Not Missing Baby Night Analysis

As the dreamlike sequence concludes, Guy is foregrounded in the shot, juxtaposed with Rosemary’s nakedness, as he is completely clothed. Her exposed body reveals her victimization and defenselessness to patriarchal control while his pajama suit divulges his concealment and protection under the same structure. After Rosemary notices the monstrous scratches on her body and claims she does not remember the occurrences of the previous night, Guy persists in making a joke out of “not missing baby night”, claiming that it “was fun in a sort of necrophile sort of way”. Rosemary’s clear horror at her husband’s disregard for her conscious consent mirrors the issues surrounding rape culture during second wave feminism, as rape tended to be trivialized and rationalized in favor of the male perpetrator.
Rosemary, clearly concerned about her husband’s lack of respect, turns from the camera and Guy’s hand appears in the screen, attempting to caress Rosemary’s back in a lackadaisical effort to comfort her.
This shot parallels Guy’s hand with Satan’s once again, and Rosemary winces at his touch as he continues to joke about “being a little bit loaded” himself, thus evading any responsibility. Heller-Nicholas contends that “melodrama comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern” (4). Rosemary’s Baby employs melodramatic horror to critique the socio-political issues of sexual assault and female autonomy, while depicting the horrific reality of rape through a monstrous, supernatural entity. While the anti-rape movement was still a few years away from development, the film nevertheless paves the way for a discussion of rape as a social problem deserving of attention, pinpointing rape as a tool for social control, and not merely the performativity of
gender. Akin to melodrama’s tendencies in exploring issues from domestic and interior perspectives, the horror that Rosemary faces in the film is literally within Rosemary herself. In Rosemary’s Baby, as a result of sexual assault, “evil appears in perhaps the most domestic space of all: the womb” (Fulfs 176). Rosemary’s pregnancy as a result of sexual assault poignantly explores anxieties surrounding pregnancy and medical discourses that emerged in the 1960s. As childbirth was one of the greatest hazards that women had to face during this time period, it was thus characterized by “anxiety, depression, [and] the sense of being a sacrificial victim” (Fischer 6-7). The melodramatic events of the film allow for the investigation of these anxieties, while horror conventions literalize them by turning Rosemary into an inverted Virgin Mary for Satan’s antichrist child. Not to be ignored is Rosemary’s name itself, as ‘Mary’ is already a part of her identity, just as Guy’s name indicates his actions’ indebtedness to patriarchal authority. Fischer further explains that worries of abnormal fetuses were common during the film’s time of release, and a 1968 pregnancy manual’s language exemplifies these concerns, “characterizing the ‘tiny parasite of a fetus’ as appropriating the body of its ‘mother-host’ for ‘his own purposes’” (10). The supernatural occurrences in the film imitate this manual’s worrying medical language, overtly considering the fetus as a male, monstrous entity that feeds off of the female host’s body.