Guy removes Rosemary's wedding ring, symbolically ending their marriage, but also becoming a kind of best-man-in-reverse; Rosemary's friend Hutch comes with weather warnings (and what is a hutch anyway but a safe place for rabbits?). During intercourse, Guy actually becomes the devil, and closing the dream out we see Terry again, this time not as a failed bride of Satan but as a sacrificial opener of the way.
In less expert hands such a dream scene might have become tiresome and didactic, but Levin carries it off lightly and quickly, compressing the entire sequence into just five pages.
But the strongest watchspring of Rosemary's Baby isn't the religious subtheme but the book's use of urban paranoia. The conflict between Rosemary Reilly and Rosemary Woodhouse enriches the story, but if the book achieves horror-and I think it does-it does so because Levin is able to play upon these innate feelings of paranoia so skillfully.
Horror is a groping for pressure points, and where are we any more vulnerable than in our feelings of paranoia? In many ways, Rosemary's Baby is like a sinister Woody Allen film, and the Woodhouse/ Reilly dichotomy is useful here, too. Besides being a Catholic forever beneath her agnostic veneer, Rosemary is, beneath her carefully acquired cosmopolitan varnish, a small-town girl . . . and you can take the girl out of the country, but et cetera, et cetera.
There is a saying-and I would be happy to attribute it if I could remember who to attribute it to-that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. In a crazy sort of way, Rosemary's story is of a coming to that sort of awareness. We become paranoid before she does (Minnie, for instance, being purposely slow with the dishes so Roman can talk to Guy-or make him a pitch-in the other room), but following her dreamlike encounter with the devil and her subsequent pregnancy, her own paranoia follows along. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds scratches-as if from claws-all over her body. "Don't yell," Guy says, showing her his fingernails; "I already filed them down.” Before long, Minnie and Roman have begun a campaign to get Rosemary to use their obstetrician-the famous Abe Sapirstein-instead of the young guy she had been going to.
Don't do that, Rosemary , we want to tell her; he's one of them.
Modern psychiatry teaches that there is no difference between us and the paranoid-schizophrenic in Bedlam except that we somehow manage to keep our crazier suspicions under control while theirs have slipped their tethers; a story like Rosemary's Baby or Finney's The Body Snatchers seems to confirm the idea. We have discussed the horror story as a tale which derives its effect from our terror of things which depart the norm; we have looked at it as a taboo land which we enter with fear and trembling, and also as a Dionysian force which may invade our comfy Apollonian status quo without warning. Maybe all horror stories are really about disorder and the fear of change, and in Rosemary's Baby we have the feeling that everything is beginning to bulge at once-we can't see all the changes, but we sense them. Our dread for Rosemary springs from the fact that she seems the only normal person in a whole city of dangerous maniacs.
Before we have reached the midpoint of Levin's tale, we suspect everybody -and in nine cases out of ten we have been right to do so. We are allowed to indulge our paranoia on Rosemary's behalf to the utmost, and all our nightmares come true. On my first reading of the book, I remember even suspecting Dr. Hill, the nice young obstetrician Rosemary has given up in favor of Dr. Sapirstein. Of course, Hill is not a Satanist . . . he just gives Rosemary back to them when she comes to him for protection.
If horror novels do serve as catharsis for more mundane fears, then Levin's Rosemary's Baby seems to reflect back and effectively use the city dweller's very real feelings of urban paranoia. In this book there really are no nice people next door, and the worst things you ever imagined about that dotty old lady down in 9-B turn out to be true. The real victory of the book is that it allows us to be crazy for a while.
5
From urban paranoia to small-town paranoia: Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers . * Finney himself has the following things to say about his book which was originally published as a Dell paperback original in 1955: "The book . . . was written in the early 1950s, and I don't really remember a lot about it. I do recall that I simply felt in the mood to write something about a strange event or a series of them in a small town; something inexplicable. And that my first thought was that a dog would be injured or killed by a car, and it would be discovered that a part of the animal's skeleton was of stainless steel; bone and steel intermingled, that is, a thread of steel running into bone and bone into steel so that it was clear the two had grown together. But this idea led to nothing in my mind . . . . I remember that I wrote the first chapterpretty much as it appeared, if I am recalling correctly-in which people complained that someone close to them was in actuality an imposter. But I didn't know where this was to lead, either. However, during the course of fooling around with this, trying to make it work out, I came across a reputable scientific theory that objects might in fact be pushed through space by the pressure of light, and that dormant life of some sort might conceivably drift through space . . . and [this] eventually worked the book out.
*As previously noted, the late-seventies remake of the Finney novel resets the story in San Francisco, opting for an urban paranoia which results in a number of sequences strikingly like those which open Polanski's film version of Rosemary's Baby . But Philip Kaufman lost more than he gained, I think, by taking Finney's story out of its natural small-town-with-a-bandstand-in-the-park setting.
"I was never satisfied with my own explanation of how these dry leaflike objects came to resemble the people they imitated; it seemed, and seems, weak, but it was the best I could do.
"I have read explanations of the 'meaning' of this story, which amuse me, because there is no meaning at all; it was just a story meant to entertain, and with no more meaning than that.
The first movie version of the book followed the book with great faithfulness, except for the foolish ending; and I've always been amused by the contentions of people connected with the picture that they had a message of some sort in mind. If so, it's a lot more than I ever did, and since they followed my story very closely, it's hard to see how this message crept in. And when the message has been defined, it has always sounded a little simpleminded to me. The idea of writing a whole book in order to say that it's not really a good thing for us all to be alike, and that individuality is a good thing, makes me laugh.” Nevertheless, Jack Finney has written a great deal of fiction about the idea that individuality is a good thing and that conformity can start to get pretty scary after it passes a certain point.
His comments (in a letter to me dated December 24, 1979) about the first film version of The Body Snatchers raised a grin on my own face as well. As Pauline Kael, Penelope Gilliatt, and all of those sobersided film critics so often prove, no one is so humorless as a big-time film critic or so apt to read deep meanings into simple doings ("In The Fury ," Pauline Kael intoned, apparently in all seriousness, "Brian De Palma has found the junk heart of America.")-it is as if these critics feel it necessary to prove and re-prove their own literary; they are like teenage boys who feel obliged to demonstrate and redemonstrate their macho . . . perhaps most of all to themselves. This may be because they are working on the fringes of a field which deals entirely with pictures and the spoken word; they must surely be aware that while it requires at least a high-school education to understand and appreciate all the facets of even such an accessible book as The Body Snatchers , any illiterate with four dollars in his or her pocket can go to a movie and find the junk heart of America. Movies are merely picture books that talk, and this seems to have left many literate movie critics with acute feelings of inferiority.
Filmmakers themselves are often happy to participate in this grotesque critical overkill, and I applauded Sam Peckinpah in my heart when he made this laconic reply to a critic who asked him why he had really made such a violent picture as The Wild Bunch : "I like shoot-em-ups.” Or so he was reputed to have said, and if it ain't true, gang, it oughtta be.
The Don Siegel version of The Body Snatchers is an amusing case where the film critics tried to have it both ways. They began by saying that both Finney's novel and Siegel's film were allegories about the witch-hunt atmosphere that accompanied the McCarthy hearings.
Then Siegel himself spoke up and said that his film was really about the Red Menace. He did not go so far as to say that there was a Commie under every American's bed, but there can be little doubt that Siegel at least believed he was making a movie about a creeping fifth column.
It is the ultimate in paranoia, we might say: they're out there and they look just like us!
In the end it's Finney who comes away sounding the most right; The Body Snatchers is just a good story, one to be read and savored for its own unique satisfactions. In the quarter-century since its original publication as a humble paperback original (a shorter version appeared in Collier's , one of those good old magazines that fell by the wayside in order to make space on the newstands of America for such intellectual publications as Hustler, Screw , and Big Butts ), the book has been rarely out of print. It reached its nadir as a Fotonovel in the wake of the Philip Kaufman remake; if there is a lower, slimier, more antibook concept than the Fotonovel, I don't know what it would be. I think I'd rather see my kids reading a stack of Beeline Books than one of those photocomics.
It reached its apogee as a Gregg Press hardcover in 1976. Gregg Press is a small company which has re-issued some fifty or sixty science fiction and fantasy books-novels, collections, and anthologies-originally published as paperbacks, in hardcover. The editors of the Gregg series (David Hartwell and L. W. Currey) have chosen wisely and well, and in the library of any reader who cares honestly about science fiction-and about books themselves as lovely artifacts-you're apt to find one or more of these distinctive green volumes with the red-gold stamping on the spines.