As recently as the late 1800s, “hysteria” was a diagnosis applied (solely) to women who acted “surly and dissatisfied without cause” by doctors who were exclusively male. It was believed to be caused by wombs that had become detached from the abdominal wall. This should tell you something about male doctors’ ignorance about female anatomy up to and including this point, not to mention their blindness as to why women in that time period might be surly and dissatisfied at all. From a modern perspective, it’s pretty obvious, and it’s not like the tendency to pathologize women’s’ experience has died out or anything, but it’s a stark example that lives on in the gendered stereotype of women as frail, irrational, and overly emotional.
But as it turns out, this isn’t a history blog, it’s a blog about scary movies. And if there’s one through-line to Rosemary’s Baby, it’s that of hysteria. I’m always a little reluctant to take on the classics - there’s that fear that something you loved when you were younger isn’t going to hold up, or that something you’re just now coming to is going to have lost some of its power with the intervening years, that its myth will have eclipsed the film itself. I can safely say that this is one of the classics for a reason - it’s a careful exercise in paranoia that etches mid-century gender norms and attitudes toward motherhood in acid. I saw this film for the first time thirty years ago and loved it then. Revisiting it today, much to my relief, it still holds up really well.
Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse are a young, upwardly mobile couple in 1966’s New York City. Guy’s an actor - not famous, not yet, but he’s done a couple of well-received plays and a bunch of television and radio advertising work, which you get the sense is what actually pays the bills. If so, it’s paying the bills handsomely, because they’re able to consider moving into a bigger, nicer apartment at the Bramford, a sprawling, rambling, venerated apartment building on Central Park West, which I’m pretty sure has never, ever been cheap. But these things are relative, and you get the sense that the place at the Bramford has some things going for it - it sounds like it’s rent-controlled, the previous occupant passed away recently, and the Bramford has a bit of a sordid history - tenants who died in spectacular ways, tenants with checkered pasts, tenants with unsavory practices. Maybe it doesn’t command the kind of cachet other buildings do.
Whatever the reason, it’s within their budget, and it’s huge and gorgeous, in a great location. The tour is a little awkward because the place is still furnished with the late occupants’ possessions - the person giving the tour hastily points out that she died in the hospital, not at home - and some things seem a little eccentric. Like the large piece of furniture blocking a functional closet. Nevertheless, they sign the lease and move in, repainting and refurnishing. They soon realize that their apartment - originally part of a much, much larger space - abuts onto that of Minnie and Roman Castavet, friends of the previous occupant. The adjoining wall is maybe a bit thin, and they can hear conversations through the wall.
Conversations, strange music, and chanting.
Once Rosemary gets pregnant, she is immediately surrounded by a entourage of men all equally dismissive of her concerns, all insistent that they know what’s best, no matter what her own body tells her, with Minnie also there every day, equally as insistent over dictating the course of her day-to-day care. It’s at this point, about an hour in, that the film shifts from being about the Woodhouse’s attempts to settle in, framed by odd incidental details and asides, and starts to be more about the struggle for Rosemary’s agency. She’s isolated from her friends, told what’s best for her, kept inside, all part of the characterization of women as weak and incapable of thinking for themselves, and of pregnant women especially as fragile and in need of constant attention and care. What starts off as solicitous becomes oppressive when you aren’t given any choice or any say in the matter, and this is sharpened by what appears to be Rosemary’s gradual deterioration. She looks absolutely awful, and she’s losing weight instead of gaining it. This is the point where it starts to become a horror film on a couple of different levels.
Rosemary is subject to an especially suffocating brand of paternalism, and as much as that’s what the zeitgeist was in the mid-60s, just before the social upheaval that would give us the women’s liberation movement, the second major civil rights movement and the gay rights movement alongside rising opposition to the war in the Vietnam, here it feels more like what’s driving the feeling of paranoia, rather than being an artifact of the times. I’d argue that this film was actually interrogating these sexist assumptions (or perhaps just satirizing them, since it wouldn’t be the only time the author behind the source novel did so). Either way, it’s depicted as being as much a part of the horror as the other things going on the background and in the margins. Almost as if to say the two are one and the same, The time in which it’s set makes itself known in other, quainter ways - this is a New York City of pay phones and doing research from encyclopedias and answering services, and the dialogue has the slightly mannered quality typical of films made during the time, but it’s not actively distracting, and in some ways I think it lends what it’s doing more weight. It is a film very much of its time saying that women are not listened to, and mothers aren’t treated as people as much as they are fragile, breakable vessels who can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them. No man who means well by Rosemary in this film (and there aren’t many) lasts very long at all.
And on top of all of this, it’s a hell of an exercise in paranoia and uneasiness. It doesn’t tip its hand soon at all, content instead to build things up in small ways that reward careful attention and observation. This is a film that is absolutely about the little details, and with a couple of exceptions does an excellent job of letting the audience make the connections for themselves, so it’s not especially played like Rosemary is losing her mind, even though that’s how almost everyone is treating her. The result is a persistent feeling of claustrophobic helplessness, helped along by a series of surreal dream sequences that sometimes intrude upon Rosemary’s reality, feeling both like actual dream sequences and like there’s something important there to be grasped, if only we knew what it was. It’s a story told in long, unbroken takes (often with little bits of business going on in the background) and sudden transitions from one place and time to another, which feels ever so slightly dislocating. The score could almost be called sardonic, made up of waltzes and lullabies and the occasional up-tempo jazz number when things really start to go south. And they eventually do. In the end, it’s all brought together in one horrible realization, what the dreams and nightmares meant, what all of the unfortunate coincidences meant, all of the overbearing advice, all of the half-heard conversations, it was all converging on a single, terrible realization. I talk a lot about the horror of revelation and how much I like it when it’s done well, And here, it’s absolutely done well.
But that’s also sort of the hell of it about this film - it is a sterling example of how to put a whole lot of little pieces, little details, little moments out there, just enough for you to get a sense of what’s happened, but only if you know how to put it together But that also means that this is kind of film you can only see once, in a sense. When you go to watch it again, it’s a different experience - still an enjoyable one, as I’ve discovered, watching all the moving parts slot together elegantly - but it’s never going to be like it was the first time. You’re expecting it now.
But this is really a small complaint about an absolutely excellent film. If you’ve seen and enjoyed Hereditary and somehow aren’t familiar with this film, correct that immediately. No slight to Ari Aster, he’s an excellent director and Hereditary is an excellent film in its own right. It’s not plagiarism or even homage, really - it treads different thematic ground from Rosemary’s Baby, but I would venture to say that without Rosemary’s Baby, there probably wouldn’t be a Hereditary. If that at all piques your interest, get on that shit now. I will say that in both movies, women are not listened to or taken seriously to terrible consequence. At one time, hell, even today, both Annie Graham and Rosemary Woodhouse would be dismissed as “hysterical.” And that is one way - as the awful histories of this film’s director and people like Harvey Weinstein can attest - that evil enters the world and flourishes.
IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment