Translated From: A sex offender who is still a genius
Discovered on: 2022-05-10 07:15:04
Femicides, the disappearance of people, especially minors and women, draw an urban culture of mistrust that robs us of calm and modifies social patterns; it deforms the landscape of human relations: we are others.
Hence King Lear: “In the cities, riots; in the fields, discord; in the palaces, treason; and the ties between father and sons, broken…”.
A film that could illustrate this social paranoia of hypermodern Mexico is Rosemary’s Baby (1968), classified as a horror film, but which just as resists as a psychological thriller, with a Freudian dream included.
Roman Polanski’s film is a montage of street mistrust that lowers the perimeter of dealing with others; suspicion incubated in an environment of citizen degradation.
Rosemary (a very young Mia Farrow) feels like the victim of a conspiracy to sacrifice the child she is about to give birth to. As the scenes go by, the complicit machinations of a satanic clan unfold.
The end is anthological; Mexican translators, usually ignorant, do not beat around the bush. They “spoiled” it with the title: The seed of the devil.
I like the other title better: Rosemary’s baby, which is the devil, in its literal sense: it smells of sulfur and has horns.
The screenplay, by Polanski himself, is based on a novel by overrated writer Ira Levin that did not lend itself to second interpretations: the author’s intention was to scare readers with the bad news that the devil had impregnated a girl from Manhattan.
But Polanski’s script breaks the predictable cliché and opens the viewer’s imagination to draw their own conclusions.
In other words, a more terrifying temptation because it is ambiguous, the same feeling that we Mexicans suffer every day.
How did the director manage to make a masterpiece? With his way of filming it. Photography is ambivalent, it reflects the same thing as a horror film as a psychological thriller.
The surreal scene of the rape of Mia Farrow by the devil can be seen both as a simple dream and as a real diabolical act. One is free to choose.
Well, at least until the day Polanski confessed to the press that his film was an example of the classic postpartum crisis. Polanski is a misogynist and clearly a sex offender.
But trying to reason what is happening to Rosemary is the least of it. The important thing is to illustrate that criminal distrust that our neighbor already inspires in us.
What hides a simple “good morning” from our neighbor? What unhealthy intentions does our wife have against us? What harm will our dear compadre try to inflict on us? And the smiling friend will want to harm us?
“Hell is other people”, said Jean-Paul Sartre.
It remains to be seen if this hell is real or invented by our paranoia, which ends up applying that maxim that the knife makes the murderer.
For it is already known, according to Jeremiah, that “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (17:9).
Rosemary’s baby gives us two interpretations depending on which gender we choose. If we approach the film from the horror genre, the fault lies with the others. If we analyze it from the psychological drama genre, the fault is ours; that is, of the neurotic protagonist.
So we can choose between two proverbs: “trust killed the cat” (horror version), or “the condemned for mistrust” (psychological version). Awareness of evil, or evil of conscience, to use Sartre’s own terms.
When Polanski made his statement to the press that it was a postpartum crisis, he chose to blame Rosemary and absolve his peers; his conscience slept peacefully.
He wanted to imply that people are good, generous and noble by nature, even if they sometimes trip over their own shadow. But a couple of months after filming wrapped, Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, was murdered along with other friends in Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles.
Decades later, John Lennon was shot to death outside the Dakota building, where the movie had been filmed.
And Polanski himself was accused of statutory rape, for seducing a 13-year-old girl in the bathtub. Simple postpartum crisis?
Rosemary’s Baby continues to be as ambiguous a film as when it was filmed: it does not seek to clarify whether social relations are deteriorating due to mistrust or because evil has really taken over society. Let readers draw their own conclusions.
