[In the following essay, Diski argues that Rosemary's Baby presents a realistic representation of the fears and anxieties experienced by women during pregnancy.]

There was a phrase in quite general use by male critics during the 50s and 60s to describe certain women writers (though not directors—but as far as I can remember only Agnès Varda had movies released back then). They were described as “man haters”. The phrase comes back to me because something similar is cropping up these days in articles written by women about film directors (still largely men). Settle down to a piece by a woman about Peckinpah, De Palma, Altman or Tarantino and you're very likely to read that they “don't like women”. (The language is slightly changed, but then women are different. They're nicer, aren't they?) “He doesn't like women”: it's a phrase that might be fine for dismissing a piece of work without merit or interest (though “crap” would do better, taking up minimal space and leaving room to write about other things). But unless the desire is to dismiss an entire body of work, it's not a criticism that tells us very much or takes us very far.

Of all directors, Peckinpah is the least problematic: women are male accessories, pure and simple, sometimes allowing his men to feel a little sentimental (though they're better at doing that with other men), but usually no more than flesh for consumption. Tarantino might be Peckinpah's successor as regards his interest in women. De Palma and Altman come further along the line of complexity, directors whose women are at least sometimes given psychological and biological motivation and are gazed at with some thought by the camera.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not suggesting that these directors, and others, do like women, I'm writing from a feeling that most men find the idea of women alarming in some way or other—and that their films, books, the way they sell us cabbages, can't help but reflect their ambivalence. To say that this is the case is to say nothing very remarkable—if used as a criticism in itself, it merely closes down further thought. Perhaps the real problem we have is that there are only two off-the-peg genders available for depiction (even allowing for alternative sexual choice), and that the relationship between them is inevitably suffused with the generalised tension which any paired oppositions must feel for one other. As a woman, I'm neither surprised nor necessarily personally offended by this state of affairs (though there are moments). Having acknowledged the inevitability, I reserve the right to be intrigued rather than outraged. In any case, it's better for my health.

Roman Polanski's view of women is nothing if not intriguing, ranging as it does from moments of remarkable sensitivity about their lives to pure and puerile pornographic depiction of their bodies. It's probably the range of understanding most men experience internally, but Polanski lays it down on film for us all to see. It is Polanski who expresses most clearly the ambiguity of his feelings—empathy and disgust—for the other sex. For this, at least, he deserves serious attention.

And in this respect, Rosemary's Baby is his richest film, centring as it does on the Other in her most esoteric condition. His earlier and later films address aspects of her predicament—neurosis, vulnerability, strangeness—but Rosemary herself is ground zero: the reproducing woman. Pregnancy is the state in which women are most alien to men. This is not unreasonable: it's also the state in which they may be most alien to themselves. Prior to pregnancy, and prior to the understanding of its linkage with reproduction, women's ability to bleed and remain healthy has always been under interdiction; the rhetoric has claimed that they are unclean, but, more essentially, it is evidence—to men who bleed only when injured—that women are beyond the ordinary human condition. You don't have to be a man to see that menstruation and pregnancy are likely to disturb those who do not experience them. You don't have to be a man to feel that the internal incubation of a life is alien. Very likely we would all have got along a lot better if we'd evolved to reproduce by laying eggs. That way the male, like the Emperor Penguin, could sit with them on his feet and feel he was an active participant in the process. Women too could benefit from the same reassurance. In exploring Rosemary's pregnancy, Polanski is not just looking at male resentment and envy at what is going on without their participation, he is also, and more interestingly, exploring the impotence of women themselves in the process of making life. Whether as a man he is fit to do so is perhaps arguable, though not by me. (One of the great disservices of the teaching of English today—and by extension any creative activity—is that children are told they must write only out of their own experience, as if reaching out to what is not known had no part in creativity.) Personally, I'm happy for Polanski to do his best, or worst, or just middling, with a woman's experience of pregnancy, and content to assess the results.

Viewed from the perspective of all the Exorcists and Omens—parts one to infinity—Rosemary's Baby, released in 1968, looks like the mother of modern satanic movies. As such, it's a fairly ordinary popular film with a better than average sense of humour. The motivation is simple; emotionally remote, ambitious actor husband (John Cassavetes) succumbs to the temptations of good roles offered by a neighbouring coven in return for the use of his painfully naive and submissive wife's body (Mia Farrow at her most anorexic) to incubate the son of Satan. The fun is in the detail: Ruth Gordon's intrusive busybody as modern urban witch (all those interfering neighbours who can no longer be denounced and burned); Ralph Bellamy as a latterday witch-doctor (what male gynaecologist isn't?); Rosemary's proto-yuppie snobbery (“They only have three matching plates”) getting its come-uppance. But something else is going on which makes you suspect that the diabolical storyline is, after all, only a trope for something much more disturbing. The real subject of the film is child-bearing, not the devil's incarnation as Anti-Christ.

The all-pervasive use of the colour yellow (Rosemary's clothes, the flowered bedroom walls, the bed sheets, the nursery decor, the refrigerator; there's scarcely a frame without some tinge of yellow) whispers not of satanic hellfire but of Easter eggs, spring and birth. Red is saved for the outfit Rosemary wears on the night of impregnation, and if it carries overtones of the daddy incubus of them all, it also speaks of the menstrual cycle and the care with which Cassavetes, as husband Guy (good name), has ensured that the womb in question is nicely lined and receptive. It may not be the contaminated chocolate mousse that Ruth Gordon gives her to eat on baby-making night which renders Rosemary impotent in the matter of her own pregnancy, but Guy's assumption of control over the process at its earliest stages. Guy initiates the idea of making a baby and takes charge of the timing, appropriating Rosemary's menstrual cycle, marking the calendar on the kitchen wall, stabbing at it with his finger to point out to her the precise day of her peak fertility. By the following month, he, not Rosemary, knows that she is exactly two days overdue. Guys like to keep tabs on what they fear they can't control. The stiff little pre-impregnation dinner à deux inaugurates not love-making but Rosemary's paralysis and rape by her husband and/or the Prince of Darkness. The apparently doctored mousse is a sufficient but not necessary condition for Rosemary's mental absence from the act of procreation; if we chose to set aside the satanic storyline, Guy's cold controlling formality would do just as well.

Rosemary dislikes the constant attention of her elderly neighbours, but the wilting of her already etiolated spirit seems to have more to do with Guy's neglect. For all I know, the symptoms she develops in early pregnancy may be classic signs of a woman bearing the son of Satan, but they must be just as common in women who through isolation feel that pregnancy is an illness. She loses weight (a horrible thing to see when the actress is Mia Farrow), she has pains “as if a wire was being tightened inside me”, she is fearful of something she can't name. If we didn't know we were watching a satanic movie, we wouldn't hesitate to call her increasing conviction that there is a conspiracy between her husband and the neighbours paranoia. Certainly, the good gynaecologist she escapes her flat to go uptown to consult sees it that way, as she sits in his office and tells him what's been going on. Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of will to see it any other way, even within the conventions of the movie we think we're seeing, because Mia Farrow's performance in that scene is so classically psychotic. This is Polanski having it, uncomfortably for us, both ways. Read Rosemary's fears as the terror of pregnancy, and all the devil-bearing stuff falls into place as the world viewed from her disturbed mind. The neighbours are filmed less and less realistically, and in the final scene, where Rosemary breaks through into the next door flat to find the coven and the black-draped cradle, the view is so distorted that the far end of the room vanishes into near-infinite distance and the people in it are virtual statues.

From an objective point of view, a nine-month pregnancy is a mysterious and fearful thing. How do you know what is going on inside you? It's an astonishing feat of (I suppose) evolution that women mostly get through the long uncertainty believing that something perfectly ordinary is happening to them. Even so, there can be few who haven't wondered to themselves that something live, something not them is sitting inside them, taking nourishment and coming to term. Pregnancy and alien implantation are only a thin, rational line apart, and Polanski teeters along it as he tries to imagine what such an experience must be like. It's a classic case study of pre-partum psychosis, not such a rare thing, and certainly not an entirely unreasonable response to such an unreasonable situation. Guys like to be in control, after all, so what must it be like for the half of the race who for months at a time are not in control at all? Men may envy women's capacity to bear life, but they must also feel some relief hat they are not obliged to do so. Rosemary's Baby is an expression of that ambiguity.