The Clownishness of Evil

Rosemary’s Baby as a Meditation on Aesthetics, Authoritarianism, and the False Self

by Leta McCollough Seletzky

Presented to the Chit Chat Club

San Francisco, California

February 10, 2026

By Paramount Pictures - The Retort newspaper, Billings, Montana, Public Domain

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

––Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Thus is the Devil ever God’s ape.”

—Martin Luther, Table Talk

I apologize in advance to scholars of history, anthropology, religion, philosophy, film, and fashion, as I’m none of these, which will become apparent soon enough. My interest in the present topic is that of a layperson. But I think it’s fair to say that every member of society who is minimally attentive to current events is rapidly gaining expertise in the interplay between clownishness, authoritarianism, and the routine deceptions large and small that govern ordinary life. It was a particularly jarring convergence of these matters that first piqued my interest: the photographs emerging from the 2022 America First Political Action Conference.

I was unfamiliar with the conference but quickly learned it was a gathering of boldface names in the white nationalist political sphere. But my visceral disgust transcended mere partisanship, with which I won’t concern myself here. The offense I felt was aesthetic.

The first photograph I saw featured Gavin McInnes, founder of the violent right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys. I had a vague idea of who he was, but it was his jacket that caught my attention. It was hideous: a searing, red-and black tartan, which he paired with a not-quite-matching red tie and rumpled white shirt that strained under the pressure of its contents. His eyes heavy-lidded and unfocused, he gazed into the middle distance from behind rectangular glasses perched atop his flushed cheeks and handlebar mustache. Quite simply, he looked clownish.

As additional photos came to my attention, an unsettling theme of visual absurdity took hold. At least to my eyes. As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But what about clownishness? That quality, as it turns out, has a more straightforward pedigree.

A Very Brief History of the Modern Clown

The word “clown,” which likely derives from a Low German term for a clod or boorish person, evokes a specific image in the minds of most Americans: white face paint, a large red nose, ruddy cheeks, and a garish, ill-fitting costume. This modern clown aesthetic lives on today across media like films, computer games, and even in our electronic communications as the emoji designated as Clown Face—Unicode U+1F921. This specific aesthetic goes back to early 19th-century England, when actor and comedian Joseph Grimaldi created a wildly popular character that writer Linda Rodriguez McRobbie dubbed “sort of the Homo erectus” of clown evolution: Joey.

Grimaldi innovated the now characteristic look of the clown, giving Joey a base of white face paint, all the better to set off his bright red cheeks and blue mohawk. Joey’s electrifying look and over-the-top antics made Grimaldi the most celebrated performer of the Regency era and helped lay the groundwork for the evolution of the clown’s performance from stumblebum hijinks to in-your-face excess. By the middle of the 19th century, the portrayal of the clown had bifurcated into two main forms: the rustic and exaggeratedly ridiculous Auguste or red clown, and the more refined white clown. It was the Auguste tradition that ultimately gave rise to superstar clowns of the 20th century like Bozo, Ronald McDonald, Krusty the Clown, and Stephen King’s Pennywise.

The Clown as Archetype

The clown figure long predates the modern Joey, of course, with evidence of its presence dating back to at least 2400 BCE in Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty. It appears in cultures around the world, from West Africa’s Yoruba cosmology to the mythos of western Native American cultures, taking on roles ranging from entertainer to spiritual mediator between order and chaos. Indeed, it would be difficult to identify a civilization that does not have some kind of clown character—whether in the form of an archetypal trickster, fool, or jester—who transgresses boundaries, upends norms, and mocks societal conventions.

So it would seem that a robust and nuanced understanding of human nature, especially in times like these, requires an understanding of the clown. And it just so happens that I’ve stumbled upon a framework I’ve found useful for this purpose. It’s derived not from anthropology, history, or religion but from a horror film: Rosemary’s Baby, adapted from a novel of the same title by Ira Levin and directed by Roman Polanski.

A Framework of Horror

I’m a horror film buff—not the slasher variety but tales of the numinous and preternatural, especially when the supernatural and psychological overlap. I suppose it’s because these stories explore the depths of mysteries that polite society generally deems off-limits, like death, the nature of existence, and the barely perceptible fingerprints of the past on much of what we see. These matters loom over our everyday lives and cast a shadow over all we do, which is probably one of the main reasons why people tend to ignore them. Particularly in the United States, with its Manifest Destiny-driven optimism and American Dream, there’s a distinct discomfort with the memento mori and the idea that the only destiny that really is manifest for every human being is death. So we seem to have collectively agreed not to discuss this, or if we must, to find a loophole or hedge. In the meantime, we whistle while we work, Disney-style, all the while whistling past the graveyard.

I find that approach dishonest, and more than that, a foundation for dishonest behavior. Fundamentally, it’s a refusal to accept mystery, one of the defining characteristics of the universe insofar as we can perceive it. And one of the few entertaining avenues for facing these mysteries head-on is the genre of horror.

I’d even go as far as to say that the genre of horror, more than any other art form, has prepared me for this moment in history. I’m thinking of stories like Stephen King’s uncannily topical The Dead Zone, in which a demagogue ascends to the U.S. presidency, and The Stand, in which a pandemic paves the way for a national divide of the highest order, to put it extremely mildly. Even The Omen film franchise, with its chronicling of the Antichrist’s inexorable rise, has something to teach us about navigating these uncertain times, I believe.

But I’ve kept coming back to Rosemary’s Baby since I first viewed it nearly 20 years ago. It’s held me in its thrall all these years not only because of the questions it raises—including whether Rosemary Woodhouse is suffering from the “prepartum crazies” as her husband calls it or is really beset by evil forces—but because of how it renders, in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere, evil as a form of clownishness and juxtaposes this against everyday life. Its buffoonish depiction of malevolence would only become more familiar to me as I grew older and watched current events unfold.

So when I saw the photograph of Gavin McInnes from the America First Political Action Conference, my mind immediately turned to Rosemary’s Baby. Putting aside what I knew about McInnes and his Proud Boys organization, I wondered if the absurdity of his appearance might hint at deeper failures of the moral variety.

To explore that distinct possibility, I turned to Polanski’s horror masterpiece. But first, I had to turn to Polanski himself—a man with horrors of his own.

Roman Polanski

Born Raymond Roman Thierry Liebling in 1933, Polanski came of age during the rise of the Third Reich. His parents were of Jewish ancestry—his father was Jewish, as was his maternal grandfather—and rising antisemitism drove them to move from his birth country of France to Poland in 1937. That country was soon invaded by the German Wehrmacht, triggering World War II, and the family was forced into the Krakow ghetto. The Nazis ultimately sent his mother to Auschwitz and murdered her in the gas chamber. They sent his father to an Austrian concentration camp, which he survived.

Polanski went on to attend film school, taking up acting and then directing. By 1967, when Paramount Pictures green-lighted the film adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby and sought to attach a director to the project, Polanski was a rising star in French and UK cinema. He’d also begun a romantic relationship with American actor and model Sharon Tate. The two married in January 1968, several months before Rosemary’s Baby was released. The following year, as Polanski worked on a film in London, a pregnant Tate and four houseguests were murdered in her Los Angeles home by members of the Manson Family cult. Polanski later said in an interview that his absence the night of the murders remained the greatest regret of his life.

He directed more films—most notably Chinatown, released in 1974—and garnered wide acclaim, not to mention a flurry of prestigious awards and nominations. In 1977, he was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. After pleading guilty to a charge of unlawful sex with a minor, he fled the United States for France when he learned the judge planned to hand down a lengthy prison sentence. He still evades justice despite multiple unsuccessful extradition requests by the United States. In the years following his arrest, six women have accused him of sexual assault, with five of them alleging they were minors at the time. He was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018.

I note that in my longstanding zeal for Rosemary’s Baby, I’d failed to think about its infamous director. I certainly knew it was Polanski’s work, but in my many viewings, that fact had somehow drifted toward the outer reaches of my consciousness and to the point of forgetting. I often ponder whether one should separate the art from the artist. Is such a thing even possible? I’m not sure it is. But I suspect that the unconscious distancing between art and artist that I experienced is far more common than a deliberate sequestration of the two. It’s also easier. And while that may aid a superficial kind of enjoyment, it inhibits a deeper understanding of the work and its significance. Such is the power—and danger—of performance.

Rosemary’s Baby and Clownish Evil

Much of Rosemary’s Baby’s potency lies in its ability to bring the viewer close to that threshold of forgetting. As the story unfolds of a gorgeous young couple beginning their lives in a fabulous Upper West Side apartment, we’re lulled into disregarding that we’re watching a horror film—one that will ultimately involve what may or may not be a satanic coven of witches.

A “Doris Day” Beginning.

The film’s opening scenes—at least once you get past the unsettling wordless lullaby sung by lead actress Mia Farrow—seem more like a soap opera or romantic comedy than a horror film. This is by design. “Rosemary’s Baby opens like a Doris Day movie. That’s the whole point,” production designer Richard Sylbert said in the 2018 documentary short Rosemary’s Baby: A Retrospective.

We meet Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse as a real estate agent leads them on a tour of a grand but gloomy apartment in the Bramford, a towering Victorian-era building rendered in brick and stone. Guy is an up-and-coming actor, and Rosemary is an elegant and well-heeled young housewife. They’re dressed elegantly, their color palette subdued.

The film continues thusly for several scenes, with the Woodhouses moving in and making over the somber space with light-colored walls and sleek, contemporary décor. One day, as Rosemary does laundry in the building’s forbidding basement, she meets Terry Gionoffrio, a houseguest of the Woodhouses’ neighbors, the Castavets. As it turns out, the Woodhouse and Castavet residences were originally a single apartment that had been split, and they now share a wall. It’s when we encounter Terry that we get our first hint of the clownishness and ensuing chaos that is to come.

The Big Top Beckons.

Terry’s clothing speaks before she does, hinting at the carnival of terror that awaits. And there is a literal big top: her boxy and sleeveless shirt is covered in straight rows of enormous teal and purple polka dots, some of which are stamped with teal and purple flowers. She pairs this with teal walking shorts.

At this point, it’s worth briefly examining what it is that creates the aesthetic effect of clownishness, versus a colorful or ornate display. After all, Rosemary wears a bright colored dress with an oversized leaf pattern in a previous scene, and yet it doesn’t send a shiver up my spine as Terry’s ensemble does. It makes sense to look to nature for clues, as the natural world presents myriad combinations of hues and proportions, but one would seldom consider them discordant in a way that reads as clownish (even the clownfish). It’s as if an underlying harmony with its own rules exists, and the violation of these rules creates a dissonant, unsettling, or even repulsive effect.

Thinkers have wrestled with this subject from time immemorial, perhaps most notably, Plato. In his dialogue Hippias Major, Hippias and Socrates try and fail to define beauty. Socrates proposes four definitions, which he ultimately rejects: 1. Beauty is that which is appropriate; 2. Beauty is that which is useful; 3. Beauty is that which is favorable; and 4. Beauty is that which makes us feel pleasure through seeing and hearing. But all these definitions ultimately collapse, and Socrates concludes the discussion by noting, “I think I now understand the precise meaning of the proverb, ‘Whatever is beautiful is difficult.’”

In Symposium, he connects beauty with knowledge and love. To grossly oversimplify, he posits that we first perceive the beauty of a physical body, then many bodies, and then upward, as if up the rungs of a ladder, to the beauty of ideas, and finally the idea of Beauty itself. Beauty is the object of love, and the appreciation of beauty requires knowledge and understanding.

Plato asserts in these and other works—and again, I oversimplify—that beauty lies not in a thing but in participation in the eternal and non-material Form of Beauty. He envisions the universe as harmonious and orderly, qualities that transcend subjective preference and extend to the very nature of being and reality. Beauty, he proposes, is the perceptible manifestation of these qualities.

Philosophies on beauty abound, such as St. Augustine’s concept of beauty as reflecting the harmony of divine order; Thomas Aquinas’ idea of beauty as wholeness, harmony, and radiance; and Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of beauty as inspiring aesthetic contemplation that frees one, at least momentarily, from the will. Though many thinkers depart from the Platonic approach to harmony as an objective metaphysical quality, harmony nonetheless remains a central idea when it comes to beauty.

Like most laypeople, I don’t engage in this kind of in-depth analysis when comes to judgments about the presence or absence of harmony. My reactions are more instinctive when I sense aesthetic friction. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line regarding the definition of obscenity, I know it when I see it.

Returning to Terry Gionoffrio’s outfit, what strikes me about it is that its neat rows of huge polka dots and bright flowers present a superficial kind of order that is discordant and false. The pattern’s proportions are out of whack, and the color scheme looks unnatural. It seems almost like a parody of harmony and of nature itself. This is the kind of aesthetic mockery that caught my attention in the photos of modern-day sartorial crimes, like McInnes’s ensemble. And mockery is a hallmark of clowning.

Terry explains to Rosemary that the Castavets took her in off the street, where she was “starving and on dope and doing a lot of other things,” and that she’d become like a daughter to them. Oh, and by the way, the Castavets had given her an unusual charm to wear around her neck—an ornate amulet that contained a foul-smelling substance.

The Lead Clowns Take Center Stage.

Though Terry gives us our first encounter with clownishness in this story, it’s the scene of her mysterious death that introduces the lead buffoons, the Castavets. The Woodhouses are returning home from a play around midnight when they find that the sidewalk outside their building has become a crime scene. Terry has plunged from the building onto the ground below, and a crowd surrounds her broken body. As the Woodhouses tell police what little they know about her, the Castavets approach.

Roman (who, interestingly enough, shares a first name with the film’s director) is the first to speak. He pairs a pink seersucker jacket with a white button-down shirt, fuchsia pants, and a gray Homburg hat with a pink hatband, along with a red bow tie and pocket square for good measure. He confirms that Terry had been living with him and his wife, Minnie, and that he “knew this would happen.” Terry would get deeply depressed on a regular basis, he says.

Standing beside him is a resolute Minnie, who wears a dress with a large swirling pattern in bright pink, orange, green, and purple. A fluttery white evening turban covers her short poufy curls, tufts of which emerge by her ears. Her garish makeup seems almost an ode to Grimaldi’s Joey: a pale base, brightly rouged cheeks, crimson lips, and sky-blue eyeshadow. She expresses incredulity that Terry would take her own life. “She was a very happy girl with no reason for self-destruction,” Minnie insists. “She must have been cleaning the windows or something.”

When police show Roman and Minnie a note that was stuck to the windowsill of their apartment and ask if it is Terry’s handwriting, they confirm that it is, perhaps a little too quickly and eagerly. “Definitely, absolutely,” Roman says.

This is a good time to turn to the topic of the evil clown, a figure that could be conceptualized as the clown’s shadow side. The evil clown coexists with the clown archetype as the flip side of a harmless or even helpful maker of mischief. But it was the advent of the modern clown that brought this shadow side to the fore. After Charles Dickens (under the nom de plume “Boz”) shaped Joey creator Joseph Grimaldi’s memoirs into a popular book, the public learned about the Regency era superstar’s tragic backstory—his turbulent and traumatic childhood, lifetime of painful and debilitating injuries, estrangement from his son, and final years of loneliness and alcoholism. It was a disturbing look at what lay underneath the fantastical makeup and costumes.

The layers of outrageous adornment themselves suggest the concealment of something sinister. It was the case of a real-life killer clown, John Wayne Gacy, that burned this idea into the public psyche in the latter part of the 20th century. Executed in 1994 after his conviction on 33 counts of murder, this rapist, torturer, and killer of boys and young men used the personas of Pogo (whom he described as a “happy clown”) and Patches (“a more serious character,” he said) to gain access to children’s events and more for years. Fictional evil clowns also rose to prominence, including King’s Pennywise, the villains of the cult classic film Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and a slew of similar depictions.

Though Rosemary’s Baby predates these developments, Minnie and Roman present a similar grotesque specter. Their outré getups and odd behavior whisper of the evil clown’s hidden horrors.

Tricksters Play the Ultimate Trick.

Having met the Castavets at the scene of Terry’s death, the Woodhouses soon become entangled with them. Minnie shows up at their door and engages in clown-coded boundary transgressions, insinuating herself inside and asking impertinent questions. She invites the Woodhouses to dinner that evening. It is at this dinner that a deception of biblical proportions is hatched—that is, if you believe Rosemary’s perceptions of the events that follow.

We aren’t shown the conversation that takes place between Guy and Roman in the Castavets’ living room as Rosemary and Minnie wash dishes in the kitchen. But Guy, who had initially shown little interest in the Castavets, suddenly becomes intensely fascinated with them. Simultaneously, Guy experiences an unexpected lucky break in his acting career, winning a prominent acting role at the expense of a colleague, who inexplicably loses his eyesight. Minnie gifts Rosemary the amulet Terry had been wearing, which we learn contains something called tannis root, “for good luck.”

Seemingly out of the blue, Guy announces that it’s time for him and Rosemary to have a baby. He joins her in tracking her ovulation, and when “baby night,” as he calls it, arrives, he and Rosemary have a romantic dinner. Dessert follows, compliments of Minnie: two individual servings of “one of her specialities [sic],” chocolate mousse (which she calls “chocolate mouse”). Rosemary notes that hers has a “chalky undertaste” and becomes woozy after eating it. What happens next goes to the heart of the film’s central question. Did Rosemary have too much to drink that evening and experience a uniquely terrifying nightmare? Or was she drugged by a coven of witches, led by the Castavets, who successfully recruited Guy and used her in a satanic ritual on baby night?

Whether or not you believe Rosemary’s interpretation of events, baby night marks the loss of her bodily autonomy. When she informs Guy that she’s pregnant, he runs to tell the Castavets, who join him in needling her to leave her chosen obstetrician for one of their close friends who happens to be a renowned obstetrician to the society set.

Dr. Abe Sapirstein is decidedly not clownish. In fact, he’s the picture of respectability with his noble head of gray hair, full beard, and three-piece suits. When Rosemary meets with Dr. Sapirstein, his first words to her are, “Please don’t read books.” He orders her to consult with him regarding any questions she may have.

For the remainder of the film, we see Rosemary wrestle with the notion of the False Self, a concept articulated by Trappist monk, theologian, writer, and activist Thomas Merton.^[1] In New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton describes the False Self as an “illusory person” who shadows us. “We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves,” he writes. “There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.” The clown, of course, thrives on illusion, which is dispelled by contemplation.

At every turn, Guy and the Castavets divert Rosemary from contemplating who she is, who she’s becoming, and who the people around her really are.  Though they goad her into depending on their external validation, we see her attempt to regain personal agency in ways large and small. She ditches her plain-vanilla blonde pageboy for a pixie cut in strawberry blonde. Guy’s reaction: “It’s the worst mistake you ever made.” We also witness her revulsion when she catches her bloody-mouthed reflection in a toaster as she gives in to a ghoulish craving to eat raw liver. She feels herself becoming estranged from her own body and soul and struggles to recover command over herself.

In the process, she also becomes estranged from the people around her. The more she attempts to assert herself, the more pushback she gets—from Guy, the Castavets, and in a particularly grim episode, her original obstetrician, who betrays her trust and sends her back into Guy and the Castavets’ clutches after she manages to give them the slip.

In terror and distress, she goes into labor in her apartment. Guy, Dr. Sapirstein, and other members of the coven—if you credit Rosemary’s point of view—pin her to her bed as Dr. Sapirstein injects her with a sedative. When she awakens, there’s no baby. “There were complications, Rosemary, but nothing that will affect future births,” Dr. Sapirstein tells her. He explains that the baby was in the wrong position. “In a hospital, I might’ve been able to do something about it,” he scolds. “But you wouldn’t listen.”

Rosemary suspects that the baby isn’t dead but alive and hidden in the Castavets’ apartment, which she discovers is still connected to the Woodhouses’ apartment through a secret passageway. She grabs a butcher knife from the kitchen, sneaks through the passageway, and barges in on a large gathering of people seemingly from around the world. They have gathered to see the baby, and now she will, too. We aren’t shown much of the infant in the black-shrouded bassinet whose appearance prompts her to cover her mouth in wordless terror before screaming, “What have you done to its eyes?”

“He has his father’s eyes,” Roman says with a slight nod. The viewer is left to decide whether Rosemary actually experiences this—and Roman really does proclaim that Satan has fathered the child—or if this is just more of the psychotic episode Guy dismissed as Rosemary’s “crazies.”

Clownishness and Us

So where does all this leave us when it comes to the aesthetically offensive photographs that started me down this path of inquiry? What can the Castavets teach us about the sinister clown of today’s world? Much, it seems.

Now more than ever, it feels as if we live in a world ruled by tricksters who excel at mockery, illusion, and sleight of hand. It’s increasingly difficult to discern reality from parody, policy from bluster, authentic footage from generated image. The outlandish is normalized to the extent that the term “sanewashing”—to smuggle in madness under the guise of reasonableness—has entered the popular lexicon. The False Self is on lurid display, not just by individual public figures but by a nation. While I don’t point all this out to offer solutions, it occurs to me that some part of the solution probably lies in pointing all this out. I leave it to you to decide what to do with the material presented here. But I humbly suggest that if you encounter the clownish, be on your guard, because you might just be encountering evil.

©️ 2026 Leta McCollough Seletzky. All rights reserved.

^[1] Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott also articulated a concept of the false self as a defensive structure formed to protect the hidden true self—again, a gross oversimplification.