Marxist Midwifery

Marxist Midwifery:
The Alienation of Maternal Labor in Rosemary’s Baby & Eraserhead

by Brian Rose
University of North Carolina at Asheville
October 2009

Marxist Midwifery:
The Alienation of Maternal Labor in Rosemary’s Baby & Eraserhead
The theme of childbirth offers a subtle yet rich symbology on which to perpetuate
many aspects Marxist ideology. Exploring the theme as an allegorical construction of
Capitalism, one finds an abundant Marxist subtext that permeates from the level of the
symbolic through to the level of social actualization: During conception, the masculine
and feminine unite in the act of copulation; what is produced from this act of intimacy,
however, is represented as undergoing Capitalist containment, and is so utilized as
something antithetical to this intimacy – that is, alienation, as manifest in the alienating
variable of the conceptual/literal infant (saturated with connotations of practical
exploitation or the depletion of resources) that cultivates an impenetrable boundary
between masculine and feminine within the ontology that the film constructs. The female
becomes an object of utility through which to cultivate this alienating influence; a barrier
is constructed between herself and the male, who is barred from the recesses of her womb
and from her creative experience. Through a process of labor, she expels an alienated
product – an object that (in the Capitalist context) is excluded from her intimacy, and
may only be treated as a dehumanized machine that desires resources and excretes waste.
One sees this allegory play out in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Lynch’s Eraserhead,
both of which treat the infant as an alien agent, locating it within some sort of abstract
distance and framing it within a dimension of ambiguity between waking ‘reality’ and
nightmarish oneiric states. As such, both films contribute to the enunciation of a MarxistFeminist notion of alienation; this enunciation is accomplished through the
phenomenological cultivation of an encompassing ‘atmosphere,’ the representation of

social dynamics (primarily that of the nuclear family) contained within that atmosphere,
and the surrealist element of oneiric states that confuse and disturb that atmosphere.
Both films very precisely underwrite a phenomenological atmosphere that
consumes the narrative itself, and all themes and activities within the films are therein
centered and delivered through the mediating contextualization of this atmosphere. In this
text I will seek to demonstrate that both films undertake an examination of one aspect
human condition (i.e. reproduction) in the context of Capitalist alienation – of which, in
his 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx explicates four types: alienation of [woman] from the
product of labor (i.e. the infant), from the productive activity of labor (i.e. physical
intimacy), from [her] species-being (i.e. femininity), and finally from other human beings
(i.e. feminist discourse).
One may identify an ideological narrative in one Marxist passage as informing the
aesthetic narrative of Rosemary’s Baby. Marx writes, “The laborer therefore only feels
[her]self outside [her] labor, and in [her] labor feels outside [her]self. . . . [Her] labor is
therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction
of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” (Marx 74). I have
substituted the translated word ‘work[er]’ with the more general ‘labor[er]’ for
consistency and made noted alteration to pronoun usage in order to better contextualize
the theory for the perspective of this text. The phenomenological atmosphere of the film
involves the misappropriation (or ‘expropriation’) of Rosemary’s feminine labor in order
to satisfy an external need.
Rosemary’s Baby cultivates this phenomenological cinematic space by opening
upon the metropolitan bustle – the archetypal fixture of the Capitalist mechanistic-

assemblage. The cold sterility of the inhuman city is contrasted with a disturbingly
inhuman lullaby as sung by a child. This sequence serves to establish an encompassing
atmosphere wherein the concrete image of Capitalism is intimately associated with the
abstract sound-byte of the lullaby. The film itself is unavoidably Gothic in its aesthetic
undertones, as both Valerius and Fischer both claim; the atmosphere it cultivates is
reactionary insomuch it inflicts itself upon the viewer and against multiplicitous
ideologies coming into a frictional contact with one another. As Valerius writes:
Rosemary's Baby articulates . . . a modern-day tale of witchcraft and
demonic pregnancy, a Faustian story of destructive ambition, a tribute to
Dracula in which the unborn rather than the undead perniciously feed off
the living, and a perversion of the Christian narrative of the Immaculate
Conception in which Satan impregnates a mortal woman in order to
become human and intervene in world history. (Valerius 118)
The film undertakes a critical examination of various value structures that are projected
in the scene upon Gothic structures, but ultimately falls back upon a reiterative discourse
involving the process of maternity and labor in order to articulate its social alienation
(and consequential devaluation) of women within Capitalist economic structures. Fischer
writes, “I read the film in the ‘space’ of various neighboring cultural discourses on
childbirth: the sacred, the mythic, the obstetrical, the psychiatric, the therapeutic, and the
artistic” (Fischer 5). Childbirth provides a richly thematic image through which to
explore a transvaluative ideology concerned with the gender implications of economic
systems, insomuch as childbirth is a fundamental process through which women’s bodies
have been historically demonstrated as being misappropriated and exploited by
masculinist power structures.
While abortion is rarely (if only once) mentioned within the film, the entire
narrative is suggestive of the theme of fetal termination. The actions utilized by the

antagonists in order to exploit and alienate Rosemary suggest the masculinist alienation
of her femininity from her corporeity; furthermore, Polanski uses cinematic devices that
compel one to resist Rosemary’s externally-imposed alienation by anticipating the
internally-imposed alienation of the malevolent fetal entity. The spectator’s proposed
resistance to her alienation, however, represents an even more deeply imposed
construction of Capitalist alienation, so as to appropriate the spectator’s benevolent
resistance into the antagonism of the film itself – the spectator thus becomes implicated
in the brutality that is persistently inflicted upon Rosemary. Valerius writes, “The story
establishes a climate of fear and danger by invoking the coercive and sometimes deadly
reality created by a conservative sexual morality in combination with the criminalization
of abortion, where infanticide, suicide, and dangerous back alley abortions were the last
resort of desperate women” (Valerius 124).
The film situates its activity within another extension of phenomenological space
– that is, within a temporal milieu that underwrites its aesthetic symbology on a
fundamental level – it is that the film finds itself immersed in an era of sexual
transvaluation (circa the mid-1960s) that allows value-interpretations of the film to
develop relative to this temporal context. Valerius maintains, “The film explicitly situates
itself in Manhattan in 1965-66, and it is a product of and widely distributed participant in
the anxieties and conflicts of that specific moment. . . . [such as] the status of women as
legitimate political and legal subjects” (Valerius 116-117).
Valerius continues to cite Marcus as to emergent medical technologies of the era
which served to objectify the process of childbirth and thus worked to expropriate
women’s bodies within the power structure. First among these were programs circulated

assuring that there is nothing to fear about pregnancy, thus perpetuating a fundamental
conceptual association of pregnancy with fear; furthermore, “new fetal visualization
technologies like ultra sound, which extended medical surveillance of pregnancy, and in
revised medical knowledge about the placenta that positioned pregnant women as
potentially toxic environments for fetuses;” and finally the legality of abortions as only
being legitimately obtainable “on the paranoid grounds of ‘fetal perniciousness and
women's susceptibility to insanity’” (Valerius 120).
These three efforts, in the context of the 1960s, engaged women in an
institutionalized objectification of their collective corporeity and existential potentiality.
Being thus objectified, they were susceptible to Capitalist expropriation of the
manufactured product of their labor (i.e. childbirth). Fischer states:
As multifarious visions of childbirth have proliferated, so have competing
discourses, each seeking to explain and contain it. Despite this vocality,
the dialogue has disempowered woman or relegated her to virtual silence.
Religious thought elides her from the birth act. . . . Traditional obstetrics
denies the parturient woman agency, configuring her as passive patient.
Psychiatry ‘damns her with faint praise’ for successfully achieving
maternal maturity by sublimating her penis envy. (Fischer 5)
Rosemary’s Baby engages these discourses of labor on all the levels that Fischer
describes – from religion (i.e., the Satanic coven that claims her womb as their
receptacle) to obstetrics (i.e., Dr. Sapirstein, who subverts her agency in order that she
may be more easily exploited), even including psychiatry (implicit within the constant
paternalistic accusations of insanity which undermine her credibility).
One conceives that Rosemary’s exercise of her privacy (i.e. abortion, divorce)
might engender some sort of agency. However, Polanski represents these alleged
resolutions of privacy as futile, perhaps because they rely upon the same sort of
alienating process (though imposed from an alternate source) whose activity is the

construction of a system of alienation. Valerius writes, “Rosemary's story would seem to
expose the limitations of privacy as a protection against violence or coercion. As the
feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ maintains, sexist power relations operate in and
through the private spaces of the home, domestic relationships, and the bodies and
psyches of individual men and women” (Valerius 121). The alienation of privacy is an
inadequate reaction against the alienation of labor as imposed by Capitalist and
masculinist power structures. Having constructed these phenomenological boundaries,
the characters are thus provided with a cinematic world in which to engage the conflict of
their respective values.
While Rosemary’s Baby articulates its discourse through a feminine perspective,
David Lynch’s Eraserhead offers a more masculinist articulation of horror and childbirth.
It nonetheless perpetuates its discourse through representations that parallel Rosemary’s
Baby. For whereas women are alienated by Capitalist structure, men invariably succumb
to the same dynamic of alienation – though they are therein exported to drastically
different phenomenological locations. Eraserhead accomplishes a masculinist
articulation of Capitalist alienation on a most fundamental level, through the perpetuation
of a harsh phenomenological atmosphere that exhibits the post-Industrial extreme of the
same Capitalist machinery that subsumes the cinematic activity of Rosemary’s Baby.
While Rosemary’s world is defined by Capitalism, it at least offers some sort of
humanistic literality with which the audience may identify or transpose themselves.
Contrastly, Henry’s world is completely lost within a nihilistic undercurrent that is too
surreal to present any semblance of continuity or humanity upon which the spectator may
grip. As Godwin claims, “The world of Eraserhead is a dead one, bleak and sterile.

Man's interference has made it actively hostile to life, and this process has rebounded on
him in the form of a perversion of the most basic of life's forces: sex” (Godwin 39). In
short, the entire film is the reiteration of a nightmarish sequence of nocturnal emissions.
As being a quintessentially aesthetic enunciation of an oneiric state, the film does
not possess any vested interest in moral structures such as Marxist revolution or Feminist
liberation. It is a political enunciation which possess no definite political goals, and
insomuch is it fundamentally a denunciation. As such, it is sufficiently egoistic enough to
explore the inner recesses of the alienated (male) identity. Godwin maintains,
“Eraserhead, while it dwells on shocking, even perverse images, seems in-turned,
obsessively introspective. It provides an auditory and visual assault which isolates each
viewer. The experience becomes intensely personal, un-shared” (Godwin 37). The dream
perspective finds itself immersed in a post-Industrial world offering no object on which
to project its hope or its pre-Industrial uterine identity. Its phenomenological atmosphere
inheres materially as “a bleak, grimy urban wasteland; concrete expanses, tenements in a
narrow street, relieved only occasionally by open space—treeless waste ground” – a
confused expanse of excess punctuated by void that possesses an incessant “metallic
rattle of some idle device off in the shadows” (Godwin 39).
In enunciating its phenomenological discourse of introspection, all activity within
the film centers around imagery with an “almost obsessive interest in biological
matters—the textures of internal organs, physical deformity” which, coupled with the
“post-industrial landscape in which the film is set[,] . . . depict people trapped in
mechanical complexes, often being absorbed into the machinery; creatures half-organic,
half-mechanical; landscapes of glistening flesh; decaying biological matter” (Godwin

38). While Rosemary’s atmosphere was one of Capitalism at the apex of its potential,
Henry’s atmosphere is one of Capitalism at the post-climactic ruination of its potential –
the machine that once flew high but has now plummeted to the ground and shattered into
a multiplicitous array of fragmentary, isolated, damaged individuals. The atmosphere
displays itself in “inefficient, decaying technology” as manifest “in the empty rotting
industrial sites, in the barely functioning elevator in Henry's building, in the violently
burning-out light bulbs” (Godwin 40).
The phenomenological cultivation of the hyper-Capitalist atmosphere of both
films must ultimately fall upon the characters to cohabitate within this atmosphere – and
at the center of these relational dynamics is the Oedipal structure of the nuclear family as
the primary object of its narrative. Both directors, however, manage to warp the Oedipal
paradigm by staging the mother-father figures as alienated across a fluctuating field of
distance (never quite determinate enough to identify, yet aesthetically consistent enough
so as to be discernable at least in irony). Furthermore, the product of their copulation (the
antithesis of their imposed alienation) is in both cases a warped and inhuman entity. Both
narratives represent the implicit rejection of Capitalism as a source of dehumanization,
insomuch as they serve to underscore the true source of cultural power dynamics as
Capitalist alienation and its misogynistic implications.
The narrative of Rosemary’s Baby traces the line between two parallel levels of
critical representation, lending to the film a sense of duality and the consequential tension
of exclusionary choice that imposes itself upon the spectator’s cinematic experience. The
first representation expresses itself quasi-literally as a Marxist critical representation,
insomuch as Rosemary’s child is the direct result of the masculinist/Capitalist utilization

of her body as a receptacle object. Furthermore, this act of utilization traces her life along
all of Marx’s levels of alienation: from the product of her labor (the devil-infant), from
her productive activity of labor (intimacy with her husband), from her species-being (her
femininity), and ultimately from society (her extramarital friendships).
Rosemary, as protagonist, undergoes the radical objectification of her own body
as her husband strikes a deal with the coven for control over it. The deal is so struck in
the pursuit of his own commercial success – Guy seeks fame and power within the
Capitalist structure so much that it overwhelms any affection he might still possess for
Rosemary, thus enabling him to rationalize his exponential utilization of her body for his
own gain. Valerius contends, “Rosemary's exploitation by her husband and the coven,
who coldly pursue their own interests in her future child without regard for her desires or
well being, might be read as an indictment of the more routine ways sexist social
relations expropriate women's reproductive labor” (Valerius 119-20). The fetus’s very
biological essence is cultivated to resemble their own design (the design of the Satanic
male element) – a design that excludes, undermines, and overshadows her own maternal
influence.
The film mocks Rosemary’s own consenting role in this process. Just as the
oppressed worker assents to oppression in the interest of his/her survival, Rosemary is
persistently willing to disassociate her own agency to the hands of male figures (figures
who the spectator receives ironically and thus discerns their malevolence). Rosemary’s
desire for care is manufactured into an object of paternalism – care is transformed into
control. As Fischer claims, “Women seek external support out of a desire ‘to be cared for
and protected’ . . . The film chronicles this dependency, as Rosemary passively

‘transfers’ stewardship of her pregnancy to others” (Fischer 11). Male figures in
Rosemary’s life “assume a paternalistic authority” (Valerius 120) which imbues them
with a credibility that is able to dismiss any of Rosemary’s thoughts or desires as
manifestations of insanity. Thus is Rosemary alienated from the productive activity of
labor, as represented in the intimacy she once shared (or believe she shared) with Guy –
as Guy exploits this intimacy in order to impose conceptual boundaries between them.
This expropriation and alienation of the product and productive activity of her
labor is reiterated as the quintessence of blasphemy, as being a ‘deal with the devil’
(Capitalist negotiation) that culminates in Rosemary’s literal rape by the devil (wherein
Capitalism seeds and constructs itself within her). This negotiation and subsequent
construction of Capitalism is delivered through the institution of marriage, wherein the
paternalistic husband’s role of protection devolves into a role of predation. This symbolic
act (syncretized with historical conceptions of witch-lore) not only assaults the speciesbeing of her femininity but no less than alienates her from it; this alienation is suggested
by the cutting of her own hair and the emaciation she undergoes following conception.
Marx writes, “External labor, labor in which [woman] alienates [her]self, is a labor of
self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the laborer
appears in the fact that it is not [her] own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to
[her], that in it [she] belongs, not to [her]self, but to another” (Marx 74).
The figures of paternalistic authority alienate Rosemary from the world in every
conceivable way – Sapirstein forbids her to read pregnancy books or to take prescription
drugs for fear that they might subvert the control which he and the others wield over her.
Even as Rosemary’s female friends console her in the kitchen at her party (urging her to

seek the advice of another doctor), Guy must be physically barred from the room, though
he still asserts his gaze paternalistically through the glass. Still, Rosemary often assents to
her own alienation. Fischer writes, “Consumed by her fears of possession, Rosemary
refuses to see friends—tracing the pregnant woman's alleged ‘increased selfpreoccupation and . . . decline of emotional investment in the external world’” (Fischer
11).
The second layer of subtext of the film is the sublimated malevolence or
dysfunction of the entity that Rosemary contains. Abortion rarely enters into literal
consideration within the narrative, but this absence of consideration is underscored by the
perpetual implication of miscarriage (as represented in her pains and in her resistance to
the masculine exploitation of her pregnancy). Nonetheless, the subtext of abortion
provides a parallel representation which contrasts the Marxist critical narrative, and
subverts this paradigm from within the perspective of the spectator; that is, the spectator
desires to see the termination of the demonic entity that Rosemary contains. Valerius
maintains, “As Finkbine's story did, Rosemary's Baby addresses itself to an audience
invested in the sentimental ideal of motherhood, exploits that investment to produce a
horrified response, and thereby makes abortion compelling” (Valerius 125).
The implication of abortion asserts itself with progressively increasing intensity
proportionate to the revelation of the entity contained by Rosemary as a sinister entity;
that is, the more one comes to see the fetus as malformed according to human standards
of functional utility, the more one (as cinematic spectator) legitimizes the possibility of
abortion. Valerius writes, “[U]ntil the twentieth century, ‘monster’ was a term used to
refer to people born with congenital deformities, and copulation with the devil was one

traditional explanation for the cause of monstrous births” (Valerius 125). The spectator
conceives a devaluation of the fetus’s life that parallels the perceived inability for the
infant to undergo Capitalist containment and utilization, and thus the product of her labor
may be conceptually expropriated and materially excised as an irrelevant (and therefore
inhuman) component of her corporeity. As Fischer reminds us, “[M]onsters suffer from
‘categorical incompleteness’” (Fischer 10)
Rosemary herself descends into the spectator’s pity as she unwittingly protects the
devil that she cultivates inside of her. Valerius writes, “Until [the] final revelation,
Rosemary's misplaced fears for the well being of her much-desired first born compel her
to piece together the conspiracy against her, and she suspects the coven is waiting for her
infant to be born in order to steal it for a sacrificial ritual” (Valerius 119). She seeks to
preserve the pregnancy when she believes that it is intended as functional (the ‘sacrificial
ritual’ representing the process Capitalist appropriation of labor), yet the spectator
invariably questions how she might feel if she was aware of the true monstrosity that her
womb conceals. By leaving this unanswered until the final scene, Polanski uses the
spectator’s own inner question to taunt his/her notions of morality and ideology.
The director refuses to satiate the spectator’s desire for termination, as it is
quintessentially imposed by the process of Capitalist alienation wherein one must abort
the product of ones labor if it is unable to be expropriated into the Capitalist structure.
One wishes the fetus to be alienated from her (as malevolent in its futility), yet Polanski
resists the spectator’s Capitalistically-imposed desire and instead aesthetically cultivates
the malevolent entity within the heroine as a spectacle in itself. In doing so, he parodies
this Capitalist devaluation of her product (as unable to be practically utilized according to

its intended function) simultaneously as he parodies the devaluation of femininity itself
(as being a vessel for an alienated and malevolent entity – willing only through ignorance
of her condition).
Summarily, Rosemary’s demonic infant serves as the critical center for two
parallel representational schema: it is simultaneously a factor of direct Capitalist
influence (i.e. alienating factor) as it is a factor upon which the spectator may impose
his/her Capitalist rejection thereof (i.e. it is dehumanized insomuch as it does not
conform to Capitalist standards of functionality). Thus the infant represents a source of
simultaneously Capitalist and Marxist sentimentality, subverts such moralistic ideological
boundaries, and ultimately contributes to a spectacle of horror via said subversion.
This subversion of moralistic ideological boundaries is most complete with its
culmination of Rosemary’s maternity – the final scene wherein she resigns herself to
nurturing the devil-spawn that she has incubated within her. She re-appropriates the
deformed product of her labor and asserts an ambiguous sense of agency by transcending
her own alienation and nurturing the infant (deformed as it is) as her own. This reassimilation of labor’s product is symbolically anticipated by Rosemary’s illicit intrusion
upon the Castavets’ apartment. Fischer writes, “Early on in Rosemary's Baby we learn
that the Woodhouse and Castevet apartments were once a single residence that was later
subdivided. The Woodhouses now live in the ‘back rooms’ of the original lodging.
Significantly, at the film's conclusion, Rosemary opens the barricaded door that conjoins
the two habitations” (Fischer 14). The phallus of a knife in hand, Rosemary storms
through boundaries once utilized in order to assault her and revolutionarily claims
ownership over the product of her own labor. This does not, however, come without a

price. Valerius states, “Rosemary's seduction by motherhood is a profane parody of
sacred maternity that is horrifying for the extreme self-sacrifice it implies. Within the
terms of the film, Rosemary's assent to nurture the baby entails eternal damnation”
(Valerius 128).
While Eraserhead relies upon the atmosphere it cultivates much more heavily
than Rosemary’s Baby (which is more character-reliant), it ultimately must fall back upon
some sort of localized identity (or oneiric symbol thereof). If, as Godwin posits, the
atmosphere that Eraserhead cultivates is that of introspection and corruption, then the
underlying foundation of Eraserhead’s phenomenological atmosphere of corruption is
“man: the human mind, or intellect, or consciousness—that part of man which causes him
to perceive himself as apart from the rest of nature, a separateness which causes him to
believe that he is free to interfere with and alter nature in any way he desires, with
impunity” (Godwin 39). And while the characters of Rosemary’s Baby are alienated, they
at least maintain some sense of linguistic congruity with one another, whereas
Eraserhead obliterates all forms of communication through its quasi-schizophrenic
discourse. Godwin states that the majority of Eraserhead’s dialogue “exhibit[s] an almost
complete incongruity in each character's behavior—a breakdown or even a complete
absence of communication between one mind and another which is nonetheless accepted
by the characters as communication” (38). The characters have become so alienated that
they do not even recognize the absurdist discontinuity that permeates all levels of
communication in which they engage.
If one is to posit that the film possesses a fixed central perspective around which
all others are organized, one may identify this perspective (though perhaps with some

difficulty) as Henry, who represents not a material identity but an oneiric identity – the
masculine perspective that has become so disengaged from reality that it may only be
expressed in the oneiric dream-state. Godwin writes, “The film itself presents us with no
one who stands outside the events of the dream. Henry, at the center, is not the dreamer
but rather the dreamer's dream identity (it is very much a male dream)” (Godwin 39).
This reiteration of the masculine perspective is a critical one, brutally introspective so as
to access the deepest fears latent within the male psyche that have been imposed
throughout the perpetuation and ruination of Capitalism. Godwin continues, “The
symbolic progress of the film reveals an ever-deepening fear of sex (as the agency by
which life perpetuates itself), leading ultimately to a disgust which can only be remedied
by a complete escape from it—into death” (39). It is Henry’s desire to transcend his
alienation from the feminine by pursuing the originary pre-Capitalist womb that will
ultimately culminate in the totalistic demise of his identity.
One may begin the examination of the characters of the film with one of the first
scenes of dialogue – this being Henry’s visit to the X’s household. Bill (Mary’s father)
represents the aged worker whose repetitive, mechanical motion has alienated him from
his own limb. Godwin describes, “[Bill] asks Henry to do the carving [because] some
years ago he had an operation on his arm. The doctors told him he would never recover
the use of it. ‘But what do they know?’ He rubbed it every day and bit by bit he regained
movement until now ‘it's as good as new.’ Except that there is absolutely no feeling in it;
he will not carve because he is afraid he might cut himself” (Godwin 40). This ritualistic
locomotive activity has imbued functionality to the limb, but has disassociated sensation
– it is only viable mechanistically, yet as such it is weaker and dehumanized, unable to

wield even a carving knife to utilize on miniscule birds (with obviously feminine
symbolism, as bleeding between the thighs and thrashing in resistance when confronted
by the phallic knife). The spectator also bears witness to a more advanced progression of
this alienation within the figure of “the grandmother sitting in the kitchen, a vegetable
appendage to the family, moving only when Mrs. X manipulates her lifeless hands to toss
the salad” (40). Vegetative, she is only alive insomuch as she may be mechanistically
employed; how, then, are we as spectators compelled to assess the value of her life – or
of life in general – within the context of this narrative?
The Oedipal consequence of Henry’s dream-identity is manifest in the figure of
‘the Baby’ – which is dehumanized in the most literal way possible, on every level from
which the spectator may perceive it. The other Oedipal figures (Henry and Mary)
approach this dehumanized entity with a sort of skeptical ambivalence, yet though it
exhausts them and their responses to it suggest a sense revulsion, they still feel compelled
to care for the alienated creature. Godwin entails a phallic significance to the Baby,
stating, “From its shape and its position in the film's structure of symbols, it can be only
one thing: the penis (complete with scrotum-the bandage-wrapped sac to which the head
is attached by a thin neck). But it is the penis grown out of all proportion; it has become a
separate entity, all appetite” (Godwin 42). Just as in Rosemary’s Baby, the product of
woman’s labor has been expropriated into a deformed masculinist structure; as shown in
a variety of levels within Henry’s dream, femininity invariably serves only as the
receptacle for his penis – furthermore, an alienated receptacle that horrifies him and
compels him to retreat.

The phallic quintessence of masculine sexuality is presented as being alienated
from the male by act of copulation (his resistance to his alienation from the feminine) and
therein manufactured by the female, only to be expelled prematurely as a reflection of his
genital contribution, so that its incessant needs terrorize her simply as a continuation of
the genital terrorism. When Mary refuses to submit to such terror, she displaces it back
upon the masculine – so that the masculinist structure whose design is the exploitation of
femininity has now inverted upon itself (suggesting the inversion of power of Marx’s
Dialectical Materialism). Godwin continues, “[The phallic infant’s] cry for attention
hardly ever stops. It even disturbs the neighbor as she is willingly giving herself to
Henry. Mary is driven away by its need, she rejects its demands (and Henry's slightest
sexual move) and is, as a punishment, ‘infected’ by its product, the malignant sperm”
(Godwin 42). Henry’s own possessive phallic sexuality alienates himself from the world,
as “Henry wants to leave the apartment, the claustrophobic trap of his tiny airless room,
but every time he reaches for the door the baby cries out again” (42).
Dream states operate within each of the films’ narratives to confuse and abstract
the order cultivated within the phenomenological atmosphere. The events themselves
within the films operate according to concrete structures and literal imagery; however,
dream and nightmare sequences impose a surrealist filter through which the spectator
accesses and processes the narrative, and thus subverts attempts at identification and
recognition. Oneiric states are representative of both the horror genre and pregnancy, and
through this mutualistic representation the activity of nightmares works to associate both
horror and pregnancy with one another. Fischer deems “the nine-month period a quasioneiric state, since women must attend to an abstract being” and “finds women prone to

reverie in this condition” (Fischer 9). This ‘quasi-oneiric state’ manifests itself as horrific
in the perpetuation of nightmare sequences within the genre. At a certain point within
each film, the dream itself is imbued within the cinematic structure, and we may not
assuredly discern between the dream and the template of reality to which the dream lays
referential claim.
Rosemary’s Baby offers a unique role for the oneiric space, insomuch as it is only
in her dream states that Rosemary discerns the true sinister nature of the conspiracy that
exploits her. In order to accomplish this, it provides a transient boundary between reality
and the dream that allows us to observe congruities between them and recognize (as
spectator) how the dream reflects reality (even if Rosemary does not). Valerius states,
“Rosemary's Baby theorizes a permeable relation between fantasy and reality in which
language serves as a placenta-like conduit for circulation between them. . . . Here fantasy
and reality are not carbon copies of one another, but they are in close communication”
(Valerius 122).
Of particular importance within the narrative is the conception scene wherein
Rosemary perceives her own rape by the devil, but only within the context of her
dreamworld. Valerius writes:
Rosemary's lucid perceptions interrupt her drug-induced dreams and she
recognizes for a panicked instant that she has confused rape by someone
inhuman with a pleasurable dream of sex with her husband. As fear
replaces her previously passive, voyeuristic interest in those dreams,
Rosemary protests ‘This is no dream! This is really happening!’ before
she is sedated. Her protest simultaneously asserts a distinction between
fantasy and reality and acknowledges how closely intertwined they are.
(Valerius 122)
Though she experiences the act of her assault, she is alienated from the intensity of it by
the sedative that the figures of paternalistic authority have concocted for her (just as

Capitalism alienates laborers from the intensity of their oppression through the opiate
influence of religion, drugs, etc.). Valerius expounds, “[A]lthough paranoia is commonly
understood precisely as an inability to differentiate between fantasy and reality, this is not
paranoid delusion, where imaginary fears and suspicions are projected out into the real
world, but its inverse. Rosemary mistakes her real experience for fantasy and dismisses
it” (Valerius 123).
The dream content itself contains a pervasive plethora of Catholic imagery – the
presence of the Kennedys, the shame of nudity, the Sistine Chapel, the Pope, etc.. This
imagery offers an ironic juxtaposition of the real template it represents, since it is the
Devil (and, significantly, not God) who is the entity with whom she copulates. Fischer
contends, “This warped rape fantasy reverberates with cultural clichés of woman's sexual
position. With female eroticism conceived as ‘the embodiment of guilt,’ it is logical that
Rosemary seeks the Holy Father's blessing” (Fischer 9). Polanski thus accomplishes a
subtle association of religious authority with demonic assault – subtle only insomuch as
he expresses it within the context of a dream.
Within Rosemary’s Baby, oneiric states not only serve to associate maternity with
horror, but also associate the audience with the narrative. As Valerius maintains, “As her
dreams digest real events and transform them into fantasy, Rosemary consumes her
dreams, which in turn elicit real responses from her. This communication between
fantasy and reality suggests by extension that between the fictional narrative itself and the
audience” (Valerius 123). Similarly, this association reflects the process of the Capitalist
mechanistic-assemblage, which works to manufacture the potentiality of the Idea into a

material Capital, and consequently this materiality is abstracted within a progressive
dialectic into further idealistic potential – a dialectic culminating in an Infinite Regress.
The surrealistic undertone of oneiric sequences invokes the historical
Capitalist/masculinist metanarrative around which alienation is constructed within the
mind of the spectator. Fischer writes, “That she is unconscious during intercourse, mocks
woman's ‘designated’ coital stance: passive and undemanding. That Guy is uninvolved
with her impregnation, evokes primitive beliefs that human males are removed from
procreation” (Fischer 9). Thus the surrealistic oneiric state serves as a cinematic parody
of paternalistic authority, and furthermore underwrites the artificial alienation of men and
women within Capitalist structures. Valerius states:
Her protest is delivered into the camera and makes a direct address that
acknowledges the presence of the audience and therefore implicates us as
voyeurs who watch as the coven members do. The direct address is also a
warning to the audience not to mistake Rosemary's violation for fantasy as
she will do the following morning. This warning both acknowledges the
role of the audience in interpretation and seeks to enroll us as witnesses of
her rape and potential allies. (Valerius 124)
The oneiric state represents a dissolution of boundaries so that the spectator may witness
Rosemary objectively, conceive reality differently from her through the ironic
disassociation she imposes between herself and her dreams (a form of alienation that the
audience does not share with her), and furthermore identify with her despite this
divergence of perspective.
The oneiric mechanisms employed by Eraserhead also mimic the abstract motion
of Capitalist mechanisms, which assert their power in complex multiplicities without
regard for any perceived contradiction within its own ideology. Godwin claims,
“[Eraserhead’s] coherence is not the external one of narrative form, but the internal one
of dream images which may represent any number of things simultaneously with no

single meaning negating any of the others” (Godwin 38). This encompassment of a
surrealist aesthetic reflects the process of Capitalist encompassment, wherein divergent
and often contradictory ideologies are appropriated to serve the same structure. For
example, Christianity and the Stock Market may express contradictory textual
assemblages of knowledge/power, yet both ideologies serve to enunciate and underwrite
a predominant ideology of Capitalist authority. Godwin continues, “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” (38). This process of visceral
immediacy recalls the process of Capitalist activity that is likewise recalled in
Rosemary’s Baby, wherein the potentiality of the idea is immediately refracted as the
material event.
Present in the film’s inception and closure (as well as sporadically throughout its
discourse) is the figure of the machinist – the entity whom Godwin deems ‘the Man in the
Planet’. He explicates, “The film's central symbol for that active part of the human mind,
responsible for the disruption and perversion of the natural world—and for the
unbalanced, faulty technology which has been the agency of that perversion—is the Man
in the Planet” (Godwin 40). This ‘Man in the Planet’ is essentially a grotesque machinist
poised before an array of levers, riddled with deformities and emitting an inhuman rattle.
The machinist represents the most abstract consequence of alienation that latently serves
both as a fixed egocentric entity of control within the human mind as well as the fixed
authoritative entity of Capitalism centered in a post-industrial cinematic dreamworld. He
is the ruined consequence of Capitalism and, furthermore, the consequence this entails

within the sublime psyche. Godwin continues, “By manipulating his levers he initiates
the action of the film; he is "in charge" of this world whose motion has become
mechanical rather than living” (Godwin 40).
The surrealistic discourse of the film underwrites a repulsion from sexual
communality; since all the entities are so fundamentally alienated, any process of
intimacy (i.e. sex) which resists or runs converse to this alienation is invariably perceived
by Henry’s dream-identity as artificial, and thus he retreats from it in fear into the
originary, pre-sexual womb. In order to enunciate this fear-driven discourse of sex, the
film employs grotesque, absurd reproductive imagery that becomes a fundamental aspect
of the oneiric experience. In the surreal sequence within the film’s moment of origin,
“[t]he conception is already corrupt; the sperm comes not from the penis, but is rather
drawn mechanically from Henry's mouth (the head) by the Man in the Planet's
manipulation of his levers” (Godwin 40-41). The Capitalist archetype of the Man in the
Planet attempts to appropriate sexual activity within his territory, yet ultimately fails in
this attempt, so as to result in the fear and absurdity that is associated with sex from the
perspective of the dream-identity. Godwin continues, “The head which attempts to
reshape the natural world here tries to control the very processes of reproduction” (41).
Capitalism is impotent to rationalize this most basic expression of human intimacy, yet it
nonetheless manages to taint the experience within the alienated oneiric identity.
Contrasting the Man in the Planet is the Lady in the Radiator, who represents a
source of escape from the harsh Capitalist atmosphere that surrounds Henry – she is the
dream within the dream, the slumbering opiate latency of the ovary-cheeked feminine
(perhaps representing a Marxist characterization of religiosity as a sedative to

political/social motivation) within a world too cacophonous to permit sleep. Godwin
maintains, “At the center is the deformed blonde woman of Henry's vision; sexless, with
a shapeless body and a bland, childish expression, she performs a stiff little Shirley
Temple-like dance” (Godwin 41). She inhabits the radiator – the proto-Marxist womb –
that remains symbolic of heat and intimacy. She is a precursory, sexless representation of
the feminine – she is associated with reproductive imagery (i.e. sperm, ovaries) but is
simultaneously too prepubescent and girlish to impose lust, and thus does not provoke the
Capitalist imposition of masculine sexual alienation. Being precursory to the sexual, the
horrific artificiality of sexual connection that Henry perceives is irrelevant within her
uterine domain.
In a surreal dream sequence, the sexless vision expels giant sperm from her body;
she proceeds to dance around the sperm with a coy smile; ultimately, her heel will
descend upon them and crush the masculine symbols, subverting the confused
masculinist/Capitalist ideology that designates sperm as the active reproductive faculty.
Henry’s source of comfort is “a sterile womb. Its sexless inhabitant and guardian
eliminates the intruding sperm, thus guaranteeing that no conception will occur—and so
no birth, no entry into the hated outer world” (Godwin 41). Thus Godwin asserts that
“Henry's desire to re-enter the womb . . . becomes an image of absorption” (42). This
originary womb evades the challenges presented by the brutality of Capitalism – as the
Lady in the Radiator chants to us soothingly while standing amidst a field of massacred
sperm, “In heaven, everything is fine. You’ve got your good things and I’ve got mine.”
Insomuch as conceptions of property are concerned, this lullaby would seem to imply a
sense of apathy toward possessive notions of ownership. The Lady in the Radiator

prophesies that heaven will transcend power-structures such as private property.
This paradise is ultimately interrupted by the insistence of Capitalist territoriality,
complete with all of its anti-sexual connotations, as Henry “is blinded by a fierce light
and the Man in the Planet takes [the Lady in the Radiator’s] place. Henry backs away and
his head explodes from his shoulders, replaced by the baby, its insistent cry more
plaintively demanding than ever” (Godwin 42). Both the Capitalist archetype of the
deformed machinist and the product of Henry’s procreative labor consume and
appropriate his fantasy, ultimately alienating it from his existence and manufacturing it
into a source of utility (his skull, the center of his conscious activity, is processed by a
mechanistic assemblage into pencils – an instrument of recapitulation and transcription
rather than original thought). Godwin assigns a warped connotation of childbirth to this
sequence, claiming that “Henry is violently expelled in that image of stillbirth” whose
“product is not alive, indeed may not even be organic” (41-42).
Henry ultimately discovers that the only way to subvert Capitalist authority is to
castrate the phallic authority within himself. He rejects the structural organ in lieu of the
deterritorialized Body-without-Organs – the purity of disordered desire, the only desire
that does not conform to Capitalist appropriation and is thus incapable of undergoing
manufacture. Godwin maintains, “The act itself is self-castration: destroy the appetite by
destroying the organ. All the poisons flood up out of the dying thing, and its death throes
cause chaos” (Godwin 43). The result, however, of his castration of phallic authority is
pure chaos and nihilism – having rejected the phenomenological atmosphere of
Capitalism, he is expelled into the nihility of the void.

Unable to fall back upon this phallic structure of Capitalist authority, the
machinist falls limp before the overloaded, electrified array of levers. Godwin writes,
“Because, in destroying the penis, Henry also destroys the tool of continuity, the means
by which the world (the particular inner world of the dream) is sustained. Without the
support of this organ, the world flies apart” (Godwin 43). Thus while Henry annihilates
himself in the perpetuation of his anti-Capitalist desire, he subverts the order just enough
to engage in a symbolic destruction of this fixed authority. Godwin continues, “[T]he
kind of control involved in man's heavy-handed manipulation of the physical world is
unable to harness the forces of life. . . . [T]he Man in the Planet pulls desperately at the
controls of his disintegrating machine and flies, with his world, into a million fragments.”
(43). The subversion of Capitalist order ultimately culminates in the explosive alienation
of the oneiric species-being.
In this text I have sought to demonstrate the parallel modes of reproductive
discourse in which these films engage – in which each film cultivates an encompassing
phenomenological atmosphere (involving the Capitalist displacement/alienation of their
humanity, potential, femininity, and masculinity) that falls back upon structuralized
characters involved in dynamics of social relations that are presented as warped and
dysfunctional according to social standards of normativity; and furthermore that both the
phenomenological atmosphere and the involved characters are fundamentally disrupted
by the incessant transmutation of reality by oneiric dream and nightmare states which
infuse surreality into the narrative. In undertaking this exploration, I hope to have
enumerated new possibilities for the association of Marxist and Feminist interests, as well
as in the ways in which these films are received by critical spectators.

WORKS CITED

Fischer, Lucy. “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’.” Cinema
Journal 31.3 (Spring 1992): 3-18. JSTOR. Ramsey Library. UNC-Asheville. 10
Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org>.
Godwin, K. George. “Eraserhead Review [untitled].” Film Quarterly 39.1 (Autumn
1985): 37-43. JSTOR. Ramsey Library. UNC-Asheville. 10 Oct. 2009.
<http://www.jstor.org>.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan.
New York: Prometheus Books 1988. Print.
Valerius, Karyn. “‘Rosemary’s Baby’, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects.” College
Literature 32.3 (Summer 2005): 116-135. JSTOR. Ramsey Library. UNCAsheville. 10 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org>.