The film narrative centers on Satan impregnating Rosemary,
a married woman in New York City. According to Roman Polanski, the film’s
director, the decisive point is actually that neither Rosemary in the film nor
the film’s viewers can know whether it was the devil who impregnated her. Beyond
the more matter of being able to distinguish a psychosis from a more “objective”
or external religious event, the importance of the supernatural to religion is also,
albeit subtly, in play, according to Polanski.
“Nothing supernatural is in the film,” Polanski says in
an interview that comes with the DVD, so the intrusion of religion into Rosemary’s
pregnancy could all be in Rosemary’s head. Given the paranoia “over the safety
of her unborn child [that] begins to control her life,” Rosemary may unjustifiably
fear that the Satanic couple in the next apartment hosts a coven that plans on sacrifice
her baby; Rosemary may hallucinate the devil’s face during the sex scene and
the devil’s likeness in her baby after his birth. As for the first
hallucination, however, Rosemary does not eat much of the drugged chocolate
dessert furnished by Minnie Castevet from next door. Whereas the sequence
through the boat scene looks hallucinatory, the fact that Roman Castevet’s
painting red lines on Rosemary’s naked chest and abs as she lies on a bed is in the same scene as the sex, which crucially
includes a camera shot of part of the devil’s body—a shot not from Rosemary’s
point of view—followed by a very brief shot of the devil’s face from Rosemary’s
point of view, the supernatural presence of the devil is indeed in the film. A
dream or hallucinatory sequence in life as in a film does not maintain a “scene”
for long, yet the one of the painting and intercourse is sustained long enough
not to be dreamlike. So I cannot agree with Polanski’s claim that nothing
supernatural is in the film. He later admitted to being an agnostic, yet he did
not keep to his personal beliefs in the making of the film—which is a good
thing.
Only one very brief
look at the devil having intercourse and another such glimpse of the baby’s
face struck me most in my first viewing of the film. Genius! I thought, as the
viewers would only get a glimpse of the central character—and one that is distinctively
religious. By showing us less, in other words, Polanski actually raised the
significance of the supernatural to religion. This raises the question of
whether the supernatural really is so important in the phenomenology of
religion. Perhaps supernatural additives have been placed in religions to gain
adherents. In Christianity, perhaps it is easier for people to focus on an
image of the resurrected Jesus than the invisible Kingdom of God, even though
Jesus in the Gospels claims he came to preach the mysteries (i.e., what is
hidden) of his Father’s Kingdom. It is easier to call the prince of peace the
king in that Kingdom, with not much attention going either to the invisible
Father or the Kingdom. In his book, The History of Natural Religion, David Hume
argues that the human brain has an innate tendency to posit human
characteristics on inanimate objects (and animals). As we do so in a given
religion, it becomes overladen, human all too human, such that the original
divine simplicity is covered. The human mind has trouble holding onto such
divine purity as Plotinus’s the One; it is much easier for us to envision the
supernatural. That which catches our eyes is irresistible even to an agnostic
director, as well as to the viewers. We crave even just a glimpse of Satan in
the film, and the provision of just a glimpse actually validates how important
the supernatural is not only in the film, but, moreover, in religion itself.
But is the supernatural in religion itself, or do we humans bring the
supernatural images to religion?
