Pure Schlock
What is this thing Roman Polanski seems to have for naked witches?
Grade: F+
“God is dead! Satan lives!”…okay. Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaption of Ira Levin’s psychological horror novel Rosemary’s Baby has no shortage of schlocky melodrama. Polanski’s suffusing the film with camp seems purposely designed to suffocate the metaphysical apprehension in Levin’s novel that made the novel such a gripping read.
The film follows the novel’s plot perfectly. Young couple Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, and Guy Woodhouse, played by John Cassavetes, move into the Bramford apartments in New York. They begin making the Gothic apartment into a lovely home to start a family. Rosemary becomes pregnant after they move in. However, she comes to suspect Guy has made a pact with a Satanic Covent of witches, led by their neighbours Minnie and Roman Castevet, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, to give the witches her baby in return for the witches magically inducing Guy’s recent big break that could elevate him from a struggling actor to a star.
However, unlike in the novel, you feel no apprehension when you watch this film. No suspense grabs your wrist or even brushes against it. You will feel no goosebumps, only a desire to slap every character whenever they open their mouths. You’ll also ponder “What is this thing Polanski seems to have for naked witches?”
Those naked witches appear in the dream sequence in which Rosemary dreams she is being raped by a horned monster. It’s actually not a dream. The monster is in fact the Devil and the rape has been arranged by the witches to sire the Devil’s child who will become the Anti-Christ and “overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples.” Whatever, but the rape scene is one of the novel’s most horrifying scenes:
He lay forward upon her…his broad chest crushing her breasts…She opened her eyes and looked into yellow furnace-eyes, smelled sulphur and tannis root, felt wet breath on her mouth, heard lust-grunts and the breathing of onlookers…The hugeness kept driving in her, the leathery body banging itself against her again and again and again.
By telling the scene from Rosemary’s POV, focusing on all the demonic stimuli assaulting her every senses, he uses touch, sight, and smell, Levin makes you feel as if you too are being violated. In Polanski’s film however, the scene is just weird. Rosemary flits in and out of a dream where she dilly dallies like an imbecile about a yacht. The surreal violence is gone. When she does drift into consciousness, she sees the witches gathered around her bed. They are not garbed in black robes like they are in Levin’s novel. They’re nude, like the witches in his MacBeth. It’s like Polanski is swinging between being deliberately Dada and needlessly naughty, alternating between cinematic impressions of Dali and of a pornographer, to avoid dramatizing the horror in Levin’s novel: an innocent woman being raped by what appears to be the Devil, feeling it’s real and not knowing if it is real or not.
That was the crux of Levin’s novel: uncertainty. Rosemary has evidence of Guy’s deal with the devil, but all her ‘evidence’ could have innocent explanations. Rosemary could just be paranoid, exacerbated by hormones…but she may not be. Polanski may have picked a Sisyphean task to start with. Everything to love about Levin’s story is lost if you know the ending. You won’t share Rosemary’s epistemological crisis, her crisis of faith in everything from her husband to if she can trust other people, and so won’t be waiting gripped by both eagerness and terror for the answer that may step out of the shadows at the end of the next scene.
But even those who come to the film without reading the novel are likely going to be turned off feeling any sort of investment in the story that is a necessary precondition for apprehension. All the characters are such simpering and meandering twits that you don’t care what weird Satanist shit they’re in to or what happens to their babies. Furrow was likely not an air-headed simpleton when Polanski made this film, but she gave a very good impression of one. She acts like a rabbit that’s been released from some government laboratory. Her voice is simultaneously jittery and airy and all her moods seem exaggerated, like she’s veering between chemically enhanced states of glee and despair, and her eyes move with the same junkie-awkward lack of coordination. You believe she’s not right in the head even before she starts talking about there being witches in 60’s New York. The rest of the cast ape her simultaneous and corny lack of emotional regulation and authenticity but they’re not playing paranoid mothers-to-be. They’re playing the stereotypical boisterous husbands and nosy neighbours. So, they come off as moth-eaten yet horribly glammed and hammed up impersonations of cliches.
Watching Polanski’s film, you’d think his source material was a cartoon from MAD Magazine, not Ira Levin whom Stephen King called the Swiss-watchmaker of suspense writers.