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What’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?
Joanna, a photographer, moves with her husband and two children to the perfect little suburb of Stepford, where she discovers to her dismay that almost all the married women in town have no interests but housekeeping and pleasing their husbands. When she does find a few women like herself, messy and alive, they start investigating why women arrive in Stepford with careers and interests and personalities and politics, then they lose all that, along with a few pounds that seem to migrate to their breasts, replaced with an extreme fascination with household cleaning products...
A taut, understated, horrifying little horror novel about what too many men really want in a woman. I am impressed that a man wrote this, and in the 70s no less, because it is so dead-on about gaslighting, condescension, men who want women to be nothing but an object of desire and a source of free labor, and the endless household labor that sucks up women's time and attention, preventing them from freeing themselves until it's too late.
I went into this knowing the premise, but it's well worth reading anyway. It's stripped-down, dead-on, and genuinely unsettling; a 1970s period piece that's not as dated as one might expect, and is most unsettling for the many ways in which it isn't dated at all.
The Stepford Wives
Joanna, a photographer, moves with her husband and two children to the perfect little suburb of Stepford, where she discovers to her dismay that almost all the married women in town have no interests but housekeeping and pleasing their husbands. When she does find a few women like herself, messy and alive, they start investigating why women arrive in Stepford with careers and interests and personalities and politics, then they lose all that, along with a few pounds that seem to migrate to their breasts, replaced with an extreme fascination with household cleaning products...
A taut, understated, horrifying little horror novel about what too many men really want in a woman. I am impressed that a man wrote this, and in the 70s no less, because it is so dead-on about gaslighting, condescension, men who want women to be nothing but an object of desire and a source of free labor, and the endless household labor that sucks up women's time and attention, preventing them from freeing themselves until it's too late.
I went into this knowing the premise, but it's well worth reading anyway. It's stripped-down, dead-on, and genuinely unsettling; a 1970s period piece that's not as dated as one might expect, and is most unsettling for the many ways in which it isn't dated at all.
The Stepford Wives
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I also love the original movie. The remake is my most hated film of all time, and I loathe it with a real flames on the side of my face intensity.
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Joanna isn't a photographer, she's a bitchy reality TV producer who specializes in programming basically designed to humiliate men. Something goes explosively wrong, and she gets fired and has a nervous breakdown. So right out of the gate, you have a scenario where Joanna isn't just a woman normally living a life that isn't centered on men, you have her as some kind of caricature of what a man thinks a high-powered woman is like and then she gets humiliated.
The Stepford situation is also a lot more cartoonish, including a woman getting used as an ATM with her husband inserting a debit card into her mouth. It's seriously muddled from a plotting standpoint, too, because it turns out that, um, some of the women are totally robots, hence the ATM situation and sparks flying out of someone's head, but some of them are just microchipped somehow, so they're able to saved for the forced happy ending. In which Joanna's milquetoast husband takes her side and partners with her to help take the Men's Association down. "Happy ending": the husbands who participated in killing their wives and/or brainwashing them via microchips are just under house arrest where their wives force them to do housework and shopping.
Super-bonus awfulness: it turns out that Stepford was the product of a woman's mind all along! The perfect mayoral wife, played by Glenn Close, used to be a surgeon, and then her husband had an affair with a Stepford-like assistant, so she murdered them, rebuilt him as a robot (??? apparently she was surgeon with advanced robotics training?), and decided to make the world a better and happier place by... I don't even know. Making sure no woman was cheated on by her husband, and accomplishing that by turning the women into robots? There's some idea that she might have also been playing on robotifying the husbands at some point, but clearly that wasn't where her priorities lay.
It could have actually been a good movie to remake, to look at the subtle differences in how sexism presents now vs. in the seventies--and there's admittedly a (badly done) attempt at that with the town's gay couple (I think it fundamentally misunderstands how this kind of sexism works, but I guess at least it's vaguely trying something more thoughtful). But instead, we get a movie where Joanna has to go through an arc of being beaten down and terrified until she properly appreciates her husband, who of course is a nice guy who wouldn't do this to her, and all the sexism can ultimately be corrected via a jokey ending in which women can apparently just shrug off their brainwashing/robotifying for the cutesy irony of making their husbands shop, and also it was all a woman's fault anyway.
I hate it so much. It's not just bad, it's unbelievably regressive and actively insulting to all the concerns behind the original book and movie.
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But it sounds like this movie didn't just recreate the issues of the original, it started circulation of a whole new lending library.
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It doesn't strike me as bizarre.
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It often seems to me like when this happens, the remakers don't entirely grok what makes the original what it is, or they have only a shallow, flanderized understanding of the social issues it's engaging with. So something that was originally at least somewhat nuanced gets flattened down to stock characters and cliched tropes, or they try to "subvert" something and end up making it more problematic because they don't understand what the original trope was doing or why it was employed or whether it actually is as much of a cliche as they assume. Or how any of it is reflected in the real world.
I think this happens less with #ownvoices stuff and more with "We should remake this famous movie to rake in the cash" edicts coming down from some old straight white dude who has no clue.
Like how else could you get from "men using women for sex and labour is bad" to "actually, it was the fault of the ball busting man-haters all along" except through some game of telephone on the theme of "it's about the war between the sexes, I guess?" Extremely shallow understanding of both the original work and of the real-world issues involved.
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That IS amazing. And they are both so iconic! I've never read or watched either, yet I know the premises of both.
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