Rosemary's Baby

"Oh no, don't change the program on my account."

Roman Polanski’s first US-made movie, Rosemary's Baby exhibits a lot of the traits that I identify with Polanski’s subsequent genius. Polanski has created some of the most memorable portrayals of female victimization and madness. From La Locataire (The Tenant) to Chinatown to Death and the Maiden, his movies give us women who are forced into strange small spaces, sexually victimized, then constantly questioned when they ask for help.

I have an inclination to claim that it would be easy to read Polanski’s work as misogynist. Some very rudimentary internet research seems to indicate that lots of people agree with me that it would be easy…and that it would be a mistake. That is, lots of people are talking about how everyone misinterprets his work, but I can’t seem to find a single article which actually calls his work sexist (the man himself, oh yes, but not the work). The explanation may lie in his personal life—he famously fled to France after pleading guilty to (and before being sentenced for) statutory rape and he is reportedly a real bastard to women on set.But I suspect there’s more to it than that.

I think this tension between misogyny and honesty exists in these films, even in the absence of any outside knowledge about the filmmaker. I think it’s hard to tell the truth about women without risking a hint of misogyny. The interesting thing about these women, and let’s return to talking about Rosemary Woodhouse now, is the way that they conform to the difficult standards set for women. They are not ugly or rebellious or man-hating. Rosemary is in every way the perfect twentieth century wife: she is bright and beautiful, educated, upbeat, sexually unrepressed, eager to be pregnant, and skilled with a wallpaper brush or a tray of hors d’oeuvre.

I can’t seem to find it right now, but I think it was in a review of The Evil Dead that Roger Ebert said something like [quote, I’m paraphrasing], This is not a violent movie, but a movie about violence. In a sense Rosemary’s Baby is a film about sexism, but like The Evil Dead in its relationship to violence, it is not quite a condemnation of sexism. It revels in sexism, and invites us to participate in that. And thus we are forced to examine our own relationship to the darkest sides of our own humanity.Rosemary consents to being raped by the devil.“Oh no, don’t change the program on my account,” she says. It is this internal tension, between naming her own desire and her need not to be a bother, that makes her so fascinating and so psychologically disturbing and ultimately so true.