Have you ever been in the trenches of war? Maybe standing in the middle of Vietnam, fighting for your life, wanting to close your eyes, open them again, and it all will be gone. Maybe seeing an AK-47 pointed at you from the bushes, not out of self-defense from the enemy, but with the intention just to kill you. If you have, you are among the 2.7 million American men and women that lived this nightmare to some degree. A lot died, some made it home, but what about the ones who survived physically but lost their minds?
The Vietnam War film genre has become synonymous with movies like Full Metal Jacket (1987), directed by Stanley Kubrick, Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Platoon (1986), directed by Oliver Stone, and countless others.
But what those films have in common is that they’re combat films, we see the war, we see the killing, we don’t know what these characters' lives were like before, and we don’t see the consequences in their life after their service. In 1980, another Vietnam film was released, The Ninth Configuration, directed by William Peter Blatty, which changed how a movie with a war theme can be portrayed. It is a psychological drama, bordering on horror, with a surprisingly ingenious use of dark comedy. It is set in a remote, dark, non-therapeutic castle turned ironically into a psychiatric hospital for U.S. soldiers who went insane in their own ways during the Vietnam War.
The movie starts with a new psychiatrist arriving to take over the treatment, Colonel Vincent Kane. His methods are unorthodox, encouraging the patients to live out the fantastical ideas in their heads, instead of being told to suppress them all. His method is to find some sort of breakthrough. One of the main patients is Captain Billy Cutshaw, an ex-astronaut, whose trauma caused him to have a breakdown right before his moon mission. His and Kane’s conversations are what introduce and finish out the philosophical, deeply disturbing debate: Is the world pure evil, with only chaos and no chance of hope, or can you see or even find the evidence of a divine purpose and goodness?
The more the movie goes on, the more sanity and insanity blend. Especially with Kane, who is eventually revealed to be not truly who he says he is, and he himself belongs in the place of the patients. His psychiatrist identity is a coping mechanism for his dark killing identity and past of serving in the war as a Marine. His past becomes too much for him to suppress, and he sacrifices himself for the protection of others. But what this act did was prove to Cutshaw, the number one divine goodness denier, that there is selflessness in this world, and so that might mean there is a God after all. Now there it is: faith – a concept beautiful to some, but terrifying to others – that drives this movie. This movie doesn’t stand alone; it’s part of a trilogy, all from the mind of William Peter Blatty. The Trilogy of Faith starts with one of the most famous movies of all time, The Exorcist (1973), then The Ninth Configuration, then finally The Exorcist III (1990). All three tell a story of possession, loss of faith, sacrifice, and then finding faith again.
The Ninth Configuration is slightly different from the Exorcist films, as there’s no unknown possession or unrealistic horror. It’s about our history, our own fears. It’s about an astronaut who was so scared of the absence of God that it drove him insane. If you’re like me and have never looked deeper into this movie, you might not connect these three movies together. But Blatty was purposeful and created stories about humanity through different and unexpected genres. One fascinating detail of this trilogy is that the astronaut Cutshaw, who appears as a patient in The Ninth Configuration, also canonically appears in The Exorcist. He gets approached by the possessed girl, Regan, and is told, “You’re going to die up there.” How all the characters, plot points, settings, and themes connect is difficult to wrap your head around if you aren’t Blatty himself.
The story first started as a novel written by Blatty, eventually developing it into the screenplay we see today. The plot is so thought out, so human, so intense, so mind-opening for an audience that may have never thought about the consequences of war, or the severity of trauma-induced mental illness. It’s an old film, so it’s not perfect, but most 80s movies aren’t. The beauty of this film is the story, the dialogue, and the characters, so much so in my opinion it could be on a theater stage as well. William Peter Blatty wanted a trilogy about the idea of faith, and this movie is the epitome of just that. There’s no possession, no demon, just men and their internal voices. There’s some violence and action, but when you walk away from seeing the credits roll, from hearing the haunting “San Antone” performed by Denny Brooks, you’ll think differently about what our country did to its own soldiers, and will be left with trying to figure out whether the realization of faith in this film was a true example or be stuck wondering how many people experienced the real horror of what is The Ninth Configuration.