Rosemary’s Husband

One of the most original bumper stickers I’ve seen uses the font of the “Baby on Board” stickers but it says “Rosemary’s Baby on Board.”

Anyway Ira Levin wrote a sequel called Son of Rosemary in which Rosemary wakes up from a 30-year coma into which she was cast after the baby’s birth. Rip van Winkle anyone?

Randy: I’ve heard that this comes up in the “Left Behind” books, and the verdict is not to get an abortion even then.

You would lose one of the all-time great shots. Minnie Castevet has Rosemary help her with the dishes, presumably so that Roman Catevet can proposition Guy Woodhouse. Curious, Rosemary looks into the living room, but all she can see is the smoke rising from a cigarette.

Watching this scene, I’ve always wondered: what did Roman have to do to convince Guy that he was for real, and not a nut? He does *something* — when Rosemary comes out, her husband has this look on his face somewhere between rapt and shocked.

More generally, it seems to me that Guy’s story does get told to us — only it gets told to us through a series of absences. The movie invites the very kind of speculations that you’ve elaborated in your post.

The book is fucking great, too.

Ted, you’re writing like a dope, but I’m glad you paid attention while it lasted. Rosemary’s Baby is Polanski’s best movie and one of the few really good movies to come out of high-budget Hollywood in the 1960s because it buried “the lede”. We all know the fucking lede. The tragic self-loathing male was always the headline. That’s why it was so easy for you (and everyone else) to fill in Cassavetes’s gaps. And if you think any of Guy’s actions defies credibility or conscience you haven’t met many ’60s guys.

For whatever combination of peculiarities, in this one case Levin and Polanski together managed to overcome (somewhat) their deservedly self-loathing narcissism by going past pure Repulsion-style emotionally sadomasochistic fantasy (still better than the Darling norm) into woman’s horror picture. And, as Goethe wrote, the woman’s horror picture draws us ever onward.

Your depiction of Guy “as an ambitious good-time-Charlie, self-centered but clearly in love, and devolves into a haunted, guilty creep” is interesting and reminds me of the debate among criminal law theorists concerning entrapment. Some argue that entrapment shouldn’t be a defense because such traps aren’t creating any predilections, but rather merely nurturing/encouraging what already exists. However, others counter, saying that with all criminal law, we have to afford people their own moral luck; that is, people deserve the fact that, even if they might be susceptible to criminal behavior if sufficiently tempted, such temptation hasn’t really come to pass, but was actually artificial. Likewise, although Guy may have actually been an average Joe in love with his wife, he did have a great deal of ambition. Some read Macbeth as showing precisely how someone, previously honorable and true, can become a monster. Here, Guy is in a precarious position: He’s right in between success and what is the most common result of a career in acting, failure. Right there on the cusp of breaking through, he’s even more ambitious than if he had been a complete up until then. So, I would say that it is not a big stretch to believe that someone in Guy’s position could transform (regress?) so quickly and completely. My guess is this: Speaking with Roman in the den, Guy was impressed perhaps with some type of inside information Roman knew about him or something that an average person would have no access to. Roman then proposed a deal with a precise outcome in favor for Guy, and then some vague “You have to help us with our ritual. Convince Rosemary that it’s for the best, or if you think it’d be better not to tell her at all, we can give her something to make her sleep.” So once Roman delivered on his end of the deal, Guy was so estatic with the result (and considering the value of what Roman did for him) that Guy has trapped in a vague pact, one which he didn’t how long would obligate him. Plus, once you find out that your neighbor has the power to blind someone with as little as a personal possession, would you renege?
So, I see the regression of Guy as a slow, step-by-step process where he was eventually sucked into it. After all, he’s never happy about participating in any of the actual devil business; for the entire second half of the movie, he’s always antsy or irritated.

Rosemary’s Baby is already a revisionist reading. Revising it back again would turn it reactionary.

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….?

Odd that no women have commented here.

Make Guy’s point of view more central? Why on Earth? To crib from Jim Henley, the audiences were soaking in it.

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.

Let’s not pillory Ted here as an anti-feminist or anything. Even implicitly, which I think some are doing. His point is best read as a more general one: oftentimes secondary characters in fiction are not given the attention they deserve and when their motives are examined, they’re baffling. In broad strokes, yes, the husband’s motives are comprehensible, especially if he’s seen to represent the patriarchy, as lisa and jlw assert above. Even so, I’d find such behavior by a *real* person fairly baffling and unlikely.

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.

A version of Rosemary’s Baby told from Guy’s point of view would be about as appealing as a version of Jane Eyre told from Mr. Rochester’s point of view, or Rebecca from Maxim de Winter’s point of view.

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)

I demand more movie posts.

Apart from anything else, Guy is boring and unpleasant. The thought of being trapped with him for two hours would be the real horror. Lovecraft does Updike. Ugh.