Monstrous Creativity: Jeepers Creepers I (2001) & II (2003)

(This essay contains spoilers. Watch the films first.)

The Jeepers Creepers films concern a monster known as 'The Creeper.' The Creeper 'sleeps' for twenty-three year stretches, then emerges for twenty-three days to 'feed', namely upon humans. I really like The Creeper. He's easily one of the most interesting monsters in modern horror film cinema. If we delve into what makes him so interesting, we'll also discover what makes the Jeepers Creepers films more than just fun monster movies; they're also works of art.

The first thing notable about The Creeper--before we ever notice he's a monster--is that he drives a truck. This first point is curious enough. Very few, if any, horror film monsters proper (i.e. physical creatures of non-human nature) drive vehicles. They attack, push, turn over vehicles; but they don't drive them. Driving a vehicle is a learned human activity, involving developed skills and knowledge. Just how far The Creeper's skills and knowledge go is demonstrated in his ability to terrorize the brother-sister protagonists of the first film. The brother, Darry (Justin Long), comments that his assailant is driving some sort of 'souped-up' truck. And indeed, it does appear The Creeper has some knowledge of mechanics, enough to 'soup-up' his truck. But by far the most remarkable thing about his truck is the false vanity plate reading, 'BEATNGU.' That's "Be eating you!", perhaps a play on The Prisoner's "Be seeing you!", telegraphing to the victims he terrifies on the road that he'll be devouring them later. Not only is The Creeper a skilled driver and mechanic, but he also has a keenly perverse sense of humour.

This isn't simply an attempt to mislead the audience in the first half of the film. While it does lead the audience to expect a human villain, subsequent developments suggest a greater significance to The Creeper's humanoid traits. After their encounter with The Creeper on the road, the siblings turn back to the house, actually a church, where they saw The Creeper disposing of bodies down a pipe. When Darry enters the pipe, he finds an elegant, arched subterranean lair where the walls and ceiling are covered with patterns of wax-preserved, stitched-together corpses. At one point in the series, this is described as a horrific approximation of the Sistene Chapel. To be compared to Michelangelo is pretty high praise. However horrific and ghastly the creation, it is indeed very inventive and, in a perverse way, beautiful. This aspect of The Creeper's lair has its effects as far as horrifying the audience goes, but it also shows us The Creeper is an artist. The idea Salva is developing as the narrative reveals more about The Creeper is the monster-as-artist, the possibility for something Other to be capable of creation, not just destruction.

Historically, in monster movies, the monster is a particularly non-creative force. Nosferatu's/Dracula's advances on Lucy are only capable of adding her to the legions of the undead. The Mummy's only imagined union with his chosen woman is, similarly, eternity in living-death, not both alive but both mummies. Frankenstein's monster depends upon his creator, the baron, to make him a woman with whom to live in permanent non-productivity. Creativity is reserved for the living and the 'normal'. Anything monstrous can only destroy. King Kong never builds anything, but he destroys plenty. Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster all take lives. The same applies to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Romero's zombies, etc.. The rule in horror cinema is that the monstrous cannot create, but can only destroy. The body that conforms to the norm alone is capable of creation.(1)

Given such overwhelming consistency, one wonders why monsters are always represented as inherently destructive. One of the more interesting answers to this question comes from Linda Williams. In her famous essay "When the Woman Looks," she argues that "the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male...the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality..." Williams argued that the monster and the female were bound together in their shared otherness from male, phallic sexual power. Since only phallic power can beget, then the monsters are inherently non-creative. However, most of the monsters are male. King Kong, Dracula, the Mummy, the Creature, and Frankenstein's Monster all wanted women, and they wanted, presumably, to fuck those women. That doesn't seem to be a very different sexuality from mine at all! I, too, would have wanted to fuck Fay Wray and Zita Johan in their prime. The sexual difference between the monster and a heterosexual adult male's is that his would be productive and the monster's would not. The monsters, as I pointed out above, consummate their sexuality not in the creation of new life, but in death or violence of some form. So what we can conclude, tweaking Williams's ideas, is that monsters are monstrous not in their sexual difference but in their sexual sterility. (This is more consonant with James Whales's ideas anyway, particularly as presented in The Old Dark House, in which the insane family occupying the house is distinct from their guests in their totally non-productive family form.) They seek relationships that are inherently non-productive and, in the conservative mind, non-productivity is equal to non-creativity.

What Victor Salva does with The Creeper, while he is solidly within the history of traditional horror film monsters, is acknowledge that non-productivity does not preclude creativity. The Creeper is a monster that bears no offspring and is a cause of death and destruction, but he's also an artist. He's such an active artist that one wonders when he takes the time to create his art. If he only has twenty-three days awake to do his artwork on top of all the killing he has to do, then he's a very fast craftsman. Perhaps his twenty-three years of sleep gives him a lot of time for creative thought.

The second film in the series, in which The Creeper targets a busload of high school football players, elaborates further on The Creeper's artistic nature. His weapons are all carved from bone, wrapped with skin, and inlaid with teeth. The Creeper's eye for detail is such that he purposely chose the tattooed skin on Darry's abdomen for the centre of his shuriken. We also see a knife with elaborate scenes carved into the bone handle. But by far the most interesting aspect of The Creeper elaborated in the sequel is his method of feeding, which is itself creative.

The Creeper's 'feeding' isn't performed for the same biological purpose as animal feeding. The Creeper terrifies his victims, smells some odor given off from them while afraid, and by doing so determines which of his victims have particularly choice body parts. When he captures and kills his victims, he doesn't consume the body part and absorb its nutrients as animals would; rather, he assimilaltes the body part whole. In the sequel, The Creeper removes one boy's head and transforms it into his own. He does the same with Darry's eyes in the first film. What's interesting to me about this behaviour is that The Creeper is not just creative, but self-creative. He's able to be an artist of himself by composing his own body out of body parts he finds the most attractive (for reasons unknown to us). The only unchanging body parts are the arachnid-like structure on the back of his head, resembling a face-hugger from the Alien franchise, and his wings. The arachnid creature is, presumably, the 'naked' Creeper, which assembles its body from choice parts. What The Creeper does in this assembly is create its own identity, its way of representing itself to others. Its identity comes not from the point-of-view of others defining it by its difference or monstrosity, but from its own positive self-defining meeting the point-of-view of others.

Jeepers Creepers is not the first of Salva's films to contain this theme. Salva's first feature, Clownhouse, is also concerned with monstrous creativity of a sort. Clownhouse concerns a group of psychopaths who escape from confinement, put on clown costumes, and terrorize a group of children, one of whom is particularly afraid of clowns. We scarcely get to see the escaped psychopaths as themselves. What we see is them invading the clown tent at the circus and applying cosmetics, creating their own identity, as it were. They use creativity to create their identity as scary clowns. They also take a twistedly creative approach toward terrorizing the film's children. Jeepers Creepers just expands and deepens the theme, transforming the psychopaths to a genuine monster and the craftlike creativity to artistry.


It is difficult to take this discussion further without bringing in biographical details on writer-director Victor Salva. Ordinarily biography is best left out of criticism, either because it's speculation read into the film or it's simply not enlightening. In the case of Salva, I think it is both significant and enlightening. Salva, while making Clownhouse, sexually abused the twelve-year-old star and videotaped it. He was reported, tried, and served his jail time. Ten years after Clownhouse, he finally got to make another feature. He even got to make a film for Disney, Powder. This film was boycotted and resulted in protests instigated primarily by the victim, by then an adult, and his family. Each film he's made since has met with some protests by people who believe a convicted pedophile should never be allowed to work again.

That's as much as need be said for our purposes. What we see is that Salva is what is often referred to in our society as a 'monster.' Anyone who abuses a child is 'monstrous'. Perhaps, however, his alternative and distinctly non-productive sexuality (homosexual and pedophilic) is part of what suggests a 'monster' to our society. While I have heard Roman Polanski called a monster very rarely, I have heard it frequently used for Salva. Polanski, despite sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl, has had wives and has two children with his present wife. Salva, who also sexually abused a twelve-year-old, has never been married and has no children. The difference is one of productivity.

So, like The Creeper and so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is non-productive. But like The Creeper and unlike so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is highly creative. In an interview, he refers to his films as his children. (2) This is very important, because creativity for Salva is allowed to substitute--perhaps very satisfactorily--for productivity; this is true both in his life and in his films. So with The Creeper, Salva is representing a very interesting aspect of who he is: a (social) monster who is also creative, a monster who is an artist, creating darkly beautiful art and creating himself in the process. Seeing the monster-as-artist in the film means seeing the possibility of artistic creation as a substitute for biological creation, artistic creation as a means of recreating oneself: in his films, Salva creates himself insofar as he shows us he is not a monster, but a creator of a different order.

As an amusing turn-of-the-tables, the denouement of Jeepers Creepers II shows the film's major protagonist, a father (Ray Wise) whose child was taken by The Creeper, charging kids to view the sleeping Creeper nailed to a wall of his barn. What's interesting about this is the total lack of creativity in the father's sideshow moneymaking. He's productive enough: he had two children and still has one. But he can only display the Creeper, a self-made work of art, rather than make his own art. Why should biological creation without artistic creation be any less monstrous than artistic creation without biological creation?

But I promised that delving into biography and how Salva reflects himself, the creator of perverse art, in The Creeper would be enlightening. Finally, I want to address this. What seeing the film's relationship to Salva himself makes us ask is just what the protestors of Powder never asked themselves: why can't the monster's art be accepted, even if we don't accept the monster? The Creeper, of course, has to kill to make his art. The Creeper is biologically a monster. But Salva doesn't and isn't. His 'monstrosity' is social only and in creating his art he can also recreate himself. He kills no-one in the process and as I've argued, and am clearly convinced of myself, Salva's films have merit as works of art. There is a possibility of separating moral concerns about the creator from the aesthetic concerns of the created art. Perhaps some are afraid that accepting the monster-as-artist means failing to see him as a monster any longer, failing to see a non-procreative creativity as monstrous.

The Jeepers Creepers films are not masterpieces. They succeed very well as entertaining monster movies, the first being particularly skillful in audience manipulation and the second containing some fantastic monster-slaying action. As penetrating works of art, they are occasionally vapid or confused. The homophobia subtext of the second film is particularly striking as such. It is in the character of The Creeper, a character into which Salva has clearly invested much of himself, that the films show great depth and insight about human concerns of monstrosity and art, and their possible co-existence. (3)

(1) There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Science-fiction horror films tend to rely, in fact, upon the horrible productivity of the monster. The Alien films in particular feature the horrific chestbursters, alien young bursting from the human bodies in which they've been implanted. Inseminoid, as the title implies, is about nothing other than an alien force that impregnates human women. There is, too, a large body of cinema--both animated and live-action--in Japan in which demons and/or aliens capture, rape, and impregnate busty human women. The most fruitful argument to deal with this objection is that in these films the very productivity of the aliens itself, which uses rather than complements human creativity itself is destructive and repulsive. It's production through destruction rather than creation. But that argument must wait for another essay.

(2) "Interview with Victor Salva," by Mike Gencarelli, www.mediamikes.com. Sept. 24, 2011.

(3) Jeepers Creepers III has been conceived and I am eagerly awaiting its birth to see how well it meshes with the ideas explored in this essay.

We're All Perverts: Viewing Incubus (1982)

The very first shot of Incubus, over which the opening credits appear, begins in total black; the camera pulls out gradually revealing that we are looking into the iris of a brown eye; the eye blinks twice. Why are we beginning a film about a sex-demon in an eye? Perhaps we are being promised that we will see, in what follows, what this eye has seen; but that would only be a valuable promise if we could detect that the eye had seen something horrible. Since the eye could be said to look entranced or in love just as well as horrified, something else must be communicated in this choice. Other films use similar techniques: Blue Velvet (1986), after a brief prologue, takes us into the severed ear for a devious nightmare until we emerge from the protagonist's ear at the coda. In Blue Velvet, we understand we are being taken into the mind for a cinematic nightmare. In Incubus, rather than entering an eye in the first shot, we are in fact emerging from the eye. Only in the final shot do we re-enter the eye. The procession isn't into a subjective realm and back into an objective one, but rather a projection of the interior, subjective onto the exterior, objective world. What we witness in this film, the first and final shots seem to tell us, is a drama of projection: what happens when minds project their dreams onto the real world. Let's see if this interpretation bears out.

The plot of Incubus concerns a young man named Tim who has begun to have nightmares about a woman being tortured by hooded men in a dungeon demanding 'Tell us!' He screams, "Leave her alone!" and awakes in a sweat. Each time he has one of these dreams, a local girl or woman is brutally raped, sometimes to death, and any man interfering is murdered. Tim gradually begins to worry that he's responsible for the deaths, though he doesn't know how. His mysterious grandmother (Helen Hughes) seems to suspect him as well. Meanwhile, a recently-moved surgeon, Sam (John Cassavetes), tries to protect his 18-year-old daughter, Tim's girlfriend, from the menace and work with the sheriff (John Ireland) to find the culprit.

The first, and most obvious, case of 'projectionism' in this plot description is Tim's dreams. His dreams are of a sadomasochistic nature. Later in the film he describes the procedure as a 'battle of wills', with the tortured woman laughing and the torturers amping it up to break her. Both parties involved are taking some sort of pleasure from the proceedings. The full nature of Tim's dreams remains nebulous throughout the film, however. At times he seems to see the victims in his dreams, but later the 'players' of the dream are identified as his grandmother's family and his mother; at other times the dreams seem to be unrelated to the victims other than always occurring in conjunction with a rape. Whatever the case, the cruel and slightly incestuous sexuality of Tim's dreams are projected onto real people in the real world through the incubus.

The brutality of the rapes is exceptional: each woman's uterus is ruptured by the force of the rape and (it is implied, though not stated) the size of the creature's penis; one woman's windpipe is split, suggesting she was both vaginally and orally raped; and in some cases the woman are filled with what Cassavetes calls an "incredible" amount of semen, so much "even the hemorrhaging couldn’t get rid of it"; and nearly all of the women die as a result of the rape alone. Though we never see any actual rape, the shots of the women screaming, in one case rendered in a relishing slow motion, along with Cassavetes's solemn descriptions of ruptured uteruses and gallons of sperm, are disturbing enough.

The key to Tim's projectionism, and perhaps to the whole film, is, of course, his relationship to the incubus. The incubus never does, and perhaps isn't even capable, of attacking until Tim has one of his dreams. The dreams themselves come upon Tim uninvited, leaving open the question (as far as the narrative goes) of who is having the greater influence over who. Either way, Tim's conscious participation in the world must cease before the incubus can begin its rapes. While Tim is conscious, the incubus is an earnest newspaper editor named Laura Kincaide. She seems to be entirely unaware that she is the incubus and is capable of leading a fairly normal life. Tim's consciousness keeps her in balance, as it were; he's like a superego operating on an id. When he is overtaken by his dreams, the intelligent and thoughtful woman becomes a demonic rapist: pure, uninhibited desire is set loose. If consciousness is participating in the world as it is, without imposing our fantasies upon it, then when Tim becomes unconscious, he loses his grasp between his dream world and the real world and the incubus is free to enact his masochistic dreams/desires upon the world--particularly upon women, as they are the locus of his erotic urges. Therefore, the template this relationship between Tim and Laura sets up is one of latent, perverse desires becoming active without limit.

What we want to see now is whether this template has any repetition amongst the film's characters. I think it does. There is a shot during the first rape-murder scene where a young man goes to his truck. We see on his front bumper a sign reading, "Galen: 150 years of boredom." Galen is the name of the small town. Apparently its occupants view the town as very uneventful. What's curious and important about this silly bumper sticker is what it reveals about the distinction between the surface and what's hidden. Everyone in Galen has secrets. Again, much like in Blue Velvet, beneath the pleasant surface of the small town are hideous perversions and secrets we normally never acknowledge. Every character we spend significant time with is shown to have some secret. Tim has his dreams. Agatha Galen (Tim's grandmother) has both the secret of Tim's origin and her family history. Her family, the Galen's, were witch-hunters and when they went a-hunting during the last slew of incubus attacks, they killed a supposed witch who give birth to Tim. She also give birth to a girl, Laura, who was sent out for adoption elsewhere. Laura's big secret is, of course, being the incubus. Even the sheriff is hiding the unsolved slew of incubus attacks and that the source of his appointment as sheriff is Agatha.

The biggest surprise, however, is the secret harbored by Sam and his daughter Jenny. Sam hints, though never confesses, that he murdered his last girlfriend, Julie. After his wife died, he got an 18-year-old girlfriend and began neglecting his daughter. When he caught Julie cheating on him, he fought with her. He said she 'managed' to get away, so he chased her down and feels guilty over it. He never states the results, but we get teasing flashbacks of a woman lying on the ground in the rain, covered in blood. He later tells Laura that Julie is dead. Presumably he murdered the girl, then moved to a small town in hiding. That Sam murdered a young woman would be bad enough, but there is also a creepily incestuous tone to his relationship with Jenny. The very first scene in which we meet Sam, not knowing who he is, he is entering his home, going upstairs, and looking at a woman exiting a shower totally naked. We realize only later that the girl he looked at is actually his daughter. He doesn't want her to have a boyfriend. She promises to never leave him. They kiss on the lips. This doesn't mean he's ever molested his daughter; it just means that, like Tim's dreams, Sam has this perversion in his hidden life.

Everyone in Galen does have a perverse hidden life. 'Galen' is, in fact, Swedish for 'crazy'. And in the Freudian sense, this is correct: everyone in Galen is crazy. To be perverse is to veer from normality, to be crazy to some degree. Ordinarily we moderate our perversions, inhibit which of them we allow to enter into the world. What this all amounts to is a sort of vision of the world (with Galen standing in for the whole world) as perverse. Everyone is a pervert. There is no-one alive who does not have perverse desires of one sort or another--whether incestuous, masochistic, sadistic, or anything else--usually beneath the surface. We inhibit them out of a sense of dignity, propriety, morality, spirituality, or any number of other values.

Complementing this vision is the moral: what happens if we uncheck those perversions, let them reign uninhibited? It is through and in the character of the incubus that hidden, perverse desires become revealed and even actualized in the world of the film. And through the incubus, we find sex, cruelty, and death inextricably bound. The distinction between eros and thanatos, as it were, depends upon the distinction between our fantasy life (which may be as perverse as we like) and our real lives (which must be inhibited). Sex without limitation consumes its participants; infinite sex is death. Sexuality has its creative power when limited, ordered by form.

The most powerful moment in Incubus, the finale, illustrates this point very well. Sam has Laura, Jenny, and Tim in his house. He's preparing to induce Tim's dream in order to interrogate him and learn its secrets. Before starting, Jenny approaches him and tells him she's going to get some rest. Here director John Hough gives us an important and intricate shot: as Jenny heads to her room upstairs, the camera tracks and pans to follow her progress up to and into her room at the top of the stairs; the camera then pans to Sam and tracks back toward him; Sam looks toward the kitchen, leading the camera to pan toward the kitchen in time to see Laura emerge with a trey of coffee; Laura enters a doorway near the kitchen and the camera pans to look past Sam into the living room; Laura meets the camera's focus in the living room and exits the doorway Sam is looking through to talk to Sam; Sam tells her he would like her to go upstairs to see Jenny and she agrees to do so. This could have been handled much more easily with editing. Hough chose to choreograph the shot for a reason, namely, to link Jenny's and Laura's destinations. Both are going to end up in her room. Laura is sent to Jenny's room by Jenny's father. He has a desire to protect her, yes. But he also has that subtly incestuous relationship with Jenny. It is the tension between the surface desire (protective father) and perverse desire (sexual interest) that leads to the film's great tragedy.

As Sam interrogates Tim, he urges Tim to "Bring it through the door. Let it come through the door." This suggestion of penetration coincides with the incubus's penetration of its final victim. Tim sees the victim in his dream, finally; instead of his mother's face, he sees Jenny's. Tim rushes upstairs with a knife Agatha gave him and tries to kill Laura, but Sam interferes and Tim stabs himself. Laura hugs Sam, asking him to never leave her. As they embrace, he sees over her shoulder Jenny's body lying in bed, bleeding profusely from between her legs. Laura, the incubus, raped her as he was interrogating Tim. He sent Laura to the room; he induced Tim's dream; he's responsible for his daughter's death.

Sam's hidden desire to fuck his daughter was brought into the real world by the incubus. Despite all his conscious efforts to protect his daughter from all harm and, for that matter, sex, his activities resulted in her being raped to death. The tragedy is of Greek proportions, with bodies littering the stage, piercing dramatic irony, and disturbing sexuality haunting the spectator long after.

The final shot is a zoom into Sam's eye. He blinks twice, then the camera zooms into the black of his iris until we see nothing but black: the black of our hidden, perverse desires. The vision the film expresses is a moralistic one, viewing unrestrained sexuality is inherently deadly. We may all be perverts, but we have fantasies for a reason and they should remain fantasies. In the sexual free-for-all of the early '80s, these notions would have seemed very reactionary; it's not surprising the film was loathed by critics upon release. A case of bad timing, I suppose: had Incubus been released when the AIDS epidemic gained enormous attention in the mid-'80s, it may have struck the same critics as an insightful critique of uninhibited sexuality. AIDS, after all, did much as the incubus did insofar as equating limitless sex with death.

Just because Incubus has a strong vision underlying its artistic choices does not mean its a perfect film, of course. Some of the film's creative decisions are questionable. Particularly the repetitive, cruel rapes. The first rape shows only the result: a traumatized girl. The second rape doesn't just show, but dwells upon the terror and agony of the rape victim, a 40-something museum curator with children. The point, by now, is already made. The third rape is at least dramatically justified, as Hough constructs the film so as to make the audience believe Tim is the incubus. (He's always running out of a scene just before a rape.) However, the fourth rape is unnecessary and, being so near the climax, only interferes with the film's pacing. Perhaps realizing this, Hough tries some virtuosity with the final rape setpiece to make it more exciting. Particularly, he amps up the gore. But there's also a stylish shot in which the camera is attached to the bottom of a wheelchair, so we see a body through the gap of a bathroom door before the girl in the wheelchair does. I have a suspicion that Hough was influenced by Argento's gialli films, where stylish murders punctuate the detective action. But in those films, the murders can continue throughout the film because the characters murdered are related to the plot. These rape-murder scenes are of previously unknown characters. They add horror to the film, but never suspense. We have no idea who the rape victims are. A couple playing around a lake, a museum curator, some girl visiting a Bruce Dickinson concert in town (!), and finally a man and his two daughters at a farmhouse.

Still, one could argue that the final rape of a girl in a wheelchair is an act of particular perversion. One could also argue that each rape victim had someone who desired to rape her. The first victim was called a 'bitch' by her boyfriend before the rape. The second victim had a wimpy husband. The third victim was at a metal concert; the stage performance was an enactment of Samson and Delilah with a song about a 'two-timing' woman. And the fourth victims were, like Sam and Jenny, daughters with a single father. Though the rapes might not be dramatically ideal, they can be seen as adding to the picture of a perverse Galen.

Overall, whether one agrees with the main thrust of the vision in Incubus, the film's vision is certainly consistent and interesting. Hough, whose horror films are generally underrated, has made a fascinating work of art with this film, magically managing both very sleazy subject matter with a very serous, diginified tone.

How Poltergeist Influenced Evil Dead II

Due to unfortunate personal circumstances, I was unable to make this week's update. However, I was able to throw together a little video showing how certain scenes, shots, and ideas in Poltergeist (1980) made their way, either consciously or unconsciously, into Evil Dead II (1986). As you'll see, just about everything Raimi borrows he embellishes and amps up several points. But the source material is clearly from the Hooper/Spielberg film.

Love and Practical Reality: A Shot-by-Shot Analysis of the 'Let's Make a Baby' Scene of Rosemary's Baby

As I am ordinarily committed to the serious appraisal of films rarely taken seriously, one may wonder what purpose is served by analysing a sequence from Rosemary's Baby, a canonical film that has been analysed frequently in the journals. I often emphasize the feeling films create, one's emotional relationship to the film. I have argued elsewhere that our emotional relationship to a film is as much truth as what one can demonstrate intellectually, 'objectively.' Much more than with literature, meaning in cinema is created through the emotional impact the image conveys. What is told in words in a novel must, in film, be created within the real space of the frame and within the viewer. A novelist can tell you of a sinister atmosphere, but an adjective in the image must be shown; a metaphor must be created through the concatenation of what is said, seen, and conjoined. A master stylist like Polanski can manipulate how we feel with his images through the use of framing, movement, colour, contrasts; and from this he can convey much more information than we would ordinarily recognize. This is all obvious to the student of cinema: it's called film language and Polanski is a recognized master of it. Yet I've been challenged for writing too much of the feeling films create and evading hard evidence in film language. This analysis, a close-reading I ordinarily simplify for my readers, shows a master constructing our feelings from the raw elements of the image and from these feelings revealing to us the essence of the film.

While the hallucinogenic dream sequence that immediately follows the romantic dinner sequence of Rosemary's Baby gets more attention, the telling twenty shots that comprise the romantic dinner sequence are very densely packed with visual information about Guy's personality, the nature of the Woodhouse marriage, and the effects Guy's deal with Roman has upon it. Though there are doubtless several important themes in Rosemary's Baby, not the least of which the issue of ownership of one's body, a major theme often neglected is Polanski's cynicism about love and romance. The way he manipulates our sympathies in the romantic dinner sequence reveals a central conflict between Guy's pragmatism and Rosemary's idealism and with that the conclusion that both are mistaken extremes.

(1) The first shot begins with red roses coming into focus. As Rosemary enters, the camera tracks slightly to the right, giving us a clear look at Rosemary who, startled and curious by the flowers, approaches them. Polanski purposely makes the flowers the subject of the shot before Rosemary. She is, as it were, the afterthought. The next shot explains the first.

(2) We see more flowers in the kitchen. Again, Rosemary walks into the shot and approaches the flowers, the flowers being the subject first. The camera then pushes in toward Rosemary, pans and reveals Guy, in the shadows, at the end of the hall, the visual answer to the question in her mind and our minds: Who put the flowers there? At this point in the film we aren't aware of Guy's involvement with the Castavets, other than his having spent some time with Roman. Yet there is an effect created here. By placing the roses in the frame before Rosemary, we get the sense of the flowers coming before her. The flowers, of course, are trivial, but what they mean is not. They are the instruments by which Guy initiates the conception of their child. Guy is putting his interest in the child before Rosemary. Of course, that might not be especially sinister or even a valid distinction had the shot not continued to make an important point.

As Guy walks down the hallway to meet Rosemary, still in the same shot, he says, "I've been a creep" and explains how he's been hoping his fellow actor, whose blindness resulted in Guy getting an important role, remains blind. We expect Guy to say he's been a creep for neglecting Rosemary, but instead he reveals this perverse desire. What's important is that he reveals this in the same shot that began with the flowers. The flowers, symbolizing the couple's romance, the conception of their child, and thus their hopes for the future, is linked to Guy's acting career and how it has come to flourish. Once again, we're not, at this point, aware that Guy is conceiving the child in order to further his career, but Polanski's direction subtly implies it for us long before we know.

The shot goes on, following Guy to the calendar as he points to two dates he has circled in red: he's 'figured out' the dates they must conceive by, he explains. We can surmise, from the rest of the film, that he's been directed to impregnate Rosemary at a certain time. The use of red to circle the dates and the red of the flowers informs us of this, initially on a subconscious level: the first real glimpse of red we get in the film is Roman's smoking jacket during the scene in which they first meet. Rosemary's colours are yellow and white; only after meeting the Castavets do reds start to bleed into the Woodhouse household, starting with the red flowers. The red of the flowers indicates the Faustian nature of their romance, insofar as it is now stamped by Roman, the red of the dates how Guy's been directed by Roman: he's sold the soul of their relationship for his career.

(3) Polanski cuts to an insert of the gramophone playing some romantic, instrumental music. The object is the paraphernalia of romance, manufacturing the mood. Guy is an actor and is skilled in the use of props to create emotions. Insofar as Guy must disguise his motives from Rosemary and create a particular mood for her, this is a performance for Guy: this is the performance, in fact, that will make his career.

There is a perverse irony in how Polanski depicts Guy's career-making performance as not on stage, but in his very life. The more I watch the film, the more I find myself feeling some sympathy for Guy. His very pragmatic and unromantic thought-process has been, 'She carries the baby; we tell her it died; get over the grief; and, with my new career, I'll be in a place to have the family we dream of.' Guy is not evil. He perhaps believes he has Rosemary's interests in some sense at heart, that he is making this sacrifice for his family. Unfortunately, he doesn't get his family's permission first and therein is Guy's major fault: he sells Rosemary's womb as though he owns it.

The cynical depiction of Guy stands in for the married couple in general, at least the urban married couple. Polanski seems to be depicting modern marriage as a stage upon which people perform roles for the good of the marriage. The conception of children is not, for Polanski, done out of True Love, but for practical motives; the couple merely represents their motives to themselves as ideal and romantic. Polanski seems skeptical about the possibility of true romance unpolluted by pragmatic calculations. In this sense, perhaps it's Rosemary and not Guy who has the problem.

(4) After the record starts, we're shown Guy lighting a fire in the fireplace. In another subtle indication of Guy's sacrifice, then, we see the paraphernalia of romance followed immediately by the paraphernalia of hell. Lighting a fire can be a romantic act, but Cassavetes's/Guy's performance in lighting the fire is vaguely sinister and also shows signs of discomfort, his head tilted slightly downward, gazing from under his brow with a nervous smile.

(5) Polanski now gives us a shot of the living room, Rosemary seated to the left and Guy at the fireplace in the center. What stands out most is that Rosemary is now wearing a red dress, her whole body covered in red satin. Until now Rosemary's colours have been light, usually yellow like her hair. The only time she wears red is during the romantic dinner, after which she is raped by her husband/the devil. My claim is not that red is symbolic of any particular concept, but rather that its placement has an effect and Polanski uses this. Red is a warm and yet dangerous colour. When we first see it on Roman, we're put on alert, despite his gentlemanly ways. The red flowers were linked to Roman for this reason. Now the red dress links Rosemary to Roman; seeing it, we feel something is off, that the romantic evening is tainted and Rosemary is in danger. Rosemary's body has been sold out to Roman's interests.

After lighting the fire, Guy approaches Rosemary at the coffee table, decapitated by the frame. Rosemary suddenly becomes alarmed over the smoke from the fireplace. Guy has forgotten to open the flue, risking the white paint. The white paint Rosemary has used to decorate the home in which she wants to build their life together conveys her hopes for the purity of their future together, a purity she wants to preserve. Rosemary believes in True Romance, even if Guy and Polanski don't. That the smoke enters the frame as Guy's head exits is important. The only sight of smoke in the film prior to that moment is during dinner at the Castevets. While Rosemary and Minnie talk, Rosemary glances into the den where Guy and Roman are speaking, seeing only smoke wafting from around the corner. Here, again, Guy is (partially) out of frame when the smoke begins, linking, like Rosemary's dress, this moment and Guy's intentions to the satanic influence of Roman Castevet and particularly to the deal Guy and Roman were presumably making. The smoke that can ruin the white paint is the influence of Roman that threatens to sully their innocence and happiness. If my analysis of Guy is correct, that satanic influence in the narrative is representative of pragmatism in life.

Rosemary and Guy both sit on the floor, Rosemary on the left and Guy on the right, the fire between them as the camera slowly pushes in. In another context, that fire could easily be read as the passion between this young couple; but in this context, the fire seems somewhat hollow, the prop in an act.

(6) Polanski cuts to the candlelight dinner. Rosemary is again on the left, Guy on the right, the table and two yellow candles between them. There are a few dinner scenes in Rosemary's Baby. The first is the dinner with Hutch, during which he relates the twisted history of their new building, including baby-eating witches. The second is the dinner with the Castevets, during which the unseen deal between Guy and Roman takes place. The third is this dinner between Rosemary and Guy alone. This context is important. The discussion during the first dinner informs us of the building's history naturally prepares us for the sinister tone of the second, the Castevets taking the place of the baby-eating witches. During this dinner, Guy is seduced to the building's dark history. The third dinner is Guy seducing Rosemary to the same, in an inverse of Adam and Eve.

As they eat and drink, the doorbell rings. Guy feigns annoyance and hurries to answer the door. For a man who, later in the scene, is quite content to leave Rosemary do all the housework, his readiness to answer the door is suspicious. The camera pushes in on Rosemary, listening intently. She hears Minnie's voice; "Not tonight," she says. The sense Polanski communicates is that Minnie is an invasive force diametrically opposed to romance and love.

(7) Guy returns with desserts, jokingly explaining them as Minnie's "ESP." Polanski pushes in to Rosemary and we see she's too relieved to be suspicious. (8) Guy, sitting at the table, does an impression of Minnie, setting Rosemary's and, to some extent our, worries at ease. (The way Guy makes fun of Minnie's pronunciation of "mousse" as "mouse" returns, in fact, in Rosemary's dream sequence, when Rosemary claims to have suffered a mouse-bite. This is also a humourous reference to Minnie as the Disney character, Minnie Mouse.) (9) Rosemary takes their dinner plates into the kitchen, disappearing into the white for a moment, perhaps indicating her security in their relationship, then returns to the table, Polanski's camera staying on her the whole time. (10) Guy starts eating the dessert, chocolate mousse. (11) Rosemary starts eating as well, but complains of a 'chalky undertaste.' At the very moment Rosemary tastes the chocolate and recoils at the undertaste, the record of romantic music reaches its end. Guy has sold out their romance by giving her the drugged dessert. The 'undertaste', moreover, parallels the sense we get throughout this whole romantic dinner sequence, the feeling, created by Polanski's mise-en-scene, that something is off. We are wholly allied with Rosemary throughout this scene and experience the unsettling undertones with her. (12, 13, 14) Strangely, Guy, who has just been mocking Minnie, becomes annoyed by Rosemary's complaints, eventually telling her, "Eat it!" Although the table is positioned evenly between them, the shots of Rosemary in this back-and-forth contain a yellow candle, whereas there is only the black void out the window for Guy. The step of giving Rosemary the mousse is the giving up of his soul; Guy is committed to fulfilling his deal with the devil. (15) Rosemary gives in and once again begins eating the mousse. She's putting on a performance that she enjoys it, yet the performance is clearly a performance, unlike Guy's. She asks Guy to change the record and while he's away dumps most of the mousse. He returns to loom behind her, hands on her shoulders, his head cut off by the frame again. Polanski uses the technique of framing-to-obscure throughout the film, most famously when Minnie is blocked by the doorframe while on the telephone. (Preview audiences literally craned their necks to try see around the doorframe.) He used it, as I noted, when Guy and Roman are speaking together. Putting someone partially out of frame makes us feel the missing information, our need to know drawing our attention not to what's in frame but to what's not in the frame; we sense that the character is hiding something and indeed has something to hide, in this case his guilt over feeding Rosemary a drugged dessert.

(16) Polanski cuts from the dinner to Guy sitting alone, back to us, in the dark den. He's watching the televised appearance of the Pope at Yankee stadium. (17) Rosemary is busy in the bright, white kitchen cleaning up, without Guy's help. The shot is not initially of Rosemary's face, however, but of the trashcan into which she's emptying the mousse, leaving behind a stain resembling dried blood on the white cloth. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the image to say it conveys a sense of desecrated virginity; yet the visual contrast of the brown and the white is established earlier in the film, as Rosemary repaints the dark brown apartment white and pale yellow. It's as though the old colour, or character, of the building is coming through in their lives.

"Christ, what a mob," Guy says from out of frame. We tilt up to see Rosemary feeling ill. This is the drug taking effect. Yet Polanski's linking of the Pope ("Christ, what a mob") to her sudden dizziness reminds us that she was raised a Catholic, amongst strict nuns. Earlier in the film she dreams of a nun and apologizes for 'telling about the window.' In her second dream, during which she dreams she's raped by the devil, she explains to the Pope that the "mouse bite" kept her from coming to see him. She obviously suffers some anxiety over her abandonment of religion, her absence from the "mob".

(18) Guy is still watching the Pope. Not the least bit interested in the Pope, he states this would be a great place for his Yamaha commercial (the ad he starred in). Guy, again, subordinates higher values to his career. Guy's rejection of ideals is, as the events are linked within the shots, a cause of Rosemary's dizziness. (19) As Guy laughs, Polanski cuts to Rosemary stumbling from the white kitchen toward the dark livingroom, where Guy has been sitting. (This contrast of light and dark can be found throughout the film, most obviously in Rosemary's redecoration of the apartment.) She knocks over a chair along the way, intimating chaos entering the domestic order. She falls into Guy's arms and simultaneously into total dark, her (and his) features no longer visible against the background of the bright kitchen. (20) Guy escorts Rosemary down the hallway, blaming the alcohol for her dizziness. After she falls, he carries her the rest of the way to their bedroom, leading into the dream sequence and the rape. Now that, as the sequence of shots up to this point has established, Rosemary's defenses have been broken down and the colours of Roman and the building have begun invading the Wodehouse world as much as callous practicality has invaded Guy's heart, she can be led off for the rape, the real nail in the coffin for the couple's romance.

I've been referring to the attitude toward relationships in Rosemary's Baby as 'cynical.' However, I would like to qualify that statement. In Foucault's terms, the current discourse is that our liberal age has allowed relationships to be based on love whereas they used to be based on practical concerns, such as wealth and power. A relationship based upon money or any practicality today is denigrated. Like all discourse for Foucault, its truth is questionable. In reality, relationships in the past were often based upon a mixture of emotional and practical concerns and the truth is they are still based upon a mixture of emotional and practical concerns. When choosing a man, women do consider how financially stable he is. This is a practical concern. We're to believe, of course, that this is a "requirement for love"; but that claim is no more accurate today than it was for Elizabethan England. Seeing the modern, urban family as partially motivated by practical concerns is realistic, not cynical.

Rosemary buys into the discourse of our time and desires a family based upon pure love. So Guy, more pragmatic, must play the part for her--and he's good at it. As Rosemary detects the 'chalky undertaste,' as it were, in his performance, she begins to imagine a Faustian conspiracy. Polanski never gives the viewer indisputable evidence that Rosemary's suspicions are true. The final revelatory scene is, like her dream sequences, slightly out of sync. Moreover, the eyes she sees as she looks at the child are exactly the eyes she sees during the rape dream sequence. Possibly Rosemary's inability to accept the unreality of her fairytale idea of love leads her to villainize Guy's practicality as downright satanic. That is, of course, completely speculation. The film is purposely ambiguous. There may indeed be a Faustian conspiracy. At the very least, the viewer is led to strongly sympathize with Rosemary and to share her perception; and from her perception, Guy has indeed sold their hopes and dreams for his career.