After taking the requisite filmmaking courses at Temple U, I experienced my epiphany watching “Rear Window” in a ‘How to Read a Film’ english course. It was locked away in litigation at the time, and we lucked out when our film librarian procured a hot 16mm print. I saw the Lord—Hitch at his peak primadonna powers, telling everybody to line up and kiss his arse. Life changin’ stuff. Come to find out a little later that somebody ratted on Sam the resourceful librarian and he got canned for revealing The Secret to a grateful few. Lesson: Don’t Postpone Joy.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m a shameless RP admirer. I’ll argue that “The Pianist” is a better film than “Schindler’s List” and probably get pelted with ‘maters. No worries, I like a good debate. But, really—what the hell? “Rosemary’s Baby” is just masterful on so many levels that I have to chuck me a Dakota load of stinky tomatoes at you. David Lynch? He DREAMS at night of creeping out Frank Sinatra with his movies. Come on! Let’s resist the jaded po-mo crap. Who volunteers to carry Roman’s jock?

I strongly commend to you, Ted, that you read Joanna Russ’s essay, “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic” by Joanna Russ. (It can be found in Russ’s essay collection To Write Like a Woman)

Keith,

I think one can interpret David Lynch’s Eraserhead in precisely this way.

(of course that’s one of many possible interpretations!)

Of course, it’s such a modernism to require that every novel (and film) be a reductive psychological examination. Hmm, I’ve never articulated this in this way before, but I think that this presumed psychological comprehensibility of fictional characters is as fanciful and false and the things that we today read as violations of verisimilitude in pre-modern fiction. In contrast to this, one of the things I most love about Tolstoy is that his characters have an almost modern inner-life, psychologically rich yet are not windup deterministic psychic robots launched into motion by a few precious and tiresomely predictable motivations.

Maybe Guy has no clue as to why he makes the decisions he makes, and maybe no one else has any hope to make much sense of them, either.

Look at mid-Sixties America: Husbands were readily sacrificing their wives and children for their own ambition. Relocate for a new job? No problem. Leave the wife alone at home so one can participate in the Rotary/Elks/Masons? You betcha. Asuage the stress no one yet had a word for by crawling into a bottle and getting rough with the honey? Pour me that damn drink! And that’s not even getting into the broader social sacrifices being asked for—up to including one’s own children—by the Daddies running the Cold War.

Nah. You want Guy’s point of view? Leave the theater, walk down the street, enter any house in Anytown, USA, circa 1966. Like all great fantasies, Rosemary’s Baby works best as a critique on the existing social order that can’t be made in a “straight” work of art. Move the spotlight away from Rosemary’s naive outside perspective and you wind up with a pretty pointless movie.

But to take your question on its merits: would a film about Guy’s moral choices be riveting? Probably not: the whole point is that it’s just another career opportunity; in the world of Rosemary’s baby, Guy is, in fact, normal and boring. The justifications would be as boring as those canned conversations between people about why or why not to buy an SUV.

How could a film that is built around the creation of an atmosphere of confusion, isolation, sickness, paranoia and nightmare, reflecting the subjective point of view of Rosemary, and her own dim understanding of the things that are happening to her, have been improved by the addition of mood-deflating glimpses into the reality of her husband’s world.

Like other horror movies, Rosemary’s Baby works by constructing extraordinary events out the anxieties of ordinary life-experiences – in this case, the experience of being a young, pregnant woman in Manhattan, in a more-or-less conventional marriage, circa the mid-sixties. Rosemary undergoes the transition from lover/friend to wife/mother, and experinces many of the things that go along with that transition: she loses touch with her younger, more vivacious friends; she in initiated into the new world of fathers, mothers and “old wives”; she loses freedom and autonomy as her husband increasingly arranges her ever more lonely life for her; her doctor changes; her husband’s career interests take increasing precedence over her own desires, and she begins to socialize more with her husband’s “colleagues” as he climbs the ladder of success; she is sick all the time and nobody seems to care greatly; and her worries and anxieties are treated as her problem, and one that must be managed; she is infantilized and everybody is “in on it”.

Shallow selfish abusive men do exist, and their ineffectual fits of sentimentality aren’t as admirable as you’d imagine. Faust isn’t necessarily an admirable, or even tragic, figure. But it’s hard to keep him from becoming one if he’s made the story’s protagonist. The star treatment is always flattering. As evidence, I’d say you unduly flatter Guy while just imagining him in the lead.

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised at encountering a certain amount of expectation that he should be in the lead. That story’s been told so often that it probably feels perverse (or worse, dull) to refuse it. What gives Rosemary’s Baby its power, though, is its refusal to let this become Guy’s story and its insistence that Rosemary stay the center of interest.

Not to overstate Levin/Polanski as proto-feminists, though. Marguerite is a problematic character, to say the least. Or the most—there’s not much to her. Unlike the female protagonists of Cat People or Repulsion, Rosemary doesn’t get a chance to strike back; unlike Alicia in Notorious, she’s not maintaining a betrayal of her own. She’s such a victim it’s hard to imagine anyone other than creep-magnet Mia Farrow playing the role. (Polanski’s original casting choice—Tuesday Weld and Robert Redford—is intriguing, but I think it would have been a different sort of movie.)

Keith, the pro-abortion (or at least anti-miracle-of-childbirth) tone seemed pretty clear to me, but it’s hardly the first thing most Amazon DVD reviewers mention. As for “horror disguised as comedy”, there is, actually, quite a bit of humor to Rosemary’s Baby. Nasty sadistic humor, but it adds interest to the victimizing.

Since for millennia women have been beaten to a pulp by the pedestal they’re raised on, it’s hard to think of a male equivalent in horror. For starters, the blank isolation of a male “Rosemary” would probably have to be portrayed as self-inflicted. Maybe in a war movie, or in the determined unlovability of Ray’s Bigger Than Life or Romero’s Martin or Cronenberg’s The Fly….?