Oscar-winning Polish director and convicted sex offender Roman Polanski can be said to have redefined the way ‘evilness’ was depicted on screen in the 1960s through his masterpiece “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). Unfortunately, just nine years later, he redefined the same evil himself by committing statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl.
“Rosemary’s Baby” is a psychological horror film about a woman’s gradual loss of control over her body and her reality. The film begins with Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband, Guy, moving into a new New York apartment building and befriending their seemingly friendly but eccentric elderly neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet. After discussing their hopes of starting a family, Rosemary becomes pregnant following a disturbing, half-dreamlike assault in which she sees a demonic presence raping her, as Guy, the Castevets and the rest of her neighbors watch. The pregnancy is followed by intense pain, disturbing dreams and a growing, eerie sense that those around her — including her own husband — are conspiring in a greater evil against her.
Pressured to see the neighbors’ chosen doctor and consume their strange prenatal ‘health drinks,’ Rosemary finds her concerns and emotions repeatedly dismissed. As she investigates the situation, she uncovers evidence that the Castevets are part of a satanic cult and that her pregnancy may be the result of a ritual intended to bring forth the Antichrist. In the chilling final scenes, Rosemary’s fears are confirmed, and Roman Castevet, the cult’s leader, forces her to accept her role as the mother of the child, despite the eeriness and horror of what this would mean for her.
Previously, I wrote about the psychological distress women experience with body image and the terror of losing control to predetermined fate. “Rosemary’s Baby” presents a combination — and arguably worsens — both horrors.
The film is numbingly eerie in the stark contrast it draws between Rosemary and the evil force that ultimately consumes her. Portrayed by a young Mia Farrow, Rosemary is defined by softness and light: gentle in voice, delicate in appearance and dressed in feminine fashion that emphasizes her angelic innocence. She is warm, welcoming and easy to please. She also looks, in every conventional sense, like she would be a wonderful mother. And that is precisely what makes the contrast so appalling. As viewers, we are forced to watch what we instinctively take as purity and goodness descend into ultimate demise — a full destruction of self and complete loss of control. In that helplessness, true horror emerges. It is not necessarily the satanic curse that unsettles us ideationally, but rather Rosemary’s depicted innocence even after the assault-like experience that impregnated her, and the quiet, suffocating violation of bodily autonomy that ultimately strips her of agency.
Watching this movie with knowledge of Polanski’s past feels even more unsettling: We are confronted with the disturbing reality that he became the very source of imprisonment and violation that his art depicts. It is difficult to grapple with the ethics of a film created by a criminal, especially when it leaves such a morally striking, visually chilling and thematically eerie imprint on its audience. This discomfort — and perhaps guilt — is further deepened by the knowledge that Polanski is also celebrated for many other acclaimed works, including “The Pianist” (2002), which earned him an Oscar for Best Director, and “Chinatown” (1974), a classic film noir that likewise confronts themes of child sexual abuse — a parallel that makes the line between art and artist feel thinner and thinner.
So, can we truly separate art from its creator when the creator’s own moral reality can so easily mirror it? How do we grapple with the fact that some of the films widely regarded as masterpieces — films that have defined what ‘great cinema’ looks like — were made by someone who committed such heinous crimes?
Perhaps the ultimate tragedy of great artwork may just as well be that the evil which it seeks to expose of the world can circle back to define its creator. In 1977, Polanski was charged in Los Angeles with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. He fled the United States on Feb. 1, 1978, one day before sentencing, and has not returned since.
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