Stephanie Sack on the deep horror of THE STEPFORD WIVES (Forbes, 1975, US)
Being a wife is some heavy sh*t. I in fact was raised to be a wife, an upper-middle class American Jewish wife, to be precise. Obviously this education proved a massive failure, but impressive and ongoing campaigns on the level of Hannibal's pachyderm army were employed.
Exploring the experience of wifehood on film is a predictable pastime for directors of all genders, as domestic dramas appeal to audiences and investors. Everyone knows what a wife is and quite a handful of humans have been, are now, or will be ensconced in the wife life. While most cinematic wives are of the garden variety sort, every once in a while there is a plot involving married ladies that is mindblowing.
Stalker's wife is not having a good day, for example; after umpteen promises to keep his ass at home her grumpy AF husband is once again sneaking off to someplace called The Zone and her only child, a little girl with a small and serious face, is showing signs of burgeoning telekinesis. Accordingly, writhing on the kitchen floor while weeping and braless seems understandable.
Our lady spouse from Possession is also dealing with some hardcore marital stress, culminating with some sort of biological expungement in a Berlin underground train station, all the while carrying groceries. Wives still go to the supermarket even when suffering from corporeal exorcisms on public transit whilst en route to clandestinely visit their Lovecraftian f*@k monsters, apparently.
However, all of that is secondary to the premise of The Stepford Wives (Forbes, 1975), one of the more bloodcurdling plots in modern horror. By replacing actual human beings who happen to be wives with look-a-like robots, a shady Seventies "men's club" transforms women, women to whom they have pledged the rest of their lives, into state-of-the-art gynoids who spend their nights as docile dead-eyed subservient sex machines and spend their days as baby-making grocery shopping fembots clad in shades of sherbet. The ERA, in play around this time, did not take this possibility into account.
This technology-fueled manipulation of women in their roles as socially acceptable spouses, fawning sexual partners, and obsequiously devoted mothers is not a new concept, as Metropolis (Lang, Germany) got there in 1927. However, by sidestepping the inevitable transformation of our scrappy and smart heroine into a soulless automat(r)on until the film's despondent final three minutes, The Stepford Wives provides a terrifying and damning glimpse into the suburban groupthink of powerful men who are white, straight, and affluent. Reformatting a sentient ladyperson against her will into a domestically compliant cyborg takes a f*@kton of money, I would assume, and this type of mechanical frippery has only ever been the pastime and pleasure of the wealthy.
Do we ever really know another person's darkest desires and intimate pleasures, especially the one other embodied entity to whom we hitch our forever wagons? Or is it the publicly-approved facsimile of programmed monogamy that provides both the appeal and repellent of a mechanically-fueled suburban sex life? The answers to these and many other questions about marriage are arguably moot; ultimately, it is the bone chilling fungibility of women's thoughts, lives, and souls that is the sticky distillation of the modern technological nightmares still fermenting in Stepford.
Written by Stephanie Sack.
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