Pazuzu (El demonio de El Exorcista): The devil as an alibi: who benefits from inexplicable evil

Pazuzu, the Assyrian-Babylonian demon that The Exorcist (1973) borrows to possess the girl Regan MacNeil, is a bad case for a criminologist —and that is exactly what makes it interesting—. A demon does not offend in any useful sense of the word: he has no childhood, no structural strain, no social learning, no psyche we can open up to look for the why. There is no studiable agency, no biography, no decision. Analyzing Pazuzu as if he were Norman Bates or Hannibal Lecter would be a category error. And yet the film offers extraordinarily rich criminological material —it just is not where it seems to be. It is not in the monster, but in the reaction of everyone who surrounds him: the terrified mother, the doctors who give up, the priests who come, the whole culture that, faced with harm it does not understand, decides to call it "the devil." For labeling theory, that gesture —naming the demon— is the real object of study.

// The theoryDeviance lies not in the act, but in who names it

The theory of labeling gave criminology a Copernican turn: it stopped asking "why does someone commit a deviant act?" in order to ask "why are some acts —and some people— labeled deviant and others not?". Howard Becker, in Outsiders (1963), phrased it with a sentence that changes everything: deviance is not a quality of the act, but of the social reaction to it. Edwin Lemert had earlier distinguished between primary deviance —the raw fact— and secondary deviance —the identity that is born when the label sticks and the subject reorganizes their life around it—. The deeper lesson is that labeling is an act of power: whoever has the authority to name evil decides where to draw the border, whom to keep inside and whom to expel as "the other." Applied to Pazuzu, this illuminates what the plot hides: the demon is not an objective discovery, it is a label that a frightened community chooses from among those it has at hand. When medicine exhausts its language and the harm is still there, nameless, the culture offers an old and reassuring one —possession— which has the advantage of closing the question instead of opening it.

// The subjectThe perfect folk devil: an enemy who cannot answer back

Stanley Cohen, in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), described how societies, faced with a diffuse threat, manufacture a folk devil on whom to concentrate all their fear, and react so disproportionately that they amplify the very thing they feared. The "possessed" is the folk devil taken to the limit: an enemy who cannot defend themselves, cannot qualify, cannot return the gaze. Pazuzu is the perfect projection because he is a blank screen on which the culture writes its terrors —of the sexuality of a girl who is growing up, of the female body running out of control, of faith that falters, of everything a society cannot name in any other way—. The historical moral panics around witchcraft, possession or "the demon-possessed" follow that exact pattern: someone vulnerable —almost always women, the marginalized, dissenters— is singled out as a vehicle of evil, and the collective accusation becomes so powerful that it confirms its own fear. The witch hunt did not find witches: it produced them, by labeling poverty, widowhood or strangeness as a diabolical pact. Regan is not a criminal; she is the place where a community deposits what it cannot bear to understand.

// The crackExplaining evil is not excusing it (nor dissolving it)

Here the crack is delicate, because labeling theory has a well-known limit: taken to the extreme, it can suggest that evil only exists in the eye of the one who labels, that there is nothing real behind it, that everything is social construction. That would be false and dangerous. The harm exists. The suffering of the victims is real, not an interpretation. To say that "possessed" is a label does not mean denying that there are people who do terrible things, nor turning real aggressors into the misunderstood. The honest reading is the opposite: precisely because human evil is real, we cannot afford to externalize it toward the supernatural. Explaining is not excusing, but externalizing is evading. Attributing a crime to "the devil," to "a monster," to "someone who was not human" is the most effective way of not being held accountable: it exempts the aggressor from responsibility —"it was not him, it was the entity"— and exempts society from looking at the conditions that produced the harm.

The danger of the demonic alibi is twofold. On the one hand, when a man who kills his family is described as "possessed by evil," he is paradoxically relieved of the responsibility he does bear: monsters do not choose, humans do. On the other, all prevention is foreclosed: if evil comes from outside, there is nothing to correct inside —not neglected mental health, not normalized violence, not the institutions that failed—. Labeling theory does not say that Regan is faking or that the suffering is invented; it says that the category with which we name it determines what we will do next. And calling evil "the devil" almost always guarantees that we will do nothing useful. The memory that matters is not that of the demon cast out in glory, but that of all the real people —the "witches" burned, the "demon-possessed" locked away, the victims whose harm was filed away as a supernatural matter— whom the label served to stop seeing.