Will the Real Devil Speak Up?

Ventriloquism, Edison’s playback, and the sound film base their appeal to spectators primarily on the tension between the two-dimensional image and three-dimensional sound, between space and surface, as well as between body and voice. My focus is on the disembodied voice in cinema, the voice with no body attached. The meanings attached to the unaccommodated or unlocatable voices in various kinds of ventriloquism seem to produce just such a suspension. The opening of the connection between a voice and a body as its source reminds us of the voice as a partial object in the writings of Jacques Lacan, as well as Rick Altman’s model of ventriloquism, in which whoever controls sound in film is a ventriloquist who “uses” the body, manipulating it as if it were a puppet. This notion becomes fascinatingly complicated when applied to The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin). The Exorcist stages the battle between the forces of sound and image, body and voice, elevating it to a terrifying good-versus-evil theological level. This battle extends the diegetic narrative to become a battle between two actors (the voice actor and the actor seen on screen) trying to share one body, a split between two personalities. The film is an exceptional case study that allows us to examine the ways in which cinema contributes to and mediates the ventriloquial act, as well as the roles of the visual, aural, and tactile perceptual channels and their relation to each other in the cinematic experience, in particular in the horror genre.