Rosemary’s Baby is a snapshot of social power dynamics in 1970s New York.  It is a film not only about the treatment of women at the hands of a powerful Patriarchy, it is also an account of price exacted from the young by the elderly in return for the transferal of power to members of a new generation.  Despite being a film about unearthly creatures, Rosemary’s Baby is ultimately a profoundly temporal film about man’s inhumanity to man (and especially woman).

Film Poster

The first thing one notices about Rosemary’s Baby is the use of colour.  When we encounter Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) they are clad respectively in yellow and blue.  However, this use of colour is not limited to the characters as, after a decoration montage, the new apartment becomes a space draped in many different shades of yellow.  In fact, so distinctive and consistent is this use of colour that at times Rosemary’s Baby looks like a film from an earlier era; it shares the same bold and almost incandescent colours as the Technicolor classics of the 1930s such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Film Still

Indeed, so consistent is Polanski’s use of blue and yellow that when we first encounter the colour red its harshness is shocking, even more shocking than the fact that this red comes from the blood of an apparent suicide victim.

Suicide?

Similarly, when the Woodhouses’ neighbours, the Satanic Minnie and Roman Castevet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) appear their outfits immediately clash with the tasteful blues and yellows of the Woodhouses.  These older people clearly come from a different world.

Castevets Returning Home

As the film goes on, the colour red pops up again and again, each time signifying the trace of black magic.  For example, in the roses that Guy gives Rosemary after he suspiciously lands a leading role, in the outfit Rosemary wears before the ritual, in the blood daubed on her naked body prior to having sex with the devil and in her dress when, months into the pregnancy, she looks so pale and emaciated that her female friends lock Guy out of the kitchen.

Red Flowers to Celebrate the Deal

Red before Bed

Satan gets his due...

Not Looking Well

It is only really in the film’s powerful final scene where Rosemary and Guy finally ditch their respective colour schemes.  Rosemary wears the blue of the Virgin Mary while Guy wears grey, his signature blue present only in a couple of bands of his tie.  This shedding of their youthful colours signifies the elevation of Guy and Rosemary from the primary colours of youth to the muted tones of adult-hood.  Idealism gives way to compromise.  It is only the most fanatical of the old ones who still maintain their distinctive colours.  Their youthful idealism never left them because it was never there, or if it was then it was in a perverted and twisted form.

If the final scene of Rosemary’s Baby marks the transition of Rosemary from powerless young woman to powerful mother then the rest of the film is a reminder of how little power Rosemary really has.  From the beginning of the film it is clear that Guy makes all the decisions and that it is Rosemary’s job to support him unquestioningly.  When Rosemary begs Guy to allow them to move into the new apartment, he acts as though it is an imposition upon him personally.  As though he is doing her a favour.  When he fails to get a part he does not even thank Rosemary when she brings him food and drink without asking and offers him supportive words.  However, nowhere is Rosemary’s lack of power clearer than in the aftermath of the ritual when she discovers herself to be covered in scratches.  “Don’t yell, I already filed them down!” Guy jokes suggesting it is quite normal for him to rape his wife while she is passed out.

Scratches

Later passages in the film also show how little power Rosemary has as a woman in a Patriarchal society.  Having worked out the real identity of the Castevets, Rosemary flies to a different doctor and tells of the plan and how not only her husband but also her doctor are in collusion with these Satanists.  The doctor assures her that all will be well and then promptly summons Rosemary’s husband and doctor to come and pick her up.  After all, she is just a hysterical woman.  Rosemary’s sense of powerlessness in the face of male plans is enough to suggest that the film is furthering a feminist agenda but in this case one would need to consider the role played by the female members of the coven in controlling Rosemary as well as the fact that the person at the top of the hierarchy is not a male but a fallen angel who here takes a male form but who might, in a different film take a completely different one…

Bedazzled (2000)

Instead, I think it is more rewarding to look at Rosemary’s Baby as a meditation on the nature of social power in the 1970s (a theme that Polanski would also touch upon in The Tenant).   As young people, Guy and Rosemary have no power and, relative to Guy, Rosemary has even less power.  She does not even have power over her own sexual and reproductive drives.  Indeed, we can see in Guy’s use of Rosemary’s body to further his own career not only the belief that there is no such thing as marital rape but also the old anti-abortionist argument that the desires of the father should be taken into account despite the fact that a) a man can always bully a woman into having or getting rid of a child against her wishes and b) it is not the man who has to carry the child to term and then assume the cultural expectations of being the primary carer.  However, Guy does not merely use Rosemary for his own ends, he effectively trades her to older and more powerful people in return for them putting their power to use on his behalf.

Beginning of the End

The final scene of Rosemary’s Baby shows Rosemary negotiating with Roman Castevets.  the scene opens with Roman ranting and praising both Satan and Adrian and proclaiming that “the year is One!” but after this show of power he comes over to Rosemary and pleads with her to raise the child as her own.  The women of the coven are too old and it is “not right”.  This displays one of the realities of any society in which the old hold more power than the young.

The Ritual Begins

The old are mortal and while they can stockpile power in their own hands, they know that eventually they must die and so it is quite common for older people to think of their legacy in the form of impact upon the future and the generations that will come after them.  We can see the exercise of this kind of power in great philanthropic works, vast monuments and even in the rearing of children.  This is where the young are able to barter for more power as ultimately they have little to offer older people other than the fact that they are more dynamic and will most like out-live these older people.  Guy uses his youth and his access to Rosemary to broker a deal with the Satanists and in the film’s final scene, Rosemary does the same.  She could turn her back on her child or she could raise it in the knowledge that it will become hugely powerful.  For all her outrage at being manipulated, raped and abused, Rosemary decides that the deal offered to her by Roman is maybe not that bad after all.

So much power... So little time

This is the same deal that is offered all humans at one point or another in their lives.  They can be independent or they can have access to the money and power accumulated by previous generations.  This power dynamic is endemic to the human condition, it is built into what it means to be live in a human society and it even underpins religious Faith; agree to follow God’s rules and he will give you bliss.  Follow Satan’s commands and he will give you temporal power.  So ancient and universal is this need for compromise that it might as well be magical or theological and so in exploring it Polanski’s use of religious imagery seems perfect.  Had the virgin birth really taken place then one can imagine Mary being in a very similar position to Rosemary; yes you were raped, but he is your child and he will one day be immeasurably powerful… are you sure you want to live out the rest of your days as a powerless peasant?  Rosemary’s Baby is about making a deal with the devil in the most generic sense of the phrase, it is about the compromises we make and the values we ignore in order to make our ways in the world.

The film is called “Un Piede di Roman Polanski” and it was joint winner of the CineKink 2009 award for Best Experimental Short.  Hat-tip to Lauren Wissot who, along with Rosanne Kapitoa, is responsible for putting together this little gem.

By 1960, the vultures had started to circle the Surrealist movement.  What had started out as a desire to destroy and rebuild the iconography of Western Art in the aftermath of the First World War now seemed like a circular and pointless endeavour through which one section of the bourgeoisie tried to shock and outrage another section of the same narrow social institution.  While members of the Generation of ‘27 burned with anger at the Franquist government which had exiled and jailed them, the alliances with Marxism that would impact film-makers such as Bunuel were still a way off.  Facing such creative stagnation, Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor came together to form Burlesque, a creative clique which would later inspire itself from the god Pan and name themselves the Panic Movement.

Film Poster

The Panic Movement yielded films, poetry and novels but its primary mode of operation was the kind of publicity stunts that give performance art a bad name;  Slitting the throats of geese, covering naked women with honey, attaching snakes to their chests and, most famously, re-staging the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish using toads and lizards for Jodorowsky’s film The Holy Mountain (1973).

One of the more accessible (and indeed interesting) works to come out of the Panic Movement is Roland Topor’s Le Locataire Chimerique (1964), better known in English as The Tenant.  Topor’s novel tells the story of a mild-mannered and discrete man who moves into a new apartment following the suicide of its previous tenant.  Initially pleased with his new digs, the tenant soon becomes incredibly anxious about the noise complaints he receives from his neighbours.  A social gathering nearly provokes his upstairs neighbour to violence while even moving a piece of furniture is enough to illicit a symphony of wall-banging from neighbours on all sides.  Consumed by guilt and fear of being thrown into the street, the tenant cuts himself off from friends and starts to descend into a state of complete paranoia about how he is perceived by fellow tenants.  This paranoia rapidly spirals out of control and the tenant descends into madness as his identity and that of the previous tenant start to bleed into one another, resulting in hallucinations and fantasies that become increasingly bizarre and grotesque until the book reaches a final and bloody denouement.

Book Cover

It is possible to read Topor’s book as an allegorical take on the alienation felt by artists, political activists and other non-conformists in the face of a repressive society that seems hell bent on excluding them and isolating them for the most petty and childish of reasons.  the story in effect revolves around someone who engages in behaviour which, while anti-social, is hardly a huge nuisance.  However, despite this, his neighbours resort to more and more extreme tactics in order to force him into conformity.  They begin with democratically requesting signatures to a petition but before long, their nimbyish authoritarian temperament pushes them to appeal to the landlord, the police and then – as the protagonist’s grip on reality becomes more untenable – institutions that are actively medieval in their cruelty.  This desire to silence people who are a tiny bit annoying is present in today’s Daily Mail readers who are swift to call on the government to ban even the smallest of annoyances from mobile phones to scooters to iPods.  However, while I think Topor’s The Tenant is a fantastic book, I am most interested in its tone.

Paris Statue inspired by Le Passe-Muraille

Despite chronicling a descent into madness and paranoia, Topor’s tone is light and almost jovial.  Indeed, it is hugely reminiscent of that used in Marcel Ayme’s Le Passe-Muraille (1943).  Ayme’s novella revolves around a bland and inoffensive civil service who suddenly discovers that he has the power to pass through walls.  This power to transgress and overcome boundaries leads the character to discover love before losing his power and remaining trapped forever inside a wall.  This novella, published along with a number of other short stories that can be classed as playfully fantastical in that they have one foot planted in the French realist tradition of Zola and Balzac but another in the fabulous tradition of La Fontaine explored in Ayme’s writing under the name Les Contes Du Chat Perche, poorly translated into English as The Wonderful Farm.  What is most surprising about Roland Polanski’s adaptation of The Tenant is the extent to which this playful and whimsical tone carries over into what is essentially quite a grim and disturbing psychological thriller.

For all its thematic darkness, The Tenant is a genuinely funny film. Its protagonist Trelkovsky is a mild-mannered and almost timorous man who is incredibly passive with women, with his neighbours and even his friends.  One of the funniest scenes in the film involves Trelkovsky squirming with horror as one of his over-bearing friends demonstrates how to deal with upset neighbours by putting on a recording of marching band music at full blast and then angrily berating a neighbour who dares to plead for a bit of quiet so that his sick wife can rest.  Another fantastic scene features Polanski himself (he plays the unhappy Trelkovsky) appearing in full drag and stroking his stocking-clad legs whilst cooing “I think I’m pregnant” into the mirror.  Even Trelkovsky’s melodramatic attempt to escape the oppression of his neighbours has a darkly comic quality to it as the man throws himself from a window and, upon realising he is not yet dead, drags his bloodied and bruised body back up the stairs in order to throw himself out the window a second time.

By preserving the whimsical elements of the original novel, Polanski not only continues to show the influence of Surrealism upon his work, he also taps into one of the most enduring motifs of European art, namely that the only sane reaction to the kind of death and misery caused by World War is to laugh.  If Surrealism is whimsical, it is because it is a reaction to the events of the First World War.  The same instinct can be seen in the French reaction to the death and collaboration that went on during the Second World War, namely the recognition via Camus that human concerns are ultimately absurd.  The Tenant does not mourn Trelkovsky’s descent into madness, it looks on and acknowledges how silly it all is.  This whimsical tone is completely at odds with the dark and haunting imagery of Repulsion and the dream-like Horror and injustice of Rosemary’s Baby.

However, it is my contention that Repulsion is a substantial landmark on the the road of Polanski’s artistic development.  The low-budget British Horror film allowed him not only to perfect some of the cinematic techniques that would feature prominently in his later works but also to tackle some of the themes dear to the generation of 1930s surrealist film-makers who clearly had quite an influence on Polanski’s thinking.

Film Poster

Set in around London’s South Kensington, Repulsion is the story of Carole Ledoux (played exquisitely by 20 year-old Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian girl whose repressed sexuality tips her into first paranoia and then psychosis.  Initially, Carole is a normal if somewhat shy and withdrawn girl living with her sister.  She works in a beauty salon but has no friends aside from her sister and a young man whose romantic ambitions she struggles to keep at arms length.  Indeed, when we first encounter the young man he acts in a way that suggests that he knows Carole but you would not get this impression at all from the way she behaves towards him.  The situation degrades when Carole’s sister starts bringing her boyfriend home with her.  Carole is repulsed not only by the sounds of sex that filter through the walls but also the presence in the bathroom of a man’s razor.  However, things start getting really bad when Carole’s sister goes away on holiday with her boyfriend, leaving Carole completely alone with her fears.

This scene comes close to the end of the film, once Carole has been on her own for a while.  The state of the apartment mirrors the state of Carole’s mind.  We can see cracks beginning to form in the walls and the place is a mess, full of upturned furniture, rotting food and (though not included in the scene) two dead bodies. Aside from the cracks in the walls, the most obvious signs of Carole’s mental state are the fact that the ringing of a nearby bell is taken as a signal at which she is raped by unseen assailants lurking in the shadows.  As she descends further into madness, the cluttered apartment suddenly expands in size, resembling a huge and cavernous expanse of darkness and menace.  From this huge space we move to the claustrophobic confines of a corridor whose walls excrete arms, groping and caressing Carole as she crawls towards her bedroom, seeking out childhood’s safest hiding place under the bed.

It is possible to detect in this scene the same psychoanalytical concerns that animated surrealist film-makers such as Bunuel and Cocteau.  Indeed, the prominence accorded Repulsion to a straight razor seems to be a deliberate tipping of the hat to Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and the famous sequence in which an eye-ball is sliced open as a cloud passes the moon.

The film’s desire to return again and again to the rotting potatoes and rabbit carcass are also reminiscent of the scene in Un Chien Andalou in which ants crawl out of a hand.  Bunuel himself claimed that this sequence was an hommage to the rotting meat in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925).  Another clear reference to the surrealist tradition are the arms exuding from the wall.  Right down to the lugubrious black and white, this portion of the scene invokes the famous scene in Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete (1945) where Belle enters the castle through a corridor full of candelabras held by real human arms poking through the walls.

All of these sequences obey a psychoanalytical dream logic through which unconscious fears and desires are made manifest through dreams.  In both the Polanski and the cocteau sequences, arms reach out from some other place and brush up against the protagonist, driving her to terror and madness in her efforts to get away from them.  However, while these arms symbolise unconscious fears reaching up towards the conscious mind, they also capture the reality of life for many women.  Faced by a world full of men – always leering, lusting and two thoughts away from reaching out and grabbing – Carole retreats first to the all female world of the beauty salon and then to the safety of her apartment but once there she is still not free of male advances both real and imaginary.  Eventually, Carole’s entire world seems to turn against her as the apartment itself starts groping and grabbing at her.  In Repulsion‘s powerful final scene, we see the reasons for this fear of men; a peaceful family picture with Carole’s parents in the foreground and a younger version of Carole glaring resentfully at her father.  Suddenly the identity of the shadowy rapist becomes clear.  If there is one man a woman should be able to trust not to lust after her it is her father.  Once that taboo is broken then the world of masculine sexuality would rightly start to seem like a relentlessly oppressive and invasive space, once Carole’s terrors start manifesting themselves in the fabric of her apartment then her only chance of escape lies in catatonia.

The way in which, at times of extreme psychological stress, the unconscious mind can bleed through into the conscious mind is a recurrent theme throughout the Apartment Trilogy.  Indeed, one could almost go as far as to suggest that it is explicitly what all three films are about.  Consider, for example, the dream sequence from Rosemary’s Baby in which the imagery is dreamlike but also completely real.

This sequence also features another of Polanski’s visual motifs; the use of optical illusions.  Aside from the dream-like imagery, the above scene features a moment in which the camera appears to slide under the bed, looking up at images of heaven reminiscent of the Sisteen Chapel and so given an impression of depth through the use of perspective.  Polanski also plays games with perspective in the dream sequence of the final film in the Apartment Trilogy, The Tenant.

In this scene, Polanski uses the same trick as in the Repulsion sequence to make the room suddenly seem a lot larger, but he augments this trick by swapping in some out-size replicas of the apartment’s furniture, further increasing the cognitive dissonance and the sense that something is not quite right.

One of the books that Polanski evidently kept on set with him during the filming of Repulsion was Richard L. Gregory’s Eye and Brain : The Science of Seeing (1966), he even enlisted Gregory as a kind of perceptual consultant and dragged him round a number of cinemas and camera manufacturers in order to research the possbility of making Repulsion a 3D film.  Gregory is most famous for developing the idea of Perception as Hypotheses, whereby the brain does not directly process visual information but instead compares the data it receives from the eye to known schemas and paradigms that allow it to make sense of objects that do not look quite right.  Gregory’s homepage includes a number of films of optical illusions that demonstrate this principle but perhaps the most famous example of this kind of thing is the Muller-Lyer illusion.

The Muller-Lyer Illusion Explained

Optical illusions are culture-specific.  We view those two lines as being off different lengths because we are used to living in built environments in which we are used to interpreting things through the use of perspective even though perspective clearly does not apply to a couple of lines on a screen.

Other than in artificially constructed Optical Illusions, Gregory points out that perception can go wrong in cases of mental illness or drug use and this is where I think psychology links up with Repulsion.  Polanski fills his scene of psychotic breakdown with optical illusions in order to make the audience share Carole’s sense of cognitive estrangement from the world around her.  The surrealists of Cocteau and Bunuel’s generation based their understanding of the human mind on the writings of Freud and so their attempts to make film about madness involved the use of dream-like imagery.  While Polanski also makes use of these kinds of techniques, he also makes use of more advanced psychological thinking trying to induce in the audience symptoms of the same psychological disfunction as the protagonist.

Repulsion‘s images of psychotic break-down are not only an important moment in cinematic history, they are also an important turning point in Polanski’s career.  The scene acknowledges the psychoanalytical and surrealist traditions but it also stresses much more recent thinking and the need to move on from tried and tested modes of artistic expression.

• Repulsion (1965)
• Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
• The Tenant (1976)

In order to pay appropriate hommage to my current obsession, I have decided to turn Ruthless Culture over to the study of Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy for a period not exceeding one week.