Rosemary’s Baby, Eraserhead and Frankenstein
Sarah Leventer
According to legend, before shooting The Shining , Stanley Kubrick screened two films for his production crew: Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. This Kubrick legend has proven difficult to verify, an apparent product of vaguely similar plots and cinephiles’ wishful thinking. However, the legend’s endurance suggests a strongly felt kinship between these films. Understanding that kinship may involve looking to one of the few sources Kubrick did admit to consulting, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Rosemary’s Baby and Eraserhead in fact reanimate Frankenstein on multiple levels, making the films two important points on the monstrous child continuum detailed in the introduction to this volume. 1 Both films follow Frankenstein ’s central narrative—a protagonist “artificially” creates life with horrific consequences—but more importantly, the films use “monstrous-childness” to elaborate on Frankenstein ’s central projects—undermining the rational order personified by male-centered, Enlightenment logic and revealing the irrational world beneath. 2
In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein , Mary Shelley famously used “my hideous progeny” to refer both to her novel and the offspring (Frankenstein’s Monster) birthed within it. This term suggests the way Shelley envisioned the affinity between her project and Victor Frankenstein’s as well as her connection to the Monster. As with Victor Frankenstein, the Monster is Shelley’s “progeny” and her doppelganger. Like her protagonist, Shelley conceived and inflicted a terrifying product on the wider world. Like the Monster, Shelley’s involuntary alterity fated her to be an unwitting messenger of terrible knowledge; the Monster and Shelley’s novel show the monstrous implications of the creative drive so important in the Romantic era. 3 As is oft remarked upon, Shelley was a divided authorial entity, both the Monster and its creator, the victim and perpetrator of a cruel reproduction. Her novel, her hideous progeny, is a warped product of those divisions (victim/creator, monstrous/civilized, rational/irrational, deformed/normative). 4
Shelley’s novel provides the model for many of the texts discussed in this volume, as well as the teratological theory applied to them: nearly every character is some combination of doppelganger/monstrous child. Frankenstein’s Monster is the enduring symbol of these myriad doublings and divisions, following exactly the pattern of monstrous-childness detailed in the introduction to this collection. He begins the novel as emblem of Victor Frankenstein’s (and the larger Industrial Revolution’s) boundless faith in science and reason but transforms into a repository for sexual, familial, and ideological nightmares. The same can be said for the Monster’s updated iterations—the children in Rosemary’s Baby and Eraserhead .
In Frankenstein, Rosemary’s Baby and Eraserhead , the child is an icon: it briefly embodies the protagonist’s best hopes, only to descend in esteem to the level of the monstrous, the darker half of the “divided self” trope so prominent in Dark Romantic/Gothic tales. In Polanski and Lynch’s films, this monstrous child also carries additional historical/theoretical import. By Rosemary’s Baby ’s release in 1968, the nation had lost thousands of soldiers in the Vietnam War as well as leaders whose deaths were previously unthinkable: Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X, among others. However, America’s realization of its role as an exporter of violence began to crystallize with the military failure of the Tet Offensive, also in 1968. The nation’s division revealed itself in the clash at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and continued to deepen through key events of the 1970s: the escalation of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the continuing increase in political activism and the violence of Kent State and Altamont, all of which occurred before Eraserhead ’s release in 1977. Rosemary and Henry (the respective protagonists of Rosemary’s Baby and Eraserhead ), too, cause catastrophic events, and are victims of the same: their children embody the historical and psychological divisions of their makers.
In both films, the children’s appearance triggers psychological crises that show the devastating effect of such identity-shattering historical incidents. Their births initiate a return to the Romantic (a return to the inexplicable, subjective experience beyond reason) by a cinema and nation that considered themselves resolutely modern. The erupting conflict between a Romantic and an Enlightenment worldview—one governed by reason, empiricism, and the endless perfectibility of the human mind—is also what structures Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein, an Enlightened subject driven by the hermeneutic impulse to know and to master the inner workings of the world, begins his quest by declaring, “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light onto our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” 5 As he pursues his monster across mountains and seas, he learns that the mind is not perfect, but limited and earthbound, and the “true” natural world cannot be conquered or even fully understood by humans. His deformed monster is an uncanny reminder of nature’s inexplicability as well as the compromised nature of the doctor’s project to know and control that world.
As filmmakers and theorists from George Méliès to Linda Williams have explored, the hermeneutic impulse is also a key drive of the cinematic apparatus. The desire to know is expressed in narrative film’s drive to penetrate the visual world, its use of the camera to “get at” the logic underpinning that world. The hermeneutic drive assumes that the world proceeds according to logic, and further, that the human mind cannot only understand that logic but replicate it in its own acts of cinematic creation. Polanski and Lynch intervene in this impulse in the same way Mary Shelley’s novel did. In Rosemary’s Baby and Eraserhead , the initially well-ordered, rational world is transformed when the irrational ruptures through in the form of a tiny, malformed body in a crib. These only partially glimpsed bodies typify Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the monstrous, as noted in the introduction to this volume, defined as the “pure unformed,” brutally remonstrating against our presumption to know. 6 By the end of these films, the entire cinematic apparatus, built on visuality and resolution, is undone.
Rosemary’s Baby follows young newlyweds, Guy (John Cassavetes) and his pregnant wife, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), on what seems an exceedingly normative journey: finding and settling into an apartment. However, at the end of Rosemary’s strange, illness-filled pregnancy, she gives birth to what may be Satan’s child. The child’s ontology provokes further anxiety for Rosemary and audience alike because it remains offscreen and forever unknowable. The child’s absence troubles the hermeneutic impulse and its ancillary practice, psychoanalysis, at a time when knowing and finding oneself became particularly urgent, and particularly difficult. 7 Psychoanalysis is structured on the principle that to understand herself, a subject must investigate the neuroses formed in her childhood. As stated in the introduction to this volume, psychoanalysis uses the child to explain adult impulses, but seeing and understanding the child is paradoxically impossible for the adult subject. As Virginia L. Blum observes, “Psychoanalysis […] is the preeminent twentieth-century discourse about childhood, a discourse that […] refuses to examine the inevitable aporias occurring when adult subjects treat as ultimately knowable a position they have both internalized and forsaken.” 8 By not picturing the child, Rosemary’s Baby casts the child’s position in an appropriately unknowable way—this partially constitutes its enduring terror for adult audiences.
Rosemary’s Baby ’s resolutely anti-visual ending sets our unconscious free: what is that child, and what has its existence unleashed? What does it suggest about the world we thought we knew? How much else don’t we know? Rosemary’s Baby uses its child’s non-appearance to provoke profound fear. However, as close analysis of two key scenes of Eraserhead —a dream sequence in which protagonist Henry’s head falls off and is replaced by the rising, phallic head of his infant, and an earlier moment when the infant eviscerates—reveals, seeing the monster-child does nothing to diminish the feeling of unspeakable dread in the worlds of Polanski and Lynch. 9
The opening of Rosemary’s Baby sets up Manhattan’s familiar, Enlightened topography, but it also subtly telegraphs the impending irrational breakdown of that world. A lilting score and pink, swirling title script play over a bird’s-eye shot of New York City. Eventually, the audience is introduced to Rosemary and Guy viewing an apartment in the Bramford Building, which overlooks Central Park. As production designer Dick Sylbert notes, “[Polanski] said ‘I thought this was a soap opera,’ and that was the best clue he had, and we used it. Rosemary’s Baby opens like a Doris Day picture, and that’s the whole point.” 10 The first few moments of Rosemary’s Baby create the impression that the film is a reliable construction of reality, one that will progress in a logical way to a conclusion that offers resolution.
However, just before the audience meets the couple, the image of Central Park, (that apparently civilized space) is made strange by its juxtaposition against a precariously high-angle shot of the Bramford, which appears to be lifted, and perfectly preserved, from a nineteenth-century Gothic novel. From this point, the film metaphorically zooms further and further into the Woodhouses’ lives until Rosemary descends completely into madness, and the opening shot of the film is shown in reverse as a zoom-out. All the qualities of the first shot are inverted, and the subversive invocation of Central Park is revealed.
Urban parks, like the “checkerboard-patterned” fields that replaced much of the English wilderness, are emblems of rational thought: they transform untamed nature, once the vaguely terrifying site of the sublime, supernatural forces that accounted for the mysteries of human experience, into orderly, subdivided spaces. 11 The creation of these spaces is part of the Enlightenment practice of dismantling the superstitious medieval worldview and replacing it with one based on empirical logic and scientific reasoning. By forcing a prolonged confrontation with the irrational and occult, and by visually inverting the image of Central Park, however, Polanski also inverts the Enlightenment worldview, reasserting the power of the supernatural, and making the notion that the inexplicable world can be civilized seem counterfeit and absurd. Upon reflection, the viewer is confronted with the realization that the soap opera aesthetic is a dark satire, and the artificially boundaried Central Park is the first indication of the ugliness of Rosemary’s world. In fact, these hints very possibly go unnoticed during initial viewing of the film, which is perhaps the most frightening realization of all.
By the film’s end, the odd angle of the bird’s-eye shot of the Bramford seems obviously malevolent, as do the medieval architecture, dissonant chords and lilting score, which now sounds like a carnivalesque, deranged lullaby. The film’s slightly amplified color scheme, especially concentrated on whites and yellows, and exaggerated furniture scale also express something malevolently too-perfect. All of these visual details speak to the concept of excess and decadence, two defining aesthetic qualities of the Dark Romantic/Gothic genre; they confirm Diane Waldeman’s assertion of the film’s structural similarities to texts like Frankenstein : “the structure has all the earmarks of the Gothic mode (the naïve woman, the opaque husband, the awesome mansion, supernatural events).” 12 However, similarities between Frankenstein and Rosemary’s Baby run much deeper, to the shared style and biographical details of their authors.
Connecting Polanski to his literary predecessor begins with perhaps the most obviously Dark Romantic quality of his films: his propensity for animating the objective world with the interior life of his protagonist. 13 This is particularly true in what is often referred to as his apartment trilogy: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby , and The Tenant . The Rosemary’s Baby poster, for instance, superimposes a baby buggy over Rosemary’s profile, making it appear her child (and the film) emerged directly from her mind. 14 In Repulsion, Polanski immerses the viewer in his protagonist Carole’s (Catherine Deneuve) perspective and offers no “break” as she slowly goes insane. The world Carole experiences becomes more and more surreal, but the line between her perspective and her environment remains unclear—her projections become the audience’s reality.
Unfortunately, for all the self-reflective energy expended to resolve Carole’s situation, Polanski’s main character and the viewer are rewarded with what film scholar John Orr calls a “final incomprehension,” the knowledge that the world is somehow less understandable than when the viewer started her mental heavy-lifting. 15 In many of his films, the protagonist’s journey is an exercise in psychic entropy, making Polanski a continuation of the Dark Romantic tradition of portraying the awakening of perception as a traumatic, solitary event. In the films of Polanski and his literary antecedents, the hermeneutic impulse to know, control, and resolve results in the failure of reason and discovery of the true world just beneath civilized society—a world in which suffering and dilemma are endemic, but simultaneously incomprehensible in terms of rational thought and language. This fall into solipsistic, abyssal experience—embodied by Rosemary’s stunned state at the end of Rosemary’s Baby or Victor Frankenstein’s guilt-ridden wandering in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein —is the central similarity that unites Polanski with Shelley.
When examining Romantic works, critics run the risk of over-relying on biographical details and conflating author and protagonist. However, as literary scholar George Levine notes, because Frankenstein is a self-admitted product of authorial preoccupations, considering Shelley’s worldview is crucial. This is particularly true when comparing her to Polanski, as a similarly random tragicness pervades their work, and parallels their life experience. 16 What Elzbieta Ostrowska says of Polanski, who was a perpetual culprit and victim of tragic circumstances, could easily be extended to Shelley: “In his work … motherhood never takes the form of a nostalgic space of safety, but rather indicates all the horrors of human life that begins at the moment of conception.” 17 , 18
Shelley’s father, William Godwin, was a political radical who inspired many of the Romantic writers (including Shelley’s husband, Percy), as did her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft died ten days after Shelley’s birth. From the very beginning of her life, then, the understanding that birth could be terrible, that Shelley herself could be marked with guilt for her mother’s death in addition to being a victim of loss, was profound. The difficulties continued throughout the Gothic author’s life, which is significant as it demonstrates that for Shelley, who began writing Frankenstein in 1816 and published it in 1818, death, ugliness and birth were always intertwined. 19 As Anne Mellor notes, likely as at least a partial reaction to the random suffering and disproportionate burden of responsibilities in Shelley’s personal experiences, with each rewrite Frankenstein became more Hobbesian and less suffused with the primacy of free will so central to her father’s views:
In 1818 … Victor Frankenstein possessed free will or the capacity for meaningful moral choice—he could have abandoned his quest for the “principle of life,” he could have cared for his creature … but in the revised text [published in 1831] … [h]e is the pawn of forces beyond his knowledge or control. Again and again Mary Shelley reassigns human actions to chance or fate. 20
In her later work, “years after writing Frankenstein Mary would have Katherine Gordon, a character modeled after herself in her novel Perkin Warbeck, admit ‘I am doomed to a divided existence, and I submit.’” 21 Perkin Warbeck has very little to do with birth or creation, which suggests that although Frankenstein may speak to female fears of motherhood, the condition of motherhood Shelley’s work examines is more precisely a metaphor for the modern malady of divided existence. As Levine observes, Frankenstein implies that the “civilized man or woman contains within the self a monstrous, destructive and self-destructive energy.” 22 As suggested in the beginning of this essay, Frankenstein’s “hideous progeny” is a projection of this monstrous-childness energy, as is Rosemary’s: all are oddly familiar, radically defamilarized Other halves. 23
Essentially, Mary Shelley relocates the classic drama between God/Satan, once conceived as external forces fighting over one’s soul, into one body composed of a public, proper self and a private, darker side. 24 Frankenstein and Rosemary’s respective shadow selves, their children, are frightening and attractive to modern consciousness because they force a confrontation with that uncanny side of ourselves buried by years of purportedly polite, civilized society. The children overturn the Enlightenment precedent that such a society has summarily conquered and dismantled such taboo drives of the human experience. As Levine notes, the confrontation with these beings “promises to reveal to us our deepest and most powerful desires and enact them.” 25 The horror of Frankenstein is the horror of Rosemary’s Baby : the purportedly civilized subject becoming acquainted with her “authentic self,” an especially potent drive in post–Freudian America, and being frightened by what she finds.
Polanski spins the contrast between uncanny human drives and civilized society, using it as a source of the film’s horror and humor. As Maximilian Le Cain notes of the Woodhouses’ apartment: “To the last, it is a conspicuously bright, clean space, the blandly cheerful vision of a glossy magazine distressingly unmarked by the obscene happenings it is witness to.” 26 Rosemary’s husband, Guy Woodhouse, desperately clings to what Le Cain refers to as the “constrictive façade of normality,” as seen when, after making his ugly trade with Satan (his wife’s body for his success), he brings Rosemary yellow daisies and announces that he bought a shirt he saw in the New Yorker. Later in this scene, when Rosemary claims their neighbor Roman Castevet is actually Satan-worshipper Steven Marcato, Guy nervously retorts “It’s 1966!” as if the fact that they live in a modern world, with reason and New Yorker styled lives, precludes the existence of ineffable evil. The Scrabble pieces Rosemary uses to figure out that “Roman Castevet” is an anagram for “Steven Marcato” serve not only to lampoon bourgeois atmosphere, but also point to another subtle theme of the film, the function of language.
While arranging the Scrabble pieces, Rosemary’s short haircut and oversized dress make her resemble a child learning her letters for the first time, a quality that is heightened by Mia Farrow’s natural aloofness. In short, this scene suggests “the baby” is not the only alterior child in the film. By arranging the Scrabble letters, then reading a book once owned by a benevolent (and prematurely taken) mentor, Rosemary learns the language of the alien world order (in this case, the supernatural, inexplicable world) in a progression similar to Frankenstein’s Monster. Rosemary is prevented from learning more about the Castevets’ coven when Guy throws away her book. Ironically though, even if she had finished the book, none of the explanations it provided could have prepared her for the awful sight of her child and her final confrontation with the Other world. 27
The inadequacy of language to a person in Rosemary’s predicament reflects the fractured nature of Shelley and Polanski’s work and anticipates the Deleuzian “crisis of the action image” that structures many New Hollywood films. According to film historian Christian Keathley, in times of extreme trauma (as portrayed in post World War II Italian cinema, for instance), the Hollywood rhetoric of active human agency—that one can always do or say something—proves utterly inadequate and untrue to the experience of that trauma. Keathley traces the narrative of films that showcase Deleuze’s “crisis of the action image,” easily fitting for Rosemary’s Baby ending, this way:
The [protagonist’s] sense of control is progressively revealed as illusory … these films often leave their protagonists not dead, but rather wounded and helpless, disconnected from their surroundings, often muttering to themselves in a catatonic traumatised state … each film concludes with its protagonist literally trapped in a reaction shot. 28
When Rosemary obsessively repeats, “This isn’t happening,” and rocks her child’s crib, she carries the trauma Keathley notes, and also becomes complicit in her husband’s odious project. Victor Frankenstein’s act of creation occurs much earlier in Frankenstein , but the confrontation facing him throughout of his novel—to kill or embrace his hideous progeny—is the same as Rosemary’s. Having created the being that will destroy her world, Rosemary resigns herself to her fate and soothes her child, but her destruction is no less total than Frankenstein’s. As does Shelley’s novel, Polanski’s ending deemphasizes agency and choice, reassigning human actions to chance or fate. 29 In fact, Polanski’s tale has an aspect that makes it even more Romantic than its source material; as feminist critic Lucy Fisher notes, “It seems significant that, as Rosemary rocks the cradle, we never fully glimpse her infamous baby, who remains forever offscreen.” 30
Central to the Enlightenment worldview is the mimetic impulse to portray events realistically and to objectify the occult by giving it a recognizable face, thereby making its dimensions finite and controllable. As mentioned earlier, the same impulse guides much of mainstream American cinema. The hermeneutic drive manifests most obviously in the cinematic obsession with demystifying the body. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen elaborates, the hermeneutic impulse to know and thereby to demystify also fuels our cultural obsession with monstrousness: “a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens.” 31 The cultural solution to sating cinematically both anxious fixations has been to make the onscreen body hyper-available to the eye. Even films that initially refuse to picture their monsters (Cat People, Jaws , etc.) eventually do so, with a double-barreled payoff of revelation and palliative resolution of the anxiety of the un-pictured (and uncontrolled). 32
When Polanski refuses to picture the monstrous-child body, he reverses the generic terms of the horror movie by unleashing the ambient social anxiety that generates monsters rather than foreclosing it in the revelation of “the evil being.” Put in another way, he amplifies the disease of civilized social anxiety rather than offering resolution of its symptoms. What ultimately makes Rosemary’s Baby so terrifying—its refusal in the non-appearance of Satan and his offspring to declare evil conquerable—is also what makes it an anti-cinematic product of counter–Enlightenment values. Rosemary’s Baby is Mary Shelley’s nightmare realized, dramatized in brilliantly paradoxical detail.
While it would be specious to assume that Rosemary’s Baby was the sole film responsible for reigniting interest in Romantic storytelling conventions, it did anticipate the 1970s’ predilection with the idea that the world is ultimately unknowable, even in circumstances that initially appear comprehensible (Chinatown , The Conversation , The Parallax View , etc.). The film also seemed to spark an increase in monstrous-birth films, beginning with the conspicuously titled It’s Alive! (1974) and its sequel It Lives Again (1978), and extending through the decade with films like Embryo (1976), Demon Seed (1977), Alien (1979), The Brood (1979), and most Romantically baroque of all, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977).
Although almost a decade separates Lynch’s first feature from Polanski’s film, the two men actually make surprisingly good bedfellows. Both directors share an interest in Polish cinema and the absurdist work of Jan Svankmajer. 33 More importantly for the purposes of this analysis, both of their monstrous birth narratives also lack a defining quality of 1960s and 70s art—distanciation. As weird as the images in Eraserhead can be, as Todd McGowan argues, Lynch is a director of proximity, “whereas Godard … works to alienate spectators and force them to recognize their distance from the images on the screen, Lynch tries to close this distance to an even greater extent than typical Hollywood films.” 34 The viewer may be repulsed by Eraserhead ; yet it is almost impossible to be detached from the film when watching it. Like Polanski, Lynch offers no respite from the film’s weird mindscape. Eraserhead ’s impossibly subjective nature recalls Frankenstein in the same way Rosemary’s Baby does. 35
Also like Rosemary’s Baby , Eraserhead invokes the power of the irrational to dwarf that power of science and logic, and in fact deepens the dramatization of the world beyond rational comprehension. Eraserhead is set entirely within the inexplicable realm that Rosemary’s Baby only glimpses at with its paradoxically unseen child. This is a realm in which reality markers like cause-and-effect logic have no place (i.e., when Henry’s girlfriend Mary X has an unprovoked seizure, her mother combs her hair; the cutting of a chicken provokes a seizure in Mrs. X, etc.). In setting, tone, and order of events—which all change capriciously—the film amplifies the omnipresent feeling in Rosemary’s Baby that the world is about to shift beneath one’s feet, that some cataclysmic event or entity threatens to overwhelm characters and audience alike. The feeling of apprehension created by both viewing experiences frequently registers often as frustration in reviews of Eraserhead :
Here either everything is real, or nothing is. We can discern no degrees of reality because there is no baseline to which we can point as rational . There can be no distinction between what really happens and what someone thinks is happening because here thought is instantaneously manifest as event.… In fact, it seems that very little actually does happen in the film, although something momentous is always about to happen. 36
This critic describes viewing Eraserhead as a subjective experience without rational comprehensibility, one in which the imminence of something momentous and potentially apocalyptic generates an unformed terror. In other words, the critic describes Eraserhead as an extended confrontation with monstrous childness, as defined earlier in this essay. Eraserhead challenges the viewer to appreciate a narrative that withholds knowledge; the film’s denial of predictability takes the terror of the unformed to new heights, with important cinematic and historical implications.
Eraserhead ’s resistance to the rules of implicit causality shatters Hollywood tradition and reflects the trauma of the times even more than other films that may initially seem more “of the era.” 37 As Keathley notes:
Certain of the century’s key events … the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam experience … mark the limits and beyond of the realist discourse that relies on continuity, cause-and-effect, and agency…. Instead, [Hayden] White argues, such traumatic historical events demand a modernist style of representation, for the formal strategies of fragmentation, discontinuity, chance, and incoherence that are common to modernism are also the characteristics that mark one’s experience of a traumatic event. The filmmakers of the post-traumatic cycle seem to have intuited this necessity … employing modernist formal devices to show that realist practice is strained to the breaking point. 38
Lynch’s film is an exercise in straining realist practices to their breaking point, and its setting and protagonist bear an uncanny similarity to the traumatized subjectivity Keathley describes. As McGowan notes, “Visually, the burnt-out industrial setting connotes an enjoyment located elsewhere—in the years past, before the steel barrels, pipes and chains.” 39 To be sure, Henry’s perpetual blank stare taken together with the idea of “enjoyment elsewhere” seem to indicate that the bleak, diseased landscape robbed him of something essential: human warmth.
As critics have noted, Henry recalls poker-faced silent film stars like Buster Keaton, but he also closely resembles another classic personality: Frankenstein’s Monster. As in Rosemary’s Baby , the “baby” in Eraserhead is not the only “child.” Like Frankenstein’s Monster, Henry is technically human, but he appears to have been birthed fully formed from the landscape itself. He is defined throughout by his out-of-placeness, which often registers as mechanical; he moves awkwardly, seldom speaks with any affect (if he speaks at all), and, as McGowan notes, “does not dress like someone who fits comfortably within the world he occupies,” throughout walking with deliberation in pants two inches too short. 40 Like the Monster, Henry wanders through a world that he was born in but that he nonetheless seems at a loss to comprehend.
The other characters who populate this world seem less alienated than Henry, though they share his odd, mechanical qualities. All body animations in the inexplicable world of the film are a weird facsimile of organic movement. Humans break down like robots freezing mid-operation, as Mary’s father, Bill X (Allen Joseph), does at the dinner table; or short-circuit, as Mary and her mother Mrs. X (Jeanne Bates), do during their seizures. The product of the one organic sexual act spoken of is a robotic simulation of an infant. Even sexuality in this realm seems illegitimate or perverted, though, of course, none of this is explained within the film. Lynch is confronting the inexplicable world through repeated machine failures, as Chris Rodley infers in Lynch on Lynch . 41
Lynch reorders the animate/inanimate schema, and the birth process, by showing aliveness and deadness in unexpected places. Even the elevator in Henry’s building awakens with a primitive consciousness of sorts, as Schneider argues, “intentionally and perhaps spitefully ‘teasing’ Henry.” 42 As Schneider describes this scene:
What follows after the [elevator] doors open is an extremely disconcerting period of waiting (approximately 13 seconds) for them to close again, and then an equally disconcerting rise up to Henry’s floor. It is not so much that anything happens during this sequence—though the lights in the elevator flicker, and briefly go out a couple of times—but our sense of foreboding is primed nevertheless. 43
An example of the unformed anxiety previously described, this sequence is also a literal example of electricity breathing “life” into an ordinarily “dead” object, though it is not the only time electricity plays a role in the film. The “machine failures” of humans in Eraserhead seem more specifically to be electrical failures. Characters jolt in unnatural, unexpected ways, creating confusion over their ontological status. Is Grandmother X, for instance, alive, dead, asleep, conscious? Eraserhead’ s purposeful confusion and electrical reanimation of dead objects connect the film to its origins in Frankenstein.
As Shelley famously said in the introduction to her text, discussions of galvanism prompted her to hypothesize: “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated … perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with a vital warmth.” 44 Describing her subsequent dream in which Frankenstein allegedly came to her, Shelley further says:
I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. 45
What Shelley goes on to say of how she imagined Dr. Frankenstein’s reaction to his creation is similar to Henry’s probable desire as he stands over his dubiously created baby: “He would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter.… He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; beholds the horrid thing … at his bedside.” 46 Unlike Victor, Henry does not fully comprehend the “thing” he created and does not demonstrate the same desire to kill his offspring, who also stirs with an uneasy, half-vital motion, until late in the film.
After seeing the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Roberts) with another man, Henry turns to look at his baby, who appears to laugh spitefully at him. Just after this encounter, Henry angrily removes the baby’s bandages. Yet even he does not anticipate the truly gruesome outcome of his actions: the baby immediately eviscerates. As Schneider notes, “By fashioning Henry’s baby skinless, boneless and poised to spill its guts out, Lynch forces Daddy and audience alike to contemplate a living, breathing (temporarily, at least) transgression of the deeply-entrenched cultural opposition, inside vs. outside.” 47 In this moment Lynch again disrupts cause-effect logic and the dead/alive schema with one important difference: there is someone to blame for this adverse event (Henry), though the effect is grossly disproportionate to the cause. 48
The heavy price Henry pays for his one spontaneous act, his existence in a world that perpetually mystifies him, and his responsibility for a being that he does not understand call to mind Dr. Frankenstein and the Dark Romantic hero more generally, as described by G.R. Thompson:
In Romantic Gothic literature man is confronted with an ambiguous world structure rather than the clearcut world of the Middle Ages. Instead, he faces a world that he has no hope of comprehending and in which he cannot make the proper moral choices, even though he is yet held responsible by some occult power for such choices. 49
Like the Gothic subject described above, Frankenstein, and Rosemary, Henry transubstantiates from an initially unwitting, alterior victim into a fatefully complicit actor in an odious creative/destructive project. The ramifications of Henry’s act and his disproportionate punishment escalate to the end of the film, when the world explodes. Just before this apocalyptic moment though, when Henry fantasizes about his beloved Lady in the Radiator, his head suddenly pops off and is replaced by the slowly rising, phallic head of his infant. If there is doubt as to whose perspective Eraserhead is told from, this image seems proof that the terror expressed at this moment is Henry’s. Freudian readings aside, “the horror of this sequence is the horror of attack from within, whether psychically, socially … or at a more primitive bodily level.” 50 In this final moment, as in Rosemary’s Baby and Frankenstein , the monstrous child, in all of its terror—its inexplicability, ineffability, and uncontrollability—overtakes the rational world of its maker. These nearly unprecedented reversals epitomize the generative power of the unformed that Deleuze found so compelling, and suggest that the appeal of Eraserhead , Rosemary’s Baby and Frankenstein is precisely the same as the horror they enact: that of the monstrously divided self.
1. According to biographer John Baxter, Kubrick asked Diane Johnson, The Shining’s co-screenwriter and professor of the Gothic, what she thought of one text: Frankenstein . John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997), 307.
2. As is argued in the introduction to this collection, childness-engaged beings like Frankenstein’s Monster, Rosemary’s baby, and protagonist Henry’s child in Eraserhead evoke “an elusive quiddity … something extra-discursive, extra-linguistic, and even ineffable.” In other words, these monstrous children confront us with how much we do not know and cannot control. This is an especially terrifying prospect within fictional words defined by logic and empiricism: the Enlightened sphere of Dr. Frankenstein, and the insistently civilized, post-industrial universes of Rosemary’s Baby and Eraserhead .
3. Shelley’s perspective on the limited, earthbound nature of the human constitution made her anomalous among her Romantic counterparts, who generally saw human capability as limitless.
4. These divisions are myriad, but include Victor’s culpability/victimhood in the deaths of those closest to him, his civilized/despicable nature, his sexuality, and his belief system structured on logic but challenged by the illogical being he creates. For a full discussion of these divisions, and a deeper investigation of the plot mechanisms of Frankenstein , see Mary Lowe-Evans, ed., Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998).
5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 49.
6. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 107.
7. The concurrent rise of New Age spiritualties and evangelical religion in the 1970s can easily be understood as an assimilative response to the dissociative events of the 1960s.
8. Virginia L. Blum, Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 25.
9. The child in Eraserhead is so unrecognizable that debate still rages over what kind of animal (or composite of animals) was used to create it.
10. “Retrospective Interviews,” Rosemary’s Baby , dir. Roman Polanski, 1968. prod. Robert Evans; (Hollywood: Paramount, 2008) DVD.
11. For an extensive discussion of the impact of this “checkerboard subdivision,” and Industrialization on the Romantic movement, see M.H. Abrams “The Romantic Period,” Norton Anthology of English Literature: 3rd Edition , ed. M.H. Abrams (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 1285–1286.
12. Diane Waldeman as qtd. in Lucy Fischer, “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby ,” in The Dread of Difference, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 417.
13. For a subsection of Romantic writers, termed the Negative or Dark Romantics, the experience of the sublime, solipsistic focus on the self, and the pressure on their creative imaginative abilities, resulted in psychic crises instead of conventional Romantic ecstasy and awe. What D. G. James says of all Romantic writers may be an overstatement for writers like Wordsworth, but more appropriately describes the Dark Romantics including Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron: “The Romantics achieve their heights by placing impossible demands for certitude on creative imagination—and finding the results unsatisfactory or ultimately insubstantial, they collapse back in despair.” James as qtd. in Robert D. Hume, “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism,” in Gothic Imagination , ed. G.R. Thompson (Tacoma: Washington State University Press, 1974), 110.
14. The question of whether the events of the film actually happen, or only happen in Rosemary’s mind, is left open-ended. In either case, the audience cannot escape Rosemary’s perspective on those events, which implies that she creates the meaning of these events for the audience by virtue of the claustrophobic subjectivity the audience is forced to share with her.
15. John Orr, “Polanski: The Art of Perceiving, ” in The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World , eds. John Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowska (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 12.
16. For evidence of the semi-autobiographical nature of Frankenstein , see Shelley’s 1831 introduction to her novel, as well as George Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein ,” in Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , ed. Mary Lowe-Evans (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 25–39.
17. Elzbeita Ostrowska, “Knife in the Water : Polanski’s Nomadic Discourse Begins,” The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World , eds. John Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowska (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 75.
18. Polanski’s mother died in the gas chambers, and he narrowly survived the Holocaust himself. He lived through the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969, and in a cruel irony, was publicly considered a suspect for the crime due to the dark nature of Rosemary’s Baby . Polanski’s criminal history is well documented, but worth mentioning because it confirms the (albeit qualified) culprit/victim position he shares with Shelley. He was charged with, and pled guilty to, unlawful sex with a minor, which has infamously kept him out of the United States since 1977.
19. Shelley delivered her first live child (who died a month later) in 1815, and over the next three years survived two more pregnancies and two more deaths. During the same time span, she also lived through the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and a pregnant Harriet Shelley (her husband’s first wife).
20. Anne Mellor as qtd. in David J. Skal, Screams of Reason : Mad Science and Modern Culture (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 54.
21. Mary Lowe-Evans, “Introduction,” Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , ed. Mary Lowe-Evans (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 2.
22. Levine, 34.
23. Gothic tales like Frankenstein most often take place in aristocratic society and infamously employ multiple sets of doppelgangers or divided characters (i.e., Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde) to suggest the dark underbellies of such societies. Rosemary’s Baby features its own host of doubles, including former Bramford residents, the Trench sisters. These proper Victorian ladies cannibalized their neighbors. Like Central Park, these briefly depicted characters are meaningful as they suggest a common theme of Frankenstein and Rosemary’s Baby —the idea that monsters are not aberrant elements who enter society from without, but rather that they are birthed from within.
24. As George Levine notes, “Morality, as it were, was replaced by schizophrenia,” 34.
25. Levine, 34.
26. Maximilian le Cain, “Into the Mouth of Madness: in The Tenant ,” The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World , eds. John Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowska (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 122.
27. Throughout the film, in fact, there are a number of tongue-in-cheek plays on the limited power of language: the incomplete note that Rosemary finds the first time she views the Bramford apartment which reads “I can no longer associate …” the realtor’s prescient observation that “we’ll never know” why the previous tenant covered up her linen closet; Dr. Saperstein’s warnings to Rosemary not to read; and Rosemary’s near-mute state at the end of the film.
28. Christian Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood’s Post-Traumatic Cycle: 1967–1976,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s , eds. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 297.
29. Mellor, as qtd. in Skal, 54.
30. Fischer, 413.
31. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Preface to Monster Theory: Reading Culture , ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996), vii.
32. See Dennis Giles, “Conditions of Pleasure in Horror Cinema,” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film , ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 38–53.
33. Lynch and Polanski have been reticent to discuss similarities between their films, but film scholars have certainly drawn parallels: none more evocative than Erica Sheen and Annette Davison’s description of the child at the center of Eraserhead: “Although … nowhere in the published interviews does Lynch make actual reference to Repulsion (Roman Polanski 1965), J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum must be onto something when they describe the baby as ‘an illegitimate monster—a mewling, eye-rolling first cousin to the skinned-rabbit centerpiece of Roman Polanski’s [film].” Erica Sheen and Annette Davison, “Introduction,” The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions , eds. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 1–4.
34. Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 12.
35. It is difficult to imagine anyone other than Lynch directing the film, and just as difficult to escape the protagonist’s perception as it is in Repulsion.
36. K.G. Godwin, “Eraserhead : The Story Behind the Strangest Film Ever Made, and Cinematic Genius Who Directed It,” Cinefantastique 14.5 (September 1984): 48.
37. Eraserhead actually debuted in 1977, after the bulk of New Hollywood films were produced.
38. Keathley, 302.
39. McGowan, 35–36.
40. McGowan, 35.
41. Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 73.
42. Steven J. Schneider, “The Essential Evil in/of Eraserhead (or, Lynch to the Contrary),” in The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions , eds. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 9.
43. Schneider, 9.
44. Shelley, 23.
45. Shelley, 24.
46. Shelley, 24.
47. Schneider, 13.
48. The other parallel to be drawn between Eraserhead and its predecessors is the heavy price Dr. Frankenstein and Henry pay for their one spontaneous act (creating The Monster and removing his baby’s bandages, respectively), a narrative rendering of the concept of entropy. According to the theory of entropy, the energetic benefit of creation within a closed system is never equal to the amount of energy expended. For his one act of creation, Frankenstein loses his younger brother, family friend Justine, wife/cousin Elizabeth, best friend Henry, and father. In Eraserhead , not only does Henry’s monstrous baby decompose before his eyes, but the planet also explodes, seemingly as a direct result of his actions.
49. G.R. Thompson, “Introduction: Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition,” Gothic Imagination: Essays on Dark Romanticism , ed. G.R. Thompson (Tacoma: Washington State University Press, 1974), 6.
50. Schneider, 15–16.