Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby
IU Cinema House Manager Ava Clouden wrestles with why they still find their pick for this fall’s Staff Selects series, Rosemary’s Baby, to be a resonant piece of cinema despite its incredibly controversial director.
I struggle to reconcile a truth I hold for myself: an evil man made an excellent movie.
An industry that enables, protects, and valorizes predators because the subjective valuation of their creative product is more important than the lives of people who haven’t received the justice alleged to protect everyone equally is morally repugnant. How can I follow that with a but? There are people working against unequal systems to create art in the same medium. Some products of the system are less odious to accept than others. There are others too discouraged by a rotten industry to continue within it.
Please take my word for it: I love women and stories about them. I also love the conceptual limits of bodily experience, and of course, movies. Rosemary’s Baby (body horror, subcategory maternity horror) is an aching, unsettlingly plausible story of a woman who is systematically abused, gaslit, and metamorphosed into carrying the Antichrist. When I think about this movie and the fictional Rosemary for too long, my eyes start to water and I experience a muted variation of fear and anxiety that I otherwise have to earn. I feel so close to this film, but I won’t pretend that I think I have no choice but to let it move me. I give it the breath to be a part of my life. I’m not helpless to the seduction of transgressive consumption; I make the choice to participate in it. Feeling bad about it is part of the game.
If my mortal capital is my time and attention, and I can still feel the sweet existential overwhelm of looking around the video store and knowing that I can never watch them all, how can I justify the opportunity cost of spending 137 minutes of my life to preserve this instead of that? What values does the cultural archive of my heart/my Letterboxd uphold? This is a movie made by a piece of sh*t who rarely leaves his extremely friendly home of France for fear of extradition. Institutions made up of individuals make curatorial choices every day to preserve some things and, by intention or by negligence (a fun imaginary lack of intention), let others fall aside. If people make those decisions as a moral bloc, can’t we lose this unrepentant man’s name? Don’t I want that?
John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow
Rosemary’s story starts as she and her husband, Guy, move into a funky apartment. Their new neighbors, Minnie and Roman, are an eccentric older couple who have taken in a young woman in recovery. Ruth Gordon, as Minnie, won an Oscar for this one (Best Supporting Actress), but John Cassavetes is the real standout to me of the non-Rosemary cast; he gives a truly top-tier performance of “guy who sucks super hard.” He’s an actor, self-interested and self-pitying with no self-reflection. Rosemary, a devoted wife, hypes him up. They’re “waiting until his career takes off” to have a baby. ‘K.
Rosemary’s home life is almost immediately lonely. Their neighbors’ uncharming quirks, first an inside joke between spouses, soon become a wedge between Rosemary and Guy, whose ego is weak to flattery and clout. (Rosemary’s flattery of him is taken for granted.) While Guy’s domestic malevolence has already been apparent, after his career takes a mysterious turn, Rosemary’s life quickly becomes a list of explicit red-flag violations of her body and autonomy. She is told to wear things that offend her. She is told to ingest things she doesn’t enjoy. In her most generous interpretation, she’s raped by her husband and experiences a profoundly disturbing vision; in reality, it’s somehow kind of worse(???), and Guy is indifferent to his actions’ harms to her.
Pregnant with her own much-wanted child, Rosemary is bullied into going to a doctor she doesn’t know, where her gaunt frame and face are handwaved away. In a burst of independence, Rosemary throws a party, where she breaks down as her friends (women of pregnant experience) express their concerns, and provide Rosemary’s only real validation of her suspicion that something about her pregnancy isn’t right. Guy sucks relentlessly.
As everything externally trustworthy falls away from Rosemary, her situation begins to feel increasingly absurd. She’s playing with puzzles alone within the suffocating walls of her apartment. She can’t trust her neighbors, who are strangers with proximity enough to be in her business. She can’t trust her husband, whose loyalty has never been to her. She’s alienated from the friends who have her best interests in mind. She can’t trust her doctor, and actually, she can’t trust any doctor, because none of them will trust her about her own body — because, after all, it’s the body for her husband’s unborn child. Rosemary finds a wall everywhere that she looks for help, and it makes you f*cking nuts.
So, in fictional 1968 with no more conversation to be had about it, Rosemary gives birth.
A hallmark of the subgenre: the infant finally separated from the mother, and beheld by her. There’s a possessiveness in these mothers; after everything, when the violent simultaneity of her body as a site of theirs comes to an end, she chooses to face the repulsive thing wrought from her. Postpartum, Rosemary is sedate — grieving — and her neighbors are lively. She’s suspicious and insistent, and with nothing left to be lost by including her, she gets answers. She’s alone in a crowd, and chooses to become a mother.
Rosemary’s Baby will be screened at IU Cinema on November 14 as part of the Staff Selects series.
Ava Clouden is a local moviegoing enthusiast, pop music devotee, and admirer of flowers. They love talk-heavy dramas, body horror, and sports business biopics.