Praise, condemnation, questions, and recipes for tannis root shakes can be sent to blackmassappealpod@gmail.com.
SHOW LINKS
- The Satanic Temple and YWCA Settle Donation Dispute Like Adults
- A history of Rosemary’s Baby
- Why ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Still Matters 47 Years Later (okay, this article’s three years old)
- Rosemary’s Baby Is Still Chilling at 50
- Teaching ‘Rosemary’s Baby’
- Can we save ‘Rosemary’s Baby’?
- Church of Satan History: Hell on Reels
- “Post-Feminist” ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is a Difficult Labor (a review of the 2014 remake)
CONTACT THE SATANIC TEMPLE – SANTA CRUZ CHAPTER
GET IN TOUCH WITH BLACK MASS APPEAL
- Patreon
- Tabitha Slander’s Instagram
- Sign up for the Black Mass Appeal newsletter
I’ve always tended to read Rosemary’s Baby as social satire through the lens of intergenerational conflict. A young couple just starting out is gradually corrupted by the older generation that has made a literal Faustian bargain in exchange for a continued stranglehold on power and control. But of course, they need young blood and control over reproduction to continue their dominance into the future. Guy can’t manage to make it to success until he, too, allows himself to be tainted by their corruption (ingratiating himself with the old guard and behaving as they would have him do). Rosemary’s own desire for a baby and family with her husband on their own terms gets coopted and corrupted by the older guard’s designs on her reproductive capacity, to produce children according to their aims and desires. I feel this message resonates well with what I perceive as the current political and societal conditions in the US: an older guard have political and economic power on lockdown with very traditional ideas about what families should be, how women should behave, what career options are valid and what you must do to access them, while the younger generations struggle to work with, around, and beyond the systemic corruption of the older generations, whether conservative or neoliberal. And they do manage, through careful grooming and coercive upbringing–e.g. through homeschool and parochial education–to produce simulacra of themselves among select members of the younger generations. Women in general struggle for both the power and public recognition of ownership over their own bodies and reproductive capacities. Creative types struggle to make their way in society and make a living without compromising themselves according to the questionable aims and whims of entrenched power. And so forth.