A new apartment, a young couple, and strange neighbors. To Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, this seems quite normal. Everything seems to be going their way. Guy receives a big part in the latest play, and Rosemary becomes pregnant. But then, she starts to feel different. The pregnancy isn’t bringing her as much joy as it should. Soon, this doesn’t remain her own journey into motherhood; but rather, it becomes everyone’s as those around her are becoming more controlling, especially the male figures. In Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s pregnancy-gone-wrong novel, Rosemary’s Baby, the director uses mise-en-scene elements such as set design, costuming, character positioning and shot compositions to relay the themes of male control and female submissiveness.
In the essay Rosemary’s Baby by Michael Perez, he states, “The reason we are dwelling at such length on the novel that led to Roman Polanski’s film is that the filmmaker translated it word for word, overlooking none of the writer’s instructions, content to delete a few of the repetitions and insistent descriptions that film makes unnecessary,” (Perez, 103). The dream sequence in the film is almost the exact same as in the novel, leaving in all of the detail of the male dominance. At the start of the scene, Guy takes Rosemary and rests her on the bed. He looms over her, making it look like he’s asserting his power. The film shows Guy’s eyeline-match as he looks down on Rosemary. All of this time, she is wearing red pajamas. Red is a motif that shows up throughout much of movie, and it tends to appear on someone or something that has been or is about to be tainted by evil. As Guy begins to remove Rosemary’s pajamas, she questions why he’s doing it, and he just tells her to sleep, and she remains passive and is taken advantage of in her lethargic state. He tells her, “Sleep is what you need. A good night’s sleep.” He’s trying to tell her what’s good for her, instead of letting her have an opinion. As Guy removes Rosemary’s pajamas, he does so with force and a malevolent smile on his face. We view this in a low-angle eyeline-match from Rosemary’s point-of-view. This assists in highlighting her helplessness in the situation.
After JFK’s snippet of dialogue in this dream sequence on the boat, the camera cuts to a male hand (presumably Guy’s) taking off Rosemary’s wedding ring. This could be a symbol of Rosemary being passed on from one man (Guy) to another (Satan). She doesn’t have any say or control of the proceedings. She is then laid on a platform with her looking up at the paintings of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and she sees a portion of the ceiling painting that has a man reaching out to God; and then, she sees a different portion of the painting that has the skeleton of a jackal. It’s as if she is going away from God, and being served on a platter to Satan. When Rosemary walks on the deck of the boat, the doorman from the apartment is steering the ship, another example of a man taking control of Rosemary’s destiny. As she walks downstairs and rests on the mattress, she envisions two male orderlies restraining her to a bed. This is in a low-angle eyeline-match of Rosemary’s.
In Dudley Andrew’s essay Adaptation, he states, “More difficult is fidelity to the spirit, to the original’s tone, values, imagery, and rhythm, since finding stylistic equivalents in film for these intangible aspects is the opposite of a mechanical process. The cineaste presumably must intuit and reproduce the feeling of the original,” (Andrew, 32). As Satan begins to rape Rosemary, the camera tracks his movements as he caresses her body. Right after, we only see Rosemary’s reactions to this. The book provides more explicit detail to what exactly is happening: “He repeated the exciting stroke again and again, his hands hot and sharp-nailed…Brutally, rhythmically, he drove his new hugeness. 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 the onlookers,” (Levin, 89). Even though Polanski stays true to the rape scene, it’s depiction in the book is considerably more sensory, allowing the reader to feel what Rosemary is feeling, which is total loss of control over what’s happening to her. As this is occurring, the Pope appears and Rosemary asks for forgiveness. He grants it, and has her kiss his ring, in another eyeline-match of Rosemary’s. All of these low-angle eyeline-matches accentuate Rosemary’s compliance to men.
When Rosemary awakens, Guy admits and lies to her what he had done, and is nonchalant about it, while she remains almost speechless that this all happened without her consent. Guy tells her, “I didn’t want to miss baby night. A couple of my nails were ragged. And it was kind of fun, in a necrophile sort of way.” The scratches on Rosemary’s back represent a man, in this case Satan, marking her as his own. She doesn’t have her pajamas on when she wakes up, showing Rosemary’s openness and fragileness.
When a person’s physical pain becomes unbearable, their survival mode kicks in, and they must decide how to combat it. In Rosemary’s case, however, she’s not allowed to have an opinion in that matter. A little after the party scene begins, Rosemary is talking to her friend Elise in the kitchen, and we see Guy speaking with a friend right outside the kitchen. As soon as Rosemary and Elise begin to discuss Dr. Hill, Guy comes into the kitchen and asks Elise to help him carry food out to the guests, as a way for Rosemary to not get a woman’s opinion. In the scene with the dinner party, Rosemary confides in her three women friends about what she’s been suffering through. When the four of them go into the kitchen to talk alone, we see a window in the kitchen door in the background. As the four begin talking, Guy peers through the window, and then tries to get in; but he is then kept out by one of Rosemary’s friends. Even though Guy isn’t looking in the window a few seconds later, the viewer still gets the feeling that he is still waiting outside for her, or that he can look through the window at any minute. He doesn’t like Rosemary getting an opinion from these women. This is all in a straight-on medium shot to show that these women are on the same level as Rosemary, and to show that they all agree for her to go back to Dr. Hill.
The scene then cuts to after the party, where Rosemary is seated on a chair on an open floor with Guy pacing around. The emptiness on the floor around her represents her own emptiness and powerlessness. As Rosemary is explaining to Guy that she wants to go back to Dr. Hill instead of continuing with Dr. Sapirstein, Guy doesn’t pay attention to her or take her opinion into consideration at first. Instead, he goes along and cleans the living room, as if he’s ignoring her. When Rosemary mentions the advice that her friends gave her, Guy continues to hate the idea of Rosemary taking their thoughts seriously. Guy says, “I won’t let you do it, Ro. I mean, because it’s, uh…it’s not fair to Sapirstein.” To which Rosemary retorts as she begins to stand and assert herself, “Not fair to…What are you talking about? What about what’s fair to me?” And then Guy responds by saying, “You want a second opinion? You tell Dr. Sapirstein and let him decide who gives it.” Rosemary then feels better right away: “The pain had stopped. It was gone. Like a struck auto horn finally put right. Like anything that stops and is gone and is gone for good and won’t ever be back again, thank merciful heaven. Gone and finished and oh, how good she might possibly feel as soon as she caught her breath!” (Levin, 160). This happens right as Rosemary is about to make a decision for herself. Her losing the pain is a symbol for her not being able to make a decision for herself. Since the pain has stopped, she is stopped as well from acting upon her own initial decision to act on her own.
One thing that can hurt a woman more than finding out that the one man she trusted the most as betrayed her, is finding out that three men she thoroughly trusted have betrayed her. Rosemary is lying down on a couch in one of Dr. Hill’s patient’s rooms. At the start of the scene when Dr. Hill turns off the light and closes the door, the viewer can tell that he has other intentions for her that he’s keeping her in the dark about. Since she is resting, Rosemary is already in a passive position when Guy and Dr. Sapirstein enter. As she sits up, Guy and Dr. Sapirstein stand over her and have a dominating presence. In a low-angle shot, we see all of Guy, but only see up to Dr. Sapirstein’s chest, which makes him appear more unknown and threatening. Dr. Sapirstein tells Rosemary in a hostile tone, “Come with us quietly, Rosemary. Don’t argue or make a scene, because if you say anything more about witches or witchcraft, we’re going to be forced to take you to a mental hospital. You don’t want that, do you? So put your shoes on.” This is another case of a woman being told how to cooperate by a man, under the threat of consequence that she can’t do anything about.
According to Robert Stam’s essay Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation, the author tells the reader, “The novel has a single material of expression, the written word, whereas the film has at least five tracks: moving photographic image, phonetic sound, music, noises, and written materials. In this sense, the cinema has not lesser, but rather greater resources of expression than the novel…” (Stam, 59). As far as Guy goes in this scene, the book just says, “They came and stood close to her. Guy’s face was stony and blank. He looked at the walls, only at the walls, not at her,” (Levin, 211). The movie, however, uses the resource of lighting to convey to the audience the two-faced mentality of Guy. He is mostly in shadow, but when he tells Rosemary that they won’t hurt her, he comes out of the shadow, and then moves back in to it when he’s done speaking. This gives the audience the impression that there’s a possibility that he could be lying to Rosemary. But because she is in a brittle state-of-being, they feel like they can manipulate her feelings and make her believe what they tell her.
Dr. Hill, the only man that Rosemary can trust towards the end, has turned against her since he didn’t believe her story, leaving her without anyone to count on. As she, Guy and Dr. Sapirstein walk out of Dr. Hill’s office, Sapirstein holds on to Rosemary’s arm the whole time, making her look like his captive. When the three get into the taxi, Rosemary is positioned tightly between the two men, not giving her any hope to escape. She is their prisoner.
Roman Polanski deepened the emotional response from his audience by going more in depth with the issue of a woman living a male-dominated life. A person reading the novel can sense a theme of a woman being imprisoned. But when watching it on film, it strikes a different chord, since we’re sitting and watching Rosemary in peril, and we can’t do anything about it. The happiness that a woman should feel when entering motherhood is taken away from Rosemary and replaced by fear and control of others around her; and Roman Polanski creates a very dark mood in his film to convey those two aspects. As a result, we as an audience can then feel everything that Rosemary feels.
Works Cited
Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 28-37.
Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 54-76.
Perez, Michael. “Rosemary’ Baby.” Positif: 50 Years: Selections from the French Film Journal. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1969. 102-105
Levin, Ira. Rosemary’s Baby. New York: Pegasus Books, 1967.
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