Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by Brian Rose
University of North Carolina at Asheville
October 2009
Marxist Midwifery:
The Alienation of Maternal Labor in Rosemarys Baby & Eraserhead
The theme of childbirth offers a subtle yet rich symbology on which to perpetuate
many aspects Marxist ideology. Exploring the theme as an allegorical construction of
Capitalism, one finds an abundant Marxist subtext that permeates from the level of the
symbolic through to the level of social actualization: During conception, the masculine
and feminine unite in the act of copulation; what is produced from this act of intimacy,
however, is represented as undergoing Capitalist containment, and is so utilized as
something antithetical to this intimacy that is, alienation, as manifest in the alienating
variable of the conceptual/literal infant (saturated with connotations of practical
exploitation or the depletion of resources) that cultivates an impenetrable boundary
between masculine and feminine within the ontology that the film constructs. The female
becomes an object of utility through which to cultivate this alienating influence; a barrier
is constructed between herself and the male, who is barred from the recesses of her womb
and from her creative experience. Through a process of labor, she expels an alienated
product an object that (in the Capitalist context) is excluded from her intimacy, and
may only be treated as a dehumanized machine that desires resources and excretes waste.
One sees this allegory play out in Polanskis Rosemarys Baby and Lynchs Eraserhead,
both of which treat the infant as an alien agent, locating it within some sort of abstract
distance and framing it within a dimension of ambiguity between waking reality and
nightmarish oneiric states. As such, both films contribute to the enunciation of a MarxistFeminist notion of alienation; this enunciation is accomplished through the
phenomenological cultivation of an encompassing atmosphere, the representation of
social dynamics (primarily that of the nuclear family) contained within that atmosphere,
and the surrealist element of oneiric states that confuse and disturb that atmosphere.
Both films very precisely underwrite a phenomenological atmosphere that
consumes the narrative itself, and all themes and activities within the films are therein
centered and delivered through the mediating contextualization of this atmosphere. In this
text I will seek to demonstrate that both films undertake an examination of one aspect
human condition (i.e. reproduction) in the context of Capitalist alienation of which, in
his 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx explicates four types: alienation of [woman] from the
product of labor (i.e. the infant), from the productive activity of labor (i.e. physical
intimacy), from [her] species-being (i.e. femininity), and finally from other human beings
(i.e. feminist discourse).
One may identify an ideological narrative in one Marxist passage as informing the
aesthetic narrative of Rosemarys Baby. Marx writes, The laborer therefore only feels
[her]self outside [her] labor, and in [her] labor feels outside [her]self. . . . [Her] labor is
therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction
of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it (Marx 74). I have
substituted the translated word work[er] with the more general labor[er] for
consistency and made noted alteration to pronoun usage in order to better contextualize
the theory for the perspective of this text. The phenomenological atmosphere of the film
involves the misappropriation (or expropriation) of Rosemarys feminine labor in order
to satisfy an external need.
Rosemarys Baby cultivates this phenomenological cinematic space by opening
upon the metropolitan bustle the archetypal fixture of the Capitalist mechanistic-
assemblage. The cold sterility of the inhuman city is contrasted with a disturbingly
inhuman lullaby as sung by a child. This sequence serves to establish an encompassing
atmosphere wherein the concrete image of Capitalism is intimately associated with the
abstract sound-byte of the lullaby. The film itself is unavoidably Gothic in its aesthetic
undertones, as both Valerius and Fischer both claim; the atmosphere it cultivates is
reactionary insomuch it inflicts itself upon the viewer and against multiplicitous
ideologies coming into a frictional contact with one another. As Valerius writes:
Rosemary's Baby articulates . . . a modern-day tale of witchcraft and
demonic pregnancy, a Faustian story of destructive ambition, a tribute to
Dracula in which the unborn rather than the undead perniciously feed off
the living, and a perversion of the Christian narrative of the Immaculate
Conception in which Satan impregnates a mortal woman in order to
become human and intervene in world history. (Valerius 118)
The film undertakes a critical examination of various value structures that are projected
in the scene upon Gothic structures, but ultimately falls back upon a reiterative discourse
involving the process of maternity and labor in order to articulate its social alienation
(and consequential devaluation) of women within Capitalist economic structures. Fischer
writes, I read the film in the space of various neighboring cultural discourses on
childbirth: the sacred, the mythic, the obstetrical, the psychiatric, the therapeutic, and the
artistic (Fischer 5). Childbirth provides a richly thematic image through which to
explore a transvaluative ideology concerned with the gender implications of economic
systems, insomuch as childbirth is a fundamental process through which womens bodies
have been historically demonstrated as being misappropriated and exploited by
masculinist power structures.
While abortion is rarely (if only once) mentioned within the film, the entire
narrative is suggestive of the theme of fetal termination. The actions utilized by the
antagonists in order to exploit and alienate Rosemary suggest the masculinist alienation
of her femininity from her corporeity; furthermore, Polanski uses cinematic devices that
compel one to resist Rosemarys externally-imposed alienation by anticipating the
internally-imposed alienation of the malevolent fetal entity. The spectators proposed
resistance to her alienation, however, represents an even more deeply imposed
construction of Capitalist alienation, so as to appropriate the spectators benevolent
resistance into the antagonism of the film itself the spectator thus becomes implicated
in the brutality that is persistently inflicted upon Rosemary. Valerius writes, The story
establishes a climate of fear and danger by invoking the coercive and sometimes deadly
reality created by a conservative sexual morality in combination with the criminalization
of abortion, where infanticide, suicide, and dangerous back alley abortions were the last
resort of desperate women (Valerius 124).
The film situates its activity within another extension of phenomenological space
that is, within a temporal milieu that underwrites its aesthetic symbology on a
fundamental level it is that the film finds itself immersed in an era of sexual
transvaluation (circa the mid-1960s) that allows value-interpretations of the film to
develop relative to this temporal context. Valerius maintains, The film explicitly situates
itself in Manhattan in 1965-66, and it is a product of and widely distributed participant in
the anxieties and conflicts of that specific moment. . . . [such as] the status of women as
legitimate political and legal subjects (Valerius 116-117).
Valerius continues to cite Marcus as to emergent medical technologies of the era
which served to objectify the process of childbirth and thus worked to expropriate
womens bodies within the power structure. First among these were programs circulated
assuring that there is nothing to fear about pregnancy, thus perpetuating a fundamental
conceptual association of pregnancy with fear; furthermore, new fetal visualization
technologies like ultra sound, which extended medical surveillance of pregnancy, and in
revised medical knowledge about the placenta that positioned pregnant women as
potentially toxic environments for fetuses; and finally the legality of abortions as only
being legitimately obtainable on the paranoid grounds of fetal perniciousness and
women's susceptibility to insanity (Valerius 120).
These three efforts, in the context of the 1960s, engaged women in an
institutionalized objectification of their collective corporeity and existential potentiality.
Being thus objectified, they were susceptible to Capitalist expropriation of the
manufactured product of their labor (i.e. childbirth). Fischer states:
As multifarious visions of childbirth have proliferated, so have competing
discourses, each seeking to explain and contain it. Despite this vocality,
the dialogue has disempowered woman or relegated her to virtual silence.
Religious thought elides her from the birth act. . . . Traditional obstetrics
denies the parturient woman agency, configuring her as passive patient.
Psychiatry damns her with faint praise for successfully achieving
maternal maturity by sublimating her penis envy. (Fischer 5)
Rosemarys Baby engages these discourses of labor on all the levels that Fischer
describes from religion (i.e., the Satanic coven that claims her womb as their
receptacle) to obstetrics (i.e., Dr. Sapirstein, who subverts her agency in order that she
may be more easily exploited), even including psychiatry (implicit within the constant
paternalistic accusations of insanity which undermine her credibility).
One conceives that Rosemarys exercise of her privacy (i.e. abortion, divorce)
might engender some sort of agency. However, Polanski represents these alleged
resolutions of privacy as futile, perhaps because they rely upon the same sort of
alienating process (though imposed from an alternate source) whose activity is the
Man's interference has made it actively hostile to life, and this process has rebounded on
him in the form of a perversion of the most basic of life's forces: sex (Godwin 39). In
short, the entire film is the reiteration of a nightmarish sequence of nocturnal emissions.
As being a quintessentially aesthetic enunciation of an oneiric state, the film does
not possess any vested interest in moral structures such as Marxist revolution or Feminist
liberation. It is a political enunciation which possess no definite political goals, and
insomuch is it fundamentally a denunciation. As such, it is sufficiently egoistic enough to
explore the inner recesses of the alienated (male) identity. Godwin maintains,
Eraserhead, while it dwells on shocking, even perverse images, seems in-turned,
obsessively introspective. It provides an auditory and visual assault which isolates each
viewer. The experience becomes intensely personal, un-shared (Godwin 37). The dream
perspective finds itself immersed in a post-Industrial world offering no object on which
to project its hope or its pre-Industrial uterine identity. Its phenomenological atmosphere
inheres materially as a bleak, grimy urban wasteland; concrete expanses, tenements in a
narrow street, relieved only occasionally by open spacetreeless waste ground a
confused expanse of excess punctuated by void that possesses an incessant metallic
rattle of some idle device off in the shadows (Godwin 39).
In enunciating its phenomenological discourse of introspection, all activity within
the film centers around imagery with an almost obsessive interest in biological
mattersthe textures of internal organs, physical deformity which, coupled with the
post-industrial landscape in which the film is set[,] . . . depict people trapped in
mechanical complexes, often being absorbed into the machinery; creatures half-organic,
half-mechanical; landscapes of glistening flesh; decaying biological matter (Godwin
38). While Rosemarys atmosphere was one of Capitalism at the apex of its potential,
Henrys atmosphere is one of Capitalism at the post-climactic ruination of its potential
the machine that once flew high but has now plummeted to the ground and shattered into
a multiplicitous array of fragmentary, isolated, damaged individuals. The atmosphere
displays itself in inefficient, decaying technology as manifest in the empty rotting
industrial sites, in the barely functioning elevator in Henry's building, in the violently
burning-out light bulbs (Godwin 40).
The phenomenological cultivation of the hyper-Capitalist atmosphere of both
films must ultimately fall upon the characters to cohabitate within this atmosphere and
at the center of these relational dynamics is the Oedipal structure of the nuclear family as
the primary object of its narrative. Both directors, however, manage to warp the Oedipal
paradigm by staging the mother-father figures as alienated across a fluctuating field of
distance (never quite determinate enough to identify, yet aesthetically consistent enough
so as to be discernable at least in irony). Furthermore, the product of their copulation (the
antithesis of their imposed alienation) is in both cases a warped and inhuman entity. Both
narratives represent the implicit rejection of Capitalism as a source of dehumanization,
insomuch as they serve to underscore the true source of cultural power dynamics as
Capitalist alienation and its misogynistic implications.
The narrative of Rosemarys Baby traces the line between two parallel levels of
critical representation, lending to the film a sense of duality and the consequential tension
of exclusionary choice that imposes itself upon the spectators cinematic experience. The
first representation expresses itself quasi-literally as a Marxist critical representation,
insomuch as Rosemarys child is the direct result of the masculinist/Capitalist utilization
of her body as a receptacle object. Furthermore, this act of utilization traces her life along
all of Marxs levels of alienation: from the product of her labor (the devil-infant), from
her productive activity of labor (intimacy with her husband), from her species-being (her
femininity), and ultimately from society (her extramarital friendships).
Rosemary, as protagonist, undergoes the radical objectification of her own body
as her husband strikes a deal with the coven for control over it. The deal is so struck in
the pursuit of his own commercial success Guy seeks fame and power within the
Capitalist structure so much that it overwhelms any affection he might still possess for
Rosemary, thus enabling him to rationalize his exponential utilization of her body for his
own gain. Valerius contends, Rosemary's exploitation by her husband and the coven,
who coldly pursue their own interests in her future child without regard for her desires or
well being, might be read as an indictment of the more routine ways sexist social
relations expropriate women's reproductive labor (Valerius 119-20). The fetuss very
biological essence is cultivated to resemble their own design (the design of the Satanic
male element) a design that excludes, undermines, and overshadows her own maternal
influence.
The film mocks Rosemarys own consenting role in this process. Just as the
oppressed worker assents to oppression in the interest of his/her survival, Rosemary is
persistently willing to disassociate her own agency to the hands of male figures (figures
who the spectator receives ironically and thus discerns their malevolence). Rosemarys
desire for care is manufactured into an object of paternalism care is transformed into
control. As Fischer claims, Women seek external support out of a desire to be cared for
and protected . . . The film chronicles this dependency, as Rosemary passively
seek the advice of another doctor), Guy must be physically barred from the room, though
he still asserts his gaze paternalistically through the glass. Still, Rosemary often assents to
her own alienation. Fischer writes, Consumed by her fears of possession, Rosemary
refuses to see friendstracing the pregnant woman's alleged increased selfpreoccupation and . . . decline of emotional investment in the external world (Fischer
11).
The second layer of subtext of the film is the sublimated malevolence or
dysfunction of the entity that Rosemary contains. Abortion rarely enters into literal
consideration within the narrative, but this absence of consideration is underscored by the
perpetual implication of miscarriage (as represented in her pains and in her resistance to
the masculine exploitation of her pregnancy). Nonetheless, the subtext of abortion
provides a parallel representation which contrasts the Marxist critical narrative, and
subverts this paradigm from within the perspective of the spectator; that is, the spectator
desires to see the termination of the demonic entity that Rosemary contains. Valerius
maintains, As Finkbine's story did, Rosemary's Baby addresses itself to an audience
invested in the sentimental ideal of motherhood, exploits that investment to produce a
horrified response, and thereby makes abortion compelling (Valerius 125).
The implication of abortion asserts itself with progressively increasing intensity
proportionate to the revelation of the entity contained by Rosemary as a sinister entity;
that is, the more one comes to see the fetus as malformed according to human standards
of functional utility, the more one (as cinematic spectator) legitimizes the possibility of
abortion. Valerius writes, [U]ntil the twentieth century, monster was a term used to
refer to people born with congenital deformities, and copulation with the devil was one
traditional explanation for the cause of monstrous births (Valerius 125). The spectator
conceives a devaluation of the fetuss life that parallels the perceived inability for the
infant to undergo Capitalist containment and utilization, and thus the product of her labor
may be conceptually expropriated and materially excised as an irrelevant (and therefore
inhuman) component of her corporeity. As Fischer reminds us, [M]onsters suffer from
categorical incompleteness (Fischer 10)
Rosemary herself descends into the spectators pity as she unwittingly protects the
devil that she cultivates inside of her. Valerius writes, Until [the] final revelation,
Rosemary's misplaced fears for the well being of her much-desired first born compel her
to piece together the conspiracy against her, and she suspects the coven is waiting for her
infant to be born in order to steal it for a sacrificial ritual (Valerius 119). She seeks to
preserve the pregnancy when she believes that it is intended as functional (the sacrificial
ritual representing the process Capitalist appropriation of labor), yet the spectator
invariably questions how she might feel if she was aware of the true monstrosity that her
womb conceals. By leaving this unanswered until the final scene, Polanski uses the
spectators own inner question to taunt his/her notions of morality and ideology.
The director refuses to satiate the spectators desire for termination, as it is
quintessentially imposed by the process of Capitalist alienation wherein one must abort
the product of ones labor if it is unable to be expropriated into the Capitalist structure.
One wishes the fetus to be alienated from her (as malevolent in its futility), yet Polanski
resists the spectators Capitalistically-imposed desire and instead aesthetically cultivates
the malevolent entity within the heroine as a spectacle in itself. In doing so, he parodies
this Capitalist devaluation of her product (as unable to be practically utilized according to
difficulty) as Henry, who represents not a material identity but an oneiric identity the
masculine perspective that has become so disengaged from reality that it may only be
expressed in the oneiric dream-state. Godwin writes, The film itself presents us with no
one who stands outside the events of the dream. Henry, at the center, is not the dreamer
but rather the dreamer's dream identity (it is very much a male dream) (Godwin 39).
This reiteration of the masculine perspective is a critical one, brutally introspective so as
to access the deepest fears latent within the male psyche that have been imposed
throughout the perpetuation and ruination of Capitalism. Godwin continues, The
symbolic progress of the film reveals an ever-deepening fear of sex (as the agency by
which life perpetuates itself), leading ultimately to a disgust which can only be remedied
by a complete escape from itinto death (39). It is Henrys desire to transcend his
alienation from the feminine by pursuing the originary pre-Capitalist womb that will
ultimately culminate in the totalistic demise of his identity.
One may begin the examination of the characters of the film with one of the first
scenes of dialogue this being Henrys visit to the Xs household. Bill (Marys father)
represents the aged worker whose repetitive, mechanical motion has alienated him from
his own limb. Godwin describes, [Bill] asks Henry to do the carving [because] some
years ago he had an operation on his arm. The doctors told him he would never recover
the use of it. But what do they know? He rubbed it every day and bit by bit he regained
movement until now it's as good as new. Except that there is absolutely no feeling in it;
he will not carve because he is afraid he might cut himself (Godwin 40). This ritualistic
locomotive activity has imbued functionality to the limb, but has disassociated sensation
it is only viable mechanistically, yet as such it is weaker and dehumanized, unable to
wield even a carving knife to utilize on miniscule birds (with obviously feminine
symbolism, as bleeding between the thighs and thrashing in resistance when confronted
by the phallic knife). The spectator also bears witness to a more advanced progression of
this alienation within the figure of the grandmother sitting in the kitchen, a vegetable
appendage to the family, moving only when Mrs. X manipulates her lifeless hands to toss
the salad (40). Vegetative, she is only alive insomuch as she may be mechanistically
employed; how, then, are we as spectators compelled to assess the value of her life or
of life in general within the context of this narrative?
The Oedipal consequence of Henrys dream-identity is manifest in the figure of
the Baby which is dehumanized in the most literal way possible, on every level from
which the spectator may perceive it. The other Oedipal figures (Henry and Mary)
approach this dehumanized entity with a sort of skeptical ambivalence, yet though it
exhausts them and their responses to it suggest a sense revulsion, they still feel compelled
to care for the alienated creature. Godwin entails a phallic significance to the Baby,
stating, From its shape and its position in the film's structure of symbols, it can be only
one thing: the penis (complete with scrotum-the bandage-wrapped sac to which the head
is attached by a thin neck). But it is the penis grown out of all proportion; it has become a
separate entity, all appetite (Godwin 42). Just as in Rosemarys Baby, the product of
womans labor has been expropriated into a deformed masculinist structure; as shown in
a variety of levels within Henrys dream, femininity invariably serves only as the
receptacle for his penis furthermore, an alienated receptacle that horrifies him and
compels him to retreat.
reverie in this condition (Fischer 9). This quasi-oneiric state manifests itself as horrific
in the perpetuation of nightmare sequences within the genre. At a certain point within
each film, the dream itself is imbued within the cinematic structure, and we may not
assuredly discern between the dream and the template of reality to which the dream lays
referential claim.
Rosemarys Baby offers a unique role for the oneiric space, insomuch as it is only
in her dream states that Rosemary discerns the true sinister nature of the conspiracy that
exploits her. In order to accomplish this, it provides a transient boundary between reality
and the dream that allows us to observe congruities between them and recognize (as
spectator) how the dream reflects reality (even if Rosemary does not). Valerius states,
Rosemary's Baby theorizes a permeable relation between fantasy and reality in which
language serves as a placenta-like conduit for circulation between them. . . . Here fantasy
and reality are not carbon copies of one another, but they are in close communication
(Valerius 122).
Of particular importance within the narrative is the conception scene wherein
Rosemary perceives her own rape by the devil, but only within the context of her
dreamworld. Valerius writes:
Rosemary's lucid perceptions interrupt her drug-induced dreams and she
recognizes for a panicked instant that she has confused rape by someone
inhuman with a pleasurable dream of sex with her husband. As fear
replaces her previously passive, voyeuristic interest in those dreams,
Rosemary protests This is no dream! This is really happening! before
she is sedated. Her protest simultaneously asserts a distinction between
fantasy and reality and acknowledges how closely intertwined they are.
(Valerius 122)
Though she experiences the act of her assault, she is alienated from the intensity of it by
the sedative that the figures of paternalistic authority have concocted for her (just as
Capitalism alienates laborers from the intensity of their oppression through the opiate
influence of religion, drugs, etc.). Valerius expounds, [A]lthough paranoia is commonly
understood precisely as an inability to differentiate between fantasy and reality, this is not
paranoid delusion, where imaginary fears and suspicions are projected out into the real
world, but its inverse. Rosemary mistakes her real experience for fantasy and dismisses
it (Valerius 123).
The dream content itself contains a pervasive plethora of Catholic imagery the
presence of the Kennedys, the shame of nudity, the Sistine Chapel, the Pope, etc.. This
imagery offers an ironic juxtaposition of the real template it represents, since it is the
Devil (and, significantly, not God) who is the entity with whom she copulates. Fischer
contends, This warped rape fantasy reverberates with cultural clichs of woman's sexual
position. With female eroticism conceived as the embodiment of guilt, it is logical that
Rosemary seeks the Holy Father's blessing (Fischer 9). Polanski thus accomplishes a
subtle association of religious authority with demonic assault subtle only insomuch as
he expresses it within the context of a dream.
Within Rosemarys Baby, oneiric states not only serve to associate maternity with
horror, but also associate the audience with the narrative. As Valerius maintains, As her
dreams digest real events and transform them into fantasy, Rosemary consumes her
dreams, which in turn elicit real responses from her. This communication between
fantasy and reality suggests by extension that between the fictional narrative itself and the
audience (Valerius 123). Similarly, this association reflects the process of the Capitalist
mechanistic-assemblage, which works to manufacture the potentiality of the Idea into a
single meaning negating any of the others (Godwin 38). This encompassment of a
surrealist aesthetic reflects the process of Capitalist encompassment, wherein divergent
and often contradictory ideologies are appropriated to serve the same structure. For
example, Christianity and the Stock Market may express contradictory textual
assemblages of knowledge/power, yet both ideologies serve to enunciate and underwrite
a predominant ideology of Capitalist authority. Godwin continues, We can discern no
degrees of reality because there is no baseline to which we can point as rational. There
can be no distinction between what really happens and what someone thinks is happening
because here thought is instantaneously manifest as event (38). This process of visceral
immediacy recalls the process of Capitalist activity that is likewise recalled in
Rosemarys Baby, wherein the potentiality of the idea is immediately refracted as the
material event.
Present in the films inception and closure (as well as sporadically throughout its
discourse) is the figure of the machinist the entity whom Godwin deems the Man in the
Planet. He explicates, The film's central symbol for that active part of the human mind,
responsible for the disruption and perversion of the natural worldand for the
unbalanced, faulty technology which has been the agency of that perversionis the Man
in the Planet (Godwin 40). This Man in the Planet is essentially a grotesque machinist
poised before an array of levers, riddled with deformities and emitting an inhuman rattle.
The machinist represents the most abstract consequence of alienation that latently serves
both as a fixed egocentric entity of control within the human mind as well as the fixed
authoritative entity of Capitalism centered in a post-industrial cinematic dreamworld. He
is the ruined consequence of Capitalism and, furthermore, the consequence this entails
within the sublime psyche. Godwin continues, By manipulating his levers he initiates
the action of the film; he is "in charge" of this world whose motion has become
mechanical rather than living (Godwin 40).
The surrealistic discourse of the film underwrites a repulsion from sexual
communality; since all the entities are so fundamentally alienated, any process of
intimacy (i.e. sex) which resists or runs converse to this alienation is invariably perceived
by Henrys dream-identity as artificial, and thus he retreats from it in fear into the
originary, pre-sexual womb. In order to enunciate this fear-driven discourse of sex, the
film employs grotesque, absurd reproductive imagery that becomes a fundamental aspect
of the oneiric experience. In the surreal sequence within the films moment of origin,
[t]he conception is already corrupt; the sperm comes not from the penis, but is rather
drawn mechanically from Henry's mouth (the head) by the Man in the Planet's
manipulation of his levers (Godwin 40-41). The Capitalist archetype of the Man in the
Planet attempts to appropriate sexual activity within his territory, yet ultimately fails in
this attempt, so as to result in the fear and absurdity that is associated with sex from the
perspective of the dream-identity. Godwin continues, The head which attempts to
reshape the natural world here tries to control the very processes of reproduction (41).
Capitalism is impotent to rationalize this most basic expression of human intimacy, yet it
nonetheless manages to taint the experience within the alienated oneiric identity.
Contrasting the Man in the Planet is the Lady in the Radiator, who represents a
source of escape from the harsh Capitalist atmosphere that surrounds Henry she is the
dream within the dream, the slumbering opiate latency of the ovary-cheeked feminine
(perhaps representing a Marxist characterization of religiosity as a sedative to
Unable to fall back upon this phallic structure of Capitalist authority, the
machinist falls limp before the overloaded, electrified array of levers. Godwin writes,
Because, in destroying the penis, Henry also destroys the tool of continuity, the means
by which the world (the particular inner world of the dream) is sustained. Without the
support of this organ, the world flies apart (Godwin 43). Thus while Henry annihilates
himself in the perpetuation of his anti-Capitalist desire, he subverts the order just enough
to engage in a symbolic destruction of this fixed authority. Godwin continues, [T]he
kind of control involved in man's heavy-handed manipulation of the physical world is
unable to harness the forces of life. . . . [T]he Man in the Planet pulls desperately at the
controls of his disintegrating machine and flies, with his world, into a million fragments.
(43). The subversion of Capitalist order ultimately culminates in the explosive alienation
of the oneiric species-being.
In this text I have sought to demonstrate the parallel modes of reproductive
discourse in which these films engage in which each film cultivates an encompassing
phenomenological atmosphere (involving the Capitalist displacement/alienation of their
humanity, potential, femininity, and masculinity) that falls back upon structuralized
characters involved in dynamics of social relations that are presented as warped and
dysfunctional according to social standards of normativity; and furthermore that both the
phenomenological atmosphere and the involved characters are fundamentally disrupted
by the incessant transmutation of reality by oneiric dream and nightmare states which
infuse surreality into the narrative. In undertaking this exploration, I hope to have
enumerated new possibilities for the association of Marxist and Feminist interests, as well
as in the ways in which these films are received by critical spectators.
WORKS CITED
Fischer, Lucy. Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemarys Baby. Cinema
Journal 31.3 (Spring 1992): 3-18. JSTOR. Ramsey Library. UNC-Asheville. 10
Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org>.
Godwin, K. George. Eraserhead Review [untitled]. Film Quarterly 39.1 (Autumn
1985): 37-43. JSTOR. Ramsey Library. UNC-Asheville. 10 Oct. 2009.
<http://www.jstor.org>.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan.
New York: Prometheus Books 1988. Print.
Valerius, Karyn. Rosemarys Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects. College
Literature 32.3 (Summer 2005): 116-135. JSTOR. Ramsey Library. UNCAsheville. 10 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org>.