42. Rosemary’s Baby

In 1990, two men dressed as police officers stole 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The crime remains unsolved, and one of the odd details was the haphazard violence of the theft, like how blades were used to slice canvases out of their frames.

Those frames still hang in the museum, letting visitors know this is where they would have been able to see a work of art. Where it should be visible and appreciated.

Chris, I thought this post was about Rosemary’s Baby?

Yeah. I’d love to talk about the impression that movie left on me. There’s a problem though:

Roman Polanski has made it impossible for me to talk about this movie with other people.

It’s a movie he made about a woman treated as a means and an object, whose body is used against her will as a vessel of evil by a conspiracy of people she knows and believes care about her complicit in this violation.

In the context of his past treatment of women and published comments about women (specifically and generally)… I’d rather not sing the praises of this movie.

It makes me think about those empty museum frames when I consider a work that needs to be discussed in the context of its primary author being a garbage human.

And Roman Polanski, for many reasons, is a festering trash pile of a man.

Rosemary’s Baby has left a mark on how I think about film, and what I think about as effective horror storytelling. So in that space in my mental museum, I leave the empty frame hanging.