This is no dream, she thought, this is really happening...
Ira Levin isn't concerned about taking things at face value, about what's on the outside, on the surface. His forte is what's skittering, squirming underneath the mask of human nature. Rosemary's Baby is notorious for its Satanism motifs, it being the definitive tale of woman becoming impregnated by Satan himself, but between the lines the real horror isn't the devil --- no, that's to stir the curiosity --- the real horror is the shattering of seemingly docile domesticity. Where the quiet muffles screams. Where the ordinary reveals its odious odor.
Levin is so good at this, masterful even. After reading The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil, I became enamored over his knack for shattering the sense of so-called "normalcy". Nothing is "normal", there isn't such a word, a feeling, and I like that Levin is blunt about that as he wriggles a little subtext into the mix. Little warnings to not trust that a neat suburban neighborhood is tranquil, or that just because Hitler is dead that right-wing Nazism can't be resurrected in his Führer's image. "Horror" as genre isn't associated with Levin, and even the man himself didn't ascribe to being a practitioner of the genre, but I do think he taps into a realistic, naked horror that explores the enduring nature of evil within ordinary settings, the type that can't be considered terrifying at first glance --- well, that is depending on what one considers terrifying.
I'm late to the devil baby party of Rosemary's Baby. A paperback has lounged about my house for years (and wouldn't you know it goes MIA when I want to read it most...), and the book isn't out of print, or difficult to find, just that I admit after partaking in super famous film adaptions first and hearing things such as "this movie is EXACTLY like the book" (see The Shawshank Redemption), that I tend to ignore the source material. I know. I suck. It pains me to even type that I have such a reflex, but Roman Polanski's 1968 film adaptation made such a deep impression on me over the years, to where reading the text felt...redundant.
For me, Rosemary's Baby as a film is ingenious and intriguing for its details. Those tiny, blink-and-you-might-miss-them details that are sprinkled throughout retain a delicious sense of unsettling ambiguity. Polanski is a terrible person (and the gross irony of him directing a film about a woman's rape isn't lost on me...), but he crafted a classic blueprint for domestic horror with this film (...and we will dare not speak of the dismal 1976 TV sequel, Look What Happened To Rosemary's Baby or the even more ill-advised 're-imagined' 2014 miniseries). It raised the bar on taking horror films from the b-movie mire into the mainstream and approaching them from a more psychological perspective where the details mattered. Details that would take on larger, more unnerving forms and meanings of uncertainty to where, by film's end, everything is not what it appears to be --- while being exactly what it appears to be.
I never watch this movie the same way as I did before. I'm always finding something new that I missed, some little quote spoken that takes on new meaning or those fine-tuned little visual details that spring up to change my perspective or question others motives. I know every twist and turn, and of course, the doomed outcome, but it still feels fresh with each viewing, and never am I not trying to warn Rosemary to get away from those meddling neighbors and that shifty-eyed husband of hers. I'm also never not chilled over the fact that a woman's pregnancy --- something that is supposed to be intimate and innocent --- is turned into something so perverse and terrorizing.
Still, without Levin's wonderful text, his attention to every detail from the start, there wouldn't have been this brilliant film affair. Polanski studied Levin's text to the letter to where character ticks, whole dialogues, and even the food that is consumed is replicated on film. It's about as faithful as an adaptation as you'll get, a film that complements the book, extending the terror it has laid bare. The genius Levin flexes in text, (and I repeat) shows that that everything is not what it appears to be, but then sentence by sentence, detail by detail, everything is exactly what it appears to be --- and then the rug is yanked beneath our once stable conscious.
I love the blurb of this particular edition for that reason: SUPPOSE you were an up-to-date young wife who moved into an old and elegant New York apartment house with a rather strange past. SUPPOSE that only after you became pregnant did you begin to suspect the building harbored a diabolically evil group of devil worshipers who had mastered the arts of black magic and witchcraft. SUPPOSE that this satanic conspiracy set out to claim not only your husband but your baby. Well, that's what happened to Rosemary...Or did it...?
Your sense of place is distorted first. Gone are the dark and stormy nights, the gabled Gothic castles, the setting of terror is a posh, bygone apartment house in the middle of the hustle and bustle of 1960s New York City. Its horrors confined in its claustrophobic quarters and illuminated in broad daylight. Who cares about the complicated history it harbors? The suspicious deaths, the devil worshiping, and dead babies wrapped in newspaper? None of this fazes Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, they settle in because the apartment house is in a posh, exclusive locale --- it can't possibly be 'bad'...
Your sense of allies is altered. Gone are the snarling creatures that rise out of coffins and stumble around in fog-saturated forests. The real devils and monsters are in human guises of busy-body octogenarian neighbors. Roman and Minnie Castavet are childless, good Samaritan oddballs whose folksy Ma and Pa Kettle routine unsettles Rosemary, and charms Guy. Charms him enough to where he grows a peculiar attachment to the older couple. This attachment soon loosening his demeanor as a suave and seemingly devoted husband.
Distant doorbells, flutes playing, low singing, a filigree charm necklace that holds a pungent smelling fungi, the "shaped all-wrong booties" being knitted, Rosemary noting that the "baby kicked like a demon"...these little things, little devilish details that creep in, leading to bigger horrors and contribute to the slow unravel of sense and self that Rosemary experiences. Her mental capability collapsing in slow motion, and the labored gaslighting she endures is the unsettling crux of this tale. It's why I don't subscribe to the "tHiS IsN't ScArY" crowd about Rosemary's Baby as leave it to Levin to bring in a subtext of women's oppression through social and religious means to outweigh the looming presence of the devil incarnate to crank up the scares.
From the scarlet lettered shames of the Salem Witch trials to teenage purity balls, women have a relentless history of being scrutinized and entangled in religion's constant concerns over their purity and civility, this even more so at the dawn of the 1960s, where a second wave of American Enlightenment on the rise. Among civil rights protests, political assassinations with questionable motives, and the Vietnam War, the bubblings of women's lib were brewing, with women coming into their own independence and understanding outside of the patriarchy. Such practices became a threat to the more traditional, conservative religious-based stances on womanhood, this as more people were questioning the basis of religion in a changing, modern setting (hence Christian theologian Paul van Buren's "Death of God" theories, and the Catholic Church pursuing reform). Rosemary's Baby is perceptive of its era, reacting toward such seismic social and political shifts and probing mindsets as it ponders the idea of the living son of Satan to be born within this cacophony of change, acting as an allegory about nature's endurance of evil, and man's vulnerability to it.
Levin from this so superbly subverts the Birth of Christ, recasting it in a shroud of paranoia, misogyny, and abuse with a lapsed Catholic ["I was brought up a Catholic. Now I don't know"] as the 'fallen', 'soiled' modern Virgin Mary, her selfish husband the compliant Joseph, whom allows a coven of kooks to conjure 'higher entity' to occupy and desecrate his wife's womb. Divine intervention this is not. This is all a calculated plot to put his questioning wife in her proper "place".
Despicable, double-crossing, pathetic men is also Levin's area of expertise. Awful men who haven't a qualm in throwing their wives to the wolves to bolster their pithy male egos. Like Walter Eberhart of The Stepford Wives, Guy Woodhouse is also a charter member of The Asshole Husbands of All-Time Club. I can never tell who's worse: one husband who had his wife murdered so he could screw at his discretion and get potato salad from a robot, or the other who sold his wife out to a coven of kooks to be raped by the Prince of Darkness, and forced her to carry his spawn to term all for a Hollywood career for himself ["They promised me you wouldn't be harmed and you haven't. We're getting so much in return."] A real toss-up. For now, Guy is in my sights as the absolute worst husband.
From the beginning, Guy telegraphs how he doesn't respect Rosemary. Emphasis on the gaps in their age, differences in religion and even interests makes one wonder why they're even together, but its clear their relationship is built on a superficial facade. Hearing Rosemary rattling off Guy's accomplishments and never her own ["He was in Luther, Nobody Loves an Albatross, and has done a lot of television and plays"] and how Guy often condescends to her, Rosemary is nothing but a decorative publicist and adoring audience all so Guy can maintain superiority and seniority over her. Guy becomes even more disdainful and dangerous after the procreation rape.
When Rosemary describes intense, excruciating pain, he tells her she's paranoid, never comforts her when she's in obvious pain. He calls her concerned friends "not bright bitches", and gets irate when Rosemary wants to switch back to the previous dreamy Dr. Hill. He even ridicules her chic Vidal Sassoon hairstyle, claiming it's the worst mistake she's ever made (no, the worst mistake she made was marrying your crumb bum ass, Guy...). The only male in Rosemary's life with some sense, concern, and respect for Rosemary is Hutch, and of course Guy finds him a "bore", and later on expendable. Any choice, protest, any type of outreach that Rosemary makes, Guy is there to strike it down, belittle, mock, or gaslight her.
Throughout Rosemary never fully questions Guy's authority over her --- she has her doubts --- but she rationalizes away her doubts, being "too innocent", "too rational" to think beyond what's in front of her...but then again, why should she probe further? He is the man she has committed herself to. He is the man who tells her he loves her. He is her family, and family wouldn't harm their own, right? Levin is saying hell nah: its the devil you know who will screw you over every single time there is an opportunity to do so. Guy found Rosemary expendable, as she was a mere object to him, where her thoughts and feelings were afterthoughts.
"True, he had done it for the best motive in the world, to make a baby, and true too he had drunk as much as she had; but she wished that no motive an no number of drinks could have enabled him to take her that way, taking only her body without her soul or self or she-ness--whatever it was he presumably loved. Now, looking back over the past weeks and months, she felt a disturbing presence of overlooked signals beyond memory, signals of a shortcoming in his love for her, of a disparity between what he said what he felt. He was an actor; could anyone know when an actor was true and not acting?"
"What had he done that was so terrible? He had gotten drunk and had grabbed her without saying may I. Well that was really an earth-shaking offense, now wasn't it? There he was, facing the biggest challenge of his career, and she--instead of being there to help him, to cue an encourage him--was off in the middle of nowhere, eating herself sick and feeling sorry for herself. Sure he was vain and self-centered; he was an actor, wasn't he? Laurence Olivier was probably vain and self-centered. And yes he might lie now and then; wasn't that exactly what had attracted her and still did?--that freedom and nonchalance so different from her own boxed-in propriety?"
Once Rosemary discovers she's pregnant, the remainder of the "coven" get in their licks as with immediacy her doctor is chosen for her, her food intake is dictated by others, and her attempting to educate herself is scoffed at. Her body and her own sense of self --- and soon her baby --- do not belong to her, her act to choose is completely stripped from her. Terrifying isn't it? She is mere property, pimped out, sold to the highest bidder, a vessel used for others selfish gains. Sadder is Rosemary's abuse is all-too common for women in a new century.
The Stepford Wives was the sneering scoff at 1970s feminism, and with Rosemary's Baby Levin explores women's constant test of purity in the face of religious propriety, uncovering the warped lacquered exterior of the 1960s housewife trope. Yet, Rosemary's Baby has a vibe that feels 21st century current. Even in a new decade, lawmakers and congressmen (a majority of them white males) continue to vie for carte blanche over a woman's body and existence as abortion rights continue to be challenged, and rights to one becoming even more difficult to obtain. Attacks on Planned Parenthood, education cut-backs, twisted "pro-life" activism, elected officials monitoring young (immigrant) girls reproductive systems right down to their menstrual cycles (I will never be over this one...), people losing their shit over two women boasting about their sex drives and sugar walls in a (mediocre) song all while we have an unchecked sexual predator(s?) in the White House....the list goes on. This type of vileness and villainy inflicted on women of all walks persists with even more vengeance today, making Rosemary's Baby less about fantasy, and more rooted in unfortunate reality.
So yes, this is horror. As a woman Rosemary's Baby is a realistic waking nightmare. The devil and all of its occultism is mere dressing, the details alone control the bigger picture. The horror is a woman being abused by her husband, raped, and forced to bear, and accept the brunt of that while society stands idle by. If that's not terrifying then what is...?
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*This post includes excerpts from a post I did many moons ago (October 2014, to be exact) on one of my old, now defunct blogs. So in essence, I'm plagiarizing myself...
*Screencaps courtesy of FlimGrab and from around the web
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