The Cinema of Perversion: Roman Polanski and David Lynch

The following the final paper from my 70's cinema class in which we were assigned to compare a director from the 1970's to a modern director. I am pleased with the result, and I hope you enjoy it....



When I speak of the cinema of perversion, I am not necessarily referring to a kind of abject moral state (though that may be part of it), instead I am referring to the kinds of perversion that are so beautifully uncovered and revealed through the works of these two masters of the macabre. It also refers to a similar, underlying dark sense of humor that runs throughout their works. They are, in fact, films about abject moral states, but to call them immoral in and of themselves would be to miss the point. I will attempt to expose the common links of corruption and perversity through Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Tenant, and the influence these works played on David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. In the 1970's, Roman Polanski, and more recently, David Lynch, have taken great joy in revealing the darker side of everyday lift, though often with a big smile on their faces.

Before I begin, I feel the need to set up some basic background information in order to more fully understand his sensibilities. Roman Polanski was one of most acclaimed filmmakers to come out of Poland in the 1960's along with giants Andrej Wajda and later Krzysztof Kieslowski, and the only one to find mainstream success in the United States. Born half-Jewish, he spent some of his youth escaping from a Polish ghetto. In fact, his mother died in a concentration camp – experiences which would, no doubt, play a major role in his cinematic sensibilities. He burst onto the scene with his debut feature, Knife in the Water in 1962, a tense Ingmar Bergman meets the French New Wave psychological thriller set on a small sail boat with three characters, which won him an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. He later went on to make another slyly perverse psychological thriller, Repulsion, the magnificent, though underseen, Cul-de-Sac, and the unfunny horror comedy, The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck – a film whose title is the best thing about it. At that point, Paramount guru Robert Evans brought him to the United States in order to adapt Ira Levin’s novel, Rosemary’s Baby which became a hit and led to his directing what many define as the quintessential 1970's film, Chinatown, again under Evans’ supervision. He later returned to Europe where he made the often misunderstood, English language thriller, The Tenant. Since then, he has gone on to make a number of other varyingly successful films including multi-Academy Award nominated film, Tess and the award winning film, The Pianist, which is arguably the finest film ever made about life in the Jewish ghettos and Nazi’s concentration camps, due to its undoubtedly personal nature.

I am of the opinion that Rosemary’s Baby is Roman Polanski’s masterpiece, and perhaps the finest horror/psychological thriller ever made. Now that’s not to say that he doesn’t still develop as a filmmaker in his later works, but this is my personal favorite of his films. I admit that I am cheating in order to use this film considering it was made in 1968, however, I would contend that its style and sensibilities are those that we have come to associate with the 1970's. It is one of those transitional films of the late 60's like, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy and The Rain People that ushered in the 1970's. It tells the story of a young married couple played my Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, who move into an elegantly creepy Manhattan apartment complex that may house more than they bargained for. Soon, she becomes pregnant and begins to suspect that her perhaps too friendly, geriatric neighbors played wonderfully by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Backer, are part of a coven and conspiring against her to sacrifice her baby. "There are conspiracies against people, aren’t there?" she asks at one point. Yes, I suppose there are. Pauline Kael, as always, succinctly puts it that, "Rosemary’s actor-husband conspires with a coven, drugs her, and mates her with Satan, in exchange for a Broadway hit." When you put it that way, one can see the truly dark sense of humor that pervades the film. The film evokes some obvious stylistic and even thematic comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock – the paranoid housewife, the sinister neighbors/husband, the dark sense of humor, and the commonplace made terrifying; however, as Roger Ebert points out in his review, "The characters and the story transcend the plot. In most horror films, and indeed in most suspense films of the Alfred Hitchcock tradition, the characters are at the mercy of the plot. In this one, they emerge as human beings actually doing these things." His unbound camera suggests a kind of freedom – though a restrained freedom over which Polanski exhibits masterful control. Behind the luxurious gothic walls of this apartment building lurks an almost unbelievable kind of evil – a satanic cult bent on raising forth the child of Satan to rule the world. It’s funny, it’s terrifying, it’s perverse, and Polanski takes glee in unmasking the corruption and evil found behind the most pleasing doors of American society.

Of all the films that I have chosen to examine, Chinatown is probably the most universally lauded and simultaneously, the most humorless. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its share of laughs – private eye Jake Gittes delivers some pointed one-liners thanks to Jack Nicholson’s delivery and Robert Towne’s brilliant script, but the humor is very snide, sarcastic, and cynical, not as joyously perverse as Rosemary’s Baby. It then becomes important to realize that a significant event occurred during the six years between the two films – Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate was brutally murdered in Beverly Hills by Charles Manson. This seminal event seemed to stain (for better or for worse) his films of the next few years. This is most apparent in his curiously brutal version of Macbeth made in 1971. Chinatown is a detective story – neo-noir, some might say – involving the ironic drowning death of the Los Angeles water commissioner during a drought in the 1930's, and his widow played by Faye Dunaway, her father played by John Huston, and the seemingly worthless desert land of the San Fernando Valley. Roger Ebert makes an important point about its style and genre conventions:

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is not only a great entertainment, but something more, something I would have thought almost impossible: It’s a 1940's private eye movie that doesn’t depend on nostalgia or camp for its effect, but works because of the enduring strength of the genre itself. In some respects, this movie actually could have been made in the 1940's. It accepts its conventions and categories at face value and doesn’t make them the objects of satire or filter them through a modern sensibility, as Robert Altman did with The Long Goodbye. Here’s a private eye movie in which all of the traditions, romantic as they may seem, are left in tact.

This is one of the most successful films at deconstructing the popularly held myths of Los Angeles. Sure it may have a sunny, family-friendly persona, but the deeper one tries to dig the more twisted and tangled things become, into a web of conspiracies and corruption involving rape, incest, and murder that all lead to John Huston’s wealthy madman, Noah Cross. When Gittes finally reaches him, he asks Cross, "Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?" Cross answers him by saying, "The future, Mr. Gitts, the future."

Polanski’s masterful visual style seems to have remained consistent through Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, but the tone is different – more cynical, more hopeless. In the end, Faye Dunaway’s character, the only good person in the film, has been killed and her daughter/sister is now in the hands of Noah Cross, the father/grandfather. The villain wins and Jake Gittes loses the woman he loves, "Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown." Polanski says that Los Angeles was founded on corruption, and then proceeds to unravel it in all of its forms. The facade of respectability is described best by Cross himself when he says, "Of course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." It’s cynical even by 1970's standards. One must ask if this change in tone is due to the culture at large, and I believe that at least to some degree it could be a reaction to the loss of innocence of the 1960's and the hardened realities of the 1970's, but I think there’s more to it. Screenwriter, Robert Towne originally wrote a more optimistic ending in which Dunaway’s character survives, but Polanski insisted that she die. This seems to me to be more of a reaction to the tragic loss of the women in his life – first his mother and later his wife. Nevertheless, as an artist, he was able to use the tragedy of his life in order to create one of the finest examples of American filmmaking, and what may be the most revealing expose on the corruption and perversity lurking beneath the surface of Los Angeles to date.

The Tenant, made in 1976, may be Roman Polanski’s last (to this point) great psychological thriller, though not his last great film. It is the concluding entry into what is loosely referred to as his "apartment trilogy" which began with Repulsion and continued with Rosemary’s Baby. The story bears more than a few obvious similarities to Rosemary’s Baby, but he takes the idea a step farther. The Tenant tells the story of a mild-mannered Polish bachelor living in Paris, named Trelkovsky (played by Polanski, himself), who rents an apartment filled with American character actors. Shelley Winters is the concierge and Melvyn Douglas is the landlord who demands peace and quiet in his building. There’s a spectacular opening shot which cranes across numerous upper-floor windows and finally down to the street level as Trelkovsky enters the building – an unusually bold movement of the camera from master cinematographer Sven Nykvist, though a typical Polanski opener. It seems that the apartment that he is renting belonged to a woman who committed suicide by jumping out of the window. Soon, he meets a beautiful stranger played by Isabelle Adjani, who was a friend of the former tenant. It’s not long before Trelkovsky begins noticing some creepy individuals staring menacingly at him in his apartment from across the courtyard. Then the paranoia begins. He believes that the other apartment dwellers are attempting, with witchcraft, to turn him into the former tenant in order to get him to commit suicide. The scenes in which his paranoia begins running amuck and he actually starts dressing like the former (female) tenant, are among the most disturbingly funny sequences in any of Polanski’s work. The ending may be my favorite in his repertoire because it is just so boldly and perversely funny, weird, and terrifying in equal doses. The Tenant is bolder and probably takes more risks than Rosemary’s Baby, though it may or may not be an overall superior film. This is one of the dividing films of Polanski’s career – some swear by it and others (even Polanski admirers) despise it. In some ways this is the best of the three films I have chosen to analyze, and in others it is the worst; and so it goes with The Tenant because, like the best of Brian De Palma, there is very little middle ground. The strengths of the film lie in the boldness of the material he begins with as well as his continuously maturing visual and psychological techniques. And once again, as with Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, the deeper one penetrates the calm, quiet exteriors of this ordinary Paris apartment building, the more sinister its inhabitants become. It’s not the blatant satanism of Rosemary’s Baby, nor is it the endless political corruption of Chinatown, it’s just a bunch of people who want peace and quiet and may be willing to take some unusual measure in order to ensure that. While watching this film, one can almost catch a glimpse of David Lynch and what was to come with cinema, just around the corner.

I consider myself one of those people who believes that David Lynch may be America’s premiere film artist working today, and specifically, Mulholland Dr. may be the finest film of the last five years. Like Fight Club and Memento, Mulholland Dr. has had fan-boy’s across the country pillaging it’s depths and trying to uncover the many mysteries and symbols of the film. However, Mulholland Dr. reveals something more sinister and with greater artistry than either of the former films. I could attempt to summarize the story (I do, after all, have my theories), but that may be beside the point. It’s a dream of a film, quite literally, and, in some ways, gets to the essence of cinema itself. Naomi Watts is simply stunning as Betty, the perky blonde who just arrived in Los Angeles with stars in her eyes and dreams of becoming a star. Laura Elena Harring is Rita, or at least that’s the name she gives (she has amnesia), a woman with a mysterious past that Betty is determined to help. The film joyfully defies narrative logic as it jumps through scenes and situations; characters change; conspiracies are revealed; fantasy, dreams, and reality blend seamlessly; and who is that creepy guy living by the dumpster. Jessica Winter points out his resemblance to the brief Satan figure of Rosemary’s Baby. "Is Rosemary’s baby living behind Winky’s?" she asks. In David Lynch’s world, you never can tell. Jim Hoberman makes the observation:

Mulholland Drive's most frighteningly self-reflexive scene comes when Betty and Rita attend a 2 a.m. performance——part séance, part underground art ritual——in a decrepit, near deserted old movie palace called Club Silencio. The mystery being celebrated is that of sound-image synchronization, which is to say cinema, and the illusion throws Betty into convulsions. At the show's climax, Rebekah Del Rio sings an a capella Spanish-language version of "Crying." She collapses onstage, but the song continues——just like the movie. For its remaining three-quarters of an hour, Mulholland Drive turns as perverse and withholding in its narrative as anything in Buñuel. Similarly surreal is the gusto with which Lynch orchestrates his particular fetishes. In Mulholland Drive, the filmmaker has the conviction to push self-indulgence past the point of no return.

But behind all of the narrative hoopla rests a scathing indictment of Los Angeles. Hoberman also points out, "It is a poisonous valentine to Hollywood. (This is the most carefully crafted L.A. period film since Chinatown – except that the period is ours.)... The ominously rumbling city is malign and seductive; the movie industry, or should we say dream factory, is an obscure conspiracy." Betty’s inane cheeriness and optimism is slowly destroyed, perverted, and corrupted as Hollywood proves not to be the dream place of its reputation. In Lynch’s world, evil is not a thing reserved for large cities, it is also hostilely active behind the placid veneers of Small Town, U.S.A. (see Blue Velvet). But for all its omnipresent corruption and perversion, Mulholland Dr., like Polanski’s films, has an underlying pitch black humor – take for instance, the scene in which an assassin makes a mistake when killing his intended victim and is then forced to kill two other people and then sets off the smoke detector, or the way in which the young movie director (Justin Theroux) finds his wife in bed with another man (Billy Ray Cyrus), and we can’t forget the Cowboy. It’s been said that the world of David Lynch is not a world which we’d like to live in, yet somehow, we suspect we do.

If I were to guess which of Roman Polanski’s film played the biggest influence on Mulholland Dr. stylistically, I would say The Tenant, but thematically I would say, Chinatown. Polanski takes his macabre subject matter and turns it into a dreamlike fascination, but Lynch takes it and makes it into the essence of a dream itself (or nightmare) by skewing the narrative – a technique Polanski rarely uses. Polanski’s films feel nightmarish, but Lynch’s films are nightmares. Where Polanski prefers to work with a foot firmly planted in the real world, Lynch prefers to create his own. I have mentioned the running similarities in their films through a similar use of dark humor, perhaps to offset the unsettling material or perhaps to intensify it. The ending of The Tenant seems to be the kind of cinematic sequence that Lynch would get off on. It has the kind of absurdity that Lynch manages to make legitimately effective. They also share a similar fascination with the perversely erotic. The "dream sequence" in Rosemary’s Baby where Satan impregnates Rosemary is one of the more unusually erotic scenes in film history. Lynch’s erotic sensibilities are similarly unusual as can be seen in Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and dare I say it, even, The Elephant Man. While the eroticism of Mulholland Dr. is certainly more tender than in Rosemary’s Baby, there is still something disquieting about it. In both of their cases, though, much of it is established by the rhythm of their films – it may be a distinctly cinematic phenomenon. The most obvious comparison between Polanski and Lynch is in the handling of Los Angeles in Chinatown and Mulholland Dr. Both directors play on the audience’s perception of Los Angeles as being sunny, friendly, and the place where dreams come true, but as in the opening scene of Lynch’s Blue Velvet, you can have a beautiful, green lawn, but below the surface an insect war is raging. If Chinatown isn’t the most vitriolic Los Angeles film ever made, then Mulholland Dr. is.

In the 1970's, Roman Polanski peeled away the layers of society to the evil that lurked below, and in recent years, David Lynch has proved a master of that very subversion. The influence of Polanski can be seen, sometimes more clearly than others, throughout the body of Lynch’s work, yet the two remain fiercely individual artists. While it may be strange to say, I feel that the perversion of their films is what makes them a joy to watch. They are masters of providing the subversive pleasures of the thriller and the unconscious. They make us laugh when we should be horrified, and they make us laugh when we are horrified. They play with our knowledge and reconstruct our perceptions. In short, they are filmmakers of a rare breed and exercise their art with unusual skill.