Rosemary’s Baby’s Dark Catholicism: The Unholy Family of Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse
Rosemary’s Baby opens with a panoramic shot of the Manhattan skyline, culminating at an archaic-looking building—the now-famous Dakota building, called the Bramford in the film. At its base, from a camera positioned far above them, we see two people turning to walk into the building. Set almost entirely within the confines of the Bramford, domestic horror is coming for us, initially signaled via a creepy lullaby that rolls on during the opening shots. The lullaby is simply a breathy soprano, chanting “La, la, la, la, la, la” for several minutes, with very spare, slightly discordant organ music underneath. It is not especially soothing, and it points toward the general emotional tone of the film: things seem, on the surface, to be calm and gentle, but there’s a turbulence and dissimulation just underneath. Something that feels just a little off.
The two people entering the Bramford are a young couple named Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse (Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes), who are looking at apartments around New York. We learn that Guy is a struggling actor—a B-list actor, at best. He makes most of his money doing commercials, but he has big dreams of being a leading man.
When their Realtor asks Guy, “Have I seen you in anything?” Guy responds-lying—that he’s been in Hamlet and The Sandpiper. Rosemary steps in to set the record straight, saying, “He’s joking. He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross and a lot of television plays and commercials.” It’s a brief exchange, but an important one— Rosemary undermines Guy in front of another man, bruising his ego, the ramifications of which have devastating consequences.
Rosemary’s costuming in this scene is noticeably childlike, innocent, and even virginal. She sports a blunt, blond bob and bangs. She’s clad all in white, with a white dress, a white purse, and white shoes. She carries white gloves in her hand. Everything about her projects stereotypical female purity. She’s beautiful, but also delicate and pale; she smiles constantly and talks in a lilting, gentle, childlike voice. A young, innocent woman, soon to be the mother, we imagine, of a young, innocent family.
Through these costuming choices and the decision to have Mia Farrow play up her childlikeness, the film accentuates a dynamic also present in Levin’s novel: Rosemary parallels history’s most famous and childlike mother, the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. Rosemary’s name of course registers that parallel; her costuming throughout further emphasizes the connection.
Indeed, not just in the opening scenes but throughout the film, Rosemary almost always appears in white or white and blue, the archetypal colors of the Virgin Mary in Christian history. Farrow pulls off this Modern Mary aesthetic effortlessly, looking like a delicate lily bobbing around her apartment after she and Guy move in.
Moreover, it is not an accident that Guy’s last name is Woodhouse; Joseph was, famously, a carpenter. The novel and film offer a modern reboot of a very old, very familiar, and acutely Christian story: a carpenter and his virtuous young wife, looking for a place to stay so they can start their family.
In all of these Christianizing choices, of course, Levin’s novel and Polanski’s adaptation of it run headlong at the institution most directly responsible in the 1960s for the ongoing horror inflicted on
American women by the criminalization of abortion: the Catholic Church. Indeed, long after Protestant churches and synagogues had lined up to advocate for the liberalization of abortion laws in New York, the Catholic Church steadfastly opposed it. Levin himself has said that he was perfectly conscious that he was “standing the story of Mary and Jesus on its head” in how he told Rosemary’s story, and he certainly had reason to in 1967.
In the 1968 film, Rosemary’s Marian purity contrasts sharply with the ponderous darkness of the apartment she and Guy move into.
On their first night in their new home, Rosemary and Guy order Chinese takeout and eat it on the floor of the living room. The shot is dark; the floors are dark; the scene is set in room tone, highlighting the young couple’s sudden separation from the world outside, the starkness and unfamiliarity of this new place, its eerie quiet.
Throughout their interaction that night – even after Rosemary has proposed that they “make love”- Guy seems stilted, disengaged.
And Rosemary, in all her purity and sweetness, seems somehow isolated and vulnerable, even though her husband is right there with her. Or maybe because he’s right there with her.
Even so, in the days that follow, Rosemary is eager to make a bright, clean, safe home for the family she so desperately wants—she covers drawers with white and yellow contact paper, she whitewashes the walls. The whole place gets a facelift, but as we watch Rosemary do all this domestic labor, we still can’t help but notice how painfully alone she is.
She feels it, too, so she accepts an invitation to have dinner at their much older neighbors’ apartment next door. Roman and Minnie Castevet-the neighbors—are exceptionally weird people. They chat up Rosemary and Guy all evening, plying them with compliments and conspicuously overfilled cocktails.
Roman, in particular, butters Guy up, saying he saw him perform in Nobody Loves an Albatross, and that he had been “struck by a gesture” that Guy had made during the performance. Roman goes on to assert, “You have a most interesting inner quality, Guy. It appears in your television work, too, and it should carry you very far indeed; provided, of course, that you get those initial “breaks.”
Guy’s sense of inferiority about his profession – recently agitated by Rosemary’s comment to the Realtor – makes him vulnerable to the form of seduction that Roman Castevet exercises over him. His wounded male ego is the fertile ground into which the metaphorical seed of Satanism is planted, though it will be Rosemary’s body that bears its fruit.
After dinner, Minnie starts pumping Rosemary for information while they do the dishes. She wants to know Rosemary’s familys fertility history and whether she expects to have children soon. Rosemary appears understandably taken aback by these intrusive questions, but Minnie is such a loudmouthed person to begin with, we can almost see Rosemary convincing herself that it’s not so unusual for Minnie to pry like this.
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Eventually, Minnie brings over some chocolate mousse for them. Turning suddenly despotic, rather than detached, Guy insists vigorously that Rosemary eat it despite her detecting what she calls a “chalky undertaste.”
“That’s silly,” he says. “There is no undertaste… Come on! The old bat slaved all day! Now eat it!”
Watching the film, even on a first viewing, the viewer knows Rosemary is being drugged; we just don’t know why. And we certainly don’t know why Guy is so aggressively on board with the drugging. He starts criticizing her for being picky; with a sigh of surrender, Rosemary picks up the mousse again and digs in. Surreptitiously, when Guy is turning over the record on the record player, she dumps the mousse into her napkin, like a sneaky child, and pretends she ate it all, asking, “Do I get a gold star, Daddy?” This line always makes me puke a little, but it does important work for the film: It reminds us that we are in the deep belly of patriarchy, and that Guy is the patriarch – the paterfamilias, the father who is head of the household-and that Rosemary is in his thrall.
Very soon after this, we see her stumbling around the apartment, clearly drugged. Guy carries her to bed, unsurprised and unconcerned about his wife’s stupor.
Rosemary then has what seems at first to be a hallucinatory dream. The camera continually rotates, surveying a small yacht crowded with people. A rippling water effect is superimposed on the shot, too, giving off a feeling of submersion and drowning. The scene is silent, and our visual field keeps rotating—the film is trying to impart to us the feeling of the spins that Rosemary is having while drugged. It is making us physiologically align with her, amplifying our bodily empathy with her. Rosemary sees herself on the boat, belowdecks; but at the same time, she can tell that Guy is untying her clothes. She is told in the dream that “Catholics only” can come along on the journey. The camera keeps moving around in circles through the next several shots; we feel a little sick, a little off balance. Her wedding ring is unceremoniously pulled off her finger. Soon she finds herself in a dark, subterranean room. There is a mattress in the room, which she is laid down on, surrounded by her naked neighbors, most notably Roman and Minnie.
Guy is there, too. The camera continues to spin. The neighbors begin chanting in an angry-sounding whisper; it’s almost as though they are threatening her. Her legs are lashed down – and that is when it becomes clear: Rosemary is at the center of some kind of rape ritual, supervised by Roman, Minnie, and numerous other inhabitants of the Bramford. All eyes are on Rosemary. She, meanwhile, looks stoned, catatonic.
Now, we see Guy walking toward her, half in darkness. As he approaches, he begins to look crusty, like he has a skin disease. His hands rake over her body. Suddenly, it’s not his hands, but the hands of some kind of demon, complete with claws, hair, and dark brownish carbuncles. These hands claw mercilessly along Rosemary’s flesh, and we watch it all in an extreme close-up.
This demonic creature mounts her slowly and begins to rape her. Rosemary looks feverish throughout much of this scene but has a moment of clarity when she sees his red and yellow face, his goatlike eyes, and she says, “This is no dream! This is really happening!” She is being raped by Satan. Her husband sanctions it; her neighbors facilitate it. She sees it clearly, with the camera zoomed close on her eyes, then Satan’s, then back to hers. Her eyes are wide with horror; she is alert and clearheaded. Someone covers her head with a dark cloth, however, and knocks her unconscious.
So, just to make things very plain: This film recounts a story of a virtuous, modern-day Mary who becomes pregnant through rape.
This choice is significant, and not just because of its aggressive anti-Catholic messaging. By New York State’s own abortion laws in 1968, Rosemary would not have been able to get an abortion on grounds of rape alone. Rape was not justification enough for abortion in 1968 in New York, nor was physical danger, nor psychological harm. Nor, indeed, was the prospect of having a baby born with deformities—which would seem likely when the child’s father is a claw-handed, leather-skinned, goat-eyed demon. The Satanic fetus, whose true range of deformities could only be known after the birth of the child, allegorizes the thousands of thalidomide pregnancies across the United States that women were forced to carry to term, anxiously waiting to see how compromised their babies would be by the drug the women had taken. Like them, Rosemary is going to be forced to carry to term a pregnancy of unknown viability.
This was no dream. This was really happening.
So Rosemary’s Baby takes on the two major justifications for the abortion liberalization that New Yorkers advocated for in the 1960s: the rape justification and the fetal anomaly justification.
Rosemary’s experience, while unique in its supernaturalness, would have been arrestingly familiar to an audience in the 1960s, an audience that knew that New York State was having such trouble liberalizing abortion law.
Even for audiences outside of New York State, the legal landscape of the abortion-law liberalization movement was well known: Many states were discussing abortion reform since abortion-related deaths were happening all over the country, every day.
Rosemary’s Baby depicts the situation facing women across the country – their lack of control over their bodies, their lack of ability to choose whether to carry a baby that was forced on them to term.
What happens to Rosemary in the film is no dream: It was really happening to countless American women, who had no legal grounds to fight back in 1968.
The morning after the Satanic rape, Guy roughly wakes up Rosemary, telling her she passed out from too much liquor the night before. Groggy and disoriented, Rosemary inspects her body and finds deep claw marks all over her side, back, and belly. Guy quickly claims responsibility, saying his nails were jagged when they had sex. Rosemary is affronted at the idea that he forced himself on her while she was unconscious: “You… while I was out?”
Unabashed by what his wife obviously feels to be a violation, Guy informs her that it was “fun” for him, “in a necrophile kind of way.” She tells him that she dreamed someone inhuman was raping her; Guy’s response, which he hollers from across the room, is “Thanks a lot!” She turns her back to him, clearly traumatized by his conduct. He comes over, clumsily traces his finger down her back, and she jerks away.
For the next several shots, Rosemary is alone, driving home the larger point: She is isolated, trapped in her building, in her marriage, and in some kind of supernatural conspiracy whose contours she can’t quite perceive.
Predictably, Rosemary and Guy’s relationship deteriorates—he can’t bring himself to look at her, and he’s entirely preoccupied with his newly flourishing acting career.
When Rosemary finds out she is indeed pregnant, she is alone; when she tells Guy, he has a bizarre reaction. He tries to avoid touching her body, even as he passes narrowly by her while she stands in a doorway. He acts happy, but his tone sounds forced and distracted.
Rosemary makes a pathetic bid that this should be a “fresh start” for them, which Guy absently agrees to, preferring to run and tell Minnie and Roman, rather than stay and rejoice with Rosemary about their coming baby. Of course, he knows it’s not his baby but Satan’s.
As a result of Guy’s avoidance, Rosemary is reduced to looking at herself in the mirror and saying, her face perched on her two hands like a little girl, “You’re pregnant!” She is so alone, so terribly alone.
And in her solitude, she echoes the experience of far, far too many other American women in 1968 and now.
But she’s not alone for long, because soon Minnie and Roman get involved, telling her whom to use as an obstetrician, what she can drink and eat, and what jewelry to wear. Rosemary finds herself constrained to cede basic control over her body to her neighbors – Guy supports it, so she must obey.
She begins to develop terrible, crippling pains in her abdomen, and she loses weight at an alarming rate for months. Numerous shots show her clad in gauzy blue-and-white housecoats, reeling with pain, the soundtrack keening mournfully behind her. Something is terribly wrong with this pregnancy; we know it, Rosemary suspects it, and Rosemary’s friends—on the rare occasions when she is allowed to see them—can see it immediately. But her fancy obstetrician Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who’s in cahoots with Minnie and Roman, instructs her not to talk to her friends. So, even though she’s surrounded by intrusive neighbors, on a deeper level, Rosemary is completely isolated.
Eventually, she tires of this forced seclusion and decides to throw a party.
Upon seeing her emaciation and pallor, her shocked girlfriends gently urge her to consider abortion, telling her that pregnancy isn’t supposed to hurt this much nor to make a woman so sick. They worry that her life may be in danger—and maternal mortality is the one justification for legal abortion in 1968 in New York State. Resistant, Rosemary says to her friends, “I’m not going to have an abortion.” Rosemary loves her growing baby. This is true because, of course, she doesn’t know (or consciously accept) that the baby isn’t Guy’s but Satan’s. How could she? It’s a ridiculous idea, impossible, supernatural.
But the film, by raising abortion explicitly as an option for Rosemary, and having her reject it, does something extraordinarily sophisticated, shedding light on the insanity of antiabortion laws in the 1960s.
Rosemary may not want an abortion, but she should get an abortion, even and perhaps especially by any Christian or Catholic standard. Because we know, as she will eventually know, too, that she was raped by Satan, and that her baby is the Antichrist. To root for Rosemary to take her pregnancy to term is to root for evil to enter the world.
This story forces Christian readers or viewers to examine the limit of their antiabortion beliefs. No Christian could possibly endorse Rosemary’s carrying that pregnancy to term; she is carrying Satan’s baby, after all. She is wrong from a theological standpoint to protect the life of this unborn child. In positing this scenario, Rosemary’s Baby has created a thought experiment in which the pope himself would have to advocate for Rosemary to terminate.
Of course, Rosemary doesn’t realize this, because of the web of cruelty and gaslighting to which Guy subjects her.
Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Guy, though he is not the baby’s father, certainly is the source of Rosemary’s problems.
In a brilliantly realized scene, late in the film, Rosemary is reading books about witches that her recently deceased friend Hutch had left for her. She’s reading because she’s trying to figure out what kind of weirdness is going on in her apartment building and whether she should be afraid for her unborn child. In a spasm of patriarchal control, Guy snatches the book Rosemary has been reading, All of Them Witches, and places it high up on a bookshelf, out of Rosemary’s reach. The camera follows Guy’s hand up the bookshelf. We can see that the book—as Guy shelves it horizontally— touches only two other books on the shelf. The books are Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
The film’s suggestion, with the juxtaposition of the three books, is that all this malign, demonic, witchy abuse to which Rosemary is subjected has at its root something dark and malevolent in male sexual behavior and its interaction with female sexual behavior.
Roman, Minnie, and Satan might seem to be the monsters of this film, but the real point of origin for all its domestic horror is Guy, his brittle ego, and the dark, dehumanizing opportunism lodged deep in his sexual mind—an opportunism bent on taking sexual advantage of his own wife.
Guy’s brittle ego is not the only thing that endangers Rosemary; the other is her own maternal instincts. After she delivers her baby, at home and in extreme duress, Guy tells her the baby died. Even in her wild grief, soon enough Rosemary knows it’s a lie: Rosemary can hear her baby crying through the walls. Through a drug-induced haze, she realizes that the Castevets have her baby, alive. Looking lost, febrile, and panicky, she manages to sneak into the Castevets’ apartment to find him.
As she enters the apartment, Rosemary is once again wearing a long, blue housedress. She sees a coven of modern-day witches assembled around her baby’s black cradle.
As she peers into the cradle, we don’t see the baby but instead only Rosemary’s face. Her eyes widen, much as they did at the moment when she realized her Satanic rape was “no dream” but “really happening.” Silent at first, she covers her mouth with her hand. “What have you done to it? What have you done to its eyes?” she asks the coven.
Roman explains, parroting in twisted form the logic of the Virgin Birth, “Satan is his father, not Guy. He came up from hell and begat a son of mortal woman. Satan is his father; his name is Adrian!”
Going on in this Satanic mockery of the story of Mary, Minnie then jumps in to say, “He chose you out of all the world. Out of all the women in the world, he chose you! He arranged things, because he wanted you to be the mother of his only living son.”
Something in Rosemary shatters. She looks catatonic as she is convinced by Roman to go and rock her baby in his cradle. She is stripped of agency and personhood, powerless, a pawn in the incarnation of the Antichrist.
The film makes her a cog in a massive Satanic conspiracy that relied upon domestic betrayal and sexual assault to produce its desired outcome. The film dehumanizes her to the bitter end and forces us to reckon with that dehumanization as absolute and irreversible.
Rosemary will not come back from this. She will not heal from what has been done to her. And, significantly, neither will everyone else: part of what is so powerful about this story is that we-the citizens of the world—are every bit as endangered by this monstrous birth as Rosemary is. Her lack of reproductive agency and autonomy will destroy us all.
hexafu 