Roman Polanski – Bitch Flicks

‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘Prevenge,’ and the Evils of the Trump Administration

Alice Lowe’s ‘Prevenge’ is in some ways a modernized version of ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ … Throughout the course of history, and especially in Trump’s America, baby always comes first. Our government cares more about fetuses than it does about living, breathing women. This chills me to the core more than a scary movie ever could.

This guest post written by Lindsay Pugh appears as part of our theme week on Women in Horror. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Whether completely alone or with a partner standing by, pregnancy is one of the most terrifying and bizarre events to happen in real life. Of course, women are expected to handle it with aplomb and joy. “Oh, you mean my entire body is going to change and then if all goes well, another human being is going to rip through my vagina, hopefully only causing minimal tearing? Fantastic! Sign me up!”

As a woman in 2017, there’s plenty to be afraid of: increased attacks on abortion, unrelenting attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, rape culture and the normalization of sexual assault (“Grab ‘em by the pussy.”), etc. The litany of bullshit is horrific and interminable. How can anyone make a horror film that will scare women when real life has turned into a waking nightmare? Easy. Throw pregnancy into the mix; take all those standard fears and concerns and amplify them. Two films that do a great job portraying these atrocities are Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Alice Lowe’s Prevenge (2016).

I hate to give Polanski, creepy Keebler Elf and sexual predator extraordinaire, credit, but Rosemary’s Baby is one of my all-time favorite horror films and feminist as fuck. It makes me feel a little better to know that his screenplay is nearly identical to Ira Levin’s novel, so it’s not like Polanski is responsible for any of the genius plotting or characterizations.

In order to truly grasp the brilliance of Rosemary’s Baby, let’s quickly review the atrocities Rosemary (Mia Farrow) has to endure, from the sex before conception to her post-birth satanic cult discovery. First, it’s important to note that Rosemary’s pregnancy is the product of rape. Even though she’s been drugged c/o Minnie’s (Ruth Gordon) chocolate mousse, Rosemary is cognizant enough to realize, “This is no dream! This is really happening.” (Although even if she wasn’t cognizant, the fact is she was unable to consent.) The morning after her rape, Guy (John Cassavetes) tries to gaslight Rosemary by apologizing for the scratches on her body and telling her they only had sex when she was blacked out because he didn’t want to miss “baby night.” Rosemary is tense and suspicious for days, but those feelings are eventually eclipsed when a phone call from her doctor confirms her pregnancy. Instead of focusing on the traumatic conception, Rosemary diverts her attention to scheduling doctor’s appointments and spreading the joyous news.

Unfortunately, Rosemary’s happiness wanes when her body begins to change. In order to combat her feelings of unease, Guy, Minnie, and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) concoct a plan to ensure that no matter how bad her symptoms become, Rosemary never believes they’re abnormal. Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy) tells Rosemary not to ask any questions or listen to advice from friends or books. Instead of taking vitamins, she’s to drink one of Minnie’s herbal concoctions every day. Rosemary wants what’s best for her baby, so she listens to the doctor, even as she becomes scarily gaunt. She knows something is wrong, but the people closest to her have done a great job of convincing her she’s paranoid and can’t trust her own instincts.

Throughout the film, Rosemary vacillates between trusting her intuition and dismissing it because she wants what’s best for the baby and doesn’t always trust herself to provide it. At several points, she tries to take control of her situation, but external forces usually convince her she’s made the wrong call. By effectively gaslighting her, Guy and the Castevets have ensured that Rosemary no longer trusts her own body or motherly intuition. At the end of the film, when Rosemary decides to embrace her role even though her child is a fucking demon, it’s a total act of rebellion. These people have taken away her sanity, her health, and nine months of her life, but they won’t take away her baby. Even though this situation isn’t what she signed up for, she’s on board for lack of a better option.

Even with a wanted baby, pregnancy can be a terrifying situation full of unknown elements. Alice Lowe had this in mind, that “pregnancy is an alien experience,” while making Prevenge. Without the power to ask questions and make informed decisions, a beautiful, exciting life event could easily turn into a waking nightmare full of anxiety and dread. The Trump administration wants to make Rosemary’s Baby a reality. Something is wrong with your pregnancy and you need to terminate it in order to avoid a lifetime of pain for yourself and your child? Too bad. You must carry the pregnancy to term and deal with the ramifications alone. Your pregnancy is the result of rape and you’re unable to deal with the psychological trauma? Or you simply don’t want to be pregnant? I hope you have the time, money, patience, and strength to deal with abortion restrictions like mandatory waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, TRAP laws, personhood laws, insurance and funding limitations, 20-week bans, forced counseling, and ideological shaming that you’re likely to encounter depending your state. And restrictions to abortion access disproportionately impact women in poverty, women of color, and women living in rural areas.

Rosemary’s Baby is as relevant today as it was forty-nine years ago. Like Guy Woodhouse, the Trump administration uses women as pawns and attempts to stave off rebellion by gaslighting, discrediting, isolating, and emotionally manipulating them.

Prevenge is in some ways a modernized version of Rosemary’s Baby. Ruth (Alice Lowe) is a widow, convinced something is wrong with her pregnancy but told by her midwife (Jo Hartley) that she needs to stay positive and listen to her instincts. The midwife tells Ruth, “Baby knows what to do. Baby will tell you what to do.” The only problem is that Ruth’s baby tells her to kill people, not to relax and eat some Cheetos dipped in clam chowder. With influences ranging from the Greek Furies, to American Psycho and Taxi Driver, Lowe “wanted to show a powerful pregnant woman,” which counters how pregnant women are traditionally depicted or viewed as frail.

During her pregnancy, Ruth is even more isolated than Rosemary. She lives out of hotel rooms, has no friends, and only interacts with her midwife and people she plans on killing. The bond with her unborn baby is the sole one we’re privy to and it’s obviously very twisted. Even when we finally see a flashback of her deceased husband, it’s of his death and not their time together.

While we often hear the midwife voice concern for the baby, we never hear her ask Ruth how she’s doing. Even after she looks through Ruth’s paperwork and realizes that her partner is dead, she doesn’t feign sympathy. She essentially tells Ruth to suck it up and remain positive because her negative energy won’t do anything to help the baby. This is the conversation she has with Ruth after realizing she’s a single mother:

Midwife: It’s very important to let the past stay in the past. It’s just nature’s way.
Ruth: I think nature’s a bit of a cunt, though, don’t you?
Midwife: Oh, negativity’s not good for the baby’s spirit, really.
Ruth: Do you think?
Midwife: Yes. I think it’s good to try to stay positive.

Ruth is clearly struggling with mental health issues and needs someone to step in and help her, but no one gives a shit about her problems; her job is to serve the baby and as long as she’s following through, there’s no cause for concern. As soon as Ruth becomes a mother, her grief and depression are non-issues to those around her because the baby comes first. Throughout the course of history, and especially in Trump’s America, baby always comes first. Our government cares more about fetuses than it does about living, breathing women. This chills me to the core more than a scary movie ever could.

Ruth and Rosemary both try to do what they think is best, but are swayed by outside influence. Ruth’s midwife tells her to listen to the baby; Dr. Sapirstein tells Rosemary to listen to him. No one tells either of these women to listen to themselves — to trust their bodies, experience, or intuition. Women are not to be trusted in any capacity, in any situation. Ruth knows that something isn’t right, that her pregnancy and mental state are abnormal. But she squashes these feelings, listens to her “baby,” and continues to kill people. Rosemary fights like hell at the end of the movie and tries to tell anyone who will listen that there’s a conspiracy against her, but she’s branded as “crazy” and immediately dismissed.

This Halloween, what’s keeping me up at night isn’t fiction; it’s real life. It’s the possibility of a 20-week abortion ban and the knowledge that I live in a country where women aren’t valued or trusted — where a majority of white women would rather have Donald Trump represent their interests than Hillary Clinton. I watch films like Prevenge and Rosemary’s Baby because I want to remind myself to stay vigilant. In 1979, Loretta Lynn said, “We’ve come a long way, baby,” but these films remind me we haven’t come far enough.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying

The “Blurred Lines” of Body Horror and Rape Culture

Rosemary’s Baby: Who Possesses the Pregnant Woman’s Body

Recommended Reading:

Woman in Revolt on Prevenge

Refinery29’s Interview with Alice Lowe: The Pregnant Serial Killer Movie Taking a Knife to Stereotypes on Film

The Most Cursed Hit Movie Ever Made by Rosemary Counter

Lindsay Pugh runs Woman in Revolt, an intersectional feminist film blog that focuses on female directors in television and film. She is a self-described militant feminist and can be found wandering the streets of Ann Arbor wearing a leather jacket adorned with “Fuck Paul Ryan” pins and shaking her fist at the patriarchy.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’

The eye we see in the film’s opening credits belongs to Carol and encapsulates her relationship to the internal and external worlds. To outside observers, Carol’s large, doe-like eyes are a signifier of her feminine allure, but, as is made palpable to the viewer, they also house her intense fear and constitute a deceptive barrier against the malignant traumas that disturb her internal world.

This guest post by Johanna Mackin appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When Carol, the demure and unassuming young beautician at the heart of Roman Polanski’s surrealistic thriller Repulsion begins to lose her grip on reality, she externalises a deep fear of men into acts of fatal violence. Some of cinema’s most symbolically layered female characters are seen to present patterns of shy and socially anxious behaviour that belie murderous impulses, but who are these timorous killers, and what archaic chains of fear are made manifest in the violent outbursts they are given to?

Carol (played by Catherine Deneuve), is irretrievable from her shyness. She looks down as she walks, her manner is subdued and often sullen, and she frequently appears lost in a world of her own. Her speaking voice is soft and she speaks little, her movement slowed by the burden of fear, and she passes across things so lightly and interacts with the world so delicately that she can barely be seen to leave a trace upon it. Her fragility and reservedness (which as we will see provide a crucial, if unsustainable, defence against threats to the self), are only breached when outside influences encroach more than the barely tolerable amount she has come to live with, and these cracks in her armoury, which give way to hallucinations of violent sexual abuse, culminate in a double androcide.

Pioneering object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein expands Freudian notions of death instinct, identifying that “anxiety has its origin in the fear of death,” which she sees as an impervious truth for every human. For the infant, the ambiguity of the object world represents a deathly threat to the self that destruction is projected onto, turning it into an external representation of the death instinct, which is introjected as internalised self danger and then projected back out into the external world. Constantly mediating a fear of the outside and a fear from within, external dangers are thus intensified due to internal fear, but the introjection of this harmful danger also intensifies “the perpetual inner-danger situation.”

The threat posed to Carol’s ego by the men she comes into contact with therefore greatly exacerbates her internalised danger, and thus the fear of death, or death of the self, given that selfhood is the only conduit through which we live in the world. Of course, real and imaginary threats can demonstrate a similar impact upon the individual, and in Carol’s case she is presented with significant instances of both, from the direct misogyny of men encountered, to imagined cracks in the walls of her apartment worsening outside of her control.

Terror management theorists developed the idea that “we humans feel fully secure only if we consider ourselves valuable contributors to that world we live in,” the world of meaning we have created to defend against the anxieties of death. A sense of our value within the world (or “self esteem”) is established in our interactions with others, and the extent to which we are able to be successfully incorporated into the dominant worldview. Studies following this position have shown that it is through elevated self esteem that we can most easily evade the fear of death. Carol’s self esteem, already negligible at the start of the film, is systematically shattered throughout the course of its events as she is leered at, coerced into romantic situations against her will, and scolded for her demeanour by a succession of people. A fundamental paradox at Carol’s centre is that her aesthetic presentation makes her appear acceptable to society, while her turbulent sense of self is greatly at odds with one which can be enjoyed as a fear-abating continuation of the dominant ideology.

In an edifying essay about the impeachment of the commercial skin industry on the way we view our own bodies, authors Kenway and Bullen highlight a crucial link between the perfect body image, and the sociological pedagogy of a myth that anything which threatens it possesses an abject quality. Naturally, these prescribed notions of attractiveness impinge greatly upon a whole society. Failure to properly conform can be taboo or prey to a litany of prejudices; compliance, as noted in Carol’s case, can elicit unwanted attention and expectations. This is epitomised in her sister’s lover’s view of her, as both “the beautiful younger sister” and someone who “needs to see a doctor,” when her failure to meet his expectations of polite social interaction threatens the stability of his own tentatively compiled defences against death anxiety.

The events that precipitate Carol’s unravelling stem from her sister’s involvement with a married man and subsequent holiday. Carol is reliant upon the protective forces exerted by her sister’s presence, and when the barrier of their private apartment is punctured by an unwanted male (she throws his belongings away after hearing her sister having sex with him), her abject defences necessarily harden, so that what little self is left may not be stolen from her. When she is left alone in the house, she meditates upon a family photo, which is returned to for clarity of motive at the end of the film. It features Carol as a young girl, lingering defensively in the background and casting a hateful stare at a nameless patriarch on the right. The implication, reinforced when the photo appears again as the final shot of the film, is that Carol was sexually abused as a child, and this is what has prompted her intense mistrust of men and series of harrowing rape hallucinations.

This internally harmful repulsion felt toward men, which was engendered in Carol at such a young age, has been unable to heal owing to constraints of society and the continual reinforcement of negative patriarchal behaviours. Colin exerts his entitlement over her (despite voicing his recognition at one point that “it’s all so sordid”), eventually breaking down the door of her apartment through sexually agitated aggression. Her landlord attempts to repeat the abuse she suffered as a child, repelled only by a fatal outburst. Even less overt threats such as cat-calling in the street and sexualised derision from other men in conversation (“Cinderella,” “Little Miss Muffet”) belie a menacing claim to women’s bodies, which asserts that Carol’s fear is not at all unfounded.

Whilst, as Klein suggests, externalisations of fear are often our most powerful therapeutic defense against it (via artistic expression, for example), Carol’s freedom to communicate is so muted by those around her, who will not weather her extremes of anxiety, that it is impossible for her to manage this fear in a healthy way, and so it spills over (like the filled bathtub into which her first victim is decanted) as an even more abject threat to be internalised once more, intensifying her removal from reality. People project onto her a social conformity that her life experiences render her incapable of meeting. Her trance-like episodes are condemned by customers and colleagues at work; her desperately relied-upon sister curtly dismisses her deep paranoia; she is told to not “look so mis’” by a well-meaning friend. This projected impediment of ill-fitting normalcy onto Carol sends her deeper into herself, manifesting as a timidity which in turn fosters more hostility from the external world which, rather than providing a patient and therapeutic space for Carol to talk into, imposes desired behaviours onto her. Her main pursuer, Colin, purposefully ignores her silence and negative body language as he repeatedly makes unwanted advances upon her.

Speaking on the development of schizoid states and schizophrenia in children, object-relations therapist D W Winnicott offers that failure of good-enough active environmental adaptation, produces a psychotic distortion of the environment-individual set-up. Relationships produce loss of the sense of self, and the latter is only regained by return to isolation. Being isolated, however […involves…] more and more defensive organization in repudiation of environmental impingement

For Carol, who can be seen to present with an obviously schizophrenic symptomatology, the healthy development of understanding illusion in the external world is distorted, or interrupted by childhood abuse. An incorporation of illusion into the life of a healthy child is challenged as they grow up (think of the tooth fairy, for example), but in the case of Carol the distinction between objective and subjective reality was denied a healthy conclusion by forcing a defensive retreat into a secret, “truly incommunicable” inner world, far removed from external reality. Here her use of illusion takes on more psychotic properties, especially when under duress such as that of her sister’s departure.

Compounding Carol’s fear throughout the film is a plethora of memento mori, which bind events to a sense of impending death. The devouring cracks in the wall; the sounds of clocks ticking and bells tolling at moment of heightened trauma; and finally, the rabbit, a symbol for Carol’s own self death (this is alluded to in talk of her being “strung up” and “all shaking like a little frightened animal”). The rabbit rots away throughout the film, eventually thrown out by the landlord who is then killed after he abuses Carol, thus severing her final defence against the unburdenable traumas of the past and from which she is unable to recover.

Winnicott speaks of the individual as then being able to inhabit a “false self that seems satisfactory to the unwary observer” (however unconvincing, Carol’s prosaic job and her hesitant engagements in conversation with Colin support this). This false self defends fiercely against the core self, “although the schizophrenia is latent and will claim attention in the end.” He describes a loosely organised self in defence against paranoid anxieties as “defensive pathological introversion.” Continuously expelling and incorporating the impeachments upon her secret, incommunicado core, Carol sinks further into a world which is entirely abject and encroaches upon the borders of her existence. This catastrophic entropy and its fatal consequences result in Carol’s defences eventually shutting down altogether as she slips into a kind of catatonic state at the end of the film. Her subjectivity is silenced by society, being deemed unacceptable, and so she has no reasonable outlet but to kill. Others must die so that she does not suffer total self death.

Repulsion is just one representation of the explosive anxieties of women in film. Carrie is perhaps the most famous example of a “timorous killer,” but other notable examples of introverted women being pushed to murderous extremes include Sleepaway Camp, Ms 45, Sightseers, Antichrist, and A Question of Silence, to name a few that are well worth exploring.

What these characters also have in common is an ability to explode and subvert the damaging environments that contain them. Sometimes their murderous transgressions from shyness and anxiety provide them with a kind of psychotic catharsis, and sometimes the consequences present a more abysmal loss of self, but what is consistently gratifying is the symbolic employment of such characters to illuminate the negative effect of a dominant cultural ideology on individuals. In a world ridden with stringent and judgmental expectations, the symbol of the timorous killer should be celebrated as a resistance against cultural order.

Johanna Mackin has recently completed an MA in Contemporary Literature in Culture and currently spends her time coding and writing poetry (the boundaries of which are often blurred). You can find some of her poetry on Instagram, or follow her on Twitter @johannamackin

‘Rosemary’s Baby’: Who Possesses the Pregnant Woman’s Body?

To what extent does a woman, pregnant or otherwise, “own” her body? To what extent can or should a woman’s (pregnant) body be subject to social concerns? Physically and socially, where is the divide between the mother’s body and the baby’s body? By raising these questions, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is not only concerned with the spiritual but, also, the social possession of the female body.

This post by staff writer Sarah Smyth appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

Who possesses the pregnant woman’s body? In Roman Polanski’s 1968 film, Rosemary’s Baby, the answer is twofold. The film’s titular protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), becomes physically possessed after she becomes pregnant with a demonic Devil child. Yet, this heightened and fantastical narrative allows for a broader discussion regarding the wider possession of the pregnant women’s body as Rosemary becomes intensely scrutinised, manipulated, and controlled by outside forces. Rosemary is not only possessed by the Devil; she is also possessed by contemporary patriarchal social, medical, technological, legal, and sexual controls.

The poster for Rosemary's Baby — The poster for *Rosemary’s Baby*

Rosemary’s Baby tells the story of young newlyweds, Rosemary and Guy (John Cassavetes), who move into an apartment in New York where they befriend their seemingly harmless but overbearing neighbors, Minne (Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role) and Roman Castevet (Signey Blackmer). Rosemary quickly becomes pregnant, and the film then follows her painful, difficult, and confusing pregnancy. Despite the assurances from Guy, Minnie, Roman, and even her doctor, that her pregnancy is normal, Rosemary – and the audience – know that something is wrong. As her suspicion grows, in the film’s dénouement, Rosemary discovers that, in a pact reminiscent of Doctor Faustus, Guy promised his first born to a coven of witches, of which Minnie and Roman are part, in order to further his acting career. She discovers that she was raped by Satan, and has given birth to a Devil-child. The power of the film resides not only in its impressive combination of the naturalistic depiction of contemporary urban life with the surreal and fantastical depiction of the Satan-worshipping witches. It also resides in the way in which the film raises a number of complex questions: To what extent does a woman, pregnant or otherwise, “own” her body? To what extent can or should a woman’s (pregnant) body be subject to social concerns? Physically and socially, where is the divide between the mother’s body and the baby’s body? By raising these questions, Rosemary’s Baby is not only concerned with the spiritual but, also, the social possession of the female body.

The primary horror of Rosemary’s Baby lies not only in the creation and realization of an abject, grotesque, and demonic baby, but in the little control Rosemary has over her body and her pregnancy. After she discovers she’s pregnant, Minnie and Roman recommend a doctor who tells Rosemary not to read books, talk to friends about their experiences, or take vitamin pills. Instead, he recommends that Minnie makes her a daily drink. Discouraging Rosemary from gaining alternative opinions and pieces of advice from books and friends, and conspiring with Roman and Minnie to force Rosemary into consuming a strange drink, the doctor abuses his position of power; he controls Rosemary both physically and mentally. Even after Rosemary loses weight at the beginning of her pregnancy, complains of being in crippling pain for a number of months, and generally looks ill, the doctor assures her that this is perfectly normal. Betrayed, controlled, and manipulated by seemingly trustworthy people – her husband, elderly neighbors and doctors – Rosemary’s Baby plays on contemporary social, legal, technological, and medical anxieties regarding the “ownership” of the pregnant female body through this heightened and fantastical narrative about spiritual possession.

Rosemary's neighbors are a bit overbearing... — Rosemary’s neighbors are a bit overbearing…

Released in 1968, Rosemary’s Baby reflects a time of change regarding the control over the reproductive female body. The Pill was approved for contraceptive use in 1960 giving women, at least in theory, greater control over their sex lives. The 1960s was an intense period regarding abortion laws in the States, eventually culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision Roe v. Wade. For A. Robin Hoffman, situating the film within its social and historical context is crucial as “we cannot understand what is horrifying about a horror movie without understanding the contemporaneous fears and concerns that penetrated both its production and the viewing public who first screened it.” Although Hoffman suggests that Rosemary’s Baby is a “social document of the growing horror of pregnancy…as reproductive technology and legal actions colluded to empower the fetus at the expense of the previously sacrosanct pregnant woman,” I relocate the horror of the film away from the visibility of the fetus and back onto the woman’s pregnant body. The horror, as played out in the narrative, is not primarily that the baby is a Devil-child, but that Rosemary has been coerced into carrying and then giving birth to this monstrous child. In this way, through the spiritual possession of Rosemary’s body, the film plays on the contemporary social anxieties surrounding the changing reproductive and sexual authority and autonomy women gained over their bodies due to the advances in medicine, technology and the law during this time.

However, the issue of bodily possession not only reflects the contemporary anxieties over a woman’s ownership of her body through pregnancy, but the assumption and investment in the pregnant body as a social issue. In the film, Rosemary’s body is subject to intense and constant scrutiny from other characters. She’s told she looks too chalky, too tired, too thin. Although these comments often stem from a place of genuine concern for Rosemary’s health, there’s an underlying assumption that the pregnant body is one on which we can freely comment. Indeed, at one point, as Rosemary’s (male) friend, Hitch, claims that “I was alarmed by her appearance”, Roman responds, “She has lost some weight, but that’s quite normal. Later she’ll gain, probably too much.” Roman’s response demonstrates the way in which the pregnant body, particularly with reference to weight, is constantly kept under surveillance. This is also true in our wider culture today. A regular feature in celebrity gossip magazines and newspapers, the “baby bump watch” observes the female celebrity’s weight gain (and then weight loss after the baby is born), maternity style, and diet and exercise regimes. As in the case of Kim Kardashian, the pregnant woman is viciously mocked and chastised if she does not fulfil the desired expectations. Likewise, among “normal” people, if a pregnant woman should choose to drink or smoke, she becomes the subject of disgust and disapproval due to the moralizing attitude society has towards her. Whilst there may be good health reasons not to drink and smoke (once again, we trust the doctors for this advice), it is the demand that women fulfill certain expectations, and the assumption that people have the authority to comment and criticize on another women’s body which is most worrying. Crucially, it demonstrates the extent to which a women’s autonomy over her body is limited. The child, the human race’s investment for its own continuation, and the embodiment of society’s futurity, becomes such a critical and crucial concern that the pregnant women’s body becomes a site of fleshy societal possession.

Gossip magazines and newspapers have a firm idea as to what constitutes the "acceptable" pregnant body, and they ridicule those who don't conform to it — Gossip magazines and newspapers have a firm idea as to what constitutes the “acceptable” pregnant body, and they ridicule those who don’t conform to it

The final way in which Rosemary’s body becomes possessed is sexually. When Guy “sells” Rosemary to the witches, demonstrating his consideration of patriarchal entitlement over her body, Rosemary passes out after eating a drugged dessert made by Minnie, and is then raped by Satan in a bizarre, surreal, and extremely disturbing sequence. Later, after she’s awoken from this “dream” – the boundary between the imagined and the actual are indistinguishable at this point–, she finds scratches over her body, and Guy tells Rosemary that he “didn’t want to miss baby night”. In other words, he admits to marital rape. Although Rosemary seems a little upset and distressed at this, the film glosses over this fact. Given that marital rape, astoundingly, wasn’t made illegal in all 50 states until 1993, the film offers no position for Rosemary to be outraged at this violation. Her body, it seems, really does belong to her husband.

Rosemary wakes up from "baby night" with scratches all over her body — Rosemary wakes up from “baby night” with scratches all over her body

Famously and controversially, the sexual possession of the female body is not contained within the intertextual parameters of the film. In 1977, Roman Polanski, the film’s director, was arrested and charged with five offences against a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Gailey, including rape. Although he initially pled not guilty, Polanski later admitted to the charge of rape, but fled to France before he was sentenced. The United States authorities have failed to extradite him and, to this day, the charges remain pending. For some, particularly in the case of Woody Allen, the need to separate art from the artist is crucial. I remain skeptical over the auteur approach to filmmaking because, although film directors often have a pervasive vision and the overall authority when making creative decisions, it also neglects the contribution made by other departments including producers, screenwriters, and cinematographers. In this way, I do not read Rosemary’s Baby as wholly Polanski’s vision. Nevertheless, the crimes of which he has been accused are abhorrent, and a discussion of the possession of the female body, particularly the sexual possession of Rosemary’s body, must be read in light of these crimes. For me, on a personal level (for I do not wish to speak on behalf of women who have experienced sexual abuse and may perceive and react to the film differently), these crimes lessen the impact of the moments of resistance in the film. At one point, at the beginning of her pregnancy, Rosemary gets a haircut, suggesting her desire to reclaim her body, even in a small way. Similarly, at another point in the film when Rosemary, looking particularly ill, throws a party, a group of her female friends rally around her and encourage her to seek a second opinion due to her current doctor’s failure to acknowledge her difficulties with the pregnancy. Crucially, they shut Guy out of their conversation, claiming it’s for “girls only”. This moment, whilst in other circumstances, may powerfully demonstrate the way in which women, as a communal force, are able to undermine patriarchal dominance, for me feels hollow. Infiltrating the way in which I read the film’s inter-textual moments of the resistance, the extra-textual events forcefully undermine the moments of power and autonomy offered to these women.

Through the fantastical spiritual possession narrative, Rosemary’s Baby powerfully and effectively reveals the contemporary social, medical, legal, technological and even, to an extent, sexual anxieties surrounding the possession of women bodies which remain relevant and pervasive today. However, although the film reveals these anxieties, it fails to resist them, and even, through the acts of the director, becomes complicit in them. Nevertheless, by continually challenging the way in which the female body – pregnant or otherwise – is considered to be “owned” by outside patriarchal forces, we can anticipate a future where the female body is unanimously her own. In other words, we can anticipate a future where the female body is neither spiritually nor socially possessed.

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Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.

Horror Week 2011: Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

Rosemary’s Baby is one scary movie. It’s about a woman’s lot in a hostile world. It is about a terrible marriage to a narcissistic and selfish person. It is about the fear of motherhood and giving birth. It is convincing as a terrifying movie about the supernatural, and as a life lesson about selling your soul to a metaphorical devil. I like horror to convince me that I have learned something about the dark side of human nature…not just play with gore, or supernatural themes, or catastrophic nightmares. It has to name a fear that we really have, or a truth we find hard to believe, and the best horror enlightens us by showing us the darkness that haunts our lives.

The film, directed by Roman Polanski and released in 1968, has been written about at length, for its link to the era’s zeitgeist, its use of everyday people as agents of evil, even its shooting locations. Urban legends have been told about it; real-life events surrounding and following the film have been scrutinized. Rosemary’s Baby is essentially a fable about marriage and motherhood, and its magic is in the sleight of hand that all effective horror movies use: we focus on the scary yarn and are fascinated by it, so that the truth told (in this case, domestic unhappiness) goes down entertainingly. If it were told in a straight narrative arc, it would be kitchen-sink-drama depressing. Ira Levin, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, also wrote The Stepford Wives. How did we ever function without the phrase “Stepford Wife,” such a useful pejorative that has entered our lexicon? We all understand this shorthand phrase to describe a certain kind of too-perfect woman who seems to have lost the ability to articulate thoughts of her own. In Levin’s upper-middle class America of the 1960s, a male-controlled, male-centered marriage meant a slow death for a wife, as she loses control of her mind, her choices, and especially her body. In both novels, the husbands are able to transform the women’s bodies against their will—this is what marriage amounts to. Levin was acutely tuned-in to embarrassing truths about self-centeredness—the man who programs his robot wife to yell, “You’re the champ!” while having sex in the Stepford Wives; Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby, eager to sacrifice his wife for his acting career. And while we all know a Stepford Wife, we probably have met these husbands as well. I find them recognizable. Levin’s characters found themselves in predicaments that were hard to imagine coming true—but the motivations for their behavior (wanting a pliant spouse, selfish ambition) were not hard to imagine at all. These human foibles are at the heart of the matter.

In the film, Mia Farrow is Rosemary Woodhouse, and John Cassavetes is her husband, Guy, an actor whose career is stalled and going nowhere. The two of them move into a spacious apartment in the Bramford building (shot on location at the Dakota building) in Manhattan. Rosemary meets a neighbor in the laundry room, a young woman who speaks highly of the people she lives with, Minnie and Roman Castavet whom, she says, took her in off the streets and saved her life. Just a few days later she is found dead on the sidewalk outside the building, a suicide. Rosemary and Guy meet Minnie and Roman that night; they are both strolling home to the building and arrive at the same time. Minnie and Roman are an older couple, in their late 60s or 70s, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. They soon insinuate themselves into the younger couple’s lives, forcing themselves onto the couple, who are too polite to reject them, but soon Guy is seduced by them. You don’t see it happen but later you come to understand that Roman has proposed a deal to Guy and Guy has accepted it. Guy has sold his soul to the devil so that he can have success in his career, and it works. The man playing the role he covets suddenly goes blind, and Guy gets the part.

The price for his success? His wife will be impregnated by the devil and bear his child. The young woman who has fallen to her death was supposed to bear the child, but maybe killed herself or was killed when she realized what she was involved in. In a terrifying scene, Rosemary, surrounded by the coven that includes Minnie and Roman, is held down and raped. She is hallucinating as this happens but some of the action she sees is taking place, and eventually she screams what has become a signature line from the film, “This is not a dream! This is really happening!” The next day, Rosemary discovers long claw marks on her back, and Guy tries to pretend that he made the marks during sex with her the night before. Rosemary looks at him differently than she has; she had seemed to adore him and now she looks at him with confusion and fear. If he scratched her like that, it’s very strange; if he is lying, it’s worse still. Much of the rest of the movie is about Rosemary trying to figure out what is happening to her, understanding what is happening, and trying to convince others that it is “really happening.” After she gives birth, the coven members tell her that her baby has died, and Guy expects her to move on and forget about it. The baby hasn’t really died, and the ambiguous ending makes it clear that the coven will use the baby to gain power and wreak havoc.

One of the reasons the film is so effective is because of the fine performances by all of the actors, even those in small roles such as Patsy Kelly as Minnie’s dim-witted friend, and Ralph Bellamy as a bellicose doctor. Ruth Gordon’s Academy Award winning performance, however, is a stand-out. She makes the conceit of devil-worshippers-who-look-like-your-grandma work, and it works beautifully. Her Minnie seems to be a batty old lady, kind of nosy but endearing and well-meaning, eccentric but not dangerous, and most importantly, harmless. It is hard to believe—nearly impossible to believe—that this old woman with her badly applied lipstick, gaping handbags and herbs from her herb garden, is sinister and evil. Gordon is entirely convincing as someone who is a skilled liar and con artist. She wiles her way into their lives because a person like Rosemary is too polite to refuse her. By the time she is sick of the Castavets and is ready to politely refuse them, Guy has been seduced and will not hear of her rejecting them.

If you take away the supernatural element, Guy could be any man who is seduced by his neighbors—wanting to keep up with the Joneses, wanting to get in on the deal, wanting to be famous, wanting to impress the others, whether it be in the building, on the job, or to the world. These people are a ticket to a bigger life and more success, money, and fame. He is willing to use his wife’s body to make it happen. Surely this is a metaphor for a person who sells his soul for success. The wife in this situation can be sacrificed in many ways to make it happen: to work hard while he pursues his dream, to be ignored or be ashamed of when he realizes he wants another kind of life than the one she can offer, to help him become a success until he is successful enough for a trophy wife. One of the tenets of a religious marriage vow is the promise to keep sexually faithful and even, in some vows, to “worship” each other’s bodies, perhaps in a holy sense of worship; what happens in the Woodhouse marriage is a complete blasphemy of this idea. A selfish person puts his or her own desires ahead of the other—with that person, there can really be no union. Stories of the “black mass” and Satanic stories may even reinforce the validity of the religious idea that they purport to trample, as may Satanic fables reinforce our most basic values: when you think about it, there could be nothing more appalling than betraying your spouse, and when it happens to you it feels horrific, like being fucked by the devil.

I’ve watched Rosemary’s Baby at different points in my life, and when I watched it after giving birth, it resonated with me about the experience of childbearing. Rosemary finds herself craving raw meat and having terrible pains—due to the fact that she is birthing a devil baby. However, cravings, pains, sickness—these are real and miserable parts of pregnancy. Having had my pregnancy nausea and sickness start around Valentine’s Day, I only have to think of Valentine’s Day to feel nauseous, and that happened to me nearly twenty years ago! I remember the fear and mixed feelings I had about having a baby, and I wanted to have a baby, and so did my husband. But I had sensitivity to smells, felt dizzy, threw up every day, and felt completely out of control of my body; I felt invaded as well as afraid, in the first part of my first pregnancy. That changed; I felt happy and calm as time progressed. But having a baby is a change that marks your life forever, and there is no turning back once it happens. It’s something that is seldom talked about or admitted to; we are annoyed or disgusted by women who feel that their pregnancy is less than ideal, or that their passage into motherhood was not easy. We do not talk about how we fear that we could be bearing a monster or a “bad seed,” how we may not know what to do, that we fear we may not have enough love or patience or mothering instinct. We do not want to hear about those fears, and we do not want to hear about how pregnancy changes a man and woman’s relationship, maybe for the worse. In Rosemary’s Baby, Guy is shown as not caring much about the baby; he knows that it will be taken away and given to the coven. How many women have found that their husband is not really interested in their pregnancy, or feels it interferes with the attention given to them, to their needs? Guy is really only interested in his burgeoning career. The knowledge that one has made a mistake, that the person one is tied now to is not the person you thought you married—Rosemary’s Baby reveals that bleak, depressing, and real-life scary story. Rosemary realizes it when she sees the scratches on her back, and she never feels the same way about him again. When Guy sees what is waiting for him in a glittering future, he realizes he’s set his sights too low in a life with Rosemary. He is no longer an understudy and is ready for more.

Horror stories like Rosemary’s Baby tell the truth about our darker natures. We can look at our bad feelings, hatreds, misgivings and betrayals without knowing too well what the story really reveals about our feelings—it’s displaced onto a monster, a Thing, a killer, a mist, a contagion. We can see the truth and the horror refracted, like looking at a Medusa head in reflection so that we do not turn to stone. We can look at our darker natures, and accept that they exist somewhere, displaced into a place we call the supernatural.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.