From Helen Gurley Brown to Helen Andelin--The Post-Feminist World of Frank Oz's The Stepford Wives
11/09/2005
By June Pulliam
The Stepford Wives, Frank Oz, director
Don't get me wrong. I am not one of these people who can't forgive remakes for not being the original. In fact, I have a fine appreciation of several remakes, as anyone who has read my reviews can tell you. And I was particularly excited when I heard that there was going to be a remake of The Stepford Wives, especially as it was going to be a comic version of the original, since one thing I truly despise is when a remake doesn't in some way add to or reinterpret the original. Moreover, the strong cast of Frank Oz's The Stepford Wives made me even more enthusiastic, as many of these actors (Nicole Kidman, Glenn Close, Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken) aren't often associated with bad films.
Alas, the skills of these fine actors were no match for Paul Rudnick, a fine jokester but a witless script writer who doesn't understand the fundamentals of crafting a believable plot, and similarly clueless producers who ultimately had no vision as to where the story would go1.
Ira Levin's 1972 novella The Stepford Wives and Bryan Forbes' 1975 television movie of the same name are both about masculine fears in the age of second wave feminism. Walter Eberhardt moves his family from Gotham to the suburbs of Stepford in pursuit of the elusive combination of low taxes and good schools. But concealed behind this relatively innocuous desire is another one to put the cork on female discontent about being shunted to a domestic sphere that was becoming increasingly limiting after the cultural changes brought about after World War II. The women of Stepford suffer from "the problem with no name," as identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, which described how the gender identity foisted upon American women by "The Experts" causes everything from clinical depression to suicidal tendencies. To remain inside the home most of the day in a suburban environment without an extended network of friends and family, the typical situation of most middle class women from the 1950s through the 1980s, is in itself enough to make any woman angry, resentful, depressed, and questioning of her own judgment. But in 1972, instead of believing that these feelings are caused by a personal failure to embrace one's natural gender role, American women were beginning to realize the problem lies with assumptions about sex that are based upon anything but a natural order of things.
Both Levin's and Forbes' versions of The Stepford Wives also describe the feelings of many men when they are confronted by women who are no longer content with being docile helpmates. Unlike their mothers in the 1950s, American women in the 1970s were a great deal more independent. Griswold v. Connecticut (1962) and Roe v. Wade (1972) made it easier for them to control their own fertility, and Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act gave them equal access to education and athletics, while the formation of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission gave them equal access to employment. Thus many of the factors that kept their mothers economic slaves weren't barriers for them. They could pick up and leave an unsatisfactory marriage, thanks to liberalized divorce laws, and they had an easier time of supporting themselves.
But these newfound rights lead to another issue: if these men are no longer the undisputed kings of their castles, then either they would have to change their ways of thinking about men and women, or they would have to resort to other means to preserve the status quo. The solutions? Well, a wealthy handful of men choose to replace what they saw as sullen, discontent rebels without a cause with docile robot wives who had perky breasts and no desire to be anything more than a combination of Betty Crocker and Xaviera Hollander.
It's this very solution to what was, in the 1950s, described as "the problem with no name," that makes The Stepford Wives ripe for parody, even in our alleged post-feminist age. Both Levin's novella and Forbes' film work as horror since they don't examine this solution too closely, for to do so would invite all sorts of speculation about the impractibility of murdering someone and replacing her, undetected, with her robot doppelganger. Also, the 1950s hausfrau that many believe actually existed in that golden age of suburban femininity is herself a grotesque parody created by Madison Avenue to sell more frozen foods, cleaning products and household appliances. Sadly, Oz's film takes advantage of none of these fairly new realizations.
The film does begin promisingly: The opening credits roll with vignettes of contented housewives, pirouetting before their new refrigerators, beaming with post-coital bliss as they clean their new ovens, smiling wanly like Francis Farmer after her lobotomy as they vacuum the house. Then the movie begins in earnest–cutting to a scene of a Joanna Eberhardt much transformed from her original incarnation. She has gone from being an intellectually curious shutterbug to the president of programming of a major television network. And not just any network, for her creation is a post-feminist fantasy, a world Helen Gurley Brown (author of that post-feminist classic, Having It All, 1982) would love, a vast gynocracy headed by highly-compensated women who make big bucks producing reality television shows that put average men in situations where they are completely humiliated by their wives.
One man, whose wife left him for half a dozen buff young sex slaves after the couple participated in an episode of I Can Do Better, comes to settle the score with Joanna as she gives a triumphant speech to an audience of network affiliates (all mostly female, by the way). He shoots Joanna in mid sentence. Joanna lives, but her career doesn't survive the assassination attempt. When it is discovered that the disgruntled I Can Do Better contestant has also attempted to murder his wife and her new lovers, Joanna is canned by the female head of the network and suffers a nervous breakdown.
Flash forward to a sedated and electro-shocked Joanna being brought to Stepford by her husband Walter so she can recuperate and the two can focus on repairing their failing marriage, which he blames on her driven pursuit of her career (Walter's career is puny by comparison). At first, Joanna is horrified to discover the women of Stepford are all perky little Barbies who seem to faithfully follow the advice of Helen Andlin's 1965 book Fascinating Womanhood, which encourages women to return to a strict 1950s interpretation of femininity to keep their spouses' interest. But then, after Walter threatens to leave Joanna for being a castrating shrew, she decides to give the Stepford way of life a try before ultimately discovering the horrifying secret that everyone who has come to see this film already knew: the women of Stepford aren't that way by choice.
And this is where the film self-destructs.
For starters, neither Rudnick nor Oz can decide on the exact nature of a Stepford wife. At first, the audience is led to believe that they're actual robots. Joanna begins to suspect that something has gone horribly wrong when one of the wives, Sarah Sunderson (Faith Hill) malfunctions during some 4th of July square dancing: she seems to have a seizure when sparks begin shooting from her ears (well who hasn't had this happen during square dancing?). Our next hint that the Stepford wives are robots comes when gay honorary Stepford wife Roger Bannister (Roger Bart) discovers a mysterious golden remote control with the word "Sarah" inscribed on it. A click of the remote sends Sarah comically walking backwards upstairs while enlarging her breasts. And in a direct imitation of Bryan Forbes' film, Joanna eventually sees her eyeless robotic double before she herself is transformed. What a shock it is for the audience then to discover later on that the Stepford wives are all so keen on remaining blonde and pleasing their men not because they have been replaced by robots, but instead, because they've had chips implanted in their heads, and the process is entirely reversible. This of course makes viewers go "hmmmm" (or WTF!) especially given that, also in direct imitation of the original film, Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler) places her hand in a gas stove burner, and does not feel any pain.
This lack of clarity about the nature of a Stepford wife is bad enough, but worse still is the direction of the plot. The Stepford Wives is a comedy in only the loosest sense in that it contains a lot of gags (or maybe in that it is so bad as to be funny, BUT we're talking Gili bad here). Oz's version of Levin's novel is finally a parody of nothing. The writer and director don't seem to be satirizing post-feminism, reality television, life in suburbia, or empty-headed materialism (SUVs and spoiled children who are given $500 to buy action figures abound). It's not enough to dress up your characters in 1950s clothing and put a few jokes in their lives. In order to have a good movie, the characters have to be motivated by something consistent.
The only thing The Stepford Wives seems to satirize is the American public's willingness to fork over seven dollars to sit and watch a crappy remake of a true classic for two hours. So maybe after all the film is a somewhat successful comedy, as I found myself thinking, "funny joke, Mr. Oz and Mr. Rudnick, but can I have my seven dollars back now?"
1Reportedly, Frank Oz shot six different endings of The Stepford Wives, and the actors had no idea which would be used. While it may not be a bad thing for a director to explore different interpretations of a story during production, in hindsight, this state of affairs was a symptom of the disorganized final product that was loosed on an unsuspecting viewing public this past weekend. And indeed, no one bothered to edit the final product with that final ending in mind.