"a social horror film if there ever was one" in his 1983 treatise on the genre, Danse Macabre. He sees the possessed Regan symbolizing for middle-aged viewers the outspoken, often profane youth protesting the Vietnam War and other social injustices, and speculates that the absence of that phenomenon from West Germany during that era may explain why the film did not perform as well there as it did in other countries (whereas the later Dawn of the Dead was extremely successful, coming as it did after an era characterized by youth-led terrorist activity such as Baader-Meinhof Gang). Danny Peary likewise notes the symbolic and real fragmentation throughout the film, from the dig-site workers breaking up rocks in the first scene to Chris's fraught relationship with her ex-husband and Karras's drift from his faith: "With the world in such disorder, the Devil can make a dramatic entrance." More specifically, at the time of the film's release, the Watergate scandal was growing more serious, implicating President Richard Nixon and the subject of regular daily news coverage. "Maybe, between that and Vietnam, people were newly awake to a certain kind of pervading societal rot, something that the spectacle of The Exorcist might've mirrored", wrote Tom Breihan for The A.V. Club in 2019. In a Christian Century article a year after the film's release, during which time Nixon had resigned, theologian Carl Raschke connected the two, calling them "psychodramas of the American soul" resulting from "the cynical mood of our age [arising] by default from the wreck of traditional religious as well as social values." One other early 1970s challenge to a weakened social order has gotten considerable attention in discussions of The Exorcist: feminism. The U.S. women's liberation movement had enjoyed some early gains in legislatures and courts, and commentators have seen the film, in which a single working mother and her apparently uncontrollable daughter are ultimately rescued by patriarchal authority, as a reaction against feminism specifically. Peter Biskind, in Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, his history of the 1970s New Hollywood, describes the film as "a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession." For the male authority figures in The Exorcist, whether priests or physicians, Regan must be restored to her innocence through abusive and violent means if necessary, the aspect of the film that he notes led John Boorman to decline the directing job. For