"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. -- Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice
"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt.” (Vigilante Citizen)
“This is no dream, this is really happening!” - Rosemary Woodhouse
The first film perhaps ever to exploit our deep dread of, old folks, 1968's Rosemary's Baby gazes deep and diabolically into the murky waters wherefrom reach the skeletal hands of grandparents reaching up from the tar pit of fundamentalism to pat their captive breeders' kicking bellies. From these waters crawl real life abominations like the 2012 male-only hearing on women's reproductive freedom, and the stoning to death of women whose hair is accidentally exposed at the fundamentalist Muslim market. At a certain depth, Christianity and Satanism become indistinguishable, especially once Asherah, Mrs. God, Yaweh's female counterpart, is banned from the Christian bible and patriarchy squashes women's rights like a bug underfoot. A million witch burnings later and who can blame the devil worshippers for being so well-hidden from the public eye, or so resentful of Christianity? To the persecuted Asherah-worshipping earth mother witch, Christianity is as the KKK is to African-Americans, or Nazis to the Jews, or modern conservatives towards everyone outside their race, religion, gender and age.
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| A typical early Christian demolishing an Asherah pole (by Dakota O'Leary) |
We see the entirety of the film from Rosemary's point of view we're never privy to what's going on, we have to guess, just as she does, until the very end, where she in a sense finds out where babies come from, or rather where her baby's father is. The entirety of the film is absent direct visualization of any devil practices (the paintings at the Castavets are removed when Rosemary and Guy first come to visit). Strangely enough, that paranoid angle was jettisoned for most of Rosemary's imitators, to be replaced by robes, horns, pentagrams, possession, smoke and mirrors and screaming naked virgins. The imitators got the surface iconography right but missed the paranoiac angle, 1974's The Exorcist included. .
Polanski knew to never show such iconography, or if one must, to do it in surreal dream sequences, or in paintings on the Castavet's walls. Polanski knew a Satanist with a gentle smile and a natty bow-tie could be far scarier than one that 'looked' scary, i.e. with a goat horn cowl and black cloak. We never see Rosemary's unholy baby, or the molesting devil (a hand and yellow eyes aside); the old people chanting around her in the dream are naked, no robes, and no horns or forked tail can compare in uncanny dead to the mystery and horror of the human reproductive system or a flock of naked old folks around your bed while your writhing in a drugged stupor. If you know this blog you know I've had my own drugged demon visitations (see here) -- I believe in them, to a certain extent. I believe the boundary line between the real and the vividly imagined is traversable in ways our minds as yet cannot consciously grasp. For instance just last night on Late Night with Craig Ferguson he was talking with an author about how characters sometimes break away from you when you're writing them - they show up in places and do things you don't consciously expect as you're writing - as if they notice you writing about them; I had that happen to me writing my first novel wherein my character realizes some people he met the other night at a coke party are Yaqui crow trickster shamen, and right at that moment I could feel real Yaqui crow trickster shamen sensing me writing about them, and they began to begin to stir in their far-off nests, sending psychic representations forth through the gossamer tubeways of thought to climb out of the page to get me, like they could blind me or destroy me with their unified field of chant/thought just as the coven had done to Tony Curtis in RB. It didn't happen but man were my neck hairs standing up.
But there's more to the story of Rosemary's Baby than just combined creative unconscious drives commingling to blind God long enough that a dream lover spawn might sneak across the uterine expanse of Mother Gaia unburnt-at-stake dimensional dividers (after all, souls of even non-devil babies have to come from somewhere).
It wasn't just Polanski's film, and he wasn't the only life it allegedly destroyed. It had as a producer the legendary master of ballyhoo, William Castle, and by 1968, Castle's patented gimmicks like skeletons on strings and tingling seats were passe. So I'm not saying right off he made up a Macbeth curse-style paranoid linking of strange on-set accidents and tragedies. But did he link them all together so it sounded like the devil had woken up and took notice his unholy name was being invoked? Castle's creative drive in this case might be said to have come true - the unconscious trickster shamen noticed him weaving a paranoid associative rumor nexus for Rosemary's ballyhoo --and sent their Satanic kidney stone calling card across the gossamer web that connects myth, dream, mind, soul, and nerve endings.
David Parkinson writes about the hate mail Castle received for the film, the curses leveled at him, and he and composer Krystof Komeda being struck down with crippling, painful ailments shortly after the film premiered, as well as the later murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate (who co-starred in Eye of the Devil in 1966 (see: The Blonde Devils of '66) and who Polanski wanted in the part of Roesemary) and their unborn baby; he omits the eerie similarity to the violation of Rosemary in the film and Polanski's own rape charges, to end with a link to John Lennon's death in 1980:
John Lennon had spent the spring of 1968 with Mia Farrow at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India. During their stay, Lennon had written "Dear Prudence" for Farrow's sister (who shared a name with Sharon Tate's Yorkshire terrier) and it featured on The Beatles' White Album that November. Charles Manson claimed that the LP contained coded messages about the impending race war he hoped to provoke with the Cielo Drive slayings. Lennon himself met a violent end in December 1980 when he was gunned down in New York — outside the Dakota apartments." (more)For Polanski, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, the coven aspect of the tale surely tapped into both the paranoia, as well as a kind of Stockholm syndrome flip side of being constantly in danger. Part of the Nazi's rationale was that Jews had a mystical black magic Protocols of the Elders of Zion cabal themselves, and just as devil worshippers had to lay low for centuries lest they be burned at stake. In America we can't imagine what it's like to be invaded, to have an openly evil and oppressive system turn human compassion and morality upside down, to obliterate all traces of rhyme and reason, to be persecuted for our heritage. But for Polanski this is a formative year reality. He knows all we see and hear of 'reality' is only the tip of a deep ink black iceberg. Behind closed doors, who knows what monsters still dwell?
In 1930s America, the Nazi-fleeing Jews, gays, artists, geniuses, flew our way, bringing their strange customs, and after the war, America turned to atomic age anxiety and away from the occult, with giant bugs and rockets instead of ghosts and demons. America became a place where junior could play catch in the back yard and old people with rakes smiled from cross the street. Occasionally a dad could go insane (as in Nicolas Ray's Bigger than Life) or kids could grow up into spoiled brats (as in Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows), but childbirth was holy and above all, babies, housewives, and old people could never be, you know, evil. A few exceptions came and went, there was The Bad Seed, and a spate of crazy old broad movies launched by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jane and Rhoda were psychotic, flash-frozen before their brains developed an empathetic response --we knew this from the get-go. But what about the sane, gentle sweethearts bringing you vitamin shakes to help your pregnancy, or the 'no arguments young lady' condescension of top shelf pediatricians played by stalwart salts like Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein who tells Rosemary "And please don't read books. Don't listen to your friends either." Sapirstein could be espousing the Muslin fundamentalist sexist line; he might add "and please don't vote, get a job, or wear pants." Rosemary's only form of revolt against this trap is her short hair-cut, which Guy thinks is tantamount to her drawing on the wall in crayon.
It's interesting to note that in both this film and Friedkin's The Exorcist, there is a woman with her child / innocence and an absentee father for her child (since the devil only shows up in her vision) dealing with another man and his older mentor - in Exorcist they are two priests, one young and one old, in Baby, the worthless husband and the older Roman Castavet. There's nary a Christian in the place. Is God Dead? so trumpets Time Magazine!
The last proper dad we see in the film, played by Maurice Evens, is the proper authority figure of the old school of monster movies, the enlightening scientist, or in the Hammer films, the merry fire-toasted Van Helsing type, outlying some grim history. "Adrian Marcata lived there, so did the Trent sisters." It turns out of course that Marcata / Mocata, it's all one - the same old man in the painting above the mantle in the Castavet home. The name Adrian Marcata should of course remind Hammer fans of The Devil Rides Out and its villain Bob Adrian Mocata, played by Charles Gray (below left), which came out the exact same year, but compared the resonant contemporary realism of Polanski's film it seems to be from years earlier, Rides is a fun, goofy deadpan classic, but Rosemary's Baby is still ahead of its time. Even Rosemary's utterance "Hey, let's make love," while they're eating dinner on the floor in their empty apartment, is straight out of the 70s. |
| Mocata, Marcata |
The cynical self-serving unconscious bluster of Guy is apparently sensed by the Castavets, which is why he's brought in to their fold and not Rosemary. They sense in her a deep goodness that he--self serving prick that he is--lacks. When the news announces "Pope Paul VI arrived at 9:47 AM" - he excitedly shouts, "that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial!" as if as a paltry actor he has some say in media buying. We later hear some of his true vitriol come out while he's rehearsing with his crutch, shouting the line "I'm in love with no one, especially not your goddamned fat wife!" as if anticipating Rosemary's swollen belly. He would almost be forgiven just because he's so bad at hiding things, he can't even act the part of a concerned doting husband convincingly, though a part of him thinks he can - because he's so vain. It's a part that also shows Cassavettes limits as an artist and actor - he was always better playing a charmless swine who genuinely thought we were awed by his charm. I personally can't stand his own improvisational, misogynistic movies. I find them painful and self-indulgent and amateurish - and Polanski nails all that down around Guy so all Cassavettes can do is squirm and pace the room and seem utterly confused by the fact that Rosemary's not charmed into submission by his patronizing grin.
Coming as it does so buried within the more 'normal' surfaces of Polanski's mise-en-scene, the lengthy dream sequence centerpiece to the film is a revelation as to how such sequences can enhance the story rather than diminish it. Most of the time in films dream sequences are cop-outs, places to dump the sexy weird shots or artsy ideas that don't fit the story but which the producers want so they can use them in the poster and coming attractions. Directors can do whatever they want in a dream sequence, get full weird, but it doesn't 'matter' - there are no consequences - the dream isn't 'real' - just an artsy diversion. Only great surrealists like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel understand that dreams are the real part, it's life that's the artsy diversion. When Rosemary momentarily comes out of her trance to note that 'this is really happening' it's terrifying, because we can't really fathom which parts of what we see and hear are the dreams and which reality. Polanski's film knows the power of the mind and the flexible nature of space and time - and in these areas lurk real horrors; the blue laser eyes and telekenetic devil children of later films are the opposite - in externalizing and literalizing the threat, it is actually less frightening. With no monster in sight, no 'seen murders' (Tony Curtis is only blinded after all, not beheaded by stray sheet glass), there's actually a crisper sense of dread. Of all the horror films of the last 20 years, only The Blair Witch Project understood this power.
"This is no dream..."
The conspiracy theories of authors like David Icke re: the Illuminati and Zionist banking cabals, works on a similar level. Irregardless of its authenticity, it's a vibrant, fascinating myth. There is no insurmountable line between truth and fiction once one enters these worlds, only a series of stages, mirror reflections, - "the mind can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." And this is the power and importance of ritual initiation ceremonies in indigenous tribes (and why Satanists and CIA programmers allegedly use inflicted trauma to create dissociative states and split personalities in their subjects, one might also add Lamaze to this list). I myself noticed this with unbearable pain in my life, like when I dislocated my knee cap. The extreme sensory pain launched my perspective into a split distance, on the one side me in agony on the other me standing slightly back, impassive, the white hot pain in a sense knocking me into a contemplative serenity; the later shot of morphine at the hospital brought me deeper into this calm detachment.
Theories about giving birth and Stockholm Syndrome align with this; the agony of childbirth shifts the consciousness of a woman into that of a mother, the pain of ritual initiation for boys, of menstruation for girls, all coincides with the journey from mythic third eye visualization to of the five senses in a recoil motion, vomiting of the soul up into the mythic outsider "observer" position, the subject moving from being an honored child guest kept out of the adult swim, to being initiated into a cosmic truth too ambivalent and full of surface hostility and danger (such as Christian persecution) for children and innocent Iowa girls to grasp unaccompanied.
Most devil movies end with the coven being swallowed up in flames (ala Suspiria, Inferno, The Devil's Rain, etc.) which is why the burning church painting Rosemary finds when she finally breaks through the hidden door into the Castavet's apartment is so wry. There are no flames for the devils, the fiery climax is frozen in amber and it's the Christian church that burns down, safely contained in oils on the wall of the devil's domicile. When Marcata declares that God is dead you feel that he just might be right. The party Rosemary bursts in on is, after all, hardly the typical cliched evil power mongers - they're eccentrics - they're funny - such as the miffed old lady trying to rock the cradle. They're bizarros. In finally solving the mystery Rosemary doesn't trigger the inferno that burns down the house - the house was God's and it's been burned down for years, just she didn't know it. Rosemary's enlightenment isn't a matter of restoring patriarchal supremacy or conquering evil on behalf of good, or even the power of maternal instinct to trump Christian values, it's about solving the mystery at the core of 20th century existence, finally telling your husband to fuck off, gluing that Asherah pole back together and birthing your way into the know.
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