Whilst I nurse this sunburn (more on that in a site report from the convention later this week), It's time for another piece of my epic.  Today we will be finishing off the 1960s by discussing Roman Polanski's classic Rosemary's Baby.  Cited works today include the film itself (because I'm paraphrasing the plot to discuss this properly), Gregory A. Waller's Introduction to American Horrors:  Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, Virginia Wright Wexman's "The Trauma of Infancy in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby" from that book, Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws:  Gender in the Modern Horror Film, and Reynold Humphries's The American Horror Film:  An Introduction.

     The other movie of the 1960s that tends to emphasize a weak female protagonist, though through somewhat different circumstances, is Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. In fact, the movie has even been considered, in much the same way as Psycho, as a crucial component of the beginning of the modern era of American horror films. (Waller 2) Regarding what specifically tends to be cited as the reasons for Rosemary's Baby's impact, the movie is often noted for Polanski's ability to make a movie with a degree of nebulousness in its main plotline separate from that seen in the story it was based on. "Though Polanski's screenplay stays close to Levin's original story, the movie maximizes the ambiguity between paranoid projection and real events that the novel repeatedly strives to resolve."(Wexman 37) Specifically what is being discussed most often is the degree to which the viewer of the movie, throughout almost the entire film, is made unsure of just how much of the events befalling Rosemary are actually happening in reality and how much of them are misinformed overreaction or imagination. While some analysts have claimed that Polanski made the answer abundantly obvious by the revelation of the coven at the movie's conclusion, the superimposing of an inhuman face over Rosemary's body, and filmic techniques meant to imply imprisonment and helplessness, the fact that Polanski never actually shows the child in the movie still leaves the question slightly open-ended. (36-7) In fact, it is this ambiguity that can show just how similar Rosemary really is to the aforementioned weak female lead, Marion in Psycho.
      Upon further analysis, while Rosemary is able to survive the entire movie, unlike Marion, it is interesting to note that, throughout the movie, she is unable to gain control of her situation, no matter what she attempts. She becomes a quintessential victim of her circumstances, her surroundings, her naiveté and the wants and desires of others. In the beginning of the movie, Rosemary willingly buys the fateful apartment with her husband Guy, even after discovering the building's dark, bloody history from her former landlord Hutch. She also, at least at first, allows herself to be sucked into a friendship with her elderly next-door neighbors, Roman and Minnie Castavet, initially not questioning her husband's closeness with Roman or strange occurrences relating to gifts she receives from them. She permits them to convince her to change her obstetrician from one she was recommended by a friend to one whom they endorse and who will prescribe treatments heavily influenced by Minnie's strange herbs. Also, on the night of conception itself, Rosemary's downfall is that she allows herself to be incapacitated, whether by tainted chocolate mousse or too much alcohol, and is thus totally unable to control and fend off her husband's sexual advances and desires. She was, in a manner of speaking, unwillingly impregnated: "When Guy tells Rosemary that he ‘didn't want to miss baby night,' he acknowledges not just an act of ‘necrophile' penetration, as he puts it the morning after, but impregnation as well."(Clover 80)
     As the movie continues, Rosemary becomes more and more suspicious of her husband and her neighbors. However, she still shows herself to be immensely weak in her convictions at multiple points over the story, most memorable of these being when she complains of both the raw meat she has begun to find herself eating and the excruciating pain she has been experiencing for the first few months of her pregnancy which Dr. Sapirstein has been ignoring. When the pain suddenly goes away as soon as it reaches its zenith, Rosemary returns to trusting Sapirstein and taking the Castavets' strange brew of herbs, suppressing the fears she once expressed. She also, to a degree, trusts her husband after she discovers he does not have a mark on his shoulders that would show he belonged to the coven. This particular example of Rosemary's naïveté is seriously egregious in that it goes against a slowly increasing amount of evidence that her husband may be untrustworthy, including his implication in the tragedies that befell a fellow actor and Hutch and his apparent unwillingness to listen to his wife's concerns regarding the Castavets.
     In the movie's final scenes, one sees Rosemary attempting everything in her power to determine the truth about her pregnancy or prevent the birth. She is thwarted in each attempt to either gain information or expose the coven, however. She attempts to determine the Castavets' secrets through research, yet her husband throws away her book when he figures out what she is doing. She tries to revisit Sapirstein to tell of her suspicions, only to realize he may be one of the Castavets' allies. She returns to her prior obstetrician, Dr. Hill, only to be betrayed by him to her husband and Sapirstein out of disbelief rather than allegiance. Finally, she attempts to run from Saperstein and Guy en route to the apartment, barricading herself inside the building. This fails as well when Guy is able to easily get through the locks with the doctor, as it is also his apartment, and sedate his wife. Ultimately, Rosemary is momentarily fooled into thinking she has had a miscarriage, discovers the truth when acting upon suspicions brought about by hearing a crying baby, and determines the extent of the coven's influences. Overall, the clearest proof of her victim role, her helplessness, and her general weakness is seen in the fact that she cannot suppress her maternal instincts and appears to agree to raise what is presumed to be the devil's child as her own. Thus, the movie ends on a note of subjugation and control in which the elders, Rosemary's doctor, and Rosemary's husband are able to utilize Rosemary's femininity and sexuality for their own gains. As put by Reynold Humphries in The American Horror Film: An Introduction:
"[...] what we are seeing is a persecuted young woman accepting the tasks of the dutiful mother and their attendant ideology. [...]For during the ‘rape' sequence the alternating shots of Guy and of Satan having sex with Rosemary insist on the piercing eyes of both: whether one accepts the supernatural reading or prefers a rational one, Rosemary will be under constant surveillance"(88-9).