This Perfect Day By Ira Levin

This Perfect Day
By Ira Levin
Copyright 1970

Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei
Led us to this perfect day

Marx, Wood, Wei and Christ
All but Marx were sacrificed

Wood, Wei, Christ and Marx
Gave us lovely schools and parks

Wei, Christ, Marx and Wood
Made us humble, made us good

Hundreds of years in the future, mankind is guided, assisted, and controlled by a computer known as Uni. Uni assigns treatments of various drugs and vitamins to keep humans pliable and happy. Jobs are assigned. Sex is permitted on Saturday nights. People are moved from continent to continent based on Uni’s perceived needs. Society is docile, happy, and controlled.

From Wikipedia:
Li RM35M4419, nicknamed "Chip" (as in "chip off the old block") by his nonconformist grandfather Jan, is a typical child Member who, through a mistake in genetic programming, has one green eye. Through his grandfather's encouragement, he learns how to play a game of "wanting things", including imagining what career he might pick if he had the choice. Chip is told by his adviser that "picking" and "choice" are manifestations of selfishness, and he tries to forget his dreams.

As Chip grows up and begins his career, he is mostly a good citizen, but commits minor subversive acts, such as procuring art materials for another "nonconformist" member who was denied them. His occasional oddities attract the attention of a secret group of Members who, like Chip, are also nonconformists. There he meets King, a Medicenter chief who obtains members records for potential future recruitment to the group, King's beautiful girlfriend Lilac, a strong-willed and inquisitive woman with unusually dark skin, and Snowflake, a rare albino member. These members teach Chip how to get his treatments reduced so that he can feel more and stronger emotions. Chip begins an affair with Snowflake, but is really attracted to Lilac.

Chip and Lilac begin to search through old museum maps and soon discover islands around the world that have disappeared from their modern map. They begin to wonder if perhaps other "incurable" members like themselves have escaped to these islands. King tells them that the idea is nonsense, but Chip soon learns that King has already interacted with some "incurables" and that they are indeed real. Before he can tell Lilac, Chip's ruse is discovered by his adviser. He and all the other members of the group are captured and treated back into docility (except King, who takes his own life before he can be captured).

Some years later, Chip's regular treatment is delayed by an earthquake. In the meanwhile, he begins to "wake up" again and remembers Lilac and the islands. He is able to shield his arm from the treatment nozzle and becomes fully awake for the first time. He locates Lilac again and kidnaps her. At first she fights him, but as she too becomes more "awake," she remembers the islands and comes willingly. In process she was raped by Chip. Finding a convenient abandoned boat on the beach, they head for the nearest island of incurables, Majorca. There they learn that UniComp, as a last resort, has planted failsafes that eventually lead all incurables to these islands, where they will be trapped forever away from the treated population, and eventually marry and have a child together.

Chip conceives of a plan—destroy the computer, UniComp, by blowing up its refrigeration system. He recruits other incurables to join him, and they make their way to the mainland. Just as they reach UniComp, one of the incurables—an agent of the programmers—betrays his partners and leads the rest of group at gunpoint to a secret luxurious underground city beneath UniComp, where they are met by Wei, one of the original planners of the Unification. Wei and the other "programmers" who live in UniComp have arranged this test so that the most daring and resourceful incurables will make their way to UniComp, where they, too, will live in luxury as programmers.

After joining the programmers, and after a few tentative attempts to confide in someone, Chip shares his misgivings with no one, lies low, and dedicates himself to the task of gaining Wei’s confidence. For example, to deceive Wei, Chip consents to the replacement of his green eye with a brown one—even though this involves giving up a cherished part of his identity.

But when, nine months later, a new group of incurables arrives, Chip leaves the welcome party with the intention of using the newcomers' explosives to blow up the master computer. There follows a harrowing physical struggle with Wei (who has the body of a young athlete), and the shooting of Wei. Just before he gets killed, Wei betrays his real motive in creating this dystopia:

“Chip, listen to me,” he said, leaning forward, “there’s joy in having it, in controlling, in being the only one.”

Chip knew all along that it was power hunger—not altruism—that drove Wei to chicanery and murders. On his way up from the underground city towards sunlight, Chip tells an angry programmer: “’There’s joy in having it’: those were [Wei’s] last words. Everything else was rationalization. And self-deception.”

The book ends with Chip riding a helicopter toward Majorca where his wife, son, financial sponsors, and friends are hopefully waiting for him. For the first time in his life, he sees raindrops in daytime—nature’s affirmation that the era of slavery and total control is finally over.

I have been an Ira Levin fan since I first discovered The Stepford Wives in the late 1970s. Yet this book never crossed my path. How can that be? I am glad to have discovered it.

Levin never veils his metaphor too heavily and here, he is obviously panning the communist state. He decries the central planners who decide every facet of the lives of the people in a communist society. However, he puts a different spin on it than Orwell or Huxley. His totalitarianism is passive from beginning to end. It never harms or hurts dissenters. It exploits them. Perhaps that is scarier.

For approximately 7/8s of this book, I was confident where the story was headed. I enjoyed reading it, but felt that Levin had broken no new ground in the field of dystopian totalitarianism. Man, was I wrong. That linear path that Levin was following took an abrupt turn. Adjusting to that, the reader thinks he’s got it figured and it twists again. I love a writer not afraid to punch his readers in the face with a great twist. Levin is great with the ending of his book.

I’ve not read all of Levin’s works, but I’ve read most of them and this one was the only one with anything resembling a happy ending. No happy ending (if you’re a Christian) for Rosemary or her baby. No happy ending for the feminists in The Stepford Wives. No happy ending from those exploited Boys from Brazil. Yet the hero in his one stab at dystopia gets his happy day. For fans of Levin, that in itself was a twist they probably didn’t see coming.

Like Levin’s other work, This Perfect Day was devoid of humor. No laugh lines. No humorous situations. It’s all dark and disconcerting. For me, this is what good horror and good dystopia is made of. Dean Koontz is one to get too cutesy with his horror and just ruins it. Stephen King does this occasionally as well. Give me the nasty writers like Levin or Bentley Little.

I wonder why This Perfect Day is not better known or more highly regarded. I believe this was the only Levin novel not made into a film and that’s a damn shame. As much as I appreciate the b-movie campiness and unveiled social commentary of the movie version of Logan’s Run, I know that This Perfect Day is a better story. Farrah Fawcett and all the other beautiful women would have fit into the script quite nicely. Alas, without a screen treatment, This Perfect Day is doomed to obscurity with so many other great dystopian novels of the 1960s and 1970s unrecognized by the Hollywood intelligentsia.

Book to Movie: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Book to Movie: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Screenplay by Roman Polanski
Directed by Roman Polanski

In 1968, director Roman Polanski adapted Ira Levin’s bestelling novel, Rosemary’s Baby to the big screen. In doing so, Polanski did not alter Levin one iota and managed to make a great movie.

Mia Farrow is perfectly cast as Rosemary Woodhouse. Mousy and demur, Farrrow plays the dupe quite well.

In casting the Castavets, Polanski chose Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer – two well known actors not known for their roles in horror films. This was also casting genius because, the creepiness of Levin’s novel was the satanists appeared to be unasumming, old people who demonstrated no evil in their overt actions or personality. Evans and Gordon were wonderful in their parts.

The script lifted much of the dialogue from the book and had the same staccato feel as the novel. Events unfolded rapidly until the climax, which built much slower to its excellent ending. Farrow played the horrified, then motherly Rosemary perfectly, giving the film a tremendously satisfying ending.

Making the film was actually the idea of producer William Castle. Castle was well known in Hollywood for his low budget, gimic horror films. For this reason, he was not allowed to adapt the book into a screenplay or direct. But for all Castle’s faults as a producer, he produced a great film in Rosemary’s Baby.

Castle makes a cameo appearance in the film as the guy waiting impatiently outside the phone booth as Rosemary talks to her OB/GYN.

It was rumored for years that the Church of Satan founder Anton Lavey played Satan in the scene where he impregnates Rosemary. According to the folks at Snopes, this is false and Lavey had no part in the making of the film.

Ira Levin had several films made based on his work and like Rosemary’s Baby, the scripts stuck very closely to the story Levin produced. Levin wrote books that lent themselves well to the big screen and Polanski and company were wise to incorporate all of Levin’s story elements, character development, and dialogue into their script. Rosemary’s Baby ranks as an excellent, intelligent horror film.

NBC has filmed and will release a four part miniseries based on Rosemary’s Baby. I fear this will be a poor effort. There’s not enough story to fill a four part miniseries and the writers no doubt had to pad the script to fill the time.

Also, the subject matter does not lend itself well to the times. In the 1960s, the role of religion and the whole controversy over “Is God Dead?” was raging. Satanism as a real life horror was pretty much debunked in the 1980s.

Like those who played Carrie in the remakes of Stephen King’s classic novel, actress Zoe Saldana has some big shoes to fill playing the iconic Rosemary Woodhouse.

Rosemary’s Baby By Ira Levin

Rosemary’s Baby
By Ira Levin
Copyright 1967

Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse are a young New York couple on their way up. He’s an actor starting to break through in commercials and New York theater. She is a loving housewife. They decide to move out of their tiny apartment into a stately apartment building called the Bramford.

The Bramford has a bad reputation, Rosemary’s friend Hutch warns her that the Bramford has a wicked history of suicides. Undeterred, Rosemary and Guy move in.

They soon become close friends with their eccentric, elderly neighbors, Minnie and Roman Casavet. They have taken in a young ward to rehabilitate her from her drug addiction. Rosemary meets her in the building’s laundry room. But just a few days after they meet, the young woman jumps from a balcony at the Bramford.

Shortly after this friendship develops, Guy gets a part in a play after the original actor inexplicably goes blind. Shortly after, Rosemary and Guy celebrate with drinks. Rosemary passes out and has odd dreams about someone having sex with her while the Casavets and other elderly people cavort around her naked.

She wakes up and Guy informs her that he had sex with her while she was asleep. He didn’t want to miss a chance to conceive a baby. Shortly after, Rosemary finds out she’s pregnant.

Rosemary has her own obstetrician in mind, but the Casavets insist that she use an old friend of theirs who is quite prestigious. He offers her a cut rate and she decides to go to him. He insists that she drink daily a concoction of herbs that Minnie prepares for her.

Rosemary deals with horrible pregnancy pains while Guy’s acting career takes off. Her friend Hutch becomes concerned and contacts her, saying he has something important to tell her, but he doesn’t want to tell her over the phone.

She goes to meet Hutch and he doesn’t show. She later learns that he’s fallen into a deep coma. Before he dies days later, he becomes lucid and insists that his sister pass along a book to Rosemary.

Rosemary acquires the book. It is about witches and Satanism. One of the most notorious witches mentioned in the book lived in the Bramford almost a century before. Hutch leaves her one clue as to why the book is important. She discerns that clue and suddenly, she notices odd coincidences and events in her life over the last nine months.

Fearing that the Casavets and even her husband want to use her baby for satanic rituals, Rosemary tries to escape. But it is futile. She is brought back to the Bramford and there she delivers her baby. Her husband and the Casavets try to assure her that everything is going to be okay with the baby, but Rosemary refuses to accept it.

Finally, with the baby crying, Rosemary goes to it. When she sees the baby’s eyes, she is horrified. He has his father’s eyes, the Casavets inform her. She has born the son of Satan. Rosemary is at first distraught, but after seeing another woman care for her baby incorrectly, the maternal instinct kicks in and Rosemary accepts the baby as her own.

Ira Levin was my first favorite writer and I first read this book when I was twelve or thirteen. I read it over and over again because I loved it so much. Reading it for the first time as an adult, I can understand why. The book is written at approximately an eighth grade level.

The passage of events is rapid and Levin’s prose is staccato as he reveals these events. While his diction is somewhat more complex, it’s almost as if every event begins with the phrase “and then.” This is the way kids tell stories. This does not take way from the depth of the story in any way and was frankly, an enjoyable change of pace from more laborious authors.

Rosemary’s Baby falls short of being called an “important” novel, but it was very much a product of its times. It’s set in 1966, the year that Time Magazine asked on its cover, “Is God Dead?” This is referenced in the book and a woman giving birth to the spawn of Satan as the Church of Satan was developing was very much a part of the zeitgeist of the times.

This exploration of the changing attitudes toward religion in the 1960s in no way dates the book. The story stands on its own and stands the test of time. Rosemary as a woman is a bit dated, but that does not detract from her character development. She’s able to put together the mystery surrounding her and acts independently to try to escape her circumstances.

Ira Levin published several books, a few which were made into movies. However, Rosemary’s Baby ranks as his finest work.