Rosemary's BabyRosemary's Baby represents all of the deep-seated terror and paranoid fear that comes with the risks and hardships of pregnancy; and it's about the Devil, too. Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) are a young, pretty couple moving into the Bramford ("Black Bramford" to some, due to its infamous reputation), oblivious to the very concept of witches and covens, Satanists and black magic. And why should that concern any rational-minded urbanite in the 20th century? Witches et al are the purview of the Middle Ages, not the Upper West Side...or are they?
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Rosemary's Baby deals in the unknown and undisclosed--and that is precisely what makes it such a perfect fit for a horror movie. Most filmgoers don't have the slightest inkling of what witches really are--aside from those silly Halloween interpretations with pointed hats and flying brooms. In the realm of the occult, a witch is a practitioner of black magic--that being the craft of the Devil himself--evil in a nutshell. For Rosemary, a lapsed Catholic, while she may not be a churchgoer, she certainly doesn't entertain the idea of a black mass in her world. And what is Rosemary's world? Frankly, it's a Doris Day kind of life, supermarket magazines and other homemaker-esque fair; things seem to progress easily along this fashion for a while. She and her unsuccessful actor/husband Guy get acquainted with their neighbors Roman (Sidney Blackmer) and Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) after an unfortunate incident with the Castevets' prior protegee, Terry. While Guy is apprehensive to get acquainted with an older couple, something after their dinner together changes his tune, and before long Guy is more enthused about their company than Ro (Guy's affectionate nickname for his "lil' missus"). Before long, they--at Guy's insistance--decide to try for that baby they always talk about. And after a disorienting night riddled with bizarre (read: horrifying) dreams of mouse-bites, a lusty Satan, and "Jackie O", Rosemary is pregnant.
Rosemary's Baby excels in luring the audience along for almost the entirety of the film with the idea that Rosemary may be the elaborate subject of a complex conspiracy at the hands of a coven of witches comprised of absolutely everyone around her to possess her unborn son...or, she might be suffering from the manic delusions that "theoretically" come with a particularly nasty case of "pre-partum depression", or something like it. Rosemary is an observant woman, and even little things that we as the audience might miss at first glance, she picks up on. Take, for example, when Roman--the character, not the director (Roman Polanski) of the all-too-coincidental same name--surreptitiously comes to visit Rosemary when she is receiving her guest, Hutch, and her eye takes note that his ears are pierced (to match his "piercing eyes", as Hutch later observes). The significance of such an observation comes with time, but Rosemary doesn't take anything for granted. So why are we (more so for first-time viewers) so reticent to believe her hysteric claims of "plots against people"? Maybe because in our oh-so-enlightened times, we refuse to believe that there are Satanists and covens, witches and black magic. And maybe we're right, sure, in our rational, scientific method kind of way. And maybe Rosemary's paranoia and terror mirrors our own reluctance to believe that evil exists in this form in our first-world, whitewashed, sterile lives. That's the thing that makes Rosemary's Baby such a persistent delight: we want Rosemary to be wrong, so desperately wrong, that there is no conspiracy of evil against her, because we don't want to believe it ourselves. And we tell ourselves it's just fiction; Rosemary is just another crazy woman who's hormone driven and can't distinguish reality from fantasy, because (in that wonderful tongue-in-cheek satire kinda way) she is just another crazy woman who shouldn't have got that pixie cut by Vidal Sassoon--how unladylike--and she shouldn't be arguing with her clearly more enlightened husband, and she shouldn't have blah, blah, blah...In a lot of ways, Rosemary is the first post-modern feminist mother heroine; too bad she had to be the mother of the Antichrist to get there.
Recommended for: Fans of a story that reels you along on a pair of conflicting fishing lines, pulling you in different directions. The horror is deeply psychological--not visceral--and your mindscape will be the battleground if you let it.
Rosemary's Baby excels in luring the audience along for almost the entirety of the film with the idea that Rosemary may be the elaborate subject of a complex conspiracy at the hands of a coven of witches comprised of absolutely everyone around her to possess her unborn son...or, she might be suffering from the manic delusions that "theoretically" come with a particularly nasty case of "pre-partum depression", or something like it. Rosemary is an observant woman, and even little things that we as the audience might miss at first glance, she picks up on. Take, for example, when Roman--the character, not the director (Roman Polanski) of the all-too-coincidental same name--surreptitiously comes to visit Rosemary when she is receiving her guest, Hutch, and her eye takes note that his ears are pierced (to match his "piercing eyes", as Hutch later observes). The significance of such an observation comes with time, but Rosemary doesn't take anything for granted. So why are we (more so for first-time viewers) so reticent to believe her hysteric claims of "plots against people"? Maybe because in our oh-so-enlightened times, we refuse to believe that there are Satanists and covens, witches and black magic. And maybe we're right, sure, in our rational, scientific method kind of way. And maybe Rosemary's paranoia and terror mirrors our own reluctance to believe that evil exists in this form in our first-world, whitewashed, sterile lives. That's the thing that makes Rosemary's Baby such a persistent delight: we want Rosemary to be wrong, so desperately wrong, that there is no conspiracy of evil against her, because we don't want to believe it ourselves. And we tell ourselves it's just fiction; Rosemary is just another crazy woman who's hormone driven and can't distinguish reality from fantasy, because (in that wonderful tongue-in-cheek satire kinda way) she is just another crazy woman who shouldn't have got that pixie cut by Vidal Sassoon--how unladylike--and she shouldn't be arguing with her clearly more enlightened husband, and she shouldn't have blah, blah, blah...In a lot of ways, Rosemary is the first post-modern feminist mother heroine; too bad she had to be the mother of the Antichrist to get there.
Recommended for: Fans of a story that reels you along on a pair of conflicting fishing lines, pulling you in different directions. The horror is deeply psychological--not visceral--and your mindscape will be the battleground if you let it.