That chalky under-taste

Rating: Null/10 (30 January 2013)

"Hierarchy is often a way to do as efficiently as possible what ought not to be done at all; a machine for compelling people to do what they have no direct rational interest in doing, for the benefit of those with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest." - Ursula Le Guin
Ira Levin specialised in Feminist horror novels. His 1972 novel, "The Stepford Wives", for example, featured a housewife whose husband colludes with a cabal of men responsible for creating a fleet of submissive, female robots. Levin's 1967 novel, "Rosemary's Baby", does a similar thing. Adapted by director Roman Polanski, it stars Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes as a young couple who move into a Gothic apartment complex (The Dakota, where John Lennon was shot).
From the onset, Farrow's character, Rosemary Woodhouse, is portrayed as a docile American housewife. Meek and waifish, she's a doting stay-at-home woman who's entirely dependent upon her husband. Elsewhere men are portrayed as being controlling, manipulative and aggressive, whilst women are consigned to traditionally feminine realms (cooking, cleaning, jewellery, gardening, knitting etc), infantilized at the hands of a monolithic, male dominated society.
One must remember that the 1960s featured many high profile debates on both abortion and the status of women as legitimate political and legal subjects. Women's movements were gaining momentum and were beginning to repeal abortion laws, fight for the right to self-determination, and seize control of the means of reproduction from a medical profession considered to be elitist and patriarchal. In this regard, Levin's novel took Rosemary and used her as a locus for a very specific culture war. It gathered numerous examples of patriarchal dominance (religion, the medical establishment, marriage etc) and featured them repeatedly vying for control of Rosemary's body. She was then bullied into passivity, subjected to outrageous coercion and eventually pushed into madness and paranoia. Rosemary was herself an agent of her own submission, the poor girl repeatedly rationalising her suffering as being "all her fault".
Midway in both film and novel, Rosemary and her husband, the aptly named Guy, resolve to have a baby. But unbeknownst to Rosemary, Guy has made a Faustian pact with a Satanic couple living next door. In return for career advancements, he will turn Rosemary's body over to Satan so that she may be raped and so give birth to the Prince of Darkness. This, of course, is a perverse take on the Bible's Immaculate Conception (also featuring a Mary). The names of the devious neighbours (Roman and Minnie Castevet) themselves conjure up the other two men meta-controlling Rosemary: John Cassavetes and Roman Polanski himself.
With at least 12 films overtly or covertly about rape, no mainstream film director has made more films "about" sexual violation than Roman Polanski. Polanski would himself be charged with raping a 13 year old girl in 1977. In real life he seems to also have a sexual predilection for young girls and teenage actresses, though his films often sympathise with the rape victim (not always; at least 3 posit the "rapist" as being unjustly bullied and/or victimised).
In "Rosemary Baby", of course, Rosemary is raped. There is some ambiguity surrounding this incident – Rosemary is either raped by her husband, given to Roman Castevet himself as a sexual favour or literally raped by Satan – but most readings have the same political subtext. Another reading sees Rosemary's persecutions as being "imagined" and "all in her head", her anxieties a result of her pregnancy, lapsed Catholicism and various domestic/maternal insecurities. The film supports this view, but accepting it turns the audience into villains, bullies equal to Guy and his neighbours. While horror movies routinely offer misogynistic repudiations of the maternal body, of the "monsterous feminine" ("Alien", "Jurassic Park" etc), and while, on the level of biology alone, the foetus is literally a parasite, separate from the mother's body, taking everything and contributing nothing to her sustenance, the film itself seems to be doing something completely else. Rosemary's paranoia is valid precisely because sexist social relations are clearly conspiring against her. Her doctors, various paternalistic authority figures, her husband, her neighbours, a male dominated medical profession...they're all colluding against Rosemary. It's another of Polanski's Kafkaesque conspiracy plots; the world really is out to get you.
Significantly, characters are constantly telling Rosemary not to read books or outright removing books from her possession. Her apartment bookshelf is itself filled with books which Guy strategically keeps out of reach, namely Kinsey's reports, "Listening with the Third Ear" and "Yes I Can", all books on self-empowerment and self-understanding. The goal is to keep Rosemary dumb, dependent and isolated. And the only scene in which Rosemary is shown to mingle with female friends – boisterous feministas who rally to her defence – is precisely the scene which spurs Guy into revealing his sexism. "Pain is a warning something isn't right," Rosemary says, repeating the mantra of her proto-feminist sisters. But Guy shoots her down: "don't listen to those bi**es!" Emancipation remains out of reach.
The film's title has an ironic twang (Rosemary's "baby" is not her baby, she didn't consent to its conception, indeed, Rosemary is herself the film's baby). Its aesthetic is Hitchcock meets New Hollywood, whilst the film itself serves as a perverse bridge from Old Hollywood to New, with many familiar faces from the Golden Age cast against type and given significant parts (Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, Sidney Blackmer, Ruth Gordon, Elisha Cook etc). Smoothly directed and misstepping only occasionally with some moments of comedy and overt "gore", the film's still influential to this day. Emblematic of the film's impact, Farrow's pixie haircut still pops up in modern horror movies ("Birth", "The Astronauts Wife" etc").
8.5/10 - Classic.