Be a normal man, I said. Sit down and watch this movie like a normal person, I said. I was pointing at myself in the mirror. Be normal or people won’t like you. They’ll eat you. They’ll figure out you’re prey and they’ll eat you. They’ll get you like they got that Japan monkey, they’re just waiting for you to give them a reason. And I said okay, I will sit my white ass down and watch a movie: normal style. I’m not even going to make it all about rats or birds or ants or whatever bullshit I’m usually on about. i swear to god.
Then in the first ten minutes the main character hears stuff rattling around in the attic and tells her butler to go get traps for the rats she thinks are up there. They argue about the existence of these hypothetical rats. It turns out it was not rats; it was just pazuzu.
I’m sorry for what I know I must do. Unfortunately, we are so back. The Exorcist (1973): confirmed pest movie.
As an exterminator: I really liked that initial framework and frankly I think something gets lost if you dont watch the entire movie keeping the first act in mind; the demon bothering this family is a pest.
It’s an invasive presence keeping you up at night and hassling your kid. The priests that get called in are otherworldly technicians. It’s not really a movie about faith. It’s a movie about healthcare, it’s a movie about being nice to your daughter, and it’s a movie about pests. I watched this movie and it made a lot of other movies make more sense.
It made me like Poltergeist even more. It made me like the conjuring movies even less. Watch this movie through the lens of an exterminator and the laws of convergent evolution will result in you reinventing Ghostbusters like 6 different times.
This little exercise impressed on me how pervasive pests, rats in particular, are in our life. Rodents have been called the dark shadow of humanity. Where we go, they go. The things we hate them for are the reflections of what we hate in ourselves. The little kleptoparasites haven’t just burrowed into our homes and land, they’ve burrowed into our very language. We let them in. Even if they disappeared tomorrow they’d still be with us.
Sometimes I feel bad, like I should have other interests. Less off-putting, more marketable ones. I feel like I don’t want to pigeon-hole myself into being the Rat Guy Who Watches Movies and only has something to say about the rats he saw in them.
But then I get distracted because I used the word “pigeon-hole” and start thinking about pigeons and what we did to them, and how unfair that whole situation really was to them, and then i start thinking about other kinds of pigeon holes and cloacas and how efficient their whole system is and after a bit I’ve completely forgotten what upset me in the first place.