Personalizing Film Adaptation:

Literature into Cinema in the Work of Roman Polanski

FUNG Tat-yeung

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Philosophy

in

English (Literary Studies)

© The Chinese University of Hong Kong

August 2005

The Chinese University of Hong Kong holds the copyright of this thesis. Any person(s) intending to use a part of whole of the materials in the thesis in a proposed publication must seek copyright release from the Dean of the Graduate School. ,汝彳統系馆書圓v\

^MUOV IMi ^^UNIVERSITY""""yM SYSTEMy-^ Abstract

The topic for my thesis is "Personalizing Film Adaptation: Literature into

Cinema in the Work of Roman Polanski." Polanski is one of the most important film

directors, and he often shows his negative views towards modern society through his

works, even in times of adaptation. This thesis aims at analyzing the techniques he

uses to make his adapted film fit into his views.

I will start by showing how Polanski establishes his personal style with his first

four original works, Knife in the Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-sac (1966)

and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), in which he shows his interest in alienated

human relationships, the victims' psychological torture and the power of evil. Then

I will explain how he continues to explore these themes in his eight adapted works,

Rosemary's Baby (1968)，Macbeth (1971)，The Tenant (1976), Tess (1979)，Bitter

Moon (1992)，Death and the Maiden (1994), The Ninth Gate (1999) and The Pianist

(2002). Polanski's techniques include breaking down human relationships so that

the villains will destroy others at any cost, making the victims too vulnerable to fight

against evil and concluding his films with the evil becoming the ultimate winner.

These techniques all together construct Polanski's extreme pessimism towards the

world. 撮要

本論文的主題爲「個人化的改編劇本：波蘭斯基的作品如何將文

學融入電影」。波蘭斯基是最重要的導演之一，他的作品，即使是改

編作品，亦經常呈現他對現代社會的批判，本論文旨在硏究波蘭斯基

如何改編原著，以表現他的意念。

本人首先分析波蘭斯基在最早期的四齣原創作品中，如何建立個

人風格，從《水中刀》、《冷血驚魂》、《孤島驚魂》及《天師捉妖》四

齣原創作品中，我們略見波蘭斯基刻意表現人性疏離、受害者所受的

心理折磨及惡魔的勢力。本人繼而分析他在八齣改編作品中如何延續

這些主題，其作品包括《魔鬼怪嬰》、《浴血金鑾殿》、《怪房客》、《驚

絲姑娘》、《偷月迷情》、《不道德的審判》、《魔鬼手記》及《鋼琴戰曲》。

當中所運用的手法，包括破壞人際關係，好讓歹角不惜代價摧毁他

人，令受害者無力對抗惡者，及以惡勢力最終可逃之夭夭的手法結

尾。這些技巧一同建構了波蘭斯基對世界的極度悲觀。 Contents

Introduction 1

1 The "Polanskian" Style as Established in Knife in the Water, 10

Repulsion, Cul-de-sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers

(I) Knife in the Water and Cul-de-sac 11

(II) Repulsion 22

(III) The Fearless Vampire Killers 26

2 The Breakdown of Human Relationships 32

(I) Friendlessness 33

(II) Unfulfilled Marriages 37

3 The Extreme Sense of Superiority That Destroys Others 67

(I) The Villains' Lust for Power 69

(II) The Victims for the Villains 78

(III) The Villains' Methods of Victimization 84

4 The Vulnerability of the Victims to Fight Against Evil 90

(I) The Victims' Inability to Fight Back 90

(II) Hallucinations as the Victims' Most Vulnerable Moments 108

5 The Extremely Pessimistic Endings 119

(I) The Emphasis of the Evil's Ultimate Domination 121

(II) The Recurrence of Events 129

Conclusion 139

Works Cited 144 Fung 1

Introduction

If you are asked to choose the most important film directors of our time, whom will you pick? Among the list are probably D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, who contributed to establish cinema as a major art form in the twentieth century, and some avant-garde directors like Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica,

Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and Frangois

Truffaut. What is so remarkable about this group of directors is probably that they demonstrate how the “auteur theory" applies to their films. Instead of filming adapted works, though they occasionally do, most of the time they create their own scripts for their films. In addition, some of them even play a major role in different aspects of their films. For example, Sergei Eisenstein and Akira Kurosawa involve themselves a great deal in editing their own films, Satyajit Ray composes music for all his films whilst Frangois Truffaut constantly stars in his own films. Some even use particular crews, such as Ingmar Bergman's choice of Sven Nykvist as his cinematographer, and Federico Fellini ’s choice of Nino Rota as his composer. In other words, the whole ideas of their films are entirely their very own. The result is that their films have been considered as literary works. Sometimes, they are referred to as the representatives of the "poetry of cinema," or simply the "cinematic poets," especially when their films are shown in some art festivals. No matter how you Fung 2 name them, one thing for sure is that they have all contributed to consolidate the position of cinema in the literary world.

One name you will definitely not miss out from the list of the most important film directors of our time is Roman Polanski. Some of his films are among the all-time classics, like Repulsion (1965)，Rosemary 's Baby (1968) and Chinatown

(1974), each considered as the best of its genre, whilst some others are not so favourably received by the critics, like The Fearless Vampire Killers (aka Pardon Me,

But Your Teeth Are in My Neck or Dance of the Vampires) (1967), Pirates (1986),

Frantic (1988) and Bitter Moon (1992). However, one cannot deny that this Polish director has established his very personal cinematic style. I would argue moreover that the audience could easily associate this personal "Polanskian" style with a world of human darkness, expressing his profound disappointment in human nature. In fact, almost all Polanski's films have the power to leave the audience feeling uneasy for days.

What is so special about Polanski is that whilst most of the often-talked-about

“autews” usually write their own original screenplays, half of Polanski's films are actually adapted from other literary works. However, as I hope to demonstrate in this thesis, even in times of adaptation, Polanski still manages to prove that the

“autew theory" applies to each one of his films because, under his very personal Fung 3

touch, the films he bases on other literary works are more than just adaptations, but

become new ones separated from the originals.

Polanski's aim, as I conceive it, of being an “auteur” or "personal" film director

while at the same time being far more of an "adapter" than other auteurs is a

particularly difficult task. Indeed, among the many forms of criticism directed by

"high" art forms, such as literature, towards "popular" art forms like film, one of the

most potent and frequently used is that film is precisely a mere adaptation of literature,

and an adaptation that can never hope to equal the complexity and sophistication of an

original literary work. For example, Virginia Woolf, though a postmodernist writer, openly expresses her contempt towards film adaptation. She "excoriated the adaptations that reduced a novel's complexity nuanced idea of 'love' to 'a kiss,' or rendered 'death,' literal-mindedly, as a 'hearse'" (Stam, 3-4), and even "describe[d] film spectators, in terms that borrow[ed] from racist discourse, as twentieth-century

'savages,' whose eyes mindlessly 'lick up' the screen" (6).

As Woolf's remarks make clear, film adaptation faces a dilemma, one which

Polanski's work (more than any other film director I believe) makes clear. As

Robert Stam explains in "Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation," which he writes for his book Literature and Film:

A "faithful" film is seen as uncreative, but an "unfaithful" film is a shameful Fung 4

betrayal of the original. An adaptation that updates the text for the present

is upbraided for not respecting the period of the source, but respectful

costume dramas are accused of a failure of nerve in not 'contemporizing'

the text. If an adaptation renders the sexual passages of the source novel

literally, it is accused of vulgarity; if it fails to do so, it is accused of

cowardice. The adapter, it seems, can never win. (8)

As a result, it is very difficult for a director to stand out as an “auteuf^” when adapting

literary works, and yet, Polanski manages to prove himself to be a true “auteur”

precisely by taking on the challenge that Stam articulates and in being (to use Stam's

terms) "unfaithful" and "faithful" at once - an adapter but also an original.

Using the terms of film-adaptation, Polanski continually demonstrates his ability to strike a balance between being faithful and being creative. On one hand, Polanski

seldom changes the dialogue spoken by the characters in the original texts, for example in his movies Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth (1971) and less (1979). In addition, Polanski is often careful to reproduce the settings of his source texts. This approach is elucidated in Andre Bazin's article "Theater and Cinema," in which he explains Jean Cocteau's philosophy of "filmed theater," the rationale Cocteau uses in making his own play Les Parents terribles (aka The Storm Within) (1948) into a film:

[I]f the room of the play became an apartment in the film, thanks to the Fung 5

screen and to the camera it would feel even more cramped than the room on

the stage. What it was essential to bring out was a sense of people being

shut in and living in proximity. (Bazin, 90)

Among Polanski's adapted films, two are based on plays, namely Macbeth and Death

and the Maiden (1994), and Cocteau's rationale in filmmaking is highly traceable in

these two films, both of which are especially attentive to reproducing the setting of their original texts. The old and dark castle chosen for Macbeth, which gives the audience the creeps, not only fits very well in the Shakespearean setting, but also adds colours to the eerie atmosphere of this story of demonology. In Death and the

Maiden, the audience is shown the outside of the house, which does not look small at all -, but inside, where all the tension takes place, the house is shown to be filled with furniture; its cramped condition allows the physical struggle to be presented more convincingly. Similarly, Polanski, when filming Rosemary's Baby, chooses for his setting an apartment that fits the description in the book and thereby facilitates highlighting the neurosis of its protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse. Such conformity towards the original dialogue and traditional techniques of "filmed theater" suggested by Andre Bazin suggests Polanski，s fidelity towards the original literary texts.

On the other hand, Polanski does considerable editing to the original texts and adds a great deal of film language to make his adapted works no less creative than his Fung 6 original ones. For example, he omits the twisted ending in Rosemary 's Baby to give his film a gloomier conclusion than the original novel. In contrast, he adds numerous silent images to create new meaning in his films. For instance, in

Macbeth, there are a number of bloodbath scenes, which, although not acted out in the original play, highlight Macbeth's brutal character. However, while Polanski conveys Macbeth's brutality, at the same time he also sympathizes with Macbeth, to a certain extent. As Neil Sinyard illustrates in his book, Filming Literature: The Art of

Screen Adaptation:

Unlike the play, where the King is killed offstage, Polanski's film shows

Duncan's murder. Nevertheless, this is not a gratuitously gory scene but

tensely and intelligently done: entering the chamber, knife in hand, Macbeth

still seems hesitant and afraid and it is the fact that Duncan suddenly

awakens and sees him that compels him to strike - for what else could he be

doing there but plotting murder? (Sinyard, 17)

Here, in Polanski's version, Macbeth is shown not just as a ruthless murderer, but also extremely human. The scene, which is done in a practically wordless way, reveals how Polanski takes control of the film language. It is highly comparable to Claude

Chabrol's masterpiece La Femme mfidele (aka The Unfaithful Wife) (1969), hailed as a must-see for all film students, which demonstrates the best use of film language in Fung 7

the most-often-discussed final scene: that the wife discovers her murdered lover's

photo in her husband's pocket and immediately tears off the photo signifies her

discovery of her husband's love as well as her forgiveness for her husband.

By remaining faithful to the original texts but at the same time trying hard to

create new meaning in his films, Polanski is "personalizing" his film adaptation. It

is true that the idea of "personalization" might be considered rather subjective; since

different directors will certainly deal with the same scene differently; every director could be said to "personalize" his own film adaptation. For instance, Neil Sinyard praises the treatment of the final scene in Laurence Olivier's Henry 厂（1944):

A less skilled director might have ended the speech on a close-up, thereby

restricting its range, but Olivier instinctively senses that a screen climax (a

close-up) and a Shakespearean climax (a fine gesture and a loud

declamation) might not match, and that the camera should go back when the

character raises his voice. (5-6)

However, to say that the treatment of this final scene makes Olivier's Henry V a more

"personalized" version of the play than that of another director, is not a persuasive argument. Polanski，s stands out as an “auteur,” and his adapted works stand alongside with his original ones, in my opinion, not just because of his imaginative or even original cinematic techniques, but because of the ideas he expresses in his films, Fung 8

together with the cinematic techniques he uses to bring about the ideas. This is the most important reason why I believe the idea of "personalization," which I emphasize in my thesis title, applies to Polanski's films.

To develop the idea further, Polanski's approach to "personalization" is not a matter of simply adding autobiographical details to his work. I would not agree with Neil Sinyard's comment on Macbeth'.

Like Polanski's two previous witchcraft films, Rosemary's Baby (1968) and

Dance of the Vampires (1969) [sic], Macbeth is about the overwhelming

power of evil. What Polanski brings to the material specifically is his own

dark personal history (most notably, his horrific childhood experience in

Nazi-occupied Poland, and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the

Satanic Manson family). (16)

In fact (as I will discuss in my conclusion), Polanski has constantly expressed his hatred towards having his films being judged based on his personal life. What

"personalization" means as a theory of adaptation in this thesis is that Polanski has a personal "philosophy," one that utters his disappointment towards the depraved modern society through each one of his films. Indeed, Polanski does not just interpret the literary works, but he fits them into this perception, thus creating a disturbed feeling among the audience with whatever films he makes, both original and Fung 9 adapted works. It is his willingness to take on the challenge of adapting literary works written by others and, in the process, personalizing them, that distinguishes

Polanski from the other first-rate directors with whom he is often grouped. Fung 10

Chapter 1

The "Polanskian" Style as Established in Knife in the Water,

Repulsion, Cul-de-sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers

It was not until his fifth feature-length film in 1968 that Polanski made his first

adapted work, Rosemary 's Baby，based on Ira Levin's novel. His first four films,

namely Knife in the Water (aka Not w wodzie) (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-sac

(1966) and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), are all originals. This may come as

a surprise to the audience as adapting the work of others - or at least relying on other

sources - is usually the hallmark of a younger developing artist, not an older

experienced one. For example, Luchino Visconti's directorial debut Ossessione

(1943) is based on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice\ Satyajit Ray's

acclaimed "Apu Trilogy," Father Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1957) and The World of

Apu (aka Apur Sansar) (1959), is based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel;

while Fran9ois Truffaut's screenplay for Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature Breathless

(aka A bout de souffle) (1960) is actually based on what Truffaut read from the

newspaper. In contrast, Polanski's first four films are all his original ideas, though

credit also goes to his co-writers, Jakub Goldberg and Jerzy Skolimowski for Knife in

the Water, and Gerard Brach for the latter three. The major reason why Polanski has chosen to start off his cinematic career with original films before turning to adapted Fung 11

works is probably that he tries to give the audience a general picture of the

"Polanskian" style - the framework for his lifelong career in cinema. As Jay Robert

Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross comment on Knife in the Water in The Motion Picture

Guide:

This early film showed a fascination with human cruelty and violence, as

well as an intense interest in exploring the complex tensions involved in

close relations, themes which were to recur throughout Polanski，s career.

(Nash, Ross, 1556)

Indeed, all Polanski's later films, both original and adapted, centre around the themes that he has explored in his early films, including not only the fragility of human relationships, especially marriage, but also the human lust for power, and the vulnerability of human beings to fight against evil. All these themes, as I will argue in the following thesis chapters, are heavily stressed by Polanski when he goes about his literary adaptations.

(I) Knife in the Water and Cul-de-sac

Polanski's first film, Knife in the Water, and third film, Cul-de-sac, both establish a similar theme exploring the fragility of human relationships. In both films, we see a couple, and how the relationship between the mismatched husband and wife is destroyed by an outsider. Taking the cinematographic style Michelangelo Antonioni Fung 12

adopts in his "Trilogy of Loneliness," namely L 'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1962)

and L'Eel is se (1963)，both Knife in the Water and Cul-de-sac make excellent use of

the landscape - the boundless sea and a remote castle respectively - to highlight the

sense of alienation and loneliness in the main characters.

Knife in the Water stuns the audience with only three characters appearing

throughout the whole 11/2-hour film. One possible reason for this minimalism is that

Polanski, who was totally unknown and with limited support at the time the film was

made, had to keep his film low budget. However, eliminating all other characters is

also Polanski's approach of baring the story down to its essential elements, which

allows him to focus entirely on the theme of the marital crisis when an intruder comes

in between, through presenting the tension that arises among these three characters: a couple, Andrzej and Krystyna, and an outsider, a young student.

Knife in the Water is basically about how easily a marriage can be destroyed.

The fragility of a marriage is clearly portrayed in the film, using such touches as

Krystyna putting up with Andrzej's arrogance silently when he criticizes her driving skills. The marriage is probably only saved by Krystyna's tolerance. However, when a young student with nothing but a knapsack joins them on a yacht trip, a showing-off game begins, putting Krystyna's silence to an end. Jealous of the student's handsome looks, Andrzej asserts his advantages over the student by boasting Fung 13

about his wealth and his sailing skills. The student in return lets Andrzej get what he

wants - power, by admitting that he cannot swim, but on the other hand, he shows off

with his pocket knife by playfully stabbing it in-between his fingers, which turns to be

almost fatal since Andrzej pushes the student into the water in a fight over the knife.

This is when Krystyna realizes her husband's complete cowardice as he intends to sail

away，pretending that nothing has happened. Hence, the realization of the spouse's

true nature, which is far from one's ideal, forms the major factor of the breakup of a

marriage in this film, and in later "Polanskiaii" cinema as well.

However, while the audience may at first suppose that the breakup of the marriage is the sole responsibility of the husband, Polanski astounds the audience with a twist of the audience's feeling about the seemingly noble wife in the style of

George Bernard Shaw's dramas - is Krystyna really a noble wife just because she tolerates everything in her marriage? As the story continues, Andrzej does eventually jump into the water to look for the possibly drowned student, and the student turns out to be a good swimmer after all — he appears back on the yacht and seduces Krystyna, who eventually degrades herself as an adulteress, which is possibly her true form unrevealed to her husband. The film ends with the husband disbelieving his wife's confession, and facing the dilemma of whether or not to report to the police about the youth, whom he still believes to be missing. Though the Fung 14

couple still goes back in the same car, the husband-wife relationship has obviously

been destroyed. Towards this pathetic marriage, Polanski offers pity to neither the

husband nor the wife, but suggests that the breakup is the consequence of a longtime

mutual conflict between them, while the appearance of the young student is nothing

more than the Sarajevo Incident.

As a follow-up to Knife in the Water, Cul-de-sac tells a similar story about the

breakup of a husband-wife relationship. Though there are more characters in the

film, it still focuses around three main characters, who are again a couple, George and

Teresa, and an outsider, Richard. The reason for adding more characters in the film is that, in addition to the new fame that allows Polanski to make a higher-budget film, the appearance of more characters gives room for Polanski to explore another major theme - "role-playing," a frequent aspect of marriage and moreover, an essential element in revealing human lust for power.

The couple in Cul-de-sac is yet another mismatch but with an even more peculiar relationship than the pair in Knife in the Water. George is an effeminate middle-aged husband who has no idea how to retain his beautiful young French wife, Teresa, a nymphomaniac who constantly cheats on him. Their bizarre relationship is only prevented from foundering by the remote castle where they live, which isolates them from the outside world. The couple is on the edge of a breakup any time when a Fung 15 catalyst, an impact from the outside world comes between them. As in Knife in the

Water, the sudden appearance of an outsider, Richard, serves no more than to expose the couple's true personas. When Richard arrives with his dying fellow gangster,

Albie, and demands shelter in the castle waiting for instruction from his boss, a similar game as in Knife in the Water begins; only this time the brutal outsider is in control. Richard asserts authority over the couple, and keeps humiliating the incapable and sissy-like George. George's inability to protect his wife is made further explicit in an episode when Richard mercilessly whips Teresa after she has burnt his toes with ignited newspapers. Such a bizarre husband-wife relationship points all the way towards the final breakup of the marriage, which, once again,

Polanski sees as the responsibilities of both the man and the woman instead of either side.

At the same time as Polanski continues his depiction of unhealthy marriages, he also makes full use of two elements that are developed further from Knife in the Water. the first is the constant appearance of intruders. With many more characters in

Cul-de-sac, the film no longer just involves a trio like Knife in the Water. Instead,

Polanski introduces a number of intruders into George and Teresa's marriage at different moments: first Richard and Albie, and then an unexpected party of guests.

The intrusion of different people into the couple's life allows Polanski to comment on Fung 16

the phenomenon of intrusion in contemporary life. Had it not been for the

unexpected intrusion, George and Teresa's marriage would have been safe for a

slightly longer time because the castle where they live is remote and usually

undisturbed. However, Cul-de-sac proves that the castle is not really a secure place

for the couple: the castle is just like an overprotective mother who fails to teach her

children how to face challenges in their lives. When the castle is indeed intruded on,

the impact is too great for the couple to maintain their marriage, resulting in their final

breakup. This theme will reappear in Polanski's later works, like Rosemary 's Baby

(1968), The Tenant (1976) and The Pianist (2002), in which we see that people who

think they are safe in some confined circumstances are not really safe.

A second theme that Cul-de-sac adds to Knife in the Water is that of

"role-playing." Contrasting with the couple in Knife in the Water, who do not actually pretend to be any different from what they usually are (so that the final revelation of their true personas only serves as a kind of iconoclasm), the pair in

Cul-de-sac, in strong contrast, constantly tries hard to put on an act, both in front of each other and in front of outsiders, lest their marital problems might be exposed.

Whilst in Knife in the Water, the calm wife reveals her adulterous nature only by the end, Cul-de-sac goes far beyond this, showing a very rare example for Polanski to portray the wife as a lewd nymphomaniac who constantly cheats on her husband - Fung 17

Strongly contrasting what we will see in most of his later films, in which women are

usually portrayed as victims. As Polanski admits in his autobiography, Roman, "the

character of Teresa was born out of a slight need of revenge" (Polanski, 190) because

of his unhappy experience in his first marriage with Barbara Lass, as well as his

co-writer, Gerard Brach's, similar experience with females. Polanski had even

wanted Lass to play Teresa, though the part finally went to Fran^oise Dorleac.

Biographer John Parker, in his book Polanski, records Barbara Lass's opinion upon

the making of Cul-de-sac:

The portrayal of the women in Polanski's stories' was also distinctly and

deliberately controversial and cruel, for which . . . [Lass] blamed herself, as

an after-effect of her leaving him. (Parker, 91)

According to Donald Pleasence, who plays George, "Roman wanted her to be simply sluttish" (Butler, 110)，as a result.

Although many artists treat role-playing as an empowering thing - the ability to shift identities so as to fulfill one's desires and to be rid of one's bondage,^ Polanski sees it otherwise in Cul-de-sac, as a way to avoid truthfulness. Indeed, as soon as

‘This mainly refers to Repulsion and Cul-de-sac. 2 For example, in Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, Cleopatra enjoys her moments of commanding and beating the servant Ftatateeta，whom she has always been afraid of, when she is reminded of her power to do so by Julius Caesar, and becomes "a real Queen." The Balcony, Jean Genet's representative play for the Theatre of the Absurd, goes much further to present a brothel for the perverts, where the prostitutes and the clients play various roles to fulfill their sadomasochistic desires. This idea probably forms the basis for Luis Bufiuel's surrealist film Belle de jour (1967), in which the title character gains her sexual satisfaction by working in a brothel similar to the one in The Balcony. Fung 18

Cul-de-sac begins, the couple has not been truthful in their marriage: the

nymphomaniac Teresa pretends to love her husband as she is having great fun with

George while dressing him up as a woman, while George, though very aware of what

his wife has been doing, lets her get away with her deception. When Richard

appears, he is stunned to see a hopelessly effeminate George in a female nightgown

and wearing eyeliner and lipstick. We can see how embarrassed George is at this moment, which is so hard to explain to an outsider like Richard. Immediately,

George tries to pretend as if nothing that Richard sees was real, insisting on putting on some decent clothes, though to no avail, as Richard strategically takes advantage of the situation at once and orders the couple around. Such a situation reveals part of their marital problems, but the couple keeps their problems and their internal dislike for each other all to themselves. For example, Teresa has always known that George is too effeminate to protect her, but she expresses her true opinion towards her husband only in the absence of Richard, i.e. when they both are locked up in their room by Richard:

TERESA: Sure, I understand that you 're not a man. You let that creep

insult me without saying a word. She sneers. You, the big war hero!

(Polanski, 157)

The couple's marital problems are only exposed when a drunk George blurts them out Fung 19

to Richard whilst Teresa is taking a dip in the sea. Later, when an unexpected party

of guests appears, George and Teresa put on an act again in front of new people and

play a normal and loving couple, while Richard plays their servant in order not to be

exposed. It is clear that role-playing becomes an essential element for George and

Teresa to maintain their morbid married life: when living on their own, the couple is

contented with their peculiar and unhealthy relationships without uncovering each

other's scars; however, whenever they have to face people, they have to conceal their

marital problems from time to time, pretending to have a normal married life.

Role-playing merely becomes a tool for the couple to escape honesty.

However, the critique of human behaviours does not end here with a challenge to

role-playing, but further intensifies into showing that humans have a deep desire to

rule over others. This desire is most obvious when the couple plays the boss and

Richard plays their servant, which becomes a chance for George and Teresa to have

their revenge over Richard by treating him coarsely. The couple's response to

Richard's previous brutal treatment of them signifies their desire to rule over Richard, especially when he has suddenly lost power because of the inconvenient situation.

Needless to say, when the guests are gone, the roles change back to their original states, for Richard becomes the boss again and treats the couple more roughly than ever，further exposing George's weakness as a husband，especially when he can do Fung 20

nothing but watch his wife being spanked by Richard. However, during the

temporary moment of ruling over Richard, the effeminate George has learnt to be not

entirely submissive. Eventually, refusing to take Richard's bullying any more,

George shoots him. Ironically, the film ends with Teresa eloping with a local,

demonstrating her desire for power as well.

A further comment Polanski makes about the desire for power over others is that

such a desire is not only present in all of us, even the weak George and Teresa，but

that even when put into practice, such a desire cannot be sustained and results in

tragedy. For example, George's shooting of Richard is not entirely purposive, but

more in an accidental way. Thus, the shooting shows George's lust for power after a long suppression, but it is by no means an assertion of power. It only further proves

George's impotence to manage his life as he begins talking to himself in a lunatic way.

George is shown to be not just a sissy, but even weaker than a woman, his hysteria terrifying Teresa, who leaves him. With such a pessimistic ending, Polanski suggests that the human desire to rule over others does not improve an undesirable situation at all, but even worsens it. Both Richard and George attempt to assert power through violence or even destruction, but both end up becoming losers:

Richard dead and George cuckolded. The title of the film suggests that "[ejvery end is a dead one," and as Ivan Butler, the writer of The Cinema of Roman Polanski, sees Fung 21

it, "destroying the menace by violence is no escape either - the destroyer merely ends

up in worse trouble than before" (Butler, 92).

Clearly, in Cul-de-sac, the breakup of the marriage is more manifest than in

Knife in the Water, suggesting a reification of Polanski's negative view of the world.

We might say moreover that the vulnerability of human relationships, especially those

between husbands and wives, explored in Knife in the Water and Cul-de-sac, as well

as the associated themes of vengeance and control, becomes one of the major focuses

in "Polanskian" cinema.

Thus, when Polanski turns his interests to adaptation, he deliberately chooses

those literary works that allows him to further develop the theme of marital and

domestic tension into the breakdown of all human relationships, suggesting that even

the one who is supposed to be most intimate to you can be so untrustworthy that he or

she may betray you or even harm you. In Chapter 2, I will explore how Polanski's

adaptation treats the fragility of marriage in such works as Ira Levin's Rosemary 's

Baby, Tess (1979)，based on Thomas Hardy's less of the d'Urbervilles, Bitter Moon

(1992), based on Pascal Bruckner's Lunes de fiel, and Ariel Dorfman's Death and the

Maiden (1994)，all of which form a universal picture of the collapse of human relationships, which facilitates the process of victimization, which will be my focus in

Chapters 3 and 4. Fung 22

(II) Repulsion

Having explored, in Knife in the Water, the theme of the breakdown of human

relationships from an outsider's viewpoint, in his second film, Repulsion, Polanski

explores this breakdown from more deeply within the victim's mind, offering an

explanation of how one becomes a victim because of the depraved society that

surrounds one. This approach by all means further consolidates Polanski's negative

view of the world. Unlike most of Polanski's created victims, who are largely

harmed by their intimate ones, the main character in Repulsion, Carol, is the victim of

her very own disturbed mind, though her psychological disturbance comes from her

subjective observation of the evilness in the opposite sex. In other words, the film

still focuses on the disturbing nature of gender relations set up previously in Knife in

the Water and to follow in Cul-de-sac. Repulsion is an unnerving cinematic

experience for the audience and goes into their subconscious minds. Here, Carol is

an attractive girl appealing to men, but who at the same time, has a strong repulsion

for men. In the film, men are portrayed as callous, at least from Carol's point of

view. Examples include her sister's lover, Michael, who takes his girlfriend for granted, a verbally-harassing construction worker whom Carol later personifies as one of the rapists in her nightmares, and a landlord who tries to take advantage of the scantly-clad Carol. Such male qualities are why Carol cannot stand the moaning Fung 23

sounds made by her sister, Helen, and Michael, every night when they make love in

the next bedroom, and Carol is equally revolted when her own boyfriend, Colin,

kisses her. By this approach, Polanski presents the evilness that exists in men: the

lust for an attractive girl like Carol, which is the cause of Carol's repulsion for men

and her psychological disturbance that destroys her life. The idea about how men

destroy an innocent girl will reappear in Polanski's later films, less and Death and the

Maiden, texts that Polanski is solely interested in adapting because they explore

similar themes.

According to The Motion Picture Guide:

[Repulsion] has in many instances been compared to Hitchcock's Psycho

(1960) (which Polanski won't deny), but instead of presenting a portrait of a

psychotic killer, Repulsion pulls the audience into the mind of the individual,

in this case Catherine Deneuve [Carol]. (Nash, Ross, 2584)

Repulsion is comparable to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho because the protagonists in both films, Carol and Norman Bates, are schizophrenic psychopaths. However, despite the similarity, Repulsion still offers the most original asset in presenting

Carol's hallucination directly on screen, which gives the audience a picture of how

Polanski victimizes his victim to an extreme. The hallucination begins when Helen and Michael go on a trip and leave Carol alone in the apartment. Carol gradually Fung 24 entirely alienates herself from the outside world by locking herself inside. She starts to see walls cracking and her repulsion for men even leads her to dream of being constantly raped, which triggers her to kill Colin and the landlord when each of them enters the apartment breaking into her isolated life. Her hallucinations intensify as she sees even more creepy visions like hands stretching out from the crevices on the wall trying to catch her, until she becomes completely out of her mind. Though

Carol eventually becomes a merciless murderer, her psychological sufferings suggest how the lustful men all together transform her into the person she becomes. This cyclic process of victimization where aggression produces victims who seem aggressors is another approach Polanski takes to fulfill his negative view of the world.

Perhaps even more ominous than the possibility of endlessly separating cyclic violence (a theme Polanski will explore later in his Macbeth) is that, in Repulsion,

Polanski, for the first time, insists that distinguishing good and evil, reality and illusion, is a problem for the audience as well as for the main characters. This is also partly Polanski's reflection of his own life. In his autobiography, Roman, he discloses his personal life in appalling detail, including his indulgence in orgies when success did not come to him, and his casual relationships with different females, which put him into different troubles. In the book, Polanski admits from the very beginning: Fung 25

For as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has

been hopelessly blurred. (Polanski, 9)

This explains why so many critics try to explain Polanski，s films with constant

reference to his personal life. John Parker, in his book, Polanski, even claims that

"'Schizophrenic' is an especially relevant word when dealing with Polanski's life"

(Parker, 7). Do we also feel the same way about our lives? With his second film,

Repulsion, Polanski tends to lead the audience to feel the same way as he does; and thus he has chosen Luis Bunuel’s surrealistic style. Taiwanese film critic, Liu

Sen-yao, considers Repulsion as Polanski's "tribute to Bunuel" [my translation] (Liu,

201) in his book, Tao Yen Yu Tien Ying (Directors and Films). Highly comparable to

Luis Bunuel's surrealistic masterpieces like Illusion Travels by Streetcar (aka La

Ilusidn viaja en tranvia) (1954) and The Criminal Life of Archihaldo de la Cruz (aka

La Vida criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz) (1955), Repulsion offers a mixture of reality and illusion that leads the audience through an extraordinary cinematic experience, making use of the main character's weak moments as well as the audience's. The real horror of the film lies in the fact that the hallucinations are so realistic that they can appear in our own dreams, and may even take over us eventually. Can the visions we see be a reflection of reality? This is going to be

Polanski's area of interest when he later turns to adapted works, climaxing on Fung 26

Rosemary Woodhouse's dream sequence in Rosemary 's Baby, the "prophecies"

presented through visual images by the witches in Macbeth (1971)，all the disturbing

visions Trelkovsky sees in The Tenant and the appearance of the other-worldly girl

who seemingly protects Dean Corso in The Ninth Gate (1999). These four films all

stun the audience by suggesting that the hallucinations occur at the characters' most

vulnerable moments, and are presented as partially real, and real enough to cause the

protagonist's distress or even downfall. Such has become another special feature in

the "Polanskian" style - the victims' failure in fighting the evil power because of their

psychological weaknesses, a theme which leads the audience to consider its own

ability to resist evil in case they are put in the same situation.

(Ill) The Fearless Vampire Killers

Having established a world of alienated human relationships which creates a

sense of evil that the main characters can hardly resist, Polanski turns to a metaphorical approach to intensify the power of evil in his fourth film, The Fearless

Vampire Killers, which is hardly an adaptation, but rather a parody of Bram Stoker's

Dracula? It is a black comedy, with a dozen hilarious elements, but it does not end

3 Some people tend to disagree that The Fearless Vampire Killers is Polanski's original work, but I will defend Polanski's originality. All that Polanski does is make use of the idea of "vampire" suggested by Bram Stoker to create a completely new story. In my opinion, the situation is comparable to James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein 0935), the sequel to Frankenstein (1931), by the same director. Frankenstein is without doubt an adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel, but Bride of Frankenstein merely makes use of the characters created by Shelley and creates an entirely new story, though James Whale makes a joke by arranging an opening in which Mary Shelley discusses her novel. Elsa Lanchester, who plays Shelley, will later play the bride as the film continues. No one will have confusion in identifying Whale's Frankenstein as an adaptation, and his Bride of Frankenstein as an Fung 27

comically. The film begins with the vampire expert, Professor Abronsius, and his

assistant, Alfred, entering a Transylvanian village in a sleigh looking for vampires to

exterminate. As soon as they stay on at an inn, Alfred falls in love with the innkeeper's daughter, Sarah, but she is soon abducted by the vampire, Count Von

Krolock. Professor Abronsius and Alfred have to go to the count's castle to look for the kidnapped girl. Plans to kill the vampires have to be abandoned when Alfred clumsily drops the suitcase containing vampire-killing tools, and their only task left is to save Sarah. Finally, they manage to get Sarah out of the castle and drive off in a sleigh as fast as they can, but this seemingly happy ending is totally twisted when

Sarah suddenly turns into another vampire and bites Alfred's neck. As the epilogue says:

"That night . . . fleeing from Transylvania, Professor Abronsius never

guessed he was carrying away with him the very evil he had wished

destroyed. Thanks to him, this evil would at last be able to spread across

the world." (Butler, 126)

Thus, this black comedy, ending with not merely the main characters but the whole world being destroyed, has the most pessimistic ending of all Polanski's early original films.

original work inspired by the characters created by Shelley. In the same way, I insist that The Fearless Vampire Killers is Polanski’s original work inspired by the character created by Stoker, but hardly an adaptation of Stoker's Dracula. Fung 28

There are two additional areas of significance in The Fearless Vampire Killers

that build up the "Polanskian" style. The first one is the subject of vampires, which

the audience may associate with demonology, but I think is Polanski's metaphorical

approach to extend and symbolize the evilness existing in humans. Presenting the

vulnerability of human relationships and the corruption of the human mind as

presented in Knife in the Water and Cul-de-sac do not seem to be enough for Polanski.

He has to extend this evilness to a larger extent - perhaps using the evil of the

supernatural world to suggest a universe malevolent to men. This time, Polanski

uses the ghost story to suggest the very same idea - that men are vulnerable in

resisting the evil forces. Worse still, evil is always the winner. Indeed, in The

Fearless Vampire Killers, the power of the demons is greater than men can fight, not

even with an expert like Professor Abronsius on their side. In fact, critic Ivan Butler thinks that the film is a strong criticism of people like Professor Abronsius:

The film is a devastating picture of the catastrophic arrogance of the

pseudo-scientist - the immoral folly of the half-informed do-gooders, the

planners, the progressives, the unenlightened self-styled enlighteners,

claiming the right to "know what's best for you" and - even when they

really know this - carrying out their self-appointed task with such

blundering lack of vision and sensitivity that they bring down disaster Fung 29

everywhere without even realizing it. (131-32)

Indeed, the professor, who believes he is doing something beneficial to the world,

ends up destroying it through unknowingly becoming the demons' most helpful

assistant. In Polanski's later adapted works, the same approach, showing that a

heroic figure promotes evil without being aware of it, appears. The character that

resembles Professor Abronsius most is Dean Corso, the book detective hired to look

for Lucifer's manuscripts, in The Ninth Gate. Arrogantly believing that he can stop

the devil from being summoned from hell, he ends up being tempted to do so.

Polanski creates other psychologically weak figures who inescapably become the

devil's assistants, like the emotionally-disturbed Rosemary Woodhouse, the devil's

son's mother who ends up helplessly succumbing to the whole evil plan, in

Rosemary 's Baby, and the ambition-driven Macbeth, who, bedazzled by the witches,

step by step executes his plan to create bloodshed in the world, in Macbeth. Like

Carol in Repulsion, all these characters demonstrate their inability to fight against evil

because of their psychological weaknesses, making them spiritually unprepared to

avoid being involved in the evil plans.

Another significance of The Fearless Vampire Killers is its extremely pessimistic

ending. We can see that Knife in the Water, Repulsion and Cul-de-sac all end tragically in the way that the main characters become destroyed or have their lives Fung 30

ruined. As detected from these three films, a tragic ending can already have been

recognized as a symbol of the "Polanskian" style, but their endings can hardly be

compared with the excessively pessimistic one in The Fearless Vampire Killers, which

not only puts the main characters in distress, but even expands the catastrophe to the

whole universe. It expresses the idea that there is no way for humans to stop the evil

from spreading all over the world. The same pessimistic ending can also be seen

later in Polanski's adapted works, like Rosemary's Baby, with the newly-born devil's

child likely to rule the world, Macbeth, with the witches in charge of all the people's

destiny to create more bloodshed, and The Ninth Gate’ with Corso, the main character,

ending up as another devil's trusted assistant. All the characters involved in the evil

plans demonstrate their complete powerlessness to control their own destiny. In

Polanski's other works, the evil plans are not necessarily related to the supernatural force. As a matter of fact, it is when the evil plans are entirely human-responsible that we see a truly tremendous force of destruction on the victims, who can do nothing but to wait for the others to shape the world, just like the title characters in Tess and

The Pianist.

All the ideas explored in Polanski's first four films together contribute to form the major framework of the "Polanskian" style, which Polanski will repeatedly make use of when he turns to adaptations. In the following chapters, I will show how Fung 31

Polanski selects literary works that fit into his framework of pessimism towards the world, as well as how he at times even transforms parts of these literary works to highlight his negative and pessimistic attitude. Fung 32

Chapter 2

The Breakdown of Human Relationships

Following his first four films, all of which are based on original scripts and not adaptations, Roman Polanski took a new direction and began creating both adapted works and original works, although the audience may find it difficult to distinguish the two kinds. Among the sixteen feature-length films he has made up until now, in fact exactly half are adapted from other sources, namely Rosemary's Baby (1968),

Macbeth (1971), The Tenant (1976), Tess (1979), Bitter Moon (1992)，Death and the

Maiden (1994)，The Ninth Gate (1999) and The Pianist (2002). Probably with just a few exceptions of well-known classics like William Shakespeare's Macbeth and

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Wtadystaw Szpilman's acclaimed autobiography, The Pianist, the audience may easily mistake Polanski's adapted works for his originals as well. The reason is that the "Polanskian" style is always present in his films, and this Polish director knows how to choose the right works to fit into the ideas he has constantly wanted to explore, all of which relate to his profound disappointment towards human nature.

Polanski makes almost all his films with the intention of disturbing the audience.

However, he does not always choose the genre of horror films to create this effect.

Rather, the most disturbing element in Polanski's films is the alienation among human Fung 33 beings that drives them to betray or even harm one another. The horror created from the presentation of the dark human nature is even more intense than the horror of the demons themselves because it is so realistic to the audience - it can be something that is happening in the world we live in. To attack the depravity of human nature,

Polanski chooses to start with breaking down the relationships among those who are supposed to be intimate with each other. The underlying reason is probably to lead an audience to ask: if you cannot even trust those who are closest to you, how can you have faith in the whole humankind?

(I) Friendlessness

In constructing a world of complete alienation among human relationships, one of the approaches Polanski takes is to put the characters he victimizes in such a state that they have no one to depend upon - in other words, a friendless state. This is most obvious in Polanski's treatment of Rosemary 's Baby, Ira Levin's bestseller, in

1968. Rosemary 's Baby is a horror film because it is about Satanism, but the real horror lies in the presentation of the utmost ugliness of human nature - how the main character, Rosemary Woodhouse, is betrayed of the trust she puts in the people surrounding her: a group of devil-worshippers whose only aim is to trick her into begetting Satan's son. What these neighbours do to Rosemary demonstrate the worst trait of human relationships - betrayal. Sadly, even though Rosemary does have a Fung 34

few trustworthy friends, they are all gone when Rosemary needs them most

desperately in the film.

It may surprise the audience that Rosemary 's Baby is actually a very close

adaptation of the original novel. As Ivan Butler comments:

The script follows the structure of the book extremely closely — most of the

dialogue is reproduced word for word - yet the film is unmistakably

Polanski，s own. For our present purpose, therefore, the interest lies in

considering his personal contribution to the resulting movie, the extent to

which he has imposed his vision on what already existed, rather than

examining it in isolation from its source. (Butler, 157)

It is manifest that though closely adapted, Rosemary 's Baby is filled with Polanski's personal touch in the seemingly minor things he has done to Ira Levin's novel. The major alteration is probably just the deletion of a number of episodes and some minor characters from the novel, most of them being Rosemary's friends. This alteration may sound effortless, but it in fact creates a crucial significance - to create a world of alienated human relationships by turning Rosemary into an eccentric person who cannot maintain friendships. As in Knife in the Water (1962) and Cul-de-sac (1966)，

Polanski does not put the blame on either Rosemary or those who fail to help her, but suggests that the alienation of human relationships is a necessary fact of life — neither Fung 35

Rosemary nor her friends have been really caring for each other all along.

One major difference between Ira Levin's original novel and Polanski，s film is

that the former still suggests some light of hope in human nature, especially when one

still has friends to run to, while the latter suggests exactly the opposite. According to the novel, Rosemary has a number of close friends who are repeatedly mentioned as they see her often; and these dear friends, together with some of Rosemary's relatives, even express their greatest concern when they learn about her misfortune of losing the baby as the novel nears its climax:

Joan and Elise and Tiger came to see her, and she spoke with Brian for

twenty minutes on the phone. Flowers came 一 roses and carnations and a

yellow azalea plant - from Allan, and Mike and Pedro, and Lou and Claudia.

(Levin, 241)

Moreover, Rosemary herself is also portrayed as a compassionate person who takes the initiative to care about others. After she learns that her friend, Edward Hutchins, is in a coma, she visits him in the hospital to show her concern for him, even though it is in vain:

Twice Rosemary went to St. Vincent's Hospital to stand beside Hutch's bed

and look down powerlessly at the closed eyes, the scarcely discernible

breathing. (153) Fung 36

By comparison, in the film, Rosemary has only one friend, Elise Dunstan, who

appears very briefly.

The deletion of episodes about Rosemary's relationship with friends clearly

suggests a world of alienated human relationships. When Rosemary suffers or is in

trouble, no one gives a damn, and she also has no one to run to. With no real friends

and no real love from her husband, Rosemary gradually falls deeper and deeper in a

world of complete isolation; and thus becomes a completely helpless victim because she has to face her enemies all by herself. Polanski's masterful camerawork of constantly using high-angle shots to belittle the character of Rosemary and overhead close-ups to show Rosemary's anxiety helps emphasize Rosemary's vulnerability to fight against the evil forces surrounding her, suggesting that there is nothing she can do to change the world, just like Professor Abronsius in The Fearless Vampire Killers

(1967), especially when she stands all alone in the world. This aspect of the film will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

After almost all of Rosemary's friends are removed, the only "friends" Rosemary has in the film are just her deceiving neighbours, especially Minnie and Roman

Castevet, the Satanists，leaders. Polanski does not give the slightest hints that they can be evil at all, and the couple is played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, who look perfectly "normal" like sweet grandparents. Ruth Gordon, whose outstanding Fung 37

performance won her an Oscar for the Best Supporting Actress, even adds a great deal

of playfulness that reminds the audience of her equally sensational and hilarious

performances as the nagging dimwitted mother in Robert Mulligan's Inside Daisy

Clover (1965), the aged and addled mother in Carl Reiner's Where 's Poppa? (1970)

and the carefree septuagenarian who falls in love with a teenager in Hal Ashby's

Harold and Maude (1973). In Rosemary 's Baby, Ruth Gordon always wears

exaggeratingly colourful clothes and beads and ridiculously thick makeup, and with

her disturbingly noisy tone, overdoes her care about Rosemary, fully demonstrating

that "[sjhe's absolutely the noisiest person [one can have] ever seen" (54). Who

could have thought that an aged chatterbox like Ruth Gordon who annoys the young out of showing too much concern can become the one who harms you? With Minnie and Roman appearing like sweet grandparent-typed people, Polanski proves the point that "appearance can be deceptive." As a result, the question posed before the audience is: does a friend who shows his concern for you really care about you, or is he only up to something else? Are there any real friends at all?

(II) Unfulfilled Marriages

However, in creating truly alienated human relationships, putting the characters in a friendless state is not as effective as showing a breakup of marital relationships - for instance, letting the wife be betrayed by her husband, who is supposed to be the Fung 38

most intimate person in her life, or even showing the couple harming each other. It

is for this reason that Polanski supplements his depiction of friendlessness by carrying

on his exploration of marital tension, as first presented in Knife in the Water and

Cul-de-sac, with his films of adaptation including Rosemary 's Baby, Tess, Bitter Moon

and Death and the Maiden. On one hand, in these films of adaptation, Polanski

seems to have an even more negative opinion of the husbands than the wives, as he

presents before his audience the worst things the males do to the females. Among

Polanski's presented-on-screen monstrous males who destroy females are Guy

Woodhouse in Rosemary's Baby, Alec d'Urberville and Angel Clare in Tess and Dr.

Roberto Miranda in Death and the Maiden. On the other hand, Polanski lets the

suffering females, including Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary's Baby, Tess

Durbeyfield in Tess and Paulina Escobar in Death and the Maiden, share some blame for failing to maintain happiness in their marriages. The view that the breakup of marital relationships is the consequence caused by both sexes is fully supported by

Polanski's presentation of the excessively peculiar relationships between Oscar and

Mimi, whose affection for each other is built upon the harm they do to each other, in

Bitter Moon.

The cruelty of the husbands to their wives is most explicitly presented in

Rosemary 's Baby. In fact, the marital relationships presented in this film are Fung 39

indisputably the worst of all. Rosemary Woodhouse is betrayed of the trust she puts

in her befriending neighbours who only use her to accomplish their depraved mission.

However, such betrayal of friendship is hardly comparable to Guy's betrayal to

Rosemary - giving his wife away in exchange for his fame. It is heartbreaking to

see how Rosemary becomes a tool for Guy to gain his success in the theatre

effortlessly. The audience will definitely be stunned to see what mean things a

husband can possibly do to his wife: using her as a tool, and turning a blind eye to her

suffering when bearing the demonic child.

It may astound the audience that Roman Polanski did not choose to direct

Rosemary 's Baby 一 William Castle, the producer of Paramount Pictures, chose him

instead. Both John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow were not the first choices to play

Guy and Rosemary either - they were assigned to Polanski. However, once Polanski has the actors at hand, he demonstrates the best qualities of a true artist — he has his own ideas on how to make the best use of them. Under his direction, Cassavetes is transformed into a real human beast and Farrow a fragile character who takes all the mishaps helplessly. How Polanski makes use of Mia Farrow's particular qualities as an actress to create his version of Rosemary Woodhouse will be discussed in Chapter

4. Here I will just focus on how Polanski makes John Cassavetes fit into the character of Guy Woodhouse. Fung 40

In sight of the fact that John Cassavetes had just earned an Oscar nomination

playing an originally disobedient and hostile prisoner in The Dirty Dozen the year

before Rosemary's Baby was made, Polanski constantly arranges shots that stress

Cassavetes's sinister look, beginning with the early episode when Guy and Rosemary

are invited to have dinner with their neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet. After

dinner, Rosemary helps with the washing whilst Guy sits down with Roman. There

is a brief shot showing Guy listening to Roman attentively while Rosemary is helping

Minnie to wash the dishes. This is when Cassavetes acts with his piercing eyes,

giving a concentrated but puzzled expression that marks the beginning of his evil

mind - being tempted by Roman to sacrifice his wife in exchange for success in show

business. It is obvious that Polanski does not intend to make the character Guy to

look like a nice gentleman at all, which is opposite to his treatment on Minnie and

Roman Castevet. Rather, Cassavetes's menacing look is much stressed to suggest his wickedness, notably in the scene when he initiatively suggests having a baby, especially after all the efforts Rosemary has paid to talk him into doing so, leading

Rosemary to naively believe that having a baby is some form of celebration for his newly-gained theatrical success. More of Cassavetes's sinister look appears when he blames Rosemary for doing something that may go against the devil-worshippers' plan - like throwing away Minnie's herbal drinks and trying to go back to Dr. Hill, her Fung 41 former gynecologist - indicating the husband's growing coldness to his wife. In addition, Cassavetes acts with a high degree of nonchalance, especially in a scene when he jerks his hand away as Rosemary invites her to feel her baby through her stomach, clearly showing that he cares neither about Rosemary's joy nor her suffering when bearing Satan's child.

An even more successful technique that emphasizes Guy's cruelty to his wife in the film is the way in which the images of Guy and the devil are juxtaposed in

Rosemary's dream sequence. As noted above, Polanski's version of Rosemary's

Baby is a faithful adaptation as it retains most of the novel's original ideas; and the film's dream sequence is also rather close to the way it is presented by Ira Levin. It is clear in both the novel and the film that a parallel is made between the husband and the devil. For example, the novel has a detailed description how Guy can be analogized to Satan in Rosemary's dream. As Rosemary is making love to her husband:

She opened her eyes and looked into yellow furnace-eyes, smelled sulphur

and tannis root, felt wet breath on her mouth, heard lust-grunts and

breathing of onlookers. (96)

Nonetheless, although both the novel and film's dream sequences stress the continuity between Guy and Satan, Polanski's is distinctive. Here is the full dream sequence in Fung 42

Levin's novel:

Rosemary slept a while, and then Guy came in and began making love to

her. He stroked her with both hands - a long, relishing stroke that began at

her bound wrists, slid down over her arms, breasts, and loins, and became a

voluptuous tickling between her legs. He repeated the exciting stroke

again and again, his hands hot and sharp-nailed, and then, when she was

ready-ready-more-than-ready, he slipped a hand in under her buttocks,

raised them, lodged his hardness against her, and pushed it powerfully in.

Bigger he was than always; painfully, wonderfully big. He lay forward

upon her, his broad chest crushing her breasts. (He was wearing, because

it was to be a costume party, a suit of coarse leathery armor.) Brutally,

rhythmically, he drove his new hugeness. She opened her eyes and looked

into yellow fumace-eyes, smelled sulphur and tannis root, felt wet breath on

her mouth, heard lust-grunts and breathing of onlookers. (95-96)

Through such explicit description of the sexual intercourse, Levin emphasizes that

Rosemary treats this scene as an experience of "an orgasm" (96). This is probably the most erotic episode in the novel, revealing Rosemary's deepest desire to have rough and vigorous sex with her husband. Such a tremendous joy she receives from the sadomasochistic lovemaking experience naturally arouses her sense of guilt. Fung 43

Thus, as her dream continues, she feels so ashamed that she conceals herself in front

of the Pope, an imaginary figure, by speaking so "sadly" that "he wouldn't suspect she had just had an orgasm" (96). This is probably Ira Levin's approach in giving the readers a hint of Rosemary's strong-willed character, showing her as a woman who is always looking for excitement and different means of happiness in her married life, even if her own thoughts distress her and cause her guilt.

In comparison, when presented in Polanski's film version, the same sequence shows a change of focus from Rosemary's erotic experience to her being devoured by evil powers. Though this dream sequence presents the most explicit nude scene in the film, the nudity does not in the slightest function as an erotic element; it is even likely to create a nauseating effect upon the audience, in strong contrast to the tender lovemaking scene in the beginning of the film when Guy and Rosemary "[unplug] the lamp and [strip] and [make] love in the nightglow of shadeless windows" (23) right on the floor of the empty house. Instead, the dream sequence focuses on vividly showing Guy's transformation into Satan through a series of montages, from a man wearing armor to an inhuman creature covered with hard scales. There is no

"stroking," and definitely no tenderness to speak of. Instead, what we see from the film is ferocious scratching and Rosemary's expressions of agony. From the close-up of Rosemary's anguished expressions, Polanski puts Rosemary into a Fung 44

helpless situation and makes her an entirely submissive figure, creating a strong

contrast to the Rosemary in Levin's novel. I will show many more examples of

Rosemary's submissiveness presented in Polanski's film in Chapter 4. The highlight of the whole episode is definitely the blending of the images of Guy Woodhouse and

Satan, which is Polanski's most disturbing metaphor of the extreme corruption of the human mind. Here, Polanski is not simply saying that Satan impregnates Rosemary but that this is done with Guy's consent and through his body; indeed, Guy is a human beast who will do anything to win the acting part, demonstrating the worst kind of marital partners. Compared with his theatrical career, Rosemary is nothing to him, and sacrificing his wife is a price Guy is ready to pay.

Like Rosemary, the title character in Polanski's less, based on Thomas Hardy's classic Tess of the d'Urbervilles, is also a tragic figure under marital tension.

Although Tess takes place in the late 1800s (Thomas Hardy never indicates the exact dates in his novels, but one may assume that his novels take place around the years they were written), almost a century prior to the events in Rosemary ’s Baby, Polanski manages to find similar traits in the two heroines. Moreover, although Polanski's

Tess centres on the title character, the males play a very important part in the film.

As the American film critic, Roger Ebert, comments, the film is a story about "the way [Tess] is gradually destroyed by the exercise of the male ego" (Ebert, 542). In Fung 45

Other words, Tess Durbeyfield is portrayed as a submissive character with no choice but waiting for different men in her life to shape the world around her. By law, Tess has two husbands, but both of them bring her tremendous sufferings - Alec d'Urberville mistreats her while Angel Clare abandons her. Like Rosemary 's Baby,

Tess is yet another faithful adaptation of the original novel, at least in terms of the dialogue spoken and the arrangement of episodes. However, just as Guy is presented as more monstrous in the film than in the novel, Alec and Angel are also degraded in

Polanski's Tess, thus creating another extreme picture of alienation, detaching Tess from any love and care that a maiden deserves from her suitors.

The transformation of Alec's character is the most obvious change from Hardy's novel as he is portrayed as so wicked that he merely treats Tess as a submissive slave, or even one of his possessions. To emphasize Alec's vulgarity, Polanski has chosen to add visual images not present in the novel showing aggressive physical touching or even violence. One clear example is the rape scene that takes place in the woods, which destroys Tess's maidenhood as well as all happiness in her future life. In

Hardy's novel, this encounter can still be considered a rape scene, but it is presented in quite a subtle way:

"Tess!" said d'Urberville.

There was no answer ... He knelt and bent lower, till her breath Fung 46

warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She

was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears. (Hardy,

71)

The tears described here may also be due to Tess's own sense of guilt that arises when she willingly lets Alec carry on with what he wants to do to her. However, in the film, the same scene is presented with a lot of physical contact, with Tess trying very hard to struggle away from Alec's kisses and attempted intimacy with her.

Polanski's version of Hardy's novel presents Alec d'Urberville as an especially cold-blooded person, which is highlighted in another scene that amplifies Tess's hatred for the man. In the novel, the scene where Alec persuades Tess to give up her labouring life after Angel Clare leaves her is presented like this:

"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he [d'Urberville] continued,

stretching his arm towards her waist; "you should be willing to share it, and

leave that mule you call your husband for ever."

One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her

skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she

passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face. It was

heavy and thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the mouth. Fancy

might have regarded that act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her Fung 47

armed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec fiercely started up from his

reclining position. A scarlet oozing appeared where her blow had alighted,

and in a moment the blood began dropping from his mouth upon the straw.

But he soon controlled himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from his

pocket, and mopped his bleeding lips.

She too had sprung up, but she sank down again.

"Now, punish me!" she said, turning up her eyes to him with the

hopeless defiance of the sparrow's gaze before its captor twists its neck.

"Whip me, crush me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I

shall not cry out. Once victim, always victim - that's the law!" (325-26)

In Hardy's novel, this slapping scene that causes Alec to bleed is more accidental than intentional. Though it is clear that Tess tries to be rid of Alec as much as she can, she does not really hate him. Alec is still portrayed as a passionate person who wishes to win the heart of the young woman. He is not entirely a heartless person, and he even does missionary work and many other things to please Tess. Tess slaps

Alec mainly because she cannot accept the truth that her husband will not come back to her, as suggested by Alec, but she regrets what she has done immediately. Yet, as with Rosemary and Guy's sexual encounter in Rosemary 's Baby, the same scene is transformed into an exceptionally violent one in Polanski's film. Tess slaps Alec Fung 48

with her glove as hard as she can in order to provoke him. In return, Alec gives a

sinister smile, holding a whip in his hands ready to beat her for good, and the scene

swiftly jumps to the line "I was your master once! I will be your master again. If you are any man's wife you are mine!" (326) This line is presented in the film as an assertion of authority, unlike the scene in the novel in which Alec hysterically expresses his sincerity in asking Tess to become his. Here, in the same the way he directs John Cassavetes in Rosemary 's Baby, Polanski arranges for Leigh Lawson, the cold-faced actor who fits perfectly into the part of the cold-hearted Alec, to give the most menacing expressions throughout the film.

In Polanski's film, Alec's wickedness is further emphasized in the final murder scene immediately after Tess meets her husband Angel again. In Hardy's novel, there is a long quarrel scene between Tess and Alec, seen by the landlady Mrs. Brooks through a keyhole:

"And then my dear, dear husband came home to me . • . and I did not know

it! . . . And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me • . • you did not

stop using it - no - you did not stop! My little sisters and brothers and my

mother's needs 一 they were the things you moved me by . . . and you said

my husband would never come back - never; and you taunted me, and said

what a simpleton I was to expect him! . . . And at last I believed you and Fung 49

gave way! . . . And then he came back! Now he is gone. Gone a second

time, and I have lost him now for ever . . . and he will not love me the

littlest bit ever any more - only hate me! ... O yes, I have lost him now -

again because of - you!" In writhing, with her head on the chair, she

turned her face towards the door, and Mrs. Brooks could not see the pain

upon it; and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth upon

them, and that the long lashes of her closed eyes stuck in wet tags to her

cheeks. She continued: "And he is dying - he looks as if he is dying! . •.

And my sin will kill him and made me be what I prayed you in pity not to

make me be again! . . . My own true husband will never, never - O God - I

can't bear this! -1 cannot!"

There were more and sharper words from the man; then a sudden rustle;

she had sprung to her feet. (373-74)

This quarrel scene by no means leads the readers to consider Alec a villain since it only accounts for Tess's crime of passion: Tess blames Alec for breaking up her hope that her husband will come back. Under Polanski's treatment, however, this scene is transformed to emphasize Alec's wickedness further. The quarrel scene is actually replaced by a silent one in which Tess is weeping while Alec shows his complete coldness as he asks several indifferent questions while reading his newspaper and Fung 50 enjoying his coffee. Leigh Lawson's cold-faced performance once again functions flawlessly under Polanski's direction. This episode reveals that after winning less back to him, this so-called "first" man in Tess's life merely treats her as an object he owns, showing no affection at all. Tess is shown to have been taken by force, which drives her to murder Alec. It is not a crime of passion in the film, but of self-defense.

Barbara Learning, in the Prologue of her book, Polanski, His Life and Films, even considers the murder scene in Tess "the climatic moment" (Learning, 11) that is absent from Thomas Hardy's novel. To some readers, Learning's book may be paying a too high tribute to Polanski，s film because most audiences will assume that the director has done no more than retaining the original style in Hardy's novel by showing the scene through a keyhole - letting the audience see the things as seen by the landlady. However, this seemingly uninspired filming technique alarms us that

"we are implicated as voyeurs; we are caught in the act" (11). Learning exposes

"our expectations of watching the violent scene" (11), and her comment once again proves Polanski's qualities as a film director: he is able to make the audience feel that his choice of camerawork is his innovative idea that is not present in the original literary work. This filming style reminds us of the opening and ending of Orson

Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) where the signpost “NO TRESPASSING" exactly Fung 51 contrasts with the camera movement. Symbolically penetrating through the barbed-wire entanglement surrounding Xanadu, Charles Foster Kane's house, what is shown on the screen grants audience the privilege to see what none of the characters in the whole film are able to see. In the same way，when we see what Mrs. Brooks sees on the screen, Polanski has already fulfilled our curiosity in letting us watch a highly personal scene from a marriage that is supposedly a secret unveiled to none but the people involved; thus we are led to reflect upon our own marriages. Learning's remarks prove that Polanski has made the audience forget that they are watching a film of adaptation, but think of it as a Polanski film filled with "Polanskian" style instead.

Polanski’s negative treatment of men, specifically husbands, extends in his version of Tess to a critique of Tess's second husband, Angel Clare, who is also portrayed as much more heartless in the film than he is in the novel. Belittling all kinds of sufferings which Angel is going through himself, and which the novel takes into account, Polanski makes Angel into a calm and unforgiving man who cannot even accept the slight flaws in other people. An example is when Angel decides to break up with Tess after learning about Tess's past with Alec. In Hardy's novel, there is a long description of the suffering that he has to go through:

Clare came close, and bent over her [Tess]. "Dead, dead, dead!" he Fung 52

murmured.

After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of

unmeasurable woe he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled her in

the sheet as in a shroud. Then lifting her from the bed with as much

respect as one would show to a dead body, he carried her across the room,

murmuring -

"My poor, poor Tess 一 my dearest, darling Tess! So sweet, so good,

so true!"

The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours,

were inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart. If it had been to

save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling, have put an end

to the position she found herself in. Thus she lay in absolute stillness,

scarcely venturing to breathe, and wondering what he was going to do with

her, suffered herself to be borne out upon the landing.

"My wife - dead, dead!" he said. (Hardy, 243)

This scene shows that the psychologically tormented Angel can hardly accept the truth that Tess is not as pure as he thought she was. Comparatively, in the film, with the above episode about Angel's psychological sufferings entirely deleted, Polanski

I makes Angel's decision seem to come too fast and too sensibly. Highlighted by Fung 53

Peter Firth's calm acting of the part of Angel Clare with a self-assured and firm

speaking tone，the character appears to be especially conscious of what he is doing

and what the result will be when he abandons his wife, which makes his iciness even

more manifest.

Angel's unkind personality is further emphasized through Polanski's severely trimmed explanation of his long disappearance after abandoning Tess. In the original novel, the suffering that Angel has gone through is illustrated through the astonishment his parents experience when they see him again:

“0，it is not Angel - not my son - the Angel who went away!" she [Mrs.

Clare] cried in all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself aside.

His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure

from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had

experienced, in the climate to which of events at home. You could see the

skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton. He

matched Crivelli's dead Christus. His sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue,

and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows and lines of his

aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his face twenty years before

their time.

"I was ill over there, you know," he said. "I am all right now." (361) Fung 54

This episode perfectly accounts for Angel's long absence from the country, and so the readers may willingly forgive him for not coming back to Tess sooner.

Comparatively, in Polanski's film, the so-called suffering that Angel has gone through is far from enough, or can hardly be compared with his wife's suffering. With his disappearance left unexplained, Angel's sudden reappearance creates the effect exactly opposite to that in the novel - the audience is likely to blame him for selfishly leaving his wife alone for so long. Even though he eventually comes back to Tess to perform the husband's duties, this marriage can hardly be called a marriage. He is still the one to be blamed for turning Tess into a criminal and causing her final downfall.

Polanski's Tess even emphasizes qualities in Angel hardly noticed in the novel, such as his vulgarity and immorality, seen when he seeks an extramarital relationship with another woman right after the breakup. In this scene, Angel has the sudden impulse to flirt with Izz Huett, asking her to go to Brazil with him. This scene is also present in the novel:

"You love me very, very much, Izz?" he suddenly asked.

"I do - I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was at the diary

together!"

"More than Tess?” Fung 55

She shook her head.

"No," she murmured, "not more than she."

"How's that?"

"Because nobody could love，ee more than Tess did! . . . She would

have laid down her life for ’ee. I could do no more."

Like the prophet on the top of Peor Izz Huett would fain have spoken

perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her rougher

nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace.

Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words

from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was

something as if a sob had solidified there. His ears repeated, “She would

have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more!”

"Forget our idle talk, Izz," he said, turning the horse's head suddenly.

"I don't know what I've been saying! I will now drive you back to where

your lane branches off." (265-66)

This scene described in the novel shows that Izz's comment about Tess's love for

Angel has a great impact on Angel, which immediately makes him ashamed and arouses his sense of guilt for thinking of betraying Tess. However, this scene is enormously trimmed in Polanski's film, showing that Angel takes Izz's comment on Fung 56 his wife very lightly, as he just signals his horse to carry on his journey without even looking back to Izz. The film seems to suggest that the man is merely disappointed because he has not succeeded in seducing Izz, or because Izz has not shown the affection he expects from a submissive female. The audience will probably expect that Angel will tempt another woman into going to Brazil with him, and feel sad for the fragility of the marriage between Angel and Tess.

In Polanski's vision of marriage, both Rosemary Woodhouse and Tess

Durbeyfield are tragic figures. Nevertheless, Polanski is not totally sympathetic towards the two females; instead, he lets them share some blame for the final breakup of their marriages. He accounts for the two submissive wives' increasing introversion in the same way he explains Carol's intensifying revulsion for the opposite sex in Repulsion (1965): all these women have connections with men who are not exactly their ideals (perhaps in reality or just in their subjective minds), but they all let their anguish override their rationality; and thus they make their lives even more miserable than before. In both Rosemary 's Baby and Tess, we can see how the husbands' cruelty towards their wives causes the wives' introversion, but Polanski seems to suggest that it is also the wives' introversion that causes the husbands' coldness towards them. In other words, the way the husbands and the wives treat each other forms a vicious circle that peaks at the final breakup of the marriages. Fung 57

Though Guy Woodhouse is unquestionably the most despicable man in

Rosemary 's Baby, Polanski shows that the submissive role Rosemary plays in this

marriage is no better than her husband's; and thus the marital tension is a result of

mutual alienation between the husband and the wife. As mentioned, the major

alteration in Polanski's version of Rosemary 's Baby is the deletion of a number of

episodes. Here, the deletion of certain episodes is especially significant in changing

Rosemary's character from a strong-willed woman who tries hard to save her

marriage to a reserved figure who does not even know how to help herself. In the

original novel, for instance, noticing that her husband is slipping further and further away from her, Rosemary takes the initiative to attend every play starring Guy

Woodhouse. By comparison, Rosemary is merely portrayed in the film as an especially withdrawn wife, excellently portrayed by the timid actress, Mia Farrow.

Polanski chooses to highlight her fragility as a human being, which I will discuss in

Chapter 4. However, the deletion of scenes concerning Rosemary's efforts to save her marriage implies that she does not love her husband enough; she never shares the joy of her husband's success in the theatre but chooses to live in a confined world of her own instead. Without doubt, Rosemary is gradually transformed into an introverted wife because of her husband's growing iciness to her, making her a pathetic figure just like Carol, whose repulsion for the opposite sex is generated from Fung 58

her own observation of men's behaviour in Repulsion. However, in a certain sense，

Rosemary is just as responsible as her deceiving husband for the breakup of her

marriage because she lacks communication with her husband and pays practically no

efforts to maintain the relationship. No wonder why Rosemary and Guy end up like

the couples in Knife in the Water and Cul-de-sac.

Like Rosemary's Baby, Polanski's Tess gives another picture accounting for a

wife's growing introversion when facing marital tension. Polanski has obviously made Alec d'Urberville and Angel Clare as contemptible as Guy Woodhouse. As a result, the audience is likely to feel sorry for Tess Durbeyfield, who is victimized by the two monsters. As we saw, in the film, the murder of Alec appears as a sort of self-defense, instead of a crime of passion as suggested by Thomas Hardy. However, the fact is that Polanski's version of Tess, possibly inspired by the mild personality of the actress, Nastassja Kinski, is so passive that she has passion for practically nothing.

Facing her two unfulfilled marriages, the submissive woman becomes even more introverted, yielding to whatever the others do to her. Most of the time, she just helplessly and silently waits for the others to shape the world around her, especially in certain episodes that may lead the audience to feel that there could have been at least something that Tess could do to better the situation. For example, the audience may think that on the wedding night when she confesses her past that is too much for Fung 59

Angel to bear, Tess, instead of doing nothing, could have said something more or

acted more passionately to persuade her new husband to change his mind and stay

with her.

As he explores the fragile and brutal marriages of Tess Durbeyfield and

Rosemary Woodhouse, Polanski also returns to the issue of victim aggression that he

previously dramatized in Cul-de-sac. As in that film, we see that one of the deepest

desires of the oppressed is to rule over the oppressors. Thus, Tess the tormented

woman tries to exercise short-lived power over the man she hates in the scene where

Tess slaps Alec with her glove. This provocative act is the only moment in the film

in which Tess can avenge herself on Alec for his rudeness to her, revealing her deepest

desire to take control of her tormenter for once. However, as in Cul-de-sac, this

chance to take control of the enemies is extremely short-lived, and it even ends up

with a greater despair than before, with the realization that the oppressed hardly

exercise any real power and have to stay victimized forever. Thus, in Tess's own

words, "Once victim, always victim - that's the law!" (326) As a consequence of her violence, Tess merely comes to understand more clearly that her attempt to exercise a brief moment of power over the hateful man hardly brings her anything, and that she has to continue to fulfill the "law" and play the eternal victim, which explains why she eventually has to end her life so tragically. The realization that her Fung 60 tragic ending is inevitable in such a decadent world is especially painful for Tess.

Moreover, her inescapable destiny suggests that all women, no matter what personalities they have — either timid like Rosemary, or passionate like Tess - are destined to suffer from permanent damage caused by their oppressors, the heartless men.

Another adaptation by Polanski, Death and the Maiden, tests to the extreme his theories of mutual victimization and aggression by those who supposedly love one another. The protagonist Paulina Escobar in Death and the Maiden, though much more skillfully in control of the role-playing game avenging against the wicked man who has haunted her life, comes only to realize that she is still a victim of an unfulfilled marriage who has to live in the shadow of her miserable past for the rest of her life. In this film, Polanski goes back to the approach used in his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water, having only three starring roles throughout the whole film (excluding those extras who appear in a concert scene); this enables him to focus on the tension among the three characters: the couple, Paulina and Gerardo

Escobar, and an intruder into their marriage life, Roberto Miranda. The film is an extended version of Ariel Dorfman's original short play of just 50 pages, co-written for the screen by Rafael Yglesias and Ariel Dorfman. The new elements added into the film version further increase the tension. Set in "a country in South America... Fung 61

after the fall of the dictatorship," as the opening credits say, the film starts with a

severe argument between husband and wife, Gerardo and Paulina, after Gerardo, a

lawyer, has accepted the President's appointment in a marionettish Commission with

a superficial mission "to investigate human rights violations that ended in death or the

presumption of death" (Dorfman, 5). Paulina loses her temper because of her

profound disappointment that her husband has done far from enough to bring justice

for the political victims. When Dr. Miranda, whom Paulina presumes is the doctor

who raped her years ago, appears and stays for the night, Paulina truly plays the boss by knocking him out in his sleep and tying him to a chair, treating the night as a chance for her husband's redemption. She urges Gerardo to perform the duties of a lawyer as well as a judge 一 putting Dr. Miranda on trial and getting him to confess on �‘ a tape, which is the way Paulina wants to get her revenge. She tries every method to make things the way she wants them to be, but it by no means reaches at her ‘ acquisition of real power.

Polanski's Death and the Maiden gives another picture of how a woman can be transformed by a man who ruins her, even though the woman is as strong-willed as

Paulina. Her strong will is demonstrated through the great deal of coarse language she uses, which constantly stuns the audience. However, no matter how tough

Paulina tries to be, she can never get away from her past sufferings. Dr. Miranda has Fung 62 been an intruder into the marriage between Paulina and Gerardo not just when the film takes place; instead he has been in between their marriage all the time since he raped Paulina long ago. Paulina is relatively luckier than Tess Durbeyfield as she could still marry a man who would try to let bygones be bygones, but she only ends up as pathetic as Tess since her marriage cannot give her happiness - all happiness has already fled away with her destroyed maidenhood. The audience will naturally tend to pity Paulina, who, now in her middle age, remains childless, probably because she cannot have any normal sex life with her husband; any sexual activities merely remind her of her haunted past.

Unlike Rosemary Woodhouse and Tess Durbeyfield, who play a submissive role in their marriages, Paulina Escobar is far from timid; instead, she is a determined and tough woman who at times even manipulates her husband. Instead of leaving the others to shape the world, Paulina takes the initiative to change it herself. However, even with such a strong personality, Paulina does not seem to successfully bring about results different from Rosemary's and Tess's. Eventually, she still falls back into her disappointment towards the inadequacy of her own marriage, which is far from her ideal: her husband is hardly a man of principles, which is what Paulina wants him to be, and he even fails to protect her when she needs him to stand on her side. Paulina finally realizes that she is just degraded into another political victim whom Gerardo Fung 63

has no real enthusiasm to help. Even worse, when Paulina forces Gerardo to get the

sadistic doctor to confess, the truth that comes out is not just the details of how

Paulina was raped, but also Gerardo's story of betrayal, at least from Paulina's point

of view - Gerardo actually had sex with another woman during the period of Paulina's

disappearance. Facing the disappointment from acquiring the unwanted truth instead

of the truth she wants, Paulina at last realizes that she has completely lost control of

her role-playing game, which she has expected to grant her the power to avenge her

lifelong oppressor so that she may be able to say goodbye to her miserable past and save her marriage. Does the game she plays really save her marriage, or does it just make her marriage even worse than before?

The question brought out in the film is: can Paulina get rid of her past after she has at last acquired what she wants - to get Dr. Miranda to confess his crime?

Actually, Ariel Dorfman's original play and Polanski's film have thoroughly different conclusions. In a way, both the play and the film are artistic in their own ways.

Dorfman's play offers an open ending, leaving the issue of justice an open question.

The play does not even explain whether Paulina has actually found the right person or not; the whole idea of kidnapping is just Paulina's way to release her frustrations.

However, the play's ending somehow suggests some light on Paulina and Gerardo's marriage. With Gerardo briefly discussing the effectiveness of the Commission Fung 64 during the intermission in the concert, the play implies that after all, Gerardo does try his best to fulfill his duties, so as not to disappoint his demanding wife.

However, the conclusion in Polanski's film takes an entirely different approach, with Dr. Miranda eventually admitting all his peculiar sexual desires when the furious

Paulina threatens to push him down a cliff. Paulina however suddenly softens and turns expressionless, and she just unties Dr. Miranda and lets him go. The film obviously offers a much more pessimistic ending, suggesting that even though Paulina has finally taken her revenge, it does not bring her any relief.

Moreover, the film suggests a stronger link between this helplessness in the political realm and within marriage. Indeed, the film leaves the Commision's effectiveness more of a question mark, thereby also symbolizing the sad fate of the marriage. With the past never dead for both of them, Paulina and Gerardo are probably always going to live with Dr. Miranda in between them. Paulina's suffering seems to prove Tess right: "Once victim, always victim - that's the law!"

(Hardy, 326) The victims' personalities make no difference to this "law."

Moreover, even greater suffering is generated from the disillusionment that results upon realization of this awful truth. If the doctor had not appeared, the couple would probably have been satisfied with their sexless marriage and let time do the healing as much as possible; but now, even this slightest hope is gone. Fung 65

We can even see how fatal the role-playing game can be from the diabolical pair,

Oscar and Mimi, in Polanski's shocking Bitter Moon, based on Pascal Bruckner's

French text, Limes de fiel. As John Parker, in his book, Polanski, comments on the making of Bitter Moon\ "There is much sexual and perversion and a good deal of nasty power-play" (Parker, 266). Indeed, the bizarre couple has started enjoying role-playing since the beginning of their purely sexual relationships, long before they are married. There are nauseating scenes including the almost naked Oscar putting on a pig's mask whilst Mimi plays his master, and Oscar handcuffing and gagging himself, waiting for Mimi to cut off his clothes and humiliate him. Gradually, the role-playing game develops to be a power-struggling game, fulfilling the couple's lust for power over each other: they actually build their affection upon hurting each other in turn, with Oscar first teasing Mimi and abandoning her, and then Mimi returning to torment Oscar after a car accident，making him paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Shockingly, they only get married after this accident, and they seem to be content with their relationships as they even tell their story to influence another couple, Nigel and

Fiona, whose marriage is on the verge of a breakup. While an audience of

Polanski's films may expect the husband to be sadomasochistic, enjoying playing both the winner and the loser, the film's ending still shocks the audience with Oscar shooting Mimi and then himself. Once again, Polanski proves that any role-playing Fung 66

games with a purpose to acquire the power to rule over others only end up in a

manner very much different from the players' expectations. In the case of Bitter

Moon, Oscar and Mimi, who want to win over each other, both end up becoming

losers. Whilst the harm in Rosemary's Baby, Tess and Death and the Maiden is one-directional, done by the evil men to the women who fail to manage their lives,

Oscar and Mimi's catastrophe in Bitter Moon is clearly a result of mutual destruction.

Both cases cause our faith in the intimate people in our lives to waver greatly.

Through breaking down the characters' relationships with those intimate to them, especially their spouses and their friends, Polanski creates a pathetic world with practically no trustable human relationships. This allows him to go to a real extreme, constructing a depraved world in which some people consider some other people inferior and treat their lives as dirt. The result is the stunning man-created inferno where humans constantly perform inhuman acts - brutally sacrificing the innocent's lives. As we shall see in the next chapter, these inhuman acts become the highlights of Polanski's films in Macbeth, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist. Fung 67

Chapter 3

The Extreme Sense of Superiority That Destroys Others

In Roman Polanski's negative view of the modern world, there are always evil forces that cause sufferings and damage to humankind. In The Fearless Vampire

Killers (1967), we have a glimpse of the symbolic power of the evil, which can be so enormous that it can even dominate the whole world. The demons created in the film, which suck the blood of the human beings to gain their power to reign over the whole world, can easily be interpreted as a kind of people who do the same thing symbolically. The most dangerous idea conceived by the human brain is by all means the extreme sense of superiority that leads some to achieve a haughty goal through whatever means, even if the cost is to sacrifice certain inferior human lives.

As a follow-up to The Fearless Vampire Killers, Polanski made two films related to the theme of demonology consecutively, namely Rosemary's Baby (1968) and

Macbeth (1971). He returned to this area of interest almost three decades later, when he made The Ninth Gate in 1999. Though each of these films belongs to the genre of horror because of the subject matter of demons, we should not assume that Polanski believes in the devil. In fact, upon making Rosemary 's Baby, Polanski admitted the following:

Being an agnostic, however, I no more believed in Satan as evil incarnate Fung 68

than I believed in a personal god; the whole idea conflicted with my rational

view of the world. (Polanski, 262)

Nevertheless, it is surely true that Polanski does believe in the depravity of the human nature. Polanski's horror films are enormously different from normal horror films. While other horror classics like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead

(1968) and William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1974) rely on nauseating images of the demons to evoke the audience's sense of fear, Polanski rarely shows his interest in filming such disturbing images. In Rosemary 's Baby, there are only very brief shots of the monster scratching Rosemary on the "baby night," with its pair of golden-yellow eyes; the baby itself, whose ugliness is described in detail in the novel, is not even shown on screen. Macbeth is comparatively more disturbing, with the witches played by some really ugly actresses, and also numerous bloodbath scenes.

However, in The Ninth Gate, no ghosts appear at all, and the only possible demon is the supernatural being played by Polanski's beautiful third wife, Emmanuelle Seigner.

However, even without putting too much emphasis on filming demons, Polanski can still create a bloodcurdling effect. In fact, in Polanski's cinema of horror, it is not the demons that scare the audience, but the hearts of those corrupt people who constantly cause damage to the lives of the others. The real horror lies in how the wicked people treat those whom they consider unimportant like tools or even dirt under their Fung 69 feet.

The most extreme villains created in Polanski's cinema possess certain qualities.

First of all, they all have tremendous lust for power, which they are ready to acquire through any means to achieve the greatest sense of superiority. Secondly, considering their goals on top of everything, they see anything else, including human lives, as insignificant; therefore, they do not care whom they hurt, so long as the sacrificed ones aid them in the road to success, or need to be eliminated because they are the obstacles to their goals. Moreover, the villains will use any methods on the sacrifices they choose, including killing them or causing permanent damage to them; they simply treat murders as games. All these qualities are found in the title character of Macbeth, the group of devil-worshippers in Rosemary 's Baby, Boris

Balkan in The Ninth Gate, and most realistically, the Nazi Germans in The Pianist

(2002). The villains are the essential elements for Polanski to picture his negative view of modern society, though he does not always choose a modern setting for his films.

(I) The Villains' Lust for Power

Let me commence with the first quality of the villains: lust for power, indeed a desire to rule the world. Unquestionably, among all the villains presented in

Polanski's films, Macbeth is most vividly and unreservedly presented because he is Fung 70

the title character of the Shakespearean tragedy, so the story naturally focuses on him

from the beginning to the end. In making his film version of the play, Polanski takes

a direction somewhat different from his usual cinematic techniques: Macbeth is a rare example of a Polanski film that uses an ancient setting (other examples may be The

Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Tess (1979), and Pirates (1986)，but none of these is nearly as ancient as Macbeth, which chronicles a Scottish King of the 12^'' century, perhaps) to refer to the modern world. Behind this innovative approach, Polanski still proves himself to be a follower of the international trend. Macbeth was made around the same period as Federico Fellini，s version of Petronius，classic, Satyhcon

(1970) and Andrei Tarkovsky's biographical film of the icon painter of the century Russia, Andrei Rublev (1966). All of these films make use of a setting of the ancient period in order to satirize modern society. Fellini Satyricon is the director's explanation of decadence in contemporary Italian society, which can actually be traced back to the ancient Roman Empire. Andrei Rublev, a film about the inner struggle of the icon painter who, witnessing the brutality of the world, doubts if his art can help the people, was accused of being politically complicated, which delayed its release in Moscow until 1971. As Tarkovsky said upon the making of Andrei Rublev,

“I do not understand historical films which have no relevance to the present" (Sinyard,

115). It is possible that Polanski has the same idea in mind as he chooses Macbeth Fung 71 as his subject matter 一 he wants to make use of an ancient setting to make a clear statement about modem society.

It is manifest that Polanski often attacks modem society through his films, and most of his films have a contemporary setting. So Polanski could have made a modern version of Macbeth if he had wanted to, and some modernized or nationalized versions of Shakespearean plays have also proven to be quite successful. Akira

Kurosawa is one of the masters of the genre. His Japanese versions of

Shakespearean tragedies, including Throne of Blood (aka Kumonosu jo or Cobweb

Castle) (1957), based on Macbeth, and Ran (1985), based on King Lear, both of which incorporate "Noh" tradition, are considered all-time classics. The Bad Sleep

Well (aka Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru) (1961)，using the storyline of Hamlet, is a modernized version of the Shakespearean play. Even Disney's cartoon The Lion

King (1994) is an adaptation of Hamlet, as is West Side Story (1961), Robert Wise and

Jerome Robbins’ updated musical version of Romeo and Juliet, which changes the setting to the ghettos of the western part of New York, with rivals triggered not between two noble families, but two gangs. Modernization seems to be an excellent approach for Polanski to express pessimistic view of modern society. However, in this case, instead of modernization, Polanski retains the historical setting in making

Macbeth. Even more, Polanski's version of Macbeth is yet another very close Fung 72 adaptation in the way that he has retained the Shakespearean language, but it does not mean that the director is uninspired. The film critic Roger Ebert even finds the film so original that, to him, even the term "interpretation" is considered an insult. As he comments, "This is an original film by an original film artist, and not an

'interpretation.' It should have been titled Polanski ’s Macbeth, just as we got Fellini

Satyricon” (Ebert, 331). Indeed, as stimulating as Fellini Satyricon and Tarkovsky's

Andrei Rublev, Polanski's Macbeth leads us to associate the play with the world we live in today, which makes it a unique film, and one of the most acclaimed versions of all "Macbeths."

One major difference between Macbeth and Polanski's other films involving victimization is that the main character here, instead of being a victimized person, is the villain himself who causes suffering to others. In fact, one interesting question is: among all Shakespearean tragedies, why has Polanski chosen to make Macbeth? It is because Macbeth has the evil victimizing personality that Polanski needs to construct his world of absolute pessimism towards human nature. Among all

Shakespearean tragic heroes, Macbeth probably has the greatest "tragic flaw," which makes his acts almost unforgivable. Enormously different from Hamlet, King Lear and Othello, all of whom preserve a certain nobility, Macbeth is merely portrayed as a selfish person after his own glory: to become a King, which is a "place and power he Fung 73 is utterly unfitted to possess" (Spurgeon，15), and only an extravagance but hardly an essence in life. Originally serving as a loyal General in the King's Army, Macbeth should have been satisfied with becoming "Thane of Glamis" and "Thane of Cawdor"

(I. iii. 48-49), but unfortunately, tempted by the witches' prophecies, he insists that he should become a King and gain the ultimate sovereignty through improper means just to glorify himself.

Changed to a real historical setting, The Pianist, Polanski's most recent work, which has gained him the greatest honour of winning the Best Director Academy

Award in 2002，reconstructs the living hell of the wartime Poland created by Germany, whose ruthless treatment of the Jews under the order of the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, the real villain of the film, resembles Macbeth's lust for power. Being a Pole and a

Holocaust survivor, and having taken a minor acting role in Andrzej Wajda's A

Generation (aka Pokolenie) (1955), a World War II drama set in Poland during the

Nazi occupation, Polanski probably should have a consciousness of the suffering his own race has gone through, and thus we can draw a parallelism between the ambitious-driven King of Scotland, Macbeth, and such totalitarian political leaders as

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. As a result, The Pianist, based on Wtadyslaw

Szpilman's acclaimed autobiography depicting his struggle for survival in the

Nazi-occupied Poland, can be considered as Polanski's semi-autobiography as well. Fung 74

Polanski ’s intention to make The Pianist is highly comparable to that of the Jewish director Steven Spielberg when he made Schindler 's List (1993) - to visualize before the audience's eyes how his compatriots have suffered. Macbeth is just a fictional character, but with The Pianist’ Polanski lets history itself be the judge to witness the calamity of such extreme nationalism as Pan-Germanism; and hence the brutality of

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Germans, whose scheme of exterminating the other races — especially the Jews - to prove Germany's national superiority even dwarfs Macbeth's brutal acts.

Like most of Polaiiski's other adapted works, The Pianist is a rather close adaptation depicting most of the events described in the book. However, as in his other adaptations, the directors makes significant changes to the material. Clearly, in the case of an autobiographic work like The Pianist, which details the brutal acts of

Nazism, it would be difficult for Polanski to darken the material further. Yet he does so nonetheless. A minor way this is accomplished is that the film lets all the mishaps fall onto the protagonist, while in the book some of the atrocities are only things he is told. For example, in the novel, the family does not have to look for another place to settle when the Nazis take power:

At least we could console ourselves that our street was already in the ghetto

area, and we did not have to look for another flat. Jews who lived outside Fung 75

the area were in an unfortunate situation. They had to pay exorbitant sums

in key money and look for a new roof over their heads in the last weeks of

October. (Szpilman, 59)

However, in the film, the Szpilmans are personally experiencing this "unfortunate situation" with all the rest - having to pack up all their properties and move themselves into the ghetto area so as to “look for a new roof over their heads." The ultimate sense of superiority of the Nazi Germans is highlighted by the personal suffering that the main character and his family have to go through, not just what they see or hear.

More importantly, Polanski ruthlessly removes the few touches of humour present in the book and replaces them with an overwhelming atmosphere of increasing gloom. For instance in the book, the pianist's father is a man who does not lose his sense of playfulness even in wartime (a role-playing exercise that perhaps empowers him to some desire). The real situation, as perceived by Wladyslaw

Szpilman and his brother Henryk, is recorded in the book like this:

Among the many irksome regulations imposed on the Jews was one which,

although unwritten, had to be observed very carefully: men of Jewish

descent must bow to every German soldier. This idiotic and humiliating

requirement made Henryk and me incandescent with rage. We did all we Fung 76

could to get around it. We took long detours in the streets, just to avoid

meeting a German, and if it could not be avoided we looked away and

pretended not to have seen him, although we could have got a beating for

that. (49)

In contrast to Wladek and Henryk's serious attitudes:

My father's attitude was quite different. He sought out the longest streets

for his walks, and bowed to the Germans with indescribably ironic grace,

happy when one of the soldiers, misled by his beaming face, gave him a

civil greeting in return and smiled as if he were a good friend. On coming

home every evening he could not refrain from commenting casually on his

extensive circle of acquaintances: he had only to set foot in the street, he

told us, and he would be surrounded by dozens of them. He really could

not resist their friendliness, and his hands were getting stiff from raising his

hat so politely. With these words he would smile impishly, rubbing his

hands with glee. (49-50)

However, the father's playfulness is by no means something that Polanski

intends to retain in his film. In some cases, playfulness can also make a serious theme - Robert Altman's MASH (1970), hailed as one of the best anti-war films, is

one example that explores the art of seeking pleasure in an unpleasant situation in a Fung 77 comic way. Szpilman's father's playfulness described in the novel may have the similar function as the sardonic attitude of the Korean War military doctors in MASH, both showing how people anesthetize themselves to forget about the reality.

Polanski can be playful, too, most notably when he made the black comedy, The

Fearless Vampire Killers, but in the case of The Pianist, Polanski obviously takes a serious approach, and he drops off all elements of playfulness in this scene and others.

He is only interested in the reconstruction of the living hell of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Thus, rather than the partly light-hearted passage in the book, Polanski makes the father in his film suffer from being slapped hard by one of the German soldiers because he forgets to take off his hat and bow to him.

When he uses more contemporary settings, Polanski of course creates villains far lower in status than Macbeth and Adolf Hitler, as in Rosemary 's Baby and The Ninth

Gate. Thus, to make these less influential people equally villainous as Macbeth and

Hitler, Polanski chooses the theme of demonology to highlight their depravity. The villains in Rosemary 's Baby are a group of devil-worshippers, whose mission is to beget Satan's son in order to put the whole world into their hands. The leader of the devil-worshippers, Roman Castevet, believes that the newborn leader "shall overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples! He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and the tortured" and that "His power is Fung 78

Stronger than stronger" and "His might will last longer than longer" (Levin，253). It is obvious that everyone in this cult has absolute confidence in Satan's power, and believes that by serving Satan, they will enjoy the glory with him. The villain in The

Ninth Gate, Boris Balkan, has the same belief. His goal is to summon Lucifer from hell in order to gain the ultimate power, believing that "it will be the Devil who comes to [him]" (Perez-Reverte, 316) to bring him to the state of exaltation, which puts him on top of anyone else on earth. With the power granted by Satan, the devil-worshippers in Rosemary ’s Baby and Boris Balkan in The Ninth Gate can rule over the whole world together with Satan, a scenario that emphasizes that even in modern settings and using average people, human dreams of power can rival those of

Nazis and tyrants.

(II) The Victims for the Villains

Having looked at the villains' lust for power to control the world, let us look at the second quality of Polanski's villains: their choice of victims. The villains do not really mind whom they hurt, so long as their victims are either functional or

"dysfunctional" in their evil plan: the victims are either usable or must be eliminated because they block the path to the villains' success. As mentioned, the villains consider some human lives as inferior, and naturally, those inferior people in their eyes become victimized by them - but the villains will also betray those who are Fung 79 originally intimate to them, including friends or even spouses, whenever they find such necessity. We can see in Rosemary 's Baby, Macbeth and The Ninth Gate how the villains choose to be friendless and come to create a friendless world around them.

The atmosphere established in The Ninth Gate explains how such a friendless world with no trust among human relationships is constructed. Compared with other films by Polanski, The Ninth Gate, adapted from Arturo Perez-Reverte's Spanish novel, The Dumas Club, is a much freer adaptation; and thus heavily simplified and trimmed. Entirely dropping out the elements of "The Dumas Club," the film focuses on the main character, Dean Corso, a book detective hired to look for the copies of a demonic book called Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows. Corso is portrayed as a sarcastic and coldhearted miser who is only interested in his own benefits and despises friendship, retaining the idea in Perez-Reverte's novel:

"Friendship," said Corso, looking around as if waiting for someone to

explain the word to him. "Bars and cemeteries are full of good friends."

(22)

The motto held by Corso indeed sets the atmosphere for the whole film. Through him, Polanski constructs a picture of thorough friendlessness and alienation among human beings. Paradoxically, however, witnessing all the cold-blooded murders becomes too much even for the unfeeling Corso. Though Corso is not the villain, Fung 80

but just a tool, the development of the story exactly matches with Corso's cynical

attitude: every man for himself.

Interestingly, Corso's attitude is the very same motto that Guy Woodhouse and

Macbeth hold when they betray a wife and a best friend respectively. The most

pathetic aspect in Rosemary 's Baby is that Rosemary is victimized because of the trust

she puts in the people she regards as her friends, her deceiving neighbours, but worst

of all, she is really betrayed not by anyone else, but by her most beloved husband,

Guy, who is indisputably the most villainous of all villains throughout the story

because he initiatively gives her away to the devil-worshippers. This shows how

unimportant Rosemary in fact is in Guy's eyes.

As villainous as Guy Woodhouse, the title character in Polanski's Macbeth is

portrayed as "a poor, vain, cruel, treacherous creature, snatching ruthlessly over the

dead bodies of kinsman and friend" (Spurgeon, 15). In his mind, making himself a

King tops everything. Driven by his strong ambition, he chooses to betray his

friends one by one, including Banquo and Macduff. In Macbeth's evil plan of making himself a King, it is simply necessary for Banquo to be eliminated, as he

"shalt get kings" (I. Hi. 67)，according to the witches' prophecies, which goes against

Macbeth's wish to extend his reign. Macduff is another figure who has to be eliminated because "he bestows himself on "The son of Duncan" (III. iv. 25), Fung 81 exposing his disloyalty towards Macbeth. The victimization ofBanquo and Macduff makes it manifest that friendship means nothing to Macbeth compared with his throne, and he chooses to create a friendless world for himself, ending up having not a soul he can trust, as well as having no one trust him.

As we can see from the above examples, disconnecting themselves from any friendship is the villains' approach to pursue their depraved goals. The formation of this world of friendlessness makes it easier for us to understand the sacrifices of strangers, some of which have done no harm to anybody. They are chosen as victims simply because of their existence. Among these harmless strangers are the innocent characters Donald Baumgart and Edward Hutchins in Rosemary 's Baby as well as Rosemary herself. Donald Baumgart is just an actor, but he must be tortured so that he can no longer act and his acting role will go to Guy Woodhouse. Hence, this innocent man is made blind by the devil-worshippers. A similar fate happens to

Hutch, who discovers information harmful to the Satanists and must therefore be killed. Moreover, even Rosemary herself is an innocent victim. While she regards her neighbours as friends, they obviously do not feel the same way towards her, but simply treat her as their tool. Ironically, despite the huge ambitions of begetting

Satan's son, Rosemary is selected not because of her special abilities, but because, living right next door to the devil-worshippers, she is the most easily and conveniently Fung 82 available victim. All these examples prove the devil-worshippers' sense of superiority: the accomplishment their project requires human sacrifices, i.e. Rosemary and Donald Baumgart, and the elimination of potential enemies, i.e. Hutch.

Furthermore, like the Nazis in The Pianist, who also，it seems at times, victimize Jews just because they can, these monsters feel no guilt at tormenting, or even considering as less than human, those whom they casually destroy.

Examples of callous barbarity of Polanski's villains are easily multipled. Boris

Balkan in The Ninth Gate commits numerous murders and the character Macbeth is comparable to such tyrants as Adolf Hitler. Macbeth's resemblance to a 20^^-century dictator is made even more explicit by one additional murder scene that is absent from the original play - the disposal of the murderers hired by Macbeth to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. Having done the job of killing Banquo but failing in killing

Fleance, so that "comes [Macbeth's] fit again" (III. iv. 19), the murderers, under

Macbeth's order, are immediately gotten rid of, lest they may expose the secret. The destiny of the murderers is truly pathetic - being used and then disposed of after serving their purpose. For Macbeth to realize his great ambition, the sacrifice of these hired murderers' lives is quite inevitable - and this occurs despite their continued loyalty to him. This additional murder scene, absent from Shakespeare's play, certainly reveals Macbeth's merciless totalitarianism more explicitly. Fung 83

It is in The Pianist that the awful injustice that makes one man a killer and another a victim is shown most clearly. As in Wiadysiaw Szpilman's book, the murders commanded by the Nazis are not even motivated but usually senseless: they kill as though they are bewitched by some strange force and become as obsessed and lost as Kurtz, as portrayed by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse

Now (1979)，a contemporary version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness given the setting of Vietnam war. As Szpilman suggests:

They liked killing anyway: killing for sport, or to make their work easier, as

target practice or simply for fun. (Szpilman, 92)

How the Nazi Germans select their victims indeed puzzles the audience, and Polanski deliberately leaves the intention behind all these murders unexplained, just as history itself can hardly give a satisfactory explanation to the Germans' behaviours. This reminds us of Ernst Janning's confession in Stanley Kramer's courtroom drama of the postwar Germany, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), scripted by Abby Mann:

"...Why did we participate? . . . Because we loved our country! . . . What

difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights?...

What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It

is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be

discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded sooner or Fung 84

later . . . And history tells how well we succeeded ... We succeeded beyond

our wildest dreams. The very elements of hate and power in Hitler that

mesmerized Germany mesmerized the world!" (Mann, 113)

It is probably this kind of irrational "patriotism" that leads the Nazi Germans in The

Pianist to follow Hitler's orders blindly to murder the Jews. Their faith in their

Fuehrer, who, as history comments, promised to make Germany the most powerful nation in the world and promoted the idea that exterminating the Jews was the only solution to Germany's problems, is not very much different from the devil-worshippers' faith in Satan; therefore, they willingly become the agents of Hitler to perform all the evil deeds to the Jews.

(Ill) The Villains' Methods of Victimization

To accentuate the variety of methods the villains can use to make their chosen victims suffer, Polanski relies on different methods for different films. In

Rosemary 's Baby’ he chooses to build up a mysterious atmosphere to reveal the villains' cunning, whilst in Macbeth, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist, he chooses violence as the medium to emphasize the villains' brutality. However, no matter what approaches Polanski takes, they all lead to one conclusion: the harm done to the victims is the result of the villains' viewing them as insignificant.

As mentioned, Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, which is categorized as a horror film, Fung 85

is a rare example of presenting practically no disturbing images at all, and Polanski

does not put too much emphasis on the use of violence to highlight the suffering of

the victims (the only exception being one bloody suicide scene). The suffering of

the other victims is only mentioned in dialogue. Major emphasis is, however, placed

on the suffering of the central character, Rosemary, and in addition to the forms of

suffering we have already seen (her cruel husband and her false friends), her very

ignorance of the Satanists' plan becomes a source of suffering, if not for her then for

the audience who recognizes her plight. Thus, having learnt the lesson that Satan

"made that foolish what's-her-name, Terry [the suicide girl], made her get all scared

and silly" (Levin, 253), the devil-worshippers finally "change [their] plans" (253) and

do not tell Rosemary anything about making her the mother of Satan's child. Even

after the baby is born, they just tell Rosemary that the baby is dead, concealing

everything. Thus, she is a truly tragic figure — kept from the truth from the very

beginning, and abandoned after she has served her purpose. She is no big deal -

nothing more than a useful tool for the devil-worshippers, but a tool will also go rusty, and this is the time she has to be forgotten. Her eventual discovery of the truth only suggests new forms of suffering for her to endure.

Polanski's approach is different when filming Macbeth, The Ninth Gate and The

Pianist, as he puts more emphasis on the violence that destroys the victims. Thomas Fung 86

Kiernan, in his book, The Roman Polanski Story, writes: "Ordinarily a play of murder and violence, mostly committed offstage, Polanski decided to make the carnage the central focus of his film" (Kiernan, 240). Indeed, in Macbeth, which was made after

Polanski's second wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered, to amplify the evilness of the title character, Polanski even makes use of ultra-violence, which many critics suggest is

"painfully reminiscent of the Tate massacre" (Katz, 919). Polanski of course hates this comment:

After the [Charles] Manson murders it was clear that whatever kind of film

I'd come out with next would have been treated the same way. (Polanski,

339-40)

In fact, seeing the film only in relation to the tragedy does degrade the function of the use of violence in Polanski's Macbeth, which is to emphasize Macbeth's tyranny to the extreme. However, on the other hand, Polanski, who had a miserable childhood, does not deny the fact that he "use[s] such real-life memories and images of blood to graphic effect in several of his films" (Kiernan, 51), and the ultra-violence in Macbeth is the most obvious example. As result, without changing the dialogue said by the characters, Polanski "silently" adds numerous nauseating bloodbath scenes supported by a haunting background score, and the most notable one is the slaughtering of

Macduff's family. As Polanski admits in his autobiography: Fung 87

My treatment of [one] scene was based on a childhood experience. This is

the moment in Act IV when the murderers dispatched by Macbeth burst in

on Lady Macduff and her small son. I suddenly recalled how the SS

officer had searched our room in the ghetto, swishing his riding crop to and

fro, toying with my teddy bear, nonchalantly emptying out the hatbox fill of

forbidden bread. The behavior of Macbeth's henchmen was inspired by

that recollection. (Polanski, 333)

This confession tells us explicitly that Polanski is associating Macbeth's murders with the SS officers, and thus Macbeth with Adolf Hitler. Indeed, it is Macbeth who creates most of the bloody scenes in the film and here are more examples besides the killing of Macduff's family. In the assassination of Duncan, just stabbing is not enough for the bloodthirsty Macbeth; he has to pierce his knife through Duncan's throat. The two guards outside Duncan's chamber are executed by Macbeth, and shown on the screen to have their heads detached from their bodies, while Banquo is axed to death by the murderers hired by Macbeth. In fact, most of these death scenes only occur offstage in Shakespeare's play, utterly different from Polanski's explicit presentations for each of them. The excessive use of bloodbath scenes is Polanski's method to vivify Macbeth's brutal and bloodthirsty character so as to create an extremely depraved human world. In short, to Macbeth, his throne tops everything, Fung 88

and he will do anything to get it, even if the price is to cut off all friendships and

sacrifice others' lives. That is why the evil king creates hell everywhere as if he is painting a Scottish version of Portrait of Hell as illustrated by the most pessimistic contemporary Japanese writer, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, best known for his short story,

Rashomon.

The same approach of using violence reappears in Polanski's most recent works,

The Ninth Gate and The Pianist, though the violence used is not as excessive as in

Macbeth, Boris Balkan in many ways resembles the bloodthirsty Macbeth in that he commits all the murders in the film, and Polanski does emphasize these scenes, including the drowning of one man and the strangling of two women. As noted above, Polanski's purpose of making The Pianist was probably to witness the sufferings his own race had gone through as a semi-autobiographical project.

Naturally, what he puts into the film are numerous murder scenes that stun the audience. When "the Germans [have] seized [a] sick man, picked him up, armchair and all, carried the chair on to the balcony, and thrown it out into the street from the third floor" (Szpilman, 79-80)，the audience is very likely to scream together with

Wladyslaw Szpilman's mother. The audience will be shocked to see how human lives are treated as dirt, and watching The Pianist is just like watching a documentary about the concentration camp; this chilling effect is surely what Polanski is looking Fung 89

for among the audience.

From the process of victimization Polanski presents in Rosemary's Baby, The

Ninth Gate, Macbeth and The Pianist, it is crystal clear that the humans have become

inhuman especially where human relationships are concerned; some humans are

considered by some others as so unimportant and inferior that their lives deserve to be

sacrificed for some greater 一 or even some nonexistent 一 goals. Does the sense of

superiority really make humans superior? Obviously not, since everything that is presented on the screen results in a perception that men are no different from animals.

To Polanski, it is not demons but the sense of superiority that generates evil in human beings. Macbeth sheds much more blood than any witches, and Boris Balkan murders others without being sure if Lucifer really exists. Polanski proves the point that evil generates more evil. All these villains have turned themselves into

"Bluebeards": once they start doing evil deeds, they become more and more obsessed in it and cannot help doing more evil deeds. They probably will keep victimizing others unless they die. Fung 90

Chapter 4

The Vulnerability of the Victims to Fight Against Evil

We have seen in the previous chapters that Polanski's negative view of the world is constructed through the enormous harm done by certain ruthless villains to the victims. However, what is even more effective in bringing out the idea of a depraved society is to suggest that the evil forces are so great that the victims are completely helpless in fighting against them. The result is that Polanski's victims, usually the main characters, are feeble in every aspect 一 physically, psychologically and spiritually. Their weaknesses leave them no choice but to wait for the others to shape the world around them. No wonder the evil powers have no obstacles in remaking the world.

(I) The Victims' Inability to Fight Back

The feebleness of Polanski's victims brilliantly demonstrates how the director makes the best use of his actors, whether they are Polanski's first choice or they are assigned to him. The most notable feeble victims created by Polanski on screen include Rosemary Woodhouse, played by the meek Mia Farrow, Tess Durbeyfield, played by Nastassja Kinski, who displays a kind of lost quality in Wim Wenders' films, and Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist (2002), played by a tall but extremely slender actor, Adrien Brody. In each case, Polanski takes advantage of his Fung 91 performers' physical and facial appearance to stress the characters' helplessness.

Moreover, he arranges episodes for his actors who play the victims to struggle and suffer even more seriously on the screen than in the novels. However, most importantly, even if the original literary works mention qualities involving the strong will of the characters, Polanski intentionally drops all these elements in order to make the characters indeed suffer the most.

Let me commence with the character of Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary's

Baby (1968). The portrayal of Rosemary in Ira Levin's novel is in fact quite different from that in Polanski's film. In the novel, Rosemary is described as a strong-willed young woman who takes the initiative to accomplish what she wants.

The beginning of the novel describes how Rosemary tries every means to convince her husband to conceive a baby with her. Then, sensing something wrong in her married life, especially following her husband Guy's success in the theatre, which makes him become more and more "preoccupied," Rosemary has a clear mind about what she should do to save her marriage: she asks her friend Hutch to let her use his cabin for three or four days, explaining, "I really think it'll be easier for him with me out of the way" (Levin, 102). Later, as Rosemary grows more and more suspicious of her husband and all the other people who pretend to befriend her, she tries to justify her suspicion, and her complicated thoughts are presented as internal monologues. Fung 92

For example, in the following paragraph, Rosemary tries to reach Dr. Hill, her former gynecologist, from a phone booth in order to get away from her husband and the other people who are in the "plot" together:

All of them. All of them. They were all in it together. Guy, Dr.

Sapirstein, Minnie, and Roman. All of them witches. All Of Them

Witches. Using her to produce a baby for them, so that they could take it

and - Don 't you worry, Andy-or-Jenny, I'll kill them before I let them touch

譯/ (219-20)

There being no quotation marks used, the readers can be sure that they are reading the internal struggle of the protagonist, instead of spoken words. Rosemary's strong will is most apparent in the final episode when she makes use of the sleeping pills given to her to send one of the plotters to sleep, so that she can free herself to look for her baby and the truth.

Such strong will on the part of the protagonist is dropped in Polanski，s film version of Rosemary 's Baby. Instead, Rosemary is portrayed as a fragile and completely powerless woman from a nervous breakdown. The part of Rosemary is well played by Mia Farrow, who, in her debut performance in a leading role, deservingly won a Golden Globe nomination. Polanski may have even contributed to typecast Mia Farrow as an ideal actress for playing weak, fantasy-dominated and Fung 93 psychologically unstable characters, a role she enacts in most of Woody Allen's films, for example, playing the lovesick moviegoer in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)，the sacrificing but cheated wife in Hannah and Her Sisters (1987), the despairing psychiatric patient in Another Woman (1988) and the scatter-brained mother in Alice

(1990). Ironically, Farrow is sometimes harshly criticized as unconvincing or even miscast when she plays femme fatale roles, like Daisy Buchanan in Jack Clayton's

The Great Gatsby (1974) or Jacqueline De Bellefort, the plotter of murder, in John

Guillermin's Death on the Nile (1978). One of the few breakthroughs for Mia

Farrow is the brassy blonde moll she plays in Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose

(1984), but the director still has to make her wear sunglasses and a heavy wig so that she seems more sultry and mysterious, and she only removes her glasses at her more vulnerable moments. This seems to show that Polanski has known the best that Mia

Farrow can offer before other directors did.

With the performance of the mild Mia Farrow, Rosemary in the film sometimes speaks in a cracked voice, showing her inability to control emotion. In the episode mentioned above, when Rosemary explains to Hutch the problems she faces in her marriage, she says, "It's a very difficult part . . . He's got to work with crutches and leg-braces, and naturally he's preoccupied and - and, well, preoccupied" (103).

Here, the last word is spoken in a weepy voice, revealing that she does not know what Fung 94 to do to save her marriage: a response opposite to that in the novel, which shows

Rosemary analyzing the situation logically. In addition, in the final segment of the novel when both Guy and Dr. Sapirstein lie to Rosemary that her baby is dead, she cries, "I don't believe you. You're both lying ... It didn't die . . . You took it.

You're lying. You're witches. You're lying. You're lying! You're lying!

You 're lying! You 're lying! You 're lying!” (238) The italicization used in the original novel seems to suggest that Rosemary is even howling at them to show her aggression, but in the film, although the same lines are spoken, the aggressive tone is replaced by a cracked voice that collapses gradually, showing the protagonist's nervous breakdown instead of her determination to fight back.

Rosemary's fragility is further elaborated through her absent-mindedness in the film, a quality not as present in the novel. Polanski uses certain film actions to suggest that Rosemary is from time to time not really aware of what she is doing.

These film actions include getting out of a taxi without closing the door and crossing the road without noticing the traffic, which easily refresh the audience's memory of

Carol's strange actions in Repulsion (1965), like ironing clothes without plugging in the iron and wearing lipstick before going to bed. These film actions may be considered very minor in sight of the plot's development, but they still create an effect showing that Rosemary is often in such an unconscious state that makes her even Fung 95 feebler in fighting against the evil people surrounding her.

Furthermore, in the film, the character of Rosemary is mingled with a considerable element of neurosis, unlike the Rosemary in the novel, who calmly unmasks and analyzes the devil-worshippers' plots layer by layer all by herself, though her discoveries come too late. For example, in the phone booth scene, she covers her mouth when talking to herself, "All of the witches," and then she giggles a bit, suggesting a kind of lunacy, possibly a symptom after all the shocking discoveries of her husband and neighbours' lies. The portrayal of Rosemary as a fragile character helps Polanski to amplify the sense that the world is controlled by evil powers. Rosemary is victimized not only by the physical pain she has to experience with her abnormal pregnancy, but also by the psychological disturbance she has to bear when facing all the people who betray her.

Polanski's version of Tess Durbeyfield strongly resembles his depiction of

Rosemary in view of their similar unfulfilled marriages and their shared helpless-victim qualities. It is true that, unlike Rosemary, Tess is not presented as a particularly strong-willed character in Thomas Hardy's original novel. However,

Polanski stresses his heroine's powerlessness further by removing from his film the elements of "fate" as well as Tess's wrongdoings. The result is that Tess silently and powerlessly waits for the others to shape the world around her in Polanski's Tess Fung 96

(1979).

"Fate" is always a very important element in Thomas Hardy's works, no matter if it leads to a happy ending or a sad ending. On one hand, fate can play a positive role in Far from the Madding Crowd, in which Gabriel Oak ends up marrying Bathsheba

Everdene only at the perfect time - not on the night when his dog kills all his flock, but only after the obstacles of his two rivals, William Boldwood and Sergeant Frank

Troy, are overcome and when Bathsheba realizes his care for her. On the other hand, fate can also play a terrible trick on the characters that leads to a violent ending.

This is the case of The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which no matter how hard Michael

Henchard tries to redeem his past wrongdoing of selling his wife Susan and daughter

Elizabeth-Jane, he still cannot avoid his eventual self-destruction, which is caused by such factors as wrong people meeting at the wrong place at the wrong time"^. The same situation occurs in Jude the Obscure, in which the star-crossed lovers, Jude

Fawley and his cousin Sue Bridehead, are doomed to separate from each other since they respectively marry the wrong persons, and fate has turned each of them back to the spouses they do not love. In the cases of Michael Henchard and Jude Fawley, their downfall has been destined from the moment they have done wrong things. It seems that fate is especially unkind to those who have made the wrong decisions in

4 For example, Henchard's rival, Donald Farfrae，meets Henchard's lover Lucetta Templeman when the former is supposed to meet Elizabeth-Jane, which ends up with Donald and Lucetta's marriage, which destroys Henchard's happiness and arouses his jealousy, leading him to his inevitable downfall. Fung 97 their lives and points all the way towards their eventual defeat. It also means that the protagonists' wrongdoings are only the facilitators for fate to play its part most viciously, even though such wrongdoings eventually make the protagonists solely responsible for their own downfall. To a certain extent, Hardy's heroes are quite comparable to any Shakespearean tragic heroes, whose downfall is caused by their own tragic flaws in the first place.

The role that fate plays in Tess of the d'Urbervilles is similar to The Mayor of

Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure in the way that it points the protagonist, Tess

Durbeyfield, towards her ultimate downfall. The name of the ancient and knightly family, "d'Urberville," is the fate that Tess has to bear. Once her father learns about their real ancestors, Tess is forced to make a connection with Alec d'Urberville, the man who destroys her happiness for the rest of her life. The deceased infant Tess bears with Alec is more than her husband Angel Clare can stand, a situation which ends with Angel abandoning her. Fate fools Tess harshly as Angel turns up at the wrong time when she has just gone back to Alec, which drives Tess to kill Alec in order to go back to Angel, resulting in the inevitable execution of Tess. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is different from The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure in the way that the protagonist is mostly in a passive state. In contrast to Michael

Henchard and Jude Fawley, who have to bear the consequences of their wrong Fung 98 decisions, Tess is merely submissively forced into the unpleasant situation and so she can have practically no choice to escape her fate.

However, even though whatever Tess does cannot twist her catastrophe, Thomas

Hardy still portrays Tess as not just a pitiable victim of fate, but also a criminal of her own passion. For example, Hardy spends long passages explaining Tess's internal struggle when Angel Clare asks her to marry him but she knows she must refuse because of her past with Alec d'Urberville:

"I shall give way - I shall say yes - I shall let myself marry him — I cannot

help it!" she jealously panted, with her hot face to the pillow that night, on

hearing one of the other girls sigh his name in her sleep. “I can't bear to

let anybody have him but me! Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill him

when he knows！ O my heart-0-0-0!" (Hardy, 175)

Tess's mother's advice for her in a letter, which says, "on no account do you say a word of your Bygone Trouble to him" (188)，is what Tess cannot be convinced of at first. However, after the terrible joke fate plays on her — her note of confession, which she slips under Angel's door, does not reach him but actually goes under the carpet - Tess obviously shows that she eventually takes her mother's advice. It is palpable that Tess lets her passion drive her to do something that she knows very well she should not - to go ahead with her marriage with Angel. After Angel abandons Fung 99

her, Tess's passion continues to dominate her, driving her to eventually turn back to

Alec and convince herself that Angel is never coming back. Her murder of Alec after Angel comes back for her is revenge against Alec, blaming him for breaking her hope for her husband's homecoming. Fate does play many terrible tricks on Tess, with wrong people showing up at the wrong time, together contributing to her

ultimate catastrophe, but like Michael Henchard and Jude Fawley，she is still

responsible for her downfall because she chooses to be dominated by her own passion;

especially since she carries on with something she knows she should not.

Polanski's Tess basically narrates the story in the same way Thomas Hardy does,

but in his adaptation, he has obviously diminished the element of "fate" that point

towards Tess's tragic end. This is probably one reason why he has omitted the name

"d'Urbervilles" from the title of his film; in addition, he has also trimmed down Tess's

own responsibility for her fall via her passion. Certainly, Polanski cannot

completely eliminate the idea of "fate" when he chooses to adapt Hardy's novel. As

Polanski talks about his reading of Hardy's novel in his autobiography, he also admits:

“All the evils in Tess's life are the fortuitous products of the small but momentous

coincidences that shape our destiny" (Polanski, 427-28). However, he is observably

more interested in showing how an innocent girl's life is ruined by the two heartless

men in her life, as I have illustrated in Chapter 2. Unlike the protagonist in Hardy's Fung 100 novel, the Tess in Polanski，s film is usually left with no choice about anything and therefore accepts anything that happens to her silently. As a result, she rarely expresses strong emotions to express her internal struggle and appears far more passive than in the novel. For instance, by omitting the episodes showing how Tess changes her mind and turns back to Alec, the film gives the audience an impression, somewhat contrary to the novel, that Tess actually sacrifices herself to save her family from poverty by becoming the mistress of someone she loathes. With this approach of filming Tess, Polanski once again demonstrates his negative view of the world - an intricate web of people maltreating other people to cause tremendous ruin to their lives.

Polanski,s handling of Nastassja Kinski, who plays Tess Durbeyfield, is similar to his use of Mia Farrow. Nastassja Kinski, whose enigmatic quality is displayed in

Wim Wenders's films，like the mute girl she plays in her debut feature, The Wrong

Move (aka Falsche Bewegung) (1975)，the anguished wife who mysteriously abandons her child in Paris, Texas (1984)，and the angel in Faraway, So Close! (aka

In weiter Feme, so nah!) (1993), contains the characteristics that Polanski is seeking for in the role of Tess; Kinski has her timidity and coyness fully presented on screen, especially since she speaks in a soft and mild tone almost throughout the film, even when she is supposed to be more assertive and firm. She also stays motionless in Fung 101

certain episodes in the film, demonstrating her thorough submission to wait for the

others to shape the world around her, best illustrated in a scene after she has become

Alec d'Urberville's mistress, where she sits on a boat holding a parasol with an empty look on her face, as if looking forward to nothing in the future. In this scene, Tess appears to be withdrawn and even passionless, and the film brings about the idea that her growing introversion towards everything is her only method to vent her discontent for the people who make her suffer. The presentation of alienated human relationships as personally experienced by an innocent girl forms another picture of

Polanski's negative view towards the world.

With a similar cinematic approach, Polanski continues to let Wladyslaw

Szpilman, the title character in his most recent film, The Pianist, suffer.

Reconstructing the living hell of Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski adapts the musician's autobiography with high earnestness. The result is a visually stunning film that chills the audience's blood. The film depicts most of the shocking events that happen to Szpilman and his family as well as those Szpilman witnesses. As mentioned in Chapter 3, for the sake of dramatization and more apparent visualization of the living hell, Polanski lets more mishaps fall onto the protagonist and his beloved family than in the novel because, like the approach Polanski takes in making most of his films, The Pianist centres almost entirely on the title character, which is not Fung 102

always the approach Szpilman has chosen (even though the book is his

autobiography). It is notable that in the epilogue, which the German essayist Wolf

Biermann was invited by Szpilman to write for his book, he makes the following

comments:

Readers will notice that although this book was written amidst the still

smouldering ashes of the Second World War, its language is surprisingly

cool. Wtadysiaw Szpilman describes his recent sufferings with an almost

melancholy detachment. (Szpilman, 211)

In fact, in many parts of the book, instead of using first-person narration to record what he witnesses directly, Szpilman adopts an approach used by historians, and retells the incidents calmly and objectively. As a result, the readers can hardly be sure whether the incidents are what Szpilman witnesses personally or just what he hears from someone else. However, since Polanski chooses to centres his film on the title character to create a dramatic effect, he not only films almost entirely from the perspective of the protagonist; what is more, comparable with Rosemary 's Baby and Tess, Polanski's The Pianist even somehow twists the personality of the protagonist to stress how hard life is like in the Nazi-occupied Poland. Both

Rosemary Woodhouse and Tess Durbeyfield are portrayed as much weaker and feebler in Polanski's films than in the novel, and the case of Wtadek Szpilman is no Fung 103

exception. In Polanski's film, the pianist appears to have a much lower sense of

dignity than in the book. While the audience is supposed to admire the character's

lust for survival in the man-made living hell, they at the same time will be astounded

to see that he will do anything to gain one more day in his life, including occasionally

degrading himself and giving up his dignity.

Polanski once again demonstrates his great talent with his handling of actors with

The Pianist. The role of Wtadystaw Szpilman is played by Adrien Brody, whose

sufferings both on screen and off screen won him the Best Actor Oscar deservingly.

In order to prepare for his role as the pianist, Brody leamt to play Chopin on the piano

and shed 30 pounds off his already-thin frame. The result is a convincing performance as a sufferer whose pain urges him to relinquish his dignity and overlook all kinds of humiliations. Brody actually plays the role of the pianist with mildness, which is quite a contrary to the book. In the book, Wladyslaw Szpilman actually compares his personality to his brother Henryk's, as exemplified in the following episode:

If Henryk shook off his gloomy thoughts it was only to start an argument

with me. He would stare at me for a while in astonishment，then shrug his

shoulders and growl, finally venting his feeling, "Really, only a born fool

would wear ties like Wladek's!" Fung 104

"Fool yourself! Idiot too!" I would reply, and our quarrel was in full

swing. He did not appreciate the fact that I had to be well dressed when I

played the piano in public. He didn't really want to understand me and my

affairs. Now that he has been dead so long I know we loved each other in

our own way, in spite of everything, although we were always getting on

each other's nerves, probably because we were very similar characters at

heart. (72-73)

In the film, however, Heiiryk and Wladek are not very similar at all and in this particular scene, only Henryk has the explosive nature. Wladek does reply to his brother with a few angry words, but the quarrel is far from "in full swing" as

described in the book, and Henryk obviously appears to be manipulating Wtadek.

Even in a scene when the two brothers are invited to join the Jewish police by a

relative with a "bad reputation" of "[keeping] falling on his feet by dint of methods

other people would regard as wrong" (109)，it is Henryk who does all the scorning

and speaks for the family to voice out what they think of him: "We thought his morals

dubious and tried to avoid him" (108-09), while Wtadek just listens silently, showing

his non-explosive nature contrasting to his brother's.

Moreover, Polanski tends to drop from his film the elements that mention the

pianist's struggle to preserve his dignity. This is shown, for example, in the Fung 105 disagreement between Wtadysiaw Szpilman and Mieczysiaw Lichtenbaum, the son of the new chairman of the Jewish Council:

He suggested that I could play in the German extermination commando's

casino, where the Gestapo and SS officers relaxed in the evening after a

tiring day spent murdering Jews. They were served by Jews who would

sooner or later be murdered too. Of course I did not want to accept such

an offer, although Lichtenbaum couldn't understand why it did not appeal to

me, and was hurt when I declined. (109)

This episode shows the artist's internal struggle as well as his deep sarcasm and contempt for Lichtenbaum: Wladyslaw Szpilman could have saved himself or gained himself a better condition with his reputation as a performer, but his dignity, sense of morality, and scorn for the man who offers him the job, are too important for him to give up; thus he declines the offer so as not to demoralize or demean himself. The episode therefore functions to discriminate the pianist from the character of Hofgen created in Istvan Szabo's Mephisto (1981), an actor who chooses to suppress his personal hatred of the Nazi politics as his fame and wealth rise. Even towards the end of the book, even though Wladyslaw Szpilman has not eaten for days and is tempted by the idea of food, he still tries his best to preserve his dignity as seen in the following episode: Fung 106

The leader looked at me, I thought, with a touch of pity. "Come with us,"

he said. "You can work, and you'll get some soup."

Soup! The mere idea of the chance of a bowl of real hit soup made

my stomach cramp with hunger so badly that for a moment I was prepared

to go with them, even if I was killed later. I wanted that soup; I just

wanted enough to eat for once! But common sense prevailed.

"No," I said. "I'm not going to the Germans."

The leader grinned, half cynical, half mocking. "Oh, I don't know,"

he protested. "The Germans aren't so bad."

"No," I repeated. "Thanks, but no."

"Just as you like," he growled.

I turned to go. As the troop moved off again, I called, "Goodbye!"

after them. (174-75)

This episode shows that even when the pianist is facing the fact that he is going to starve to death, he still chooses to die in an honourable way, i.e. at least not to degrade himself to work for the Germans. However, these episodes are all deleted in the film, and the film focuses on the pianist's psychological weakness instead.

Actually, Wtadystaw Szpilman admits in the book that he does have his moments Fung 107

of weakness:

I was the only one of the family to act with such shameful weakness.

Perhaps it was because I alone might somehow be able to save us, through

my popularity as a performer, and so I felt responsible. (94) �

However, it is manifest that the weakness is generated from the fact that Szpilman

lays the entire family burden onto his shoulders. Nevertheless, what is shown in the

film is another kind of weakness — cowardice, which is best exemplified in one of the added episodes that is absent from the book, in which Szpilman kneels down, grabs a

German soldier's leg and pleads with him to spare his life after he accidentally drops a load of bricks. In this way, the pianist created by Polanski is highly comparable with Pasqualino Frafuso in Lina Wertmiiller's Seven Beauties (aka Pasqualino

Settebellezze) (1976), who starts off with a plan to seduce the female commander to save all those in the concentration camp but ends up becoming her accomplice, killing his own race in order to stay alive; another analogy is the doomed prisoners in Pier

Paolo Pasolini's Said, or The 120 Days of Sodom (aka Said o le 120 giornate di

Sodomd) (1975), some of whom, being kept in the inferno created by a gang of corrupt Fascist members, choose to betray each other or even assimilate with the

Fascists to avoid being executed. In other words, the brutality of the Nazi-Germans has dehumanized Szpilman into an undignified survival-seeker in Polanski's film. Fung 108

(II) Hallucinations as the Victims' Most Vulnerable Moments

It is manifest that Polanski makes his protagonists so physically and psychologically vulnerable that they lack the power to fight against the evil forces in the world. A particularly "filmic" way to demonstrate this condition - one not so easily presentable in novels - is the presentation of hallucinations. In Polanski’s films, there are many hallucinatory scenes and furthermore, it is at the characters' weakest and most helpless moments when they see such hallucinations, in which they cannot distinguish between illusion and reality; this is also the moment when the evil forces are completely in charge, taking over the whole of their victims.

Through his second feature, Repulsion, Polanski leads the audience through an extraordinary cinematic experience, presenting all kinds of hallucinations that Carol suffers, including the cracking walls and the nightly rapes. Carol's hallucinations are the result of her negative view of the men around her. Polanski reworks the same idea later in The Tenant (1976), a film adapted from Roland Topor's novel in which

Polanski himself plays the title character, Trelkovsky - which explains why the audience can easily mistake the film as Polanski's original work. • A psychological thriller, The Tenant leads Polanski's audience through the very same journey of mixture of illusion and reality as Trelkovsky is gradually taken over by the soul of the previous tenant who committed suicide, Simone Choule. Suspecting his landlord Fung 109 and neighbours of trying to subtly change him into Simone Choule, Trelkovsky believes that he begins to comprehend what drove the woman to take her own life, so that by the time he has eventually transformed into the already dead woman, he too kills himself.

In The Tenant, the images Polanski presents on the screen are a mixture of illusion and reality seen through Trelkovsky's eyes. One notable scene is when

Trelkovsky is strangled by Madame Dioz, the chairlady of the residential committee who hates him because he refuses to sign the paper to expel another tenant, Madame

Gaderian, whom Madame Dioz describes as the troublemaker making all the noises at

night. The images of Madame Dioz strangling Trelkovsky are presented in juxtaposition with those showing Trelkovsky holding his own neck. In this scene,

Polanski makes it obvious that being strangled is only Trelkovsky's hallucination.

As the film continues, we will find that the screen more and more frequently shows

what Trelkovsky sees with his disturbed mind, such as Simone Choule, who is already

dead, unwrapping her own bandages in the toilet, the neighbours playing volleyball

with his own head, and by the end of the film, the crowd of applauding spectators

waiting for him to jump from his apartment. As Trelkovsky's hallucinations become

more and more serious, the audience will start to question not only his current mental

health but also whether it was illusion or reality they were watching in the earlier Fung 110 parts of the film. For example, has Madame Dioz really invited Trelkovsky to sign the paper that forces Madame Gaderian to leave? Do Madame Gaderian and her crippled daughter really exist, or are they just imaginary figures in Trelkovsky's mind?

Is Trelkovsky really being constantly complained about and discriminated against by all the other tenants? These also are probably all hallucinations, which are generated from the subjective interpretation that Trelkovsky (or Simone Choule) has for the world. Though Trelkovsky is ultimately portrayed as a severely mentally disordered person, his disturbing hallucinations still effectively reflect how a world of alienated human relationships, as reflected from the selfishness of the other tenants, does harm to others, causing someone like Trelkovsky to suffer from a nervous breakdown.

In fact, the hallucinations of the protagonists in Polanski's films always occur at their weakest moments, when they cannot distinguish between illusion and reality.

These are also the moments that the evil powers love to make use of to take charge of the protagonists' lives, and this becomes one of Polanski's most powerful tools to assert his negative view of the world. In Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth (1971) and The

Ninth Gate (1999), the greatest highlights are by all means the hallucinations the protagonists have when they are drugged or bedazzled. This cinematic technique reveals how Polanski's skill works at its best, especially since all three films have conclusions leading the audience and the protagonists back to the hallucinations, Fung 111 revealing the awful truth that the hallucinations are actually half illusion and half reality.

The highlight of Rosemary ’s Baby is the terrifying "dream" Rosemary has on the

"baby night," which, as the audience will eventually discover, as does Rosemary, is more than merely a "dream." For instance, Rosemary's hallucinations begin with her lying on a bench and being carried along a hallway. She sees such things as the glorious paintings by Michelangelo, but suddenly the gingham contact paper she has used for the shelves of her closet also appears. She sees such strange images as a burning church and a statue of a black-bearded man, but is soon surrounded by the people she knows: her husband and her neighbours. These touches remind the audience that what seems a "hallucination" to Rosemary (her impregnation by Satan) is actually her fate. More sadly, Rosemary herself spends much of the film tormented by her semi-recognition of this fact. It is only at the end of the film that

Rosemary is able to put the pieces together and see the truth that lies beneath hallucination. By this time, however, it is too late and the only "truth" there is for

Rosemary to realize is that she has been a victim all along.

Polanski's more recent film, The Ninth Gate, is similar to Rosemary's Baby in

style and theme as its central character, Dean Corso, is selected for an evil scheme on

the surface because of his "qualifications" as an expert in demonic books but actually Fung 112 because of his extreme spiritual weakness. In this way, Corso is just like Rosemary

Woodhouse, whom we at first think is chosen as Satan's bride because of her fertility or her capacity for motherhood but later realize is called upon only because of her convenience and vulnerability. In The Ninth Gate, there is a nameless girl who protects Corso, and unlike Arturo Perez-Reverte's subtle implication, Polanski makes it clear that she is not human, showing that she can fly in the sky. Clearly, the inclusion in the film of an otherworldly figure that can fly makes an audience suspect all of the visions that Corso sees. Moreover, questioning Corso's senses leads an audience to question his values, too. Although Corso considers himself a force for good, he does fail to resist the girl's temptation, become more and more obsessed with the diabolical scheme, and eventually take part in it - though he has always tried to prevent more evil from happening around him. In this way, Corso, who knows right from wrong at first, has become a pathetic figure who loses himself — he is the best tool for the evil plot because he is psychologically too vulnerable to resist the temptation. Once again, Polanski shows that it is during a person's spiritual depression that he is most easily made use of by the evil powers.

Polanski's Macbeth also impresses the audience with a mixture of illusion and reality as seen through the eyes of the title character as a means of dramatizing victimization. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Macbeth is a villain who creates Fung 113 bloodshed for those around him. However, is Macbeth all bad? It is undeniable that the film, perhaps like the play, arouses the audience's pity for Macbeth, especially when the film concludes with his inescapable death, and constantly shows his psychological weaknesses. Macbeth is the victimizer, but he is at the same time victimized and Polanski uses scenes of hallucination as a way to turn even such a bold killers as Macbeth into a victim in his own right.

One example of such a victimizing hallucination is the dagger that appears in

Macbeth's eyes before he murders Duncan. Shakespeare's play does not really explain how the part should be acted out, but it is clear to the audience that this is indeed Macbeth's disturbed hallucination:

[MACBETH:] Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:-

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw. Fung 114

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use. (II. i. 33-43)

On stage, this part about Macbeth’s hallucination is possibly visualized through the actor's troubled expressions, but it does have its limitation. What Polanski has done in the film is more than can be done on stage. He presents Macbeth's hallucination directly on the screen, and the audience can see Macbeth trying to grab hold of the illusion of a dagger and failing to do so, followed by the illusion of the dagger later pointing towards Duncan's room, driving Macbeth to stab it into Duncan's chest. In this way, the sense is created that Macbeth really is being "marshalled" to his fate and that the real murderer is not Macbeth, but the strange forces behind him that compel him to kill: he is seen to be intensely driven by irresistible compulsions and even lacking free will about the things lie does. The film's emphasis on the witches and their power reinforces this reading, allowing us even perhaps to see Macbeth as a tool of evil forces, a bewitched man, or even a sort of Nazi soldier in the service of evil far greater than he.

Polanski occasionally adds episodes absent from the original play to highlight

Macbeth's psychologically disturbed mind and to draw attention to a theme some productions of Macbeth overlook: his helplessness. One of these additional episodes is Macbeth's nightmare after he hires the murderers to kill Banquo and his son, Fung 115

Fleance. In the nightmare, Banquo's son, Fleance, picks up Macbeth's crown and puts it on his head, while the sneering Banquo gags Macbeth with his hand trying to suffocate him. The nightmare, which is not in the play, functions to show that

Macbeth is falling deeper and deeper into his own hallucination, and is therefore more visibly tormented by it. In this way, Macbeth's killing of Banquo is just like his assassination of Duncan; he is shown not as entirely ruthless, but as a pathetic character with an irritated mind. It is therefore appropriate in Polanski's film that

Banquo continues to bother Macbeth even after his death, and the appearance of

Banquo's ghost in the feast that drives Macbeth to act frantically manifestly pushes

Macbeth's hallucination to an extreme.

The highlight of Polanski's Macbeth is without doubt the visual images Macbeth

is led to see in the witches' cave, a montage combining illusion with reality and giving

hints about the truths behind the witches' deceptively pleasing words. In this way, as

in Rosemary ’s Baby, the idea is conveyed that the truth is there for us to see, if only

we could, but that our status as victims makes it impossible for us to do so. Macbeth

is the audience surrogate in this hopeless effort, at first unable to distinguish truth

from false hope and ultimately able to recognize truth at a point where truth becomes

identical to doom. The episode begins when, in desperation, Macbeth goes to the

witches again late at night to ask about his destiny. He is made to drink a cup of Fung 116 broth and then, as he looks into the large pot of broth, is led through a series of images that give Macbeth his false hope but at the same time reveal the truth at his tragic future. The apparition who gives Macbeth the first advice, saying, "Macbeth,

Macbeth, Macbeth! beware Macduff; / Beware the Thane of Fife. Dismiss me.

Enough" (IV. i. 71-72) is replaced by Macbeth's own physiognomy. As Macbeth replies, "Whate'er thou art, for thy good caution thanks; / Thou hast harped my fear aright. But one word more�（’73-74), he touches the broth, and immediately he sees his own cut-off head rolling away, and then a woman's belly being ripped, a new-born baby crying and the delivery woman laughing. Highly comparable to

Rosemary's "dream" in Rosemary 's Baby, the truths are all revealed here - he will have his head chopped off by Macduff, a man who "was from his mother's womb /

Untimely ripped" (V. viii. 15-16), contradicting the apparition's next prophesy that

“none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth" (IV. i. 80-81)，which gives Macbeth false hope and encourages him to reply fearlessly, "Then live, Macduff; what need I fear of thee? / But yet I'll make assurance doubt sure, / And take a bond of fate.

Thou shalt not live" (82-84). In Macbeth's vision, he stabs into an armour, which then shatters. Here the screen is mingled with a very brief shot panning downwards and showing a glimpse of Macbeth's own head lying on the ground, which is the same shot used at the end of the film when Macbeth eventually has his head chopped off. Fung 117

This series of montage images are of course only presented in the original play as dialogue. The point of these images may not seem accessible by the audience at first glance, but it does display Polanski's qualities as a distinguished craftsman, who combines illusion with reality, and the awful truth with Macbeth's false hope. The hallucinations here are only what Macbeth wishes to see, so that he can convince himself that he still has some hope for a bright future, not realizing that he is falling into a trap set by the deceitful witches, who by the end are all revealed as "juggling fiends . . . / That palter with us in a double sense; / That palter keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope" (V. viii. 19-22). As in other

Polanski-created hallucinations, it is Macbeth's weakest moments upon which the evil forces build their success. Furthermore, as in Rosemary 's Baby, the hallucinations ironically present the very essential truth about the victims' lives to them but at the same time those victims are incapable of recognizing it, until very end when it is too late.

As we can see from these examples of hallucinations in Polanski's films, the characters he uses, even "tyrants" like Macbeth, are so vulnerable that they cannot even recognize the truth about their own lives even in those rare hallucinatory

moments when it is shown to them. Thus, when the evil powers happen to pick them

up, they are too feeble to do anything but to act basically in an evil way. They can Fung 118 either become assimilated by the evil powers, like Macbeth and Dean Corso, or wait to be slain, like Rosemary Woodhouse, Tess Durbeyfield and Wtadyslaw Szpilman.

Either method makes them the victimized ones. Indeed, it can be argued that even good people in Polanski's films, like Tess, Rosemary and Szpilman, do more harm than good to others: Rosemary gives birth to Satan's child, Tess commits murder, and some would say Szpilman's lack of courage is not the best response to Nazism.

Sadly, when the victims are indeed so vulnerable in every aspect, nothing can stop the evil powers from creating even more evil in the world. Fung 119

Chapter 5

The Extremely Pessimistic Endings

In the previous chapters, I have shown how Roman Polanski expresses his negative view of modern society through cinema by constructing a world where no one can be trusted, and the evil people, dominated by their sense of superiority, victimize the others who are too vulnerable to fight back or even protect themselves.

All these ideas point towards the negative endings that distinguish Polanski's films from other directors' films; and indeed, an extremely pessimistic ending has even become a symbol of Polanski's films.

Polanski is quite comparable with Edgar Allan Poe in style because they are both interested in telling disturbing tales. Moreover, Polanski's intention of filmmaking fits very well in another concept of Poe's, which is the idea of ''denouement^ mentioned in his essay, The Philosophy of Composition. Here, Poe capitalizes on the success of his poem, The Raven, and accounts for how he wrote it, focusing on the build-up of action and especially the ending. The Raven can be considered as distressing as most of Poe's horror stories because the image of the bird is obviously ill-omened: it is described as a "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore" (Baym, 703); thus it functions to keep breaking the bereaved lover's dream of meeting the girl he loves, a repetitive movement that nonetheless undergoes a subtle Fung 120 but distinctive twist at the poem's end 一 the denouement of the poem. According to

Poe's The Philosophy of Composition:

Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be

elaborated to its denouement before any thing be attempted with the pen.

It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its

indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and

especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

(Baym, 752)

The denouement mentioned here does not hint as to whether a Poe ending is optimistic or pessimistic, but it is obviously pessimistic in the case of The Raven.

From this analysis, Poe makes it plain that everything he sets for the poem points towards its depressing denouement: the student's realization that his mistress is gone forever. Poe's rationale for writing The Raven includes setting a tone of sorrow, using the refrain of the monotonous and nonchalant word, "Nevermore," and forming a close circumscription of space; all of these devices help to construct the ultimately mournful denouement. Comparable to Poe's approach in writing his horror stories,

Polanski's pessimistic conclusions are also constructed through building up a picture of the worst human relationships, culminating, as in The Raven, in a final recognition of the absolute fated misery of mankind. The Pianist (2002) is a rare example of a Fung 121

Polanski film that offers a positive ending, but this is partly due to the fact that he cannot change the life of the title character since his film is based on an autobiography.

In most other cases, however, even when some literary works' endings somehow shed some light of hope on human nature, Polanski deliberately changes them into extremely gloomy conclusions.

(I) The Emphasis of the Evil's Ultimate Domination

Polanski's interest in pessimistic endings can actually be traced in his early works as well, such as The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) mentioned in the introduction. However, the most notable film in terms of an ending is one of

Polanski's greatest, Chinatown (1974). This film cleverly and deceptively starts off like other works in the detective story genre, as the private eye, Jake Gittes，played by

Jack Nicholson, is hired to investigate Evelyn Mulwray's husband's marital infidelity.

Even after the film's scope widens a bit beyond the traditional detective movie and

Jake finds his investigation getting into far bigger issues that involve political corruptions, the film's ending is still wholly unexpected. Chinatown won an

I

Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Robert Towne, but much of the credit should go to Polanski himself, because one major asset of the film is its ending.

Polanski，in his autobiography, Roman, records one of the behind-the-scene stories:

Towne and I couldn't agree on an ending. Towne wanted the evil tycoon Fung 122

to die and his daughter, Evelyn, to live. He wanted a happy ending; all

would turn out okay for her after a short spell in jail. I knew that if

ChinatoMm was to be special, not just another thriller where the good guys

triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die. Its dramatic impact would be

lost unless audiences left their seats with a sense of outrage at the injustice

of it all. (Polanski, 348)

It is clear that Robert Towne originally intended the film to be a kind of tribute to early Hollywood film-noir classics like John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), which is one of the reasons why Huston was invited to play the role of the ruthless tycoon, Noah Cross; however, the final version of the film reflects Polanski's sensibility instead. It uses the director's "pessimistic conclusion which he felt truthfully reflected the modern age" (Sinyard, 129) to rework the entire detective genre. While traditional detective films end with the enaction of "justice" - a situation that occurs even, if to a lesser extent, in film-noir movies - Polanski's

Chinatown ends with the domination of corruption. After a profuse investigation, the detective Jake Gittes solves the whole case, discovering that Evelyn's husband is murdered by Noah Cross because he discovers that the water department is pumping water from all the rivers and drying out all the fields. However, even having solved the mystery of the murder, Jake helplessly watches Evelyn, the woman he has tried to Fung 123 help, being shot and her monstrous and incestuous father, Noah Cross, taking away the "sister-and-daughter" Evelyn has always sworn to protect. The best thing to do

in the depraved world of Chinatown is to do "as little as possible," in Gittes's words,

and the last shot of the film shows that Gittes is swallowed up by the dark streets of

Chinatown.

Neil Sinyard, in his book, Classic Movies’ considers Chinatown as a major

breakthrough in cinema:

Chinatown is a calculated assault on the complacent certainties of the

traditional detective film, in which good always triumphed and the

individualist hero saw that justice was done. In Chinatown, the detective

solves the crime, but that is all he solves. (129)

In Polanski, His Life and Films, Barbara Learning makes similar comments:

Conventionally, detective stories end in the restitution of social order as

subversive elements are dispelled. But in Polanski's travesty of the genre,

violence and desire triumph. (Learning, 147)

All these favourable comments show that the pessimistic ending that Polanski insists

on is perhaps the best thing that Chinatown offers，which explains why it is

considered by most critics as a landmark film. Although the film is not an adapted

film, it is clear that what Polanski has done in Chinatown is similar to his approach of Fung 124 dealing with other literary materials: changing Towne's original positive ending into a negative one that makes the evil power the ultimate winner.

In addition, the ending of Chinatown is pessimistic not just because the innocent

Evelyn Mulwray is shot, but more importantly, because the world - or at least the whole of Los Angeles - is going to face a hopeless future. In Classic Movies, Neil

Sinyard analyzes the scenario like this:

Chinatown shows the limit of individualism, the invincible conspiracies of

power, and the irresistible allure of evil. When Nicholson [Jake Gittes]

asks Huston [Noah Cross] towards the end what all this corruption and

murder has really been for, Huston replies: "The future! The future!" It

is a bloodchilling thought, and the film ensures that we take that thought

seriously. (Sinyard, 129)

It is true that once a cold-blooded tycoon like Noah Cross is in charge of the "future"

of the society, there is practically no "future" to the people at all. Chinatown is

"bloodchilling" because it is realistic. As Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross

comment in The Motion Picture Guide: "Water is the root of all evil in this film, and it

is in actuality the great god that ordains the destiny of desert-bound Los Angeles"

(Nash, Ross, 418). In other words, the evil presented in the film is not really far

away from us, but may concern any of us. As a result, the feeling of injustice is Fung 125 aroused among the audience not just because Evelyn dies, but more importantly, because evil people like Noah Cross can always get away with their crimes and continue to take advantage of the poor, in this case, the farmers who are deprived of the water they have paid for and the future generations of Californians who will continue to find control of water in the hands of a privileged few. In this way, the pessimism in Chinatown is pushed beyond the pains of one twisted family dynamic, but towards a universal perspective concerning the whole society.

Pushing his negative views to this sort of universal level, especially in relation to endings, is also Polanski's approach in making a number of his adapted films. For example, while the original endings of both Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Ninth

Gate (1999) are in some way positive, Polanski deliberately makes them as negative as he can. Both films have chosen Satanism to symbolize the evil powers that

devour the world, and to suggest the exceedingly negative idea that the whole world

will eventually be in the hands of the evil forces. Thus, Polanski gives these two

films very similar endings: the devil ultimately takes control of the world and will

corrupt more and more human minds. In both cases, the endings in the original

novels are hardly as negative as that, and to a certain extent, they even return the

stories to a relatively more positive mode, but Polanski apparently considers this

approach unfit to express his bleaker view of modem society. Fung 126

In Rosemary ’s Baby’ what Polanski has mainly done to Ira Levin's original novel is simply to delete the twisted ending that gives a little light of hope. According to the original ending of the novel, Rosemary has thoughts of killing the baby and then committing suicide to prevent the world from being destroyed, and herself from being the destroyer:

The thing to do was kill it . . . grab it and throw it out the window. And

jump out after it. Mother Slays Baby and Self at Bramford.

Save the world from God-knows-what. From Satan-knows-what.

(Levin, 257)

But then she gets this idea out of her head as she still has hope:

He couldn't be all bad, he just couldn ’t. Even if he was half Satan, wasn't

he half her as well, half decent, ordinary, sensible, human being? If she

worked against them, exerted a good influence to counteract their bad

one... (260-61)

Finally, she even insists on taking the baby back to her side, raising him and calling

him by the name "Andrew John Woodhouse," instead of "Adrian Steven," the

diabolical name chosen by the devil-worshipping leader, Roman Castevet.

This original long conclusion is absent from the film and the deletion of this

twisted ending, which goes against Polanski's absolute pessimism towards human Fung 127 nature, creates a different effect. Instead of seeing Rosemary as a hopeful person trying, against all odds, to do good in the world, Polanski's ending leads the audience to feel that the mother is selfish as she refuses to do the righteous thing to destroy the baby in order to save the world; instead she turns a blind eye to the fact that the world will be destroyed just because she wants to keep the baby out of her motherly instinct.

By accepting her fate as the baby's mother, Rosemary is seen as eventually being

assimilated by those devil-worshippers, and now even accepting herself to be one of

them. On the screen, we can see no trace of Rosemary's decisiveness to fight back,

but only her submissive silence, which is presented throughout the film as her way of

dealing with the problems she faces in her marriage. Just like Jake Gittes, Rosemary

is another of Polanski's tragic characters who is eventually completely devoured by

the evil powers.

Interestingly, Polanski's treatment of Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Dumas Club in

making The Ninth Gate is exactly the opposite of the way he handles Rosemary 's

Baby; nonetheless, he brings his distinctive pessimism to bear in the climax. The

story concerns the villain Boris Balkan's lust for power, which he believes can be

acquired by summoning Lucifer. His plan involves obtaining all three copies of a

demonic book, The Nine Doors, at any price in order to gather the nine engravings

needed for the summoning process. However, the original novel ends ironically with Fung 128 no Lucifer to be summoned after all:

That's why things didn't tally for [Boris Balkan]: in the three copies, the

final engraving was a forgery. (Perez-Reverte, 323)

This original conclusion clearly suggests that everything is just "stuff that dreams are made of," as Sam Spade says it in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon.

However, Polanski's film does not end here, but adds a long additional ending to create yet another world where the evil powers dominate and corrupt people's minds eventually. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Dean Corso is hardly a lovable character because he chooses to be "friendless"; also, as in the novel, he is motivated primarily by money. Nonetheless, in both the film and the novel, Corso does have redeeming qualities: as he witnesses the murders one by one, he tries to stop more bad things from happening. Nevertheless, the film, unlike the book, shows him to be increasingly obsessed with the evil plan himself. A long ending absent from the book is added to the film to show this obsession. After Balkan fails to summon

Lucifer and burns himself to death insanely, Corso immediately collects all the engravings, determined to find out the truth about the books. He is met by an otherworldly girl who has helped him through all his troubles, and now she leads him to look for the final engraving, which does exist. The conclusion shows Corso again entering the castle where Balkan burnt himself to death, and this ambiguous ending Fung 129 suggests that Corso is going to accomplish what Balkan cannot do, i.e. to summon

Lucifer himself. Such an ending leads the audience to believe that the evil plan is real after all, and Lucifer is waiting for some assistant on earth to appear to summon him from hell. The film does not actually suggest that Corso will eventually gain power to take control of the whole world, but Lucifer, Polanski's symbol for the destructive evil forces, is very much still a possibility at the end of the film.

(II) The Recurrence of Events

Besides creating disturbingly destructive endings for his films, Polanski has another technique to express his extremely pessimistic view towards the world: the recurrence of events, which means the use of foreshadowing, giving the films endings that remind audiences of the openings. This technique is traceable in most of

Polanski's works, both original and adapted. For example, his early work, Knife in

the Water (1962), opens with a mismatched couple, Andrzej and Krystyna, driving to the pier in a car, and it ends with them driving away in the same car. This is the

approach that Polanski adopts again in Bitter Moon (1992), his adapted work

comparable with Knife in the Water thematically; this film opens with Nigel and Fiona,

a similar couple facing marital crisis, looking at the ocean while on a cruise, and ends

exactly the same way. Furthermore, in both Knife in the Water and Bitter Moon, the

couple tries to maintain their relationship so as to save their marriage by going on a Fung 130 vacation together, but they only end up discovering that their marriage is too fragile to pass any tests. The coordination of the beginning and the ending forms the films in a circular structure, suggesting that everything simply goes back to its original position, and will repeat itself like a wheel. With this approach, the films not only imply that the couple, despite all the efforts, has achieved no success at all in saving their marriages, but also that, even if they survive the test this time, they are likely to face similar temptations in their future lives again and again, which will put their marriages into repeated crises.

It is also notable that by placing the beginning and the ending of his films in coordination, Polanski can make particularly skillful use of landscape and setting.

The use of landscape is a technique that Michelangelo Antonioni often adopts to

present the characters' internal mind, especially in his famous "Trilogy of Loneliness":

L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1962) and L'Eclisse (1963), where Antonioni

constantly uses long shots showing the protagonists walking alone in open space to

reflect their sense of alienation. Polanski makes use of exactly the same skill to open

and end a number of his films; for instance, Knife in the Water opens and ends with

the couple driving on a very long road that seems never to end, while in Bitter Moon,

the couple is looking at the boundless ocean surrounding them. The landscapes used

in these two films reflect that the marital relationships are in such turmoil that there Fung 131 seems to be no real resting place for these characters.

The technique of the use of landscape in both the opening and the ending of a film is also used in Tess (1979) to show how infinitesimal human lives are. The film opens with Tess Durbeyfield and her schoolmates learning how to dance on a

boundless prairie, where she very briefly meets Angel Clare, the man who will

destroy her life; the film ends with Tess, accompanied by Angel, being led away by

the police and walking slowly on a foggy prairie that looks not so different from the

one in the beginning. With the long shots that make the character look particularly

tiny, Polanski shows that Tess is too helpless a girl to take charge of her own life. In

a more macroscopic sense, this illustrates how infinitesimal human beings are

compared with the world, and Tess is just one of those insignificant figures whose

death is mourned by very few people. Therefore, the question posed here is: how

many insignificant lives like Tess's are being destroyed in this boundless but

merciless universe? In this way, the idea of recurrence of events does not only shed

light on the central character, but pushes audience's response towards a universal

reading, which means that the same tragic events can happen to anyone on earth again

and again.

The idea of recurrence of events in a universal sense becomes a disturbing but

powerful message in the ending of Macbeth (1971). As I have pointed out in the Fung 132 previous chapters, Polanski's Macbeth can be considered a faithful adaptation to the extent that it retains much of the original dialogue, and adds no new dialogue to the

Shakespearean language. However, to make his version distinctive, Polanski does add numerous wordless visual images to present messages that cannot easily be brought on stage, or even perhaps ideas that may not be William Shakespeare's original intention, but merely Polanski's personal view. In both the opening and ending of Polanski's Macbeth’ we can easily detect images that are absent from the original play. Polanski sticks to the original opening, which presents the witches' dialogue:

FIRST WITCH: When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

SECOND WITCH: When the hurlyburly's done,

When the battle's lost and won.

THIRD WITCH: That will be ere the set of sun.

FIRST WITCH: Where the place?

SECOND WITCH: Upon the heath.

THIRD WITCH: There to meet with Macbeth. (I. i. 1-7)

This opening implies that the witches have set Macbeth as their next target, or their next victim, because of his obsession with the victories in battles, but Polanski draws Fung 133 this idea even more to the surface by adding footage showing the witches burying a chopped-off hand and spilling some blood on the burial place. We have no idea who the dead person is, but we can guess that a battle has just ended, and much blood has been shed. The owner of that hand is probably the three witches' last victim, and only by searching for the next one "shall [they] three meet again" (1. i. 1) in Polanski's rendering. Their dialogue seems to reveal that they are obligated by some master,

Hecate or even Satan, to accomplish some tasks that kill human lives; only in this way will they have the chance to see each other, and their next victim happens to be

Macbeth.

Throughout Polanski's Macbeth, as I have shown in Chapter 4, Polanski continually stresses the darkest possibilities in the play and Polanski's ending is especially dire. Indeed, the tragedy is about Macbeth's rise and fall, and after

Macbeth is beheaded, the original play ends with the hopeful speech presented by

Malcolm, the new King of Scotland:

MALCOLM: We shall not spend a large expense of time

Before we reckon with your several loves,

And make us even with you. My thanes and kinsmen,

Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland

In such an honour named. What's more to do, Fung 134

Which would be planted newly with the time -

As calling home our exiled friends abroad

That fled the snares of watchful tyranny,

Producing forth the cruel ministers

Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,

Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands

Took off her life - this, and what needful else

That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,

We will perform in measure, time and place.

So thanks to all at once, and to each one,

Whom we invited to see us crowned at Scone. (V. ix. 26-41)

This speech presents new hope to the new kingdom, as Malcolm makes several promises here, including making his thanes and kinsmen earls and calling back the exiled loyal men. We can expect that, together with the help of his faithful and trustworthy noblemen, Malcolm will very likely build a new Scotland totally free of tyranny. (This reading is especially likely given the fact that the King of England at the time Macbeth was written was James I of Scotland, who was also the patron of

Shakespeare's theatre company, the King's men.) However, as in other Polanski films, elements that imply any clues of hopefulness are not to Polanski's taste, and it Fung 135 is unsurprising that Malcolm's speech is omitted in Polanski's film version of

Macbeth. This promising and heartening speech is instead replaced by some disturbing silent visual images that can mainly be divided into two parts. The first one dwells on Shakespeare's own gory ending - Macbeth's violent death. In fact, the original play only illustrates Macbeth's death through very brief stage actions.

The duel between Macbeth and Macduff is shown with the following stage direction:

[Exeunt, fighting.

Alarums. Re-enter fighting, and MACBETH is slain (V. viii. 34)

The next scene shows Macduff entering in triumph, paying tribute to Malcolm:

Re-enter MACDUFF, with MACBETH's head

MACDUFF Hail, King! For so thou art. Behold, where stands

Th' usurper's cursed head. (V. ix. 20)

The stage directions very briefly explain that Macbeth is killed and beheaded, although great violence is implied. In contrast, Polanski makes excessive use of violence, arranging a 2!/2-minute duel scene that ends with Macbeth's head being chopped off directly before the audience's eyes. More disturbingly, Polanski replaces Malcolm's hopeful speech with a series of grotesque concluding imageries:

Macbeth's wide-open-eyed skull is stuck on a pole and "paraded" around the knights, who all appear to be sneering and making fun of him, before it is raised high to be Fung 136 exhibited before all the other people. These images showing Macbeth's violent death remind the audience of the opening of the film, when the three witches bury a chopped-off hand, implying that the witches have accomplished yet another task assigned by their master, Hecate. Are they going to look for another victim?

The second series of images, which is also the very last part of Polanski's

Macbeth, suggests that these witches probably are looking for the next victim.

Instead of Malcolm giving encouragement to the noblemen, what we see on the screen is Malcolm's brother, Donalbain, being bedazzled by the diabolical singing of the witches, and then leaving his horse outside the same cave where Macbeth has asked the witches about his destiny in Act Four Scene 1. This conclusion perhaps appears to be open-ended, but it obviously implies that Donalbain enters the cave to listen to the witches' prophecies. We can expect that the witches will once again use their cunning words to arouse Dobalbain's jealousy over his elder brother, who has just been crowned, and the same bloodshed presented throughout the film is likely to happen all over again. This use of silent visual images is Polanski's method to add the idea of the recurrence of events into the Shakespearean tragedy; he cleverly does

so without making alterations to the original play but at the same time making his film

a distinctive version among all "Macbeths." Doing this also allows Polanski to make

the play's "witches" not only something supernatural, but also symbolic; as with Fung 137

Shakepeare's original play, the tragedy of Polanski's Macbeth is more about the evilness of human desires rather than the evilness of demonic forces. In Polanski's extremely negative view of the world, horrible things certainly will not just end with the death of Macbeth, but more and more people will be driven by their endless

desires to cause bloodshed all over the world ceaselessly.

Highly comparable with Macbeth, Rosemary 's Baby also ends with a wordless

visual image that not only expresses a disturbing idea that symbolically concerns the

fate of the whole world, but also recapitulates the opening of the film. As we have

seen, the original ending in Ira Levin's novel - one that suggests a certain degree of

hopefulness - is deleted in the film. To be more specific, the novel's ending is

replaced by a very brief shot, showing a bird's eye view of the fayade of the old

residential building in which Rosemary lives. A couple is entering the gate, and this

reminds the audience of exactly how the film starts. Upon a closer look, however,

we will find that the two shots are actually done separately, with the opening one

showing more cars driving on the road, and the concluding one showing fewer cars.

The couple in the first scene are Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, but the identity of

the couple entering the gate at the end of the film is unknown and depends upon the

audience's imagination; but, whoever is imagined, this ending probably again implies

the idea of recurrence of events, another innocent couple to be be victimized in this Fung 138 same place. Such is the power of Polanski's endings: they disturbingly inspire the audience to imagine the worst things that may happen if ever the story has to go on. Fung 139

Conclusion

Roman Polanski is ranked among the greatest film directors of our time and at the same time distinguished from the other masters of cinema for his uniqueness; his lynx eyes perceive modem society in his own personal way. More importantly, perhaps, unlike most great modern film directors, Polanski has shown constant interest in adapting literary works; and he does so, like any fine artist, by personalizing the literary works he chooses, transforming them to fit into his negative view of human nature. It is true that Polanski adopts different cinematic techniques for different films, but no matter what methods he uses, his films as a whole construct a clear picture of his absolute pessimism towards the modern world one, in which nobody can be trusted, and certain conceited people allow their depraved desires to develop to such an extent that elimination of those inferior people who are too weak to fight back seems like an everyday matter to them. All these negative ideas point towards the extremely pessimistic endings which have almost become the

"trademark" of Polanski's films.

Polanski's intention of filmmaking is often discussed in the media, which has been irritating Polanski from time to time. The media often seeks explanations for the pessimism Polanski shows through his films. One of the most unfair criticisms is

obviously to relate Polanski's use of ultra-violence in Macbeth (1971) to the Charles Fung 140

Manson case, which took the life of his then-pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. As recorded by Thomas Kieman in his book, The Roman Polanski Story:

When Macbeth was released late in 1971, dozens of critics became instant

psychoanalysts. They attributed its most memorable if shocking

sequences - its visual gore - to Polanski's deepening obsession with

violence and bestiality, an obsession that went against the grain of things

that had happened in his real life. "Sick," "morbid," and "twisted" were

just a few of the adjectives applied to his cinematic vision. "How," asked

one reviewer, "do we account for this man who apparently has decided to

make us pay for the tragic murder of his wife and friends by demonically

bathing us in vomitous film horror?" (Kiernan, 240)

Worse still, some critiques even blamed Polanski for causing Sharon Tate's death,

accusing him, based on rumours, of using black magic when making Rosemary 's Baby

(1968). In 1977, Polanski was in trouble again when he was arrested for raping a

13-year-old girl. The media was interested in exploring the details of the intercourse.

It was inevitable that when Tess was released in 1979, it was condemned not because

of the film's quality, but because Polanski hired the then-17-year-old Nastassja Kinski,

who had been his girlfriend since she was 15. After so many years, some people

may still tend to see Dr. Miranda's confession of his perverse sexual desire in Death Fung 141

and the Maiden (1994) as Polanski's confession of his own sexual crime, which has

made him a fugitive and an exile up till now. All these comments, based on some

narrow-minded observation of Polanski's personalities, have manifestly degraded the

true aesthetic values of Polanski films on no grounds.

Even though Polanski has had an unhappy and unpleasant life in some ways and

usually expresses his negative views towards the modern world, there can be another

approach to understand his films. Perhaps it is through arousing disturbed and

irritated feelings among the audience that Polanski brings about powerful messages presenting a great warning to all humans: if we do not do something to improve our

interpersonal relationships, but instead continue to indulge ourselves in pursuing the realization of our distasteful desires, the whole world will one day be destroyed by our very own hands. We can without difficulties see this approach in many sci-fi movies about the future world, for example, George Pal's The Time Machine (1960)， based on H. G. Wells's novel, Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968)，based on Pierre Boulle's book, and even a recent film, Roland Emmerich's The Day After

Tomorrow (2004). We should be very aware that these films do not necessarily reflect the directors' pessimism towards the future, and we should also treat Polanski films in the same way.

It is quite notable that we have recently seen a slight twist of direction in Fung 142

Polanski's most recent film, The Pianist (2002). Although the film presents the living hell of the Nazi-occupied Poland that chills the audience's blood, it is still a hopeful film. It is perhaps true that the film has a more optimistic ending simply because Polanski bases his film on an autobiography, which forbids him from changing the title character's life as freely as he does in the other films. However, in

presenting the living hell of wartime Poland, Polanski still admits that there can be

some trust among human beings, and that human relationships are not all bad, or

purely alienated. Polanski's The Pianist is actually comparable with Fred

Zinnemann's The Seventh Cross (1944), which is about how the seventh condemned

man escapes the hands of the Nazi Germans with the help of different people. At the

same time as we feel awful about the brutal behaviour of the Nazi Germans when

watching Polanski's film, we are also aware that the pianist can eventually survive

because of the helping hands of different people, including the couple who finds the

hiding place for him, and most importantly, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, the German

officer who even finds food for him so that he can hold on until the end of the war.

Polanski's The Pianist is actually about new hope given to a person who is facing an

extremely difficult situation.

While I am working on this thesis, Polanski's newest film, Oliver Twist, is still in

production. Will it be as gloomy as other Polanski films? The answer is an Fung 143

obvious “no，，because the story is about how a suffering orphan eventually finds love in the world and is united with his uncle, whom he has never known before.

Although Charles Dickens's novel mainly focuses on the hardship during the

Industrial Revolution, it manifestly offers a happy ending. In one of the interviews,

Polanski claimed that he had always wanted to make a children's film. Choosing to make a film on Oliver Twist, Polanski is very likely not going to change its ending into a negative one.

In view of this most recent project by Polanski, it is therefore also fair to deduce that Polanski really meant to be positive when he made The Pianist. However, no matter what approach Polanski takes, and no matter if the critics give favourable comments or not, it is an undeniable fact that Polanski films always have the power to inspire us to reflect upon the world we are living in. The audience will always be looking forward to seeing the next Polanski film. Fung 144

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