Astronauts Who Won’t Fly and Killers Who Won’t Kill: William Peter Blatty and the second Exorcist film that wasn’t.
Overshadowed by its Exorcist siblings, the middle child of Blatty’s “faith trilogy” pries darkness out of the Devil’s hands and stabs it into the heart of men.
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The Ninth Configuration is a special sort of triple-threat we don’t get to see very often in film: it seizes control of your visual field, bangs on your funny bone, and while doing so, raises questions about life, sanity, and faith that are hyper-relevant to our times. Now, this is a bold statement, given that most people have never heard of the film, much less seen it, and it ought to come with some sort of back up, so it doesn’t read like a bunch of pretentious, movie review hyperbole, right? Well, that is exactly the thing that makes this film so tricky… it is hard to capture in language. We’re all familiar with the concept of The Elevator Pitch: you try and trim all the fat and gristle off the concept of a story, and drive the remaining sharpened bone-spike directly into the mind of the person you’re talking to, in the hopes that it will stick. Usually, it is a pretty simple X-meets-Y-with-a-pinch-of-Z affair, but not with this film. The Ninth Configuration is a movie that seems very comfortable laughing in the face of every reasonable attempt to contain it in an elevator pitch. “It’s a film about the lunatics taking over the asylum. Only they aren’t lunatics. The staff are. Sometimes. Maybe.” Or perhaps “It’s an anti-war comedy, set in a gothic horror locale. With guys in Superman costumes. And… bikers.” Or maybe even “It’s the film that was supposed to be in between The Exorcist and The Exorcist III, but it was written before The Exorcist, and then rewritten after, and then filmed. But it’s about faith… and war… and astronauts… and… mistaken identity. But still about faith!” Given enough time in said elevator, attempting pitches to summarize The Ninth Configuration, one could reasonably expect to be carried off in a straightjacket, still talking about dogs performing Shakespeare and Superman rescuing Julius Caesar from assassination. And not only would it would all be true, it would somehow be oddly understandable to anyone who’d seen it.
So, we can safely say The Ninth Configuration is a strange film. I don’t mean strange in the usual artsy, incomprehensible way, that leaves you feeling dumber and less hip for having watched it and not understood . It does the dance of a late ‘70s/’80s anti-war comedy while infesting the plot of a military insane asylum story, being filmed on the set of a gothic vampire movie, where the director is having gaseous LSD pumped through the vents at intervals. And it appears to be all of these things in a tight, competent way, but I say appears because at its twisted heart, The Ninth Configuration is really a film about faith, inner demons, and maybe redemption. Maybe. But the consistent “What the Hell am I watching?” quality of the film can easily blind to you to the complexity going on under the surface. And… can, and has, made it hard to popularize via word of mouth.
On a first viewing – and this is definitely a film you should give yourself at least two runs through, if only to be sure you don’t miss anything while you’re laughing, cringing, or theorizing—Configuration seems to be a dark comedy about a military mental hospital full of officers who have either mysteriously lost their minds, or who have faked mysteriously having lost their minds: either way, the Pentagon wants answers to the “what”, and more importantly the “why” of their condition. Unsurprisingly, the military doesn’t like officers they can’t send to the field. We enter the story to find a veritable vaudeville cast of crazy patients, all awaiting the arrival of the new head psychiatrist for the facility, one Marine Colonel Hudson Kane. Kane, masterfully played by Stacy Keach (known for his role as ‘80s TV detective Mike Hammer, and more recently for roles in Prison Break and The Bourne Legacy), manages to be calm, genial, and restrained, while also being tense, monotone, and menacing- he’s the ultimate blank slate that not only the patients, but the audience, winds up projecting their theories and interpretations on to… at least for the beginning of the film.
A Monty Python-esque cast of crazies create a dark burlesquey backdrop for the interaction between Kane and the bombastically mad Captain Cutshaw, an Air Force astronaut who cracked in the capsule while waiting for launch on a moon mission, and had to be dragged screaming from the launch pad. Cutshaw is an amazing character, manic and cunning, played by Scott Wilson (who has been remarkable in everything from In Cold Blood to The Last Samurai, and currently plays one-legged Hershel Greene on The Walking Dead), and has set himself up as the ringleader of the circus that is the asylum. He enters into a hilarious and infuriating therapeutic relationship with Kane, in which the more Kane manages to coax him out of his madman routine and get him talking, the more Cutshaw and the rest of the patients-slash-inmates of the asylum begin to suspect that Kane may be the least sane out of all of them.
A perfect example of this is what we’ll call “The Hammer Scene.” When Kane stops an enraged, hammer-wielding patient from knocking holes in a stone wall to find out what he is doing, he doesn’t bat an eye at being told that the wall’s molecules are disobedient, and therefore need to be punished. Instead, Kane responds by suggesting that the hammer is the source of the problem, and requests in a creepily calm, unphased monotone, that he be allowed to take it for study. In that moment, we see the line between sane and insane start to blur: is the patient really demented or just a faker? Is Kane just playing along to get the hammer, or is he really considering the possibility of disobedient molecules? The only answer we get is a silent stare at the camera from the now hammer-carrying Kane, and a building suspense that pushes us closer to the edge of our seats.
THE HAMMER SCENE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi5D03-KARM
As the film plays on, Kane and Cutshaw’s states of mind are revealed to us a piece at a time: tense and heavy dialogue here, a psychedelic visual display of delusion there, and a dream sequence, or is it a flashback, fitted in to keep our heads spinning. Through it all, the story of Cutshaw’s launch pad breakdown is pieced together, and the cracks in Kane’s stony façade begin to grow, until we wind up caught in a disturbingly funny vortex of mistaken identity, demented therapy techniques, battlefield trauma, and an absolutely brutal biker gang bar brawl. What start out as chuckles at the antics of the inmates begin to become nervous, slightly uncomfortable laughs: slowly, a scene at a time, the realization dawns that nothing is quite what it has seemed. A story that felt familiar, about how man’s actions can destroy his psyche, and how helping others might be able to repair it, begins to become something else. Give the film a second watch, and the pieces start to fall into a different pattern… especially if you know a bit about the making of the film, which is arguably as crazy as the plot itself.
Written and directed by William Peter Blatty, best known for having penned The Exorcist films, or at least the original and third, The Ninth Configuration was written before, and rewritten during, the writing of The Exorcist. Like The Exorcist, it was originally written as a script, even before the novels were written: Blatty was a screenwriter first and novelist second, quite literally. This is extra-weird, because according to Blatty, The Ninth Configuration should really be viewed as the “middle-child” of his Faith Trilogy, sandwiched between The Exorcist and The Exorcist III, two straight up horror films with little of the comedy we see in Configuration.A former co-writer on Pink Panther films, Blatty manages to bounce from horror to comedy and back artfully, which winds up making Configuration a sort of a “film negative” version of the concepts at work in The Exorcist. Rather than a film about boundless supernatural evil directly impacting the lives of innocents until faith and sacrifice save the day, Configuration is a film about personal evil, how one copes with it, and how personal sacrifice can sometimes save a person’s faith. Or at least, it might be that, depending on how you hold it up to the light, and how hard you shake it. Where William Friedkin’s direction of The Exorcist conveys Blatty’s plot and theme with a needle point, Blatty’s direction of his own work in Configuration is a more spastic-with-a-shotgun affair, which he still makes work.
Armed with these details, the movie hits the mind’s eye differently. The insane Captain Cutshaw (rumored to be the same astronaut character that Devil-possessed Regan from The Exorcist told he would die “up there” ) fights tooth and nail to avoid talking about why he aborted his trip to the moon, all the while deflecting by harassing Kane for his open Catholic faith. To Cutshaw, Kane seems deluded: the old classic problem of evil, of how there can be good in a world so full of violence and suffering, makes Kane’s quiet faith seem ludicrous. To Cutshaw, strapped to the top of a rocket, staring up at the dark, the stars and spaces between are not some beautiful, almost-out-of-reach features of Creation… but a cold, lonely place to die.
WHY WON’T YOU GO TO THE MOON: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfHH6mWPTRY
Kane, who has his own tortured reasons for being obsessed with the healing of the patients at the asylum, sees care for others as the only path away from evil, and potentially the only path to redemption out of his own darkness. Watching the comedic banter fly back and forth between them, we get to see Blatty recreate the essential trying-not-to-crap-your-pants tension from The Exorcist, but without the need for a Devil or God at all. Both men have inner demons aplenty to drive the plot, and the weapons used this time around are wit and banter instead of Bibles and holy water.
Managing to be funny and brutally honest at the same time as being deeply philosophical and chillingly creepy is a Hell of a hard thing to pull off, but Configuration pulls it off. In addition to all the mental fuel you need to get your brain spun up and twitching, you also get a script full of almost endless quotables, trippy visuals, and a deviously twisty plot. Totally worth the time invested to take it in, but remember, you’ve been warned: try not to explain it in elevators.
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