I’ve been avoiding Love Story like the plague because I always thought JFK, Jr. was a breezy, evasive lightweight and Carolyn Bessette was a screeching toxic bitch. But this Wesley Morris N.Y. Times riff put the hook in.
Morris basically analogizes the second half of Love Story with Rosemary’s Baby:
“Like a lot of people, I am watching Love Story…J.F.K. Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. It’s been two months of this show now. It’s very popular, and it’s about to come to an end. So what did we watch? What just happened?
“I would say, okay, for me, what happened was I was watching this really cute sitcom for about four episodes — Carolyn Bessette just going to work to her job at Calvin Klein. That, to me, is that NBC sitcom version of Carolyn Bessette’s life. She meets J.F.K. Jr. and the script gets flipped. The show goes from, like, Sex and the City to Rosemary’s Baby. It goes from this sitcom to a horror movie.
“And I think the nature of the horror is just one of these sort of subgenres of romance that involves a woman making a choice to (a) be with a man who is either going to ruin her life or (b) her life is going to end in some way, some terrible way.
“What Carolyn Bessette needs is a minute to think about is whether she wants to knowingly become Rosemary. Do I remain this free, independent spirit in New York City, having the time of my life, or do I give all of that up to marry a man who…he may not want to change my life, but the world he comes from and all of the things attached to it — in this case, meaning the tabloids, the paparazzi — is that going to be worth the sacrifice of all my, like, carefree single-girlness? And then once she marries him, she’s like, What did I do?
“And, you know, there’s a great moment where, I mean, it might be too much, but it’s not, really. She’s just, like, in her boredom and misery, just sort of like, crawled under a glass coffee table and is just kind of pinned there. And the shot kind of lingers. It is a wonderful metaphor for the entire experience that she has. It’s not a closet. She could have just hid in the closet, but she doesn’t. She hides under a thing that we can all see through, which is glass. And she’s trapped there.
“And I don’t know, I feel like that is a really deep situation that this show is very patiently unspooling. She is really resisting becoming Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby. But I think what she realizes toward the end of this show is it’s too late. She already is.”