The Exorcist as science fiction

I love the moment in The Exorcist when Regan, the girl, says to the astronaut attending a party at her house, 'you're gonna die up there'. If the Apollo missions were intended as a symbol in the struggle for American geopolitical primacy, a mark of economic prosperity and a volley in the fight for world ideological hegemony, the US had taken severe blows in these areas by 1973. The resistance to American wars of aggression in Indochina and, connected but not reducible to it, a cycle of social struggles against American domestic order, along with the breakup of the postwar boom across the West, were puncturing what the moon landing had been meant to represent. Regan is, among other things, a symbol of the youth rebellions of those years; to announce this theme, the film opens with her mother, an actress, filming a scene in which she tries to temper a crowd of protesting students. Regan 'you're gonna die up there' MacNeil takes a shot at the phallocratic go-get-um elan of the space program, and delivers a physical punchline, pissing on the carpet. Assaulting the bourgeois interior with her wet, stinky excrement, intruding bodily realities into the iron-cage repression of the Puritan work ethic that had taken America to the moon, her flesh announces - the party's over! So for a moment The Exorcist is a science fiction film too, trafficking in the same space-mission-gone-wrong, hubristic horror as does 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.