Welcome back to The Series Project, CraveOnline‘s regular feature where I, Witney Seibold, watch an entire franchise of films, often suffering deeply (as in Witchcraft) sometimes enjoying myself (as in Godzilla), just to give you a film-by-film reportage, specially commenting on how the films flow together as a unit.
Note: I am aware that The AV Club recently started their own version of this called Run The Series, authored by one A.A. Dowd. This is not a matter of someone reading my work and stealing my idea – I cannot flatter myself in such a way. This was just a coincidence, and an instance of great minds thinking alike. Although if you want to send hate mail to Dowd on the matter, then I encourage it. If for no other reason than to fan flames and manufacture a rivalry. I could use a good rivalry. It can only make me more popular.
I have to begin this week’s installment of the Project with a SPOILER WARNING. I will be talking about the five films in The Stepford Wives series (yes, there are five), and there is no way to talk about these films without giving away the big twist ending of the 1975 cult classic. So I implore you: If you have not seen The Stepford Wives, and you want the famous twist to remain a secret, then don’t read this article. If you don’t care, then trek on, Magellan.
The Stepford Wives was based on a novel by Ira Levin, who also wrote the original novel of Rosemary’s Baby. The two stories bear a remarkable resemblance. They are both about seemingly perfect suburban and/or domestic scenarios, both centered on a female protagonist, whose idylls are interrupted by something dark, sinister, and perhaps supernatural. In both cases, the commentary is that evil may be lurking in the domesticity we tend to lionize as a culture, paired with a more subtle feminist theme of the objectification of women as simple-minded homemakers and mothers, freed from human ambition.
The 1975 feature film based on Levin’s novel is well known in cult circles, and many of you may have even seen the awful 2004 remake with Nicole Kidman. Lesser known are the three TV movies also related to The Stepford Wives. In 1980, there was a follow-up called Revenge of the Stepford Wives. In 1987, it was updated as The Stepford Children. In 1996, a gender-flipped edition of the tale, The Stepford Husbands, was broadcasted. And then it was remade by Frank Oz nearly ten years ago. This week, I will be looking at the original, along with the first two TV movies. Next week, I’ll talk about Husbands and the remake.
TV movies are, to make a broad and not-entirely-accurate generalization, different than theatrical feature films, and not just in terms of budget; TV movies tend to have a much more blunt quality, often pushing hard for melodrama and soap opera dynamics. They weep a lot. They also tend to moralize. Most feature films have some sort of agenda, but TV movies are much more up-front about it. They have a moral message they want to sell, and, dammit, they’re going to sell it in whatever way possible, no matter how cheap or corny. They also tend to bolster pop psychology soundbites a lot, and you may find that a heroic psychologist is featured heavily in a lot of TV movies from the late 1970s through the late 1980s. Although the Stepford TV movies don’t have the shrink character.
There is an entire cult of people out there who love TV movies for these very reasons, and the bulk of them – especially the “big issue” TV movies – are amazingly campy. Cancer, rape, insanity, incest, drug problems, teen pregnancy, cyberbullying… all of these things can be yours with unabashed and unbelievable sincerity.
That will be three of the five Stepford movies. Cheap, clunky, corny, campy. Drama will be heightened, and pacing will be awkward. It’s just our milieu. Before we get there, though, let’s take a look at the first classic in our series…
The Stepford Wives (dir. Bryan Forbes, 1975)
Katharine Ross plays a city mouse named Joanna who was just coerced into moving to Stepford, CT by her pushy husband Walter (Peter Masterson). Joanna is a modern woman interested in photography and noise and bustle, so she’s doesn’t take to well to the upright, ultra-clean, ultra-quiet suburban heaven of Stepford. In Stepford all the women are well-behaved and clean, and seem interested in nothing but housework and modest dress. They smile and chatter lightly about nothing at all.
Joanna does find a more charismatic friend in Bobbie (Paula Prentiss), a trash-talking, horny smoker. The two of them have both noted that most of the Stepford women behave oddly. They also don’t like that the men in Stepford, including both of their husbands, have all joined a mysterious Freemason-like men’s organization. They also notice a few odd things. They spy on a neighbor, and overhear that he’s a stallion in bed even though he’s clearly old and frail. When one of the Stepford wives gets drunk at a party, she begins repeating herself to everyone. The husbands then spirit her away to… well, not the local hospital. What’s going on here?
Eventually even Bobbie turns from her modern, trash-talking self into a dress-wearing homemaker. Who, uh, doesn’t bleed when stabbed.
It probably won’t take you too long to guess what’s going on, and the twist is pretty well known to just about everyone with a modest sci-fi education: The women in Stepford have been replaced by a race of creepy bio-bots. The men in the town, seeking domestic bliss, have been killing their modern feminist wives, and replacing them with a race of robot clones who are obedient, cheerful, and good in bed.
The feminist commentary is pretty obvious, but still salient. Many men, the film seems to argue, still wish to see women as June Cleaver types with no thoughts beyond serving their home and their man. Some men will murder their wives just to fulfill this fantasy. It’s domesticity as tyranny. The perceived conservative 1950s status quo is the monster. The Stepford Wives acknowledges that this dated image of women – lifeless, kitchen-dwelling angels – is still very real in America in 1975.
I’m kind of surprised there’s no lesbian character. How chilling it would have been to see a lesbian woman get kidnapped by the straight white men of Stepford, only to be converted into a heterosexual domestic slave? It certainly would have driven the point home a lot more.
Like I said: The story is one that could have been covered in a half-hour sci-fi anthology series, but The Stepford Wives is still something of a classic, in both its sci-fi conceits and its themes of oppressive conformity to a male-invented object fantasy. Indeed, the word “Stepford” (not based on a real city, by the way) has come to represent a scary form of blank-eyed robotic domestic conformity.
It’s established in The Stepford Wives that robot eyeballs are hard to make, so the evil robot-building men typically steal the eyeballs from their robots’ human counterparts. In one of the final scenes of the film, Joanna confronts a black-eyed robot double of herself. The final shot of the film is Joanna’s robot double, now wearing her eyeballs, strolling placidly through a supermarket.
That premise will be kind of abandoned in the first forgotten sequel…
