When thinking – as one does – about the intricacies of depicting something at once as terrifying, visceral and extremely socially sensitive as rape on film, my mind often turns to the famous scene in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, in which the protagonist, presumably drugged and only half asleep, is either raped, or dreams that she is raped, by the Devil. It is inarguably one of the most impactful horror scenes ever made, perhaps because it works to evoke fear, confusion and entrapment on multiple levels at once. The setting is the familiar, tropey set piece of the satanic ritual, with various faces, some familiar, others not, gazing down on Rosemary and speaking of her rather than to her, looking on in a way that not only deepens her confusion, but makes them wholly complicit in what is about to happen. At first, she believes this all to be a dream, but as the beast finally peers over her, she eerily screams ‘This is no dream, this is really happening!’. This belief of hers allows us, the audience, to choose between one of two possible options: either she is, in fact, dreaming, but is caught in that terrible semi-lucid state of slumber wherein we have all believed to have more agency than we do, only to experience the awful frustration of being trapped in our own nightmare; or, as the preceding scene seems to suggest, she has been drugged by her husband, meaning both her state of confusion and the strange powerlessness she is experiencing are due to this, not the dream. In that case, Rosemary has no control over whatever is happening not simply because she’s unconscious, but because someone did not want her to have control.
But in truth, the most terrifying scene in the film is the one immediately following it: the next morning, Rosemary wakes up from what she now assumes to have indeed been a terribly vivid nightmare, only to find claw marks on her back. When she expresses her anguish to her husband, he comforts her in a rather patronising, but playful and light-hearted way, assuring her that no, a demon didn’t rape her the night before – he did.
These are not only very different times, but Rosemary is a very traditional housewife even for the period, marked by a rural, conservative, deeply catholic upbringing. Stunned, all she can do at that moment is sheepishly ask ‘why?’. And when he casually offers the excuse of short ovulation periods, she can only quietly mumble that he could have woken her up, or waited: ‘it’s not about a split second’. We are helpless, too, as we watch Rosemary’s confusion, this time in the light of day – how she touches the claw marks on her back – how she alternates between looking at her husband, then away from him, away from us – we watch her in this still, single, extended shot, as her entire world crumbles. As she learns that evil has, one way or another, entered her home, entered her body. And when, after some time has passed, we learn that she is pregnant, we don’t know for a fact that, as she comes to believe, the foetus is the spawn of Satan. But we can easily understand that, to her, it might as well be.
Were you to stumble on this description of the film, or indeed the film itself, without any prior knowledge of its director, I believe it would be difficult for you to object to the idea that Rosemary’s Baby is a not only a feminist film, but a particularly poignant and radical one. But the fact is that you – most probably – do. You probably know that Roman Polanski was found guilty in 1973 of drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl in the United States. You might also know that he has since been accused of sexual abuse by five other women, and you have most likely been witness to the bewildering support he has received from film industries on both sides of the Atlantic. You might have been among those so sickened by this support that it, among other things, indelibly changed your view of the world of cinema.
For all these reasons, your experience of the rape scene in Rosemary’s Baby might be equally indelibly marred by what you know about the man behind the camera. There are people who, while they don’t object to engaging with art made by terrible people – particularly with classics made over fifty years ago – simply cannot watch this scene, because of its similarities with real events. This sentiment is very understandable, so much so that I have often wondered why I am not prone to it myself. Why is it that I have no qualms about dissociating the artist from his work, when the work’s subject matter is so ostensibly tied to the artist’s actions? Why doesn’t my disgust at the continued moral, artistic and financial support the man continues to receive come into conflict not only with my continued enjoyment of this particular work, but with my wholehearted attachment to it as a feminist film?
In my now years-long quest to justify this contradiction to myself, I have come to split the question into two parts. On one hand, this apparent paradox obviously speaks to the mysteries of the creative process and of the complicated triangular relationship between art, its creator and its audience. On the other hand, a debate about the moral separation between a film and its director also, perhaps mostly, touches on the nature of evil itself, or how we would prefer to imagine it.
When it comes to the perceived mysteries of filmmaking, however, it is possible the matter could be simply, even crudely resolved by the argument that, perhaps, we tend to overstate the omnipotent role of the auteur director in the ultimate product that is a finished film. First of all, film is a collaborative medium, but it is even more so in this case since, to put it even more crudely: Polanski didn’t write the story. In fact, he was so (wrongly) convinced that he had a contractual obligation to adapt Ira Levin’s novel as faithfully as possible that, narratively speaking, neither version adds anything to the other. Even all the genius of Rosemary’s Baby’s narrative framing, the ways in which we receive all our information through her point of view while remaining one step ahead of her for much of the film, as well as the ambiguous combination of an unreliable narrator’s paranoia with legitimate, tangible reasons for her to feel paranoid, were already the genius of the book.
But beyond the limitations of auteur theory and the questionable act of throwing out scores of people’s intellectual and creative work because of the actions of one, albeit crucial, cog in the machine, to reject any piece of art on the basis of its creator’s morality is to operate on another, more broad assumption, that of an inherent connexion between morality and art. This question is perhaps especially complex when it pertains to film, as the process of storytelling does entail thinking critically about the ways people interact with other, and whether they are right, or harmful. Even in the case of stories with morally grey premisses or protagonists, the storyteller has to be aware of their moral ambiguity, or risk alienating the audience. But even so, this exercise is different from thinking and acting morally in real life, wherein our actions are defined by so much more than our conscious decisions, and others’ wellbeing might come at the expense of our own. This is often why people repeatedly do things they know are wrong, and about which they feel guilty: the need, the desire, or indeed the power associated with a certain act ultimately outweighs the harm they know to be done to others in the process. In other words, people can be hypocrites. That doesn’t diminish the values they allegedly hold to in and of themselves, just as it doesn’t make their works of fiction any less morally true.
Of course, this also means that however much good a work of art brings into the world, it shouldn’t lead us to put its creator on a moral pedestal, however tempting, or even seemingly reasonable that may be. Understanding the human condition enough to make a very good film about it is a skill, not a virtue.
In fact, one might say that even broadly speaking, understanding and empathy are often far too conflated in public discourse. There is a notion that educating people to the suffering of others will naturally lead to kinder attitudes. But while there is, obviously, much truth and even effectiveness to this idea, it also somewhat negates the possibility of ill intent – of the desire to gain power (or perhaps regain perceived lost power) by pushing someone else in the dirt. To get anything from such an act, one must actually, to some extent at least, understand, know what a victim is feeling, even engage with it on a personal level. Therefore, a deep interest and understanding of suffering can sometimes go hand in hand with cruelty.
This view of morality may seem extremely cynical to a lot of people. But I believe a disagreement on these questions is the true heart of the debate on engaging with art made by terrible people, even if we don’t always word it in this particular way. On the other hand, and to come back to my initial conundrum, the argument as I’ve expressed it actually works as a double-edged sword: if committing a terrible act and understanding the victim’s plight are not only compatible things, but sometimes inextricably linked, it raises the unsettling question of whether Rosemary’s Baby’s sharp depiction of a woman’s agony is actually an exercise in sadism.
In fact, has this accusation not been raised many times, perhaps not against this film, but in relation to others it has greatly inspired? An example that comes to mind is Aronofsky Mother!, a film that inspired many women to express disgust and exhaustion at female suffering being depicted through such a close, unrelenting and voyeuristic lens. Is Rosemary’s Baby an expression of sadistic voyeurism, which revels both in the protagonist’s plight as well as in the depiction of a vulnerable woman as a potentially psychotic person whose point of view, though it dominates the story, cannot be reasonably trusted? This would be an understandable interpretation of the film based on the director’s life, and an even more understandable reason not to enjoy it, let alone call it feminist.
Except for this admittedly simple objection: that if we must take into account the auteur’s life when viewing a film, then we must logically include all of its elements. The fact that it would be an impossible feat is the first argument against this line of thinking, but in the case of this film, it also quickly leads us down a different path. Many people have made connexions between Rosemary’s distressingly gaunt figure as her baby slowly drains all the life force from her body, and the fact that Polanski’s mother was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. I’m sure that for a number of viewers aware of the director’s life at the time, this was the primary lens through which to watch the struggle of this sick, dispossessed woman as she was dehumanised by seemingly inhuman forces.
The unsettling truth is that, while I believe actions may be correctly described as founded in pure evil, people can’t be. In the process of making art, an individual is comprised of as many conflicting motivations as a film production. And the whole system is even more complicated, when you add the audience into the mix. Because if the auteur’s intentions matter so much when speaking of the meaning behind a film, why shouldn’t mine?
While I believe that auteur theory’s faith in the possibility of cinema being as much the product of a single creator’s mind a novel can be is at best purely idealistic and at worst quite fraudulent, I observe myself subscribing at times to my own ideal: that of the omnipotent viewer. I don’t tend to put directors on pedestals as much as other people do, and I don’t dream of the cinematic medium allowing for the vision of a single creator to be realised. But I am strongly – and perhaps unreasonably – attached to the power and freedom of the individual audience member, as the ultimate gaze, the one that may cancel out all others that have preceded it up to that point. I know what Rosemary’s Baby is about. I know what the direction says about a woman’s denied perspective, particularly at a time in her life where she finds herself suddenly and irrevocably imprisoned in a role she so desired, until it was made clear to her that her desire has nothing to with it, nothing to do with anything from now on. And while Polanski’s motivations in adapting this story can only ever be speculated upon, the inspiration I have drawn time and time again from the result is real. For some people, this all might amount to too thin a justification for my indifference to the person behind what I believe is the best, most powerful rape sequence of all time, and I can accept that. But how else would you explain it?