The Stepford Wives (

1975

)

The horror genre is routinely lambasted by critics as a wretched gutter of misogynistic filth, where twisted, socially awkward men congregate in order to watch women get eviscerated onscreen. Personally, I don’t see it. Most horror films that I’ve seen have been pretty even-handed with their carnage, killing off men and women alike in similar numbers. Sure, there are some genuinely odious works to be found, especially if you comb through the depths of obscure exploitation films. Yet, for every Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985) there are several horror films that one could describe as openly feminist. Nor are they merely confined to the last few decades either, as the subgenre of feminist horror dates back at least to the 1950s with movies like I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). Of these socially conscious, feminist horror movies there are few better known or more obvious in their leanings than today’s film, and adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel of the same name.

We open with a family of four moving out of New York City and settling in the sleepy little suburb of Stepford. The family is composed of stay-at-home mom/amateur photographer Joanna, her husband Walter a big-shot lawyer, two kids too small to really have much in the way of personality, and a dog (who Joanna nearly leaves behind in the apartment as when they move). Walter is very gung-ho about this move to the suburbs but Joanna has mixed feelings. She’s the sort of insufferable urbanite who considers living more than five blocks from a subway line is a moral failing. Indeed, she’s hardly in Stepford for five minutes before she’s pining for the noise of jackhammers at 6:00 AM and the smell of rancid garbage cooking slowly under the Summer sun.

Then again, she does have a point. Stepford is a seriously dull place, full of boring professional men who work 80-hour weeks and have no hobbies worth mentioning. Even in their meager spare time, they turn the Stepford Men’s association meetings into one long, boring department meeting. Their wives are little better, as the town seems to consist solely of women whose sole purpose in life is to garden, cook, and spruce up their houses. The only exceptions to this rule are Joanna herself, her neighbor Bobbie (who has the messiest kitchen in town), and trophy wife Charmine Wimperis (Ginger from Gilligan’s Island). However, even those outliers begin to change and before long Joanna sees both Charmine and Bobbie transform into bland, cleaning-crazed housewives, just like the rest of the town.

It’s at this point that Joanna begins to get worried that there’s something very wrong with Stepford. A quick analysis of the town’s water supply proves that it’s not any of the nearby chemical companies dumping waste into the reservoir that’s causing the gender specific mental transformations, so Joanna comes to the only logical conclusion: The men of Stepford are replacing their wives with robotic doppelgängers. Naturally, everybody she confesses this fear to thinks she’s certifiable, so she opts to seek some psychiatric counseling, settling on a psychologist in a neighboring community.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a psychologist more unfit for her position than this lady here, because when Joanna reveals that she’s convinced that her husband is planning to replace her with a robot, the doctor tells Joanna to grab her kids and run off without telling anyone. Sure, in the context of the movie it’s the right decision, but there’s no way the doctor could know this was the case. The last thing a shrink should do is tell a paranoid schizophrenic to skip town with her two pre-school aged kids in tow. If you did that in real life you’d wake up to a news report the next day about how a crazed housewife drowned both her children after becoming convinced they were robotic doubles. Given the circumstances if I was the doctor I’d probably have Joanna committed, that way she can get the help she needs and also have the reassurance that her husband won’t be able to roboticize her while she’s in the loony bin. Presumably the doctor believes her because they are both women and thus both subjected to the same trials and tribulations, so she’s more than willing to overlook the fact that Joanna gives every impression of being a lunatic. I guess #believeallwomen has deeper roots than I thought! Unfortunately for Joanna it’s too late for her to escape, the men of Stepford have already hidden her kids from her and are putting the finishing touches on their robo-Joanna.

As a paranoid thriller, The Stepford Wives is a tolerable option if you cannot find a copy of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), but as political parable it is a fucking mess. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with satirizing male desire by showing them taking their interesting, human wives and transforming them into soulless sex-bots. Indeed, a deeply disturbing film could be made from such a premise alone. However, if this is really the intent then it is extremely important that the soulless sex-bots be more sexually appealing than the women they are replacing. Otherwise why would the men bother?

However, for most of the film, the Stepford Wives are decidedly less physically appealing than the real women we see onscreen. Indeed, most of them look more like sweet old grandmas than sexual dynamos. The only exception to the rule Joanna herself, whose robotic doppelganger at least has a considerably larger chest. They don’t even dress is a conventionally sexy manner, favoring high necked dresses loaded the gills with frills and laces. If the men of Stepford were really converting their wives into robotic doubles I imagine the whole town would be wearing bikinis, cheerleader outfits, nurses’ uniforms, or some other outfit in line with that particular husband’s fetishes. Even if we assume the husbands wouldn’t want them to leave the house dressed like that, we still don’t see any evidence of sexually appealing costumes anywhere in the film.

Indeed, the mere fact that the husbands arbitrarily limit themselves to one sex-bot seems out of line with typical male fantasies. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with monogamy, especially when it’s with someone that you love deeply. However, if you’ve already swapped your one true love out for a toaster with silicone implants why on earth would you feel compelled to stay loyal to your wedding vows? Sure, some guys would be content with their one robo-wife but I can’t imagine every man in Stepford would feel the same way. Do you really expect me to believe that in the whole town you can’t find one guy that can’t make up his mind whether he’d rather have a blonde or a brunette and decides to get both?

Then there are the priorities of the robotic wives, which hardly seems like something ripped from male fantasies. They spend all day cooking and cleaning making their houses look like something out of a magazine. Yet one does not have to spend a long time analyzing the readership demographics of Good Housekeeping to realize that these magazine spreads are aiming at female fantasies rather than male. Sure, men want a wife that can cook and if somebody else is straightening up the house all the better, but the Stepford girls take cleaning well beyond what most men would expect or even appreciate. How many men are there that dream of a spouse that color-codes their linen and of that small subset how many of them are interested in having a wife in the first place?

If the film is meant to be an attack on male fantasies then it is of paramount importance that the men in the audience be able to recognize their own less than admirable traits in the men of Stepford. Here, The Stepford Wives is a resounding failure. The fantasy is so far off that I wondered if either the screenwriter or the author of the original novel was a woman, and when I discovered that neither writer was I wondered if they were gay (neither seems to be, both having married women and fathered children, though I suppose you never really know).

If you are feeling especially well-disposed towards The Stepford Wives you could argue that the real target of the film’s satire are people from the suburbs rather than people from the big cities. Only those rubes in the small towns beyond the orbital highway would be dull enough to consider women like these superior to the genuine article. This is the line of reasoning that El Santo over at 1000misspenthours takes in his review, and while the film is a good deal more compelling this way than as a satire of male desire, it still feels a bit too much like doing the screenwriter’s work for them.

I think it’s far more likely that the film is less a satire of suburban norms and instead a crucial misunderstanding of America’s cultural history. The town of Stepford is very much modeled on idealized images of American suburbs from the 1950s. Indeed, that’s the reason why all the Stepford wives dress in those singularly unappealing dresses, because they want to give the impression that the town is somehow stranded twenty years in the past. The prevailing wisdom about the period holds that it was a time of extreme misogyny where men forced their wives to live in suburban homes, do all the cooking and cleaning, and pop out a string of babies. That’s not completely untrue, but it is a gross oversimplification of the situation. Nearly everyone, be they man or women, in the 1950s saw the suburbs as the promise land safe from the growing crime of the cities. Indeed, if anything women were keener to move out to the suburbs then their husbands; after all they wouldn’t be the ones spending three hours a day sitting in traffic during the commute. A house in the suburbs was, generally speaking, what women of the period wanted. That it would up feeling like a gilded cage for so many women only showcases their shortsighted embrace of a new paradigm, not that the world is fundamentally sexist and men are conspiring together in secretive cabals to enslave their wives.

However, this simple fact has been deliberately obscured by the last fifty years of feminist theory which, ironically enough, tends to remove all agency from women and insist that any hardship they suffer is the result not of their own poor judgement but instead a sinister plot hatched by their husbands, fathers, and sons. The Stepford Wives thoughtlessly adheres to their dogma, ratcheting up the core absurdity to fit it into its science fiction premise. However, this exaggeration, rather than exposing an underlying truth about human society instead has the opposite effect, exposing instead the lies and fabrications that the film’s creators have swallowed wholesale. This is why the supposed masculine paradise of Stepford, where women are unthinking and unfeeling slaves of the patriarchy, defining features are beautifully maintained rose gardens and immaculately organized linen closets.

There was, perhaps, a poignant social commentary that could have been made from this premise and it wouldn’t require much tweaking to achieve. Indeed, the film could play out as it does almost to the end with Joanna gradually coming to suspect that the Stepford Men’s association is turning their wives into robots. The twist would come at the end when Joanna smashes her husband’s head, and rather than blood coming out sparks of electricity fly and he collapses in the same broken spasming fashion as the other damaged robots we’ve seen before. Then it is revealed that the men are the first to be transformed into unthinking robots, good little worker bees that will toil away ceaselessly in the office before heading back home for the evening. Here would be an accurate, and compelling satire of social norms and gender relations, but unfortunately to do so would be to acknowledge both male suffering and female self-absorption, two truths that most right-thinking people will not allow themselves to consider, even when safely inside the confines of a goofy horror movie.