While I'm too lazy to present a painstaking defense of my thesis that The Passion of Joan of Arc was an anticipatory remake of The Exorcist, I have encountered new evidence in its favor.
Dreyer's Ordet, it turns out, was also an anticipatory remake of The Exorcist. At times the resemblance is just uncanny and, in all seriousness, I have to wonder if the author, screenwriter, or director of The Exorcist was a Dreyer fan.
By the way, I'm not sure how surprising the film's surprise ending is, but for what it's worth: there will be information that might ruin the ending. This is not, I should be clear, a "spoiler alert." A Spoiler Alert is a hackneyed phrase used by bad, evil people who should be severely reprimanded, possibly with wiffle bats, at the very least with hurtful words.
Ordet is a film about a particularly perverse kind of possession. A talented, very serious student of religion becomes possessed by, get this, Jesus Christ. (A result of reading too much Kierkegaard, as the young man's father pricelessly explains.) Of course, that's not exactly how it's presented. We meet the young man as a lunatic who is convinced that he is Jesus Christ, only to be strongly prodded throughout the film to come to the conclusion that he was indeed the real thing.
The overarching narrative concerns the devoutly religious father's desire to free his son from this madness, and his gradually weakening faith in the face of this, and many, many other trials. So, if you're keeping score: a possession, an exorcist, and a trial of faith. Of course, the whole thing becomes ironic by the film's end, since we realize that the father was trying to exorcise the actual bejeezus out of his son, not madness. So his is not such the heroic narrative.
All the same. The secondary narrative revolves around a second son (there's a third subplot involving a third son, but skip it...) who has rejected religion outright. This part of the film revolves around a single, painful, and extended birth and death scene. The faithless son's pregnant wife goes into labor, but there are difficulties. There are long painful screaming sequences, long nervous clockticking sitting at the kitchen table and worrying if she'll die sequences, and a brief moment of relief when the doctor announces she'll pull through, even though the baby did not.
All of these scenes, where the quiet domesticity of the kitchen contrasts with the terrifying moans from behind the bedroom door, strongly evoke the feel and mood of The Exorcist. The father and son steel themselves each time they enter the bedroom, as if expecting to see the Devil himself. When they enter the room, we find an unholy trinity circling the woman: a doctor, a young man of no faith, and an older religious figure of weakening faith.
Ring any bells?
Just when you think the thematic parallels can't get any clearer, the successful delivery, or dispossession, of the woman from death (and the unsuccessful exorcism of her baby) is followed by a celebratory cup of coffee between doctor, heathen, and believer. In so many words, the doctor to believer: "So, did I save your daughter or did your God do it?"
The structure of this film is the opposite of its heir. The Exorcist begins by prompting us to believe in the devil: the repeatedly inexplicable events, the failure of every attempt to find a medical explanation or cure. But the film's end undermines this with the utter failure and impotence of the faithful priest. A careful viewer is less sure at the end than the beginning about the status of the girl's condition as possession or madness, and her cure as miracle or coincidence.
Ordet reverses this: everything tells us the son is bonkers at the beginning of the movie, but bit by bit it pushes us to believe he's not. And it does it in precisely the opposite way as the other film: by showing us again and again the success of the faithful: the son predicts every plot development in the movie in advance, the death of the child, the illness of the mother, her surprise death following the recovery, and, of course, her resurrection, which he performs.
But like The Exorcist and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet also insists upon blurring the line between madness and faith. Even if the son, John, is indeed possessed by Jesus Christ, he's no less insane for all that. The movie insists on this: when John appears in the final scene, and makes for the coffin in order to raise the dead, despite all the confirmations the movie has made of his faith, it just screams crazy. We want to stop him, just as the nearby priest briefly tries to do. We feel particularly embarrassed for him because he's about to destroy his little sister's faith. He promised the girl he'd raise her mother from the dead--and he promised here precisely because she was the only one who believed he could do it.
[To be continued...]
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