My Dr. bird’s eye view on The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)
I’ve watched hundreds and hundreds of possession movies before. But the reason I realized they’re religious copaganda the other day is because of this new movie the Pope’s Exorcist.
Almost every possession movie is misogynist, but this movie really takes that to the next level.
This is a new movie advertised to me on the front page of Netflix. A movie that is framing healthy sexuality and assigned female at birth bodies as shameful. It casts misogyny, in every single form, as heroic when done by the alleged best most chauvinist ass exorcist priest 🤢
Again, I’ve seen hundreds of possession movies in my life. What’s happening here for mainstream public eyes, due to the major ad placement it clearly has (2023), is absolutely fuckin disgusting.
It’s the way that it always symbolically displaces violences done by yt cismen throughout history and describes them as something that possessed people assigned female at birth. It’s the way that the movie treats the way that a teen girl dresses as why she’s attacked.
It’s the way that the priest is framed as the “only possible savior” using a god that has been used to mediate endless violences globally against people that it’s texts deem as less than human.
It’s the way that demons are treated as if they’re something that exist outside of the cismen who commit these violence at disproportionate rates compared to the entire rest of the population. It casts victims like the perpetrators possessed them, ignoring priest sexual violence.
It casts an ahistorical message that the only people who can possibly protect victims and/or viewers from predators are other fucking predators. But that never fucking happens. That’s why violences across-the-board are barely ever criminalized. The same predator class are judges.
It isn’t time to lay down the burden of the priest, ignoring the sexual violence done by other priests to countless people. Any kind of justice hasn’t even begun to actually be done in 2023, let alone in the 80s (their diegesis). This movie framing it as if it is is real fucked.
And honestly, this is the very first possession movie I’ve ever seen where they’re trying to exercise a demon from a young person assigned male at birth. I can’t decide if that’s better or worse.
Because I get that it could be like it’s an old evil (matrices of domination) that’s in the body of a small boy. And yeah, it is the responsibility of prior generations to teach the younger ones, the old evil of its ways. But that’s not how this movie is framing it.
This movie is just placing the blame for all systemic issues in a symbolic form, as if the great evil is something that exists outside of the cismen that made it this way. I understand they’re framing “evils” that have been passed down as if they’re something that isn’t inherent.
But honestly, I think that’s kind of a fucking copout, at this point. Because it basically excuses countless years of violence, as if this was some thing that had just “possessed” them. As if they don’t have to take ownership for thousands of years of colonizing that they did.
But yeah, on the other hand, none of this shit is fucking inherent, it was all created. But that shit was created on purpose. It was created by people that made human fucking decisions to make most of our lives a living hell. And now these movies ignore their active part in that.
If there is any actual usefulness to a movie like this, it’s to recognize that you don’t get to fucking displace the evilness that colonizers designed as if it was something that they don’t have to take full fucking accountability for now. That is required for moving forward.