Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [12]
“All she has to be is young, healthy, and not a virgin,” squawks her neighbor Ruth Gordon. Here is the movie in essence, the targeting of Rosemary, a Catholic girl who lost her faith to become an agnostic, and the sound of the real world bleeding into her dream. An even more surreal series of images flashes in montage when she is impregnated by the Devil—including one on a yacht with John F. Kennedy, who tells her the cruise is “for Catholics only” when she asks about her friend Hutch, who warns her against moving into the new building, supposedly haunted by a coven of witches. Even the supernatural elements display human weakness and flaws. Polanski insisted that the old witches be nude, causing headaches among the brass at Paramount.
This psychedelic dream may be the most dated-looking scene of this film. Years later, Polanski, who drew on his experiences with a bad trip on LSD, said he wished he could shoot it again. Its hazy look is in stark contrast to the crisp cinematography of the apartment. “We prefogged the film for that scene,” says the cinematographer William A. Fraker. “We exposed the film to light and then ran it through and put it in the camera. We were trying to do new things.”
The scene ingeniously hinted at what was really going on without wasting time on a clunky expository monologue. It also reflects the mental state of the heroine, who begins to question her own faculties. Everyone seems to be lying. Guy tells her she looks great when she clearly is gaunt and sickly. Her doctor thinks she’s delusional. The older next-door neighbors are untrustworthy. But she also thinks it might just be paranoia. The movie has the groovy feel of a paranoid bad trip. “This is no dream!” she shouts. “It’s really happening.”
Polanski often used a wide-angle lens to make the environment of the Dakota as much a part of the movie as the actors. The floors creaked and the dark elevators made for a gripping central character. “When you use a wider lens, you are always aware of the set around her. If you go long, the focus becomes only on her,” said Fraker. “Roman wanted the focus to be on the house.”
Rosemary’s Baby was something relatively new: a horror film for adults. Not surprisingly, it ran into conflicts from the studio. When filming slowed down and costs rose out of control, there was talk inside the studio about firing Polanski. Evans held firm. He also earned brushback for opening the movie in June, traditionally the time for family fare. The advertising departments wanted to sell the stars, the shocks. Instead, Polanski went with a subtle, iconic image—a baby carriage with the tagline hovering over it: “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby.” Then there was the phone call from Frank Sinatra demanding that Evans let his wife Mia Farrow out of the contract to appear in The Detective, a film that Sinatra was to star in. Evans dodged the issue. After he called a meeting with Farrow, and made the argument that if she stayed on with Rosemary’s Baby she could win an Oscar, she told Sinatra to wait. That made him angry. He served her divorce papers on the set and she never won the Oscar.
As the shoot came to a close, one major issue remained to be resolved: what to show in the final images. The whole film had built to this moment. Rosemary, pale and sickly, had suspected that her pregnancy has gone terribly wrong, that her husband and her neighbors are not to be trusted. So she flees to the doctor who promptly sedates her and she goes into labor. When she wakes up, Dr. Sapirstein tells her the baby has died but she doesn