Rosemary’s Baby

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?

Carnage

I was drawn to the film Carnage by the actors—specifically, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, though Jody Foster and John Riley can certainly hold their own as established actors, and in fact have been in Hollywood far longer than Waltz and Winslet. The primary message of the film seems to be that making up may be more natural than the adults think. This is perhaps why the conflict between the adults doesn’t really get resolved—there being no sense of resolution. This is particularly noticeable because of how dramatically the emotions escalated—particularly in Foster’s character but with Winslet’s coming in a close second. In other words, the acting firepower was perhaps too much, given the actual matter of conflict—the boys’ fight in a city park.

To be sure, things can get out of hand once alcohol enters the social equation, but after viewing the film, I had the sense that “Much Ado About Nothing” would have been a better title than “Carnage.” Given the film’s title, I expected the story to end with someone dying. Such an ending would fit with the emotion Foster brought to bear. From a dramatic standpoint, sometimes less is more, and this seems to apply to the early tension between Foster’s and Waltz’s characters. That was more realistic—more believable.

That the “dramatic” secondary conflict was not resolved only adds to the film’s problems, though as I mention above, this could be part of the larger message. Though even so (and I don’t think an intellectual connection trumps leaving a major conflict unresolved), the resolution was choppy (to say the least) and abrupt. It was as if one of the boys in the park had been hired to edit the end of the film.

At any rate, an audience should not leave the theatre feeling like things were left hanging at the climax. Nor should the audience wonder why the guests stayed around for so long, or question whether the intensity of emotion is believable or merely acted. Were the characters "held together" simply by the motive to get to the bottom of the tension—or to have it out in real carnage? Considering Waltz’s character’s calls, it is difficult to believe that anything but the 18-year-old scotch could have kept him in the apartment for so long. Was he even there at all? The absence of his presence was itself stirring some of the tension, but it is not clear that it could be sufficient to get Foster's character so upset. If Polanski viewed the characters' dominant motive as being to fight or resolve unresolved angst, and furthermore as sufficient to hold the four adults in the apartment for so long, it can be asked whether he was (perhaps inadvertently) also setting the viewers up to want something that would not come in the course of the film—namely, enough resolution at the end to be emotionally satisfying. What astonishes me is that giving the characters sufficient motivation to sustain the story and providing the third act with enough resolution are basic tenets of screenwriting—something Polanski and Reza no doubt knew as they were working on the screenplay.

Perhaps carnage done at the expense of the basics in screenwriting doesn’t work after all, in spite of the earlier attempts by sleepers of the New Wave and Neo-Realism in the twentieth century (no wonder deconstruction followed these two movements). As much as detest predictable narrative, presumption in bypassing a basic ingredient of storytelling is perhaps worse.