Satanic Capitalists in Rosemary's Baby

BEWARE SPOILERS

We go into every post assuming you’ve already watched the films being discussed. In other words, we’re about to spoil the hell out of Rosemary's Baby (1968), which is unfortunately not available anywhere without a premium subscription as of this writing (10/4/2021)

A few weeks ago, we kicked off our latest Dissections series about Satanic cults with We Summon the Darkness (2019), discussing moral panic, fundamentalism, and why the film is better than audiences on Rotten Tomatoes would have you believe.

Since then, it’s been a busy month. We’ve been releasing new Fables for the Dying, our ongoing series of horrifying short prose by various writers. We launched a new Judgments section, where we’re going to continue to post spoiler-free reviews of books, movies, and other horror media. And we launched our Patreon page, where you can help support what we’re doing. If you sign up to be one of our Hellish Medium supporters, you’ll get one of these baller postcards in the process.

All good things, for sure, but today, we’re getting back on the Dissections table to plunder the guts of one of the most famous, and infamous, Satanic cult movies in film history, Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

But before we get to that, let’s all acknowledge that Roman Polanski, who adapted the screenplay and directed Rosemary’s Baby, was a total dirtbag who had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” and fled to France the day before his sentencing. He wasn’t exactly a shining example of goodness before he engaged in pedophilia either. Rosemary’s Baby is a masterpiece, but Polanski’s exacting vision and his reckless and abusive methods to achieve it caused a lot of drama with a lot of people on and off set.

But plenty of people have already written and rewritten all about Polanski’s sexual assault charges and the dramas surrounding his first English film. You can read about it in a hundred other places, like in this IndieWire article. Same goes for all the weird curse-like stuff that happened after filming. Check out this Vanity Fair piece for a good summary on all that.

Ironically, given that Polanski is such a dirtbag, both the film and Ira Levin’s novel, on which it’s based, invite feminist interpretations. In recent years, writers like Noah Berlatsky, for Tor, have described the novel as a narrative about the horrors of patriarchy without feminism. Others, including other bloggers like Miranda Corcoran, have written about the depiction of a woman being refused her own bodily autonomy (still disgustingly relevant in the good old USA).

The film has had other well-documented impacts on American culture at large. Some have even argued that the film and the novel played a role in the Satanic Panic of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s by bringing thoughts of devil-worshipping cults into mainstream media. (Here’s a good article from Crooked Marquee about that.)

So here's a curious observation: Rosemary's Baby, and many of the Satanic (and not necessarily Satanic) cult films that have emerged in its wake, especially in recent years, draw clear and direct lines between late-stage capitalism and Satanism (or just evil-cultism), including Satanic Panic (2019), Ready or Not (2019), Kill List (2011, which we wrote about back in March), Lyle (2014), and Society (1989).

Rosemary’s Baby and the films that have followed it tell stories in which cult members commit terrible acts in the name of Satan (or in the cases of Kill List and Society, a neo-Pagan money god and weird goop-monsters, respectively) in exchange for capitalist success. They tell stories about the evils that unchecked, late-stage capitalism incentivizes: selfishness, greed, ruthlessness, and the sacrifice of others for status, wealth, power, and privilege.

Rosemary’s Oppression

In Rosemary’s Baby, husband Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) agrees to a Satanic plot with new neighbors in the apartment building he and his wife Rosemary (Mia Farrow) have moved into. He uses what today come across as very unsubtle patriarchal tools to control and gaslight his wife, manipulating her into birthing the antichrist in exchange for a successful acting career, replete with big, ambitious parts and lots of money.

At the start of the film, as the New York couple moves into the Bramford, a Renaissance Revival apartment building with a long and troubled history, we learn of Guy’s struggling career. He’s been in a few commercials, and he’s currently vying for the lead role in a play, but he hasn’t gotten the big break he desperately wants.

Rosemary just wants to settle down and have a baby, something clearly not on Guy’s list of priorities. But after an impromptu dinner with their neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, both of them cartoonishly villainous in the best ways possible), Guy suddenly and enthusiastically tells Rosemary he’s ready to be a father. He’s even got her ovulation schedule down and knows the exact calendar days they should try to conceive.

Once Rosemary learns she’s pregnant, Guy, Roman, and Minnie start to control her life--who she talks to, which doctor she sees during her pregnancy, what books she's allowed to own. They keep tabs on her whereabouts, and Guy, her supposed life partner, takes to shouting her down when she tries to speak up for herself.

It’s been well-established by lots of other writers that all of these oppressive means are patriarchal--they’re things that misogynists and misogynistic societies use to control women. But they’re also tools used by wealthy, high-status, and powerful people and groups to keep other people and groups below them on the social ladder: control of medical care, banning of books and ideas, tracking people’s whereabouts, using hateful rhetoric to drown out and demean people for trying to take control of their own lives.

In other parts of the world and at other points in history, we might say that these are the tools of dictators, police states, and totalitarian regimes. But in the United States, in 2021, they’re awfully reminiscent of private insurers decades-long fight against universal healthcare, of the constant demonizing of any idea that doesn’t fit the capitalist free market, of advertisers tracking your exact location and schedule to figure out how best to manipulate you into buying more stuff, and of a maniac turning the presidency into a role on a never-ending reality TV show.

And if these aren’t all signs of cartoonishly evil late-stage capitalism, we don’t know what is.

Guy’s Ambition

For Roman and Minnie, all of this manipulation and drugging and accessorizing to Satanic sexual assault is to ensure the birth of the antichrist. But Guy, somehow more despicably, does it for professional success.

Think about that for a second. He doesn’t care about the antichrist. He’s not doing this to usher in the end times. That’s Roman and Minnie. They’re the supervillains. And yet, Guy is clearly the bigger piece of human garbage.

It’s telling that audiences--and Rosemary, who spits in his face when she discovers the plot but doesn’t so much as raise her voice to the rest of the cult--are more repulsed by Guy’s naked ambition, his greed, his lying and manipulation, and his disregard for his wife’s basic rights than we are by people actually trying to bring about the end of the world.

It’s also telling that the Castevets choose to enlist this particular man, with great ambition but little success, an actor willing to hustle to get what he wants, a man full of cynical judgment and disdain--disdain for Rosemary’s friend Hutch (Maurice Evans), for the effeminate Mr. Nicklas who shows them the apartment (Elisha Cook Jr.), and even for Minnie Castevet, whom Guy seems to regard as low class, despite her high-society marriage to Roman.

In short, Guy is hungry for wealth, status, and power, and he’s the sort of man willing to engage in the worst behaviors that capitalism incentivizes to get it. Rosemary is little more than a means to his nefarious plans, as he drugs, isolates, gaslights, and lords his control of their finances to manipulate her into letting him use her body as if he owned it.

Rosemary’s isolation starts early on, when Terry (Angela Dorian), the first friend she makes at the Bramford, throws herself out of a seventh-story window to her untimely death. The Castevets had taken Terry in off the street, seemingly having rescued her from a life of drugs and prostitution. She confesses, “At first, I thought they wanted me for some kind of a sex thing,” but they soon became like guardians to her.

Terry’s death, and Rosemary’s resulting condolences to neighbors Roman and Minnie, is the pivotal moment in which Rosemary’s trouble, and Guy’s “lucky” break, begins. Initially, Terry was slated to be the unwitting mother of the antichrist, wearing the silver “lucky charm” necklace filled with tannis root (or “Devil’s Pepper” as we eventually learn). She kills herself, it would seem, once she discovers that she’s slated to bring about the end of days (the movie seems to imply this, but the whole on-screen affair is left rather ambiguous). With Terry dead, the Castevets must redirect their plans, and Rosemary and Guy become, almost immediately, their new targets.

Minnie scouts the new candidates during a visit with Rosemary while Guy’s at work. There, Minnie gets a sense of how to sell Guy on manipulating his wife, asking about the prices of pieces of furniture, nosing around to learn their financial situation, and even looking through their mail. Turns out it’s not that difficult to convince this self-centered egotistical actor to put his career above the health and sanity of his wife. She invites the couple to dinner, and Roman manages to rope him in during the short span in which Rosemary helps Minnie wash the dishes after eating.

After that, Guy becomes, in essence, his wife’s jailer and pimp. He doesn’t hesitate in agreeing to the Satanic deal. He doesn’t even consider telling Rosemary about the pact and instead stays quiet about the nature of his sudden acting success, even though the terms of the agreement require sacrifice from her, not from him. He’s rewarded almost immediately with a call saying that the actor who beat him out for the lead role in a play has suddenly gone blind and that now the role is his.

Basking in his ill-gotten gains, Guy continues to disregard Rosemary’s rights. He lies to her, drugs her, and--well, there’s no subtle way to say this--lets Satan rape her during a hallucinogenic half-waking fever dream as a circle of cultists stand naked around the bed and chant.

The morning after, he shakes her awake, demanding that she make breakfast and, when she asks for “five minutes” and tells him to “eat out,” scoffs, “Like hell I will!” When she finally lifts herself from the pillow and finds scratches all over her body, he assures her, “I already filed ‘em [his nails] down. … I didn’t want to miss baby night! … It was kind of fun in a necrophile sort of way.”

Rosemary’s clearly upset and tells him, “I dreamed someone was raping me. I don’t know, someone inhuman.” Husband-of-the-year Guy Woodhouse responds, “Thanks a lot! … I didn’t want to miss the night! … I was a little bit loaded myself, you know?” In other words, his cover story for letting Satan rape her is, Oh, that was me. I got drunk and had sex with your unconscious body without your consent and left a bunch of scratches from my scrubby-ass nails all over your torso.

Another significant moment that emphasizes Guy’s appalling and dehumanizing ambition comes after a group of Satanists pin her down, drug her, and force her to have a home birth. When she demands to see her newborn boy, she’s told that her son died during labor. In light of all of this, Guy tells her:

Let's face it, darling, you had the prepartum crazies. Now you're going to rest and get over them. I know this is the worst thing that ever happened to you, but from now on everything’s going to be roses. Paramount is within an inch of where we want them, and suddenly Universal is interested too. We're going to blow this town and be in the beautiful hills of Beverly with the pool and the spice garden and the whole schmear. And the kids, too, Ro. Scout’s honor. … Got to run now and get famous!

The woman’s just been told her baby is dead, but to Guy, who’s become a master of patriarchal capitalism, her grief is irrelevant compared to his bright future of fame and fortune.

Old Money

Notably, all of the ranking cult members (perhaps all of them, regardless of rank) are old, having already made names for themselves and having enjoyed lives of wealth and status and power. One is a renowned doctor. Another a well-respected dentist. Many of them seem to have been born into their money and privilege. In other words, this is old money. Classic decay of decadence stuff. The aging rich hoarding money from the young and poor and passing it on to their children.

But not all members were born into these positions of privilege. Some, like Minnie, seem to have married into it. She comes across as loud, crass, and nosy. Her New York accent is shrill and over-pronounced. The “beautiful silver,” the “brand new carpet,” and the fur coats and hats all mark the couple’s wealth, but at the same time, Minnie shows traditional signs of “bad breeding.” An aristocrat with low class, you might say. Roman, however, is a poised world traveler with piercing eyes and a well-refined mid-Atlantic accent who clearly comes from very old money.

The Pregnancy

When the Castevets find out that Rosemary is pregnant, they recruit fellow cult member, highly esteemed Dr. Sapirstein, to be her doctor. The pair guarantee her “bargain rates” despite Sapirstein being in incredible demand, making it sound like a great privilege even though it’s simply a way to keep control over Rosemary throughout her pregnancy.

Dr. Sapirstein prescribes her vitamin shakes, to be prepared by Minnie and her herbarium, and openly discourages Rosemary from reading about pregnancy and talking to friends and other women about their own experiences. Obviously, this is a big red flag, but Rosemary misses it because she’s consumed with her own excitement and knows that Dr. Sapirstein is a man of age, status, and high-repute. Why would she question him?

Sapirstein uses his status to manipulate Rosemary and keep her ignorant about the devil-baby inside her. The sharp pain she’s suffering in her first trimester is normal, he says, and will go away “any day now.” When she asks whether it might be an ectopic pregnancy, he mocks her and tells her to throw away any books she’s been reading. Like Guy, he controls the information she’s exposed to, using his status to do so.

It’s worth noting, too, that the friction between Guy and Rosemary peaks again when she hosts a party to which none of the old society folks are invited. Guy tries to turn her from the idea (mainly because it makes controlling her more difficult), but she stubbornly tells him it’s happening: “It’s a very special party. You have to be under sixty to get in.”

When her young friends learn about the pain of her pregnancy, they comfort her and try to convince her to see another doctor for a second opinion. Guy works hard to keep the women from gathering in the kitchen--trying his best to keep her isolated from her friends. And he's furious at these women, calling them “a bunch of not-very-bright bitches who ought to mind their own goddamn business.”

He comes across as a maniac, promptly rejecting Rosemary’s request to see another doctor for a second opinion: “We'll have to pay Sapirstein and pay Hill [the other doctor] too. It's out of the question. … I won’t let you. It’s not fair to Sapirstein!” This leaves Rosemary stunned and incredulous, but as she finally starts to shout back, “What are you talking about? What about what’s fair to me?” the pain suddenly stops.

Give Up, Buy In, Sell Out

Rosemary’s Baby is about people who give up (or never had) moral conviction, who buy into a system that oppresses and abuses others, and who sell those people out to become rich, famous, and influential. Only one character refuses.

Throughout the scenes with Hutch, we get signs that he’s a man of goodwill and community. We first meet him in the kitchen, where he’s preparing a feast for his old friends and neighbors, the Woodhouses. He constantly shows his concern for their, and especially Rosemary’s, well-being. He gives them a reference when they’re moving into the Bramford, even though he doesn’t want them to go. He acts selflessly throughout the film. And in a world that rewards selfishness and greed, a character like that either dies or gets to be the hero. Hutch doesn’t get to be the hero.

Father figure to Rosemary, Hutch never wanted the couple to move into the Bramford in the first place. He tried to dissuade them with its twisted history of murder, suicide, cannibalism, and Satanic rituals. He’s appalled and concerned at her sickly appearance when he visits, particularly by how thin she is despite the pregnancy. He begins researching the tannis root in her “lucky charm” (which, however many days later, leads him to witchcraft and requesting to meet Rosemary somewhere outside of the apartment to discuss all he’s learned).

Toward the end of Hutch's visit with Rosemary, Guy (prompted by Roman) rushes home in full makeup to steal one of Hutch’s gloves so that the cult can cast a curse that ultimately sends the old friend, the father figure, the one character in the film trying to help into a coma and eventually death. Even in the wake of his death, though, he still manages to send Rosemary coded clues with a book on witchcraft and a message that “the name is an anagram.”

At this point, Rosemary understands quite clearly, through the hints left by poor Hutch, that Guy and Minnie and Roman and Dr. Sapirstein and all their high society friends are plotting something evil--and that it involves her baby. Certain that the coven is going to use her newborn for some kind of sacrificial ritual and scared for her life and her child’s, she tries to flee and recruit the help of Dr. Hill, her original doctor. But even he, while not a member of the cult, is vulnerable to their influence.

When she first tells him her crazed story, he’s willing to listen even though he likely thinks she’s lost her mind. But then she says Sapirstein’s name, a well-respected doctor. The top man in his field. So Dr. Hill leaves to call Sapirstein, who brings Guy to Hill’s office, where they fetch Rosemary and bring her home to birth her son.

The Castevets and their friends, Guy, Sapirstein, and now even Dr. Hill. All of them buy in and sell themselves or someone else out for the society to enrich, elevate, and empower themselves or to avoid whatever tragedy might befall them if they don’t. They use people like Terry and cast them aside if they’re too weak until they find a body strong enough and a mind that can be manipulated. Rosemary is not immune. When she discovers her son is still alive, and Guy is not the father, Roman proclaims,

Satan is his father and his name Adrian. He shall overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples. He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and the tortured. Hail, Adrian! Hail, Satan!

Once she’s had a good spit in Guy’s face, Rosemary’s entire affect changes. She watches as one of the cult members, Laura-Louise (Patsy Kelly), rocks Adrian in his black-shrouded bassinet like she’s grating a giant block of cheese. “You’re rocking him too fast,” Rosemary says. And she repeats this as Laura-Louise whines, “Sit down. Get her out of here. Put her where she belongs.”

Then, Roman urges Rosemary to rock him instead, shushing Laura-Louise. When Rosemary says, “You’re trying to get me to be his mother,” he replies, “Aren’t you his mother?” The film closes with Rosemary giving up, buying into her new role as mother of the antichrist, and selling out the world for her son. She decides it’s ultimately better to be a part of this system, to take what she can from it, what she’s always wanted--to settle down and be a mother--fulfilling the role that this late-stage capitalist, patriarchal society has built for her.