doctrine of “correction,” which relies on two more fundamental principles. First, there is the idea of the paterfamilias: the man as the ruler of the household. Second, the idea that women and children were the man’s property: ancient Anglo and Christian doctrine held that a woman became “one flesh” with her husband when she married him. This gave him total legal control over her, her body, her children, and her property. The concept of the union of flesh made it exceptionally difficult to punish domestic violence: How do you prosecute a man for punishing a body he owns? A body over which he has uncontested and uncontestable possession?
The genius of this film is that the demon possession narrative simply literalizes the actual lived reality many women and children suffered through in the 1970s: they were possessed by powerful men, who had near-total autonomy over their bodies and freedom. The demon clearly understands himself to be “correcting” Chris and Regan. He is subjugating them and breaking them. The demon clearly sees himself as the paterfamilias, whose stranglehold on his domestic subordinates is absolute.