Response 5: Rosemary's Baby

“How she grows her own things”: Possession and Entrapment in Rosemary’s Baby

Growth, germination, gestation, and waiting are all obvious themes in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Also mentioned in class was the idea of woman as container, as gestation machine, which raises questions of agency on all parts of the spectrum, starting specifically with impregnation. Near the beginning of the film, after Terry’s suicide, she is described in the following way: “she seemed so happy, and full of ——” but the dialogue is cut off. We know she was not full of life, and now we see that she’s been disposed of. We can later hear Minnie and Roman shouting through the walls about “starting from scratch,” that is, starting the process of life all over. The pun here should point straight to the scene where we see Rosemary’s skin drug raw by the devil’s fingernails. It should also bring to mind abrasion as a method of germination, taking the case off the seed to speed up what nature would do anyway—since, as Rosemary says, “we’re fertile alright.”

Womb imagery is everywhere in this film, particularly in the scene where Terry’s charm is shed from pink fetal tissue (paper), and later kept in a rosy metal box in a drawer out of sight (where the mold can grow, since it flourishes in the dark). Womb-commentary abounds as well, especially in relation to this object. On receiving the charm, we hear the lines “I can’t accept,” “you already have,” “if you took it you ought to wear it,” and so on. All imply a certain responsibility, despite a certain lack of agency. They can be read with an anti-abortion sentiment (also discussed in class) as in you-did-it-so-you-better-keep-it.

This same insistence is repeated later regarding the role Rosemary is expected to play: “aren’t you his mother?” “just be a mother to your baby,” “...supposing you had the baby and lost it, wouldn’t that be the same?” She is encouraged to look at the child as something that can be mass- and re-produced, just as Rosemary herself has been looked at as a replaceable/disposable host. She is an object, and tossed around as such. That “pretty holder or charm or whatever it is” acts as a microcosm of the woman herself: pretty mother or host or whatever she is (whatever, not even whoever).

In her compromised identity, Rosemary is even pseudo-fetal herself when in the phone booth (another container) outside the doctor’s office. In calling to the outside world she’s been cut off from, the phone cord acts umbilical lifeline in trying to reach some kind of help. As she’s become more infantile throughout the film, her entrapment is especially significant here in it being the scene just before the delivery.

Whichever body she is, at whatever time, it is always filled and always attended to. Rosemary is nearly never alone, and always with life inside her. As an audience we are always immediately next to her (no depth of field), and our being tethered to her says something about our own entrapment in the film. Do we belong to anyone specifically? Are we “delivered” out some cinematic canal at the end of the film? We are certainly cut off from her as she decides to care for her baby—and we never see the demon child, it is in no way ours.