SOME excellent analysis of the movie “The Stepford Wives.” (Immodesty warning.)

— Comments —

Janice writes:

I think that something important was left out by the poster of the youtube video on the film “Stepford Wives”, which I viewed from the link on your site.

I had seen this 45-year-old horror movie, start to finish, long ago. It was a corny and badly scripted movie, true, but it did feature, as its premise, an evil masculine reaction to (yes, wrong to sensible minds) feminist ideas. The women are foolishly and pridefully led by 60’s propaganda; but in the film, the Men’s Club of Stepford was literally involved in calculating the murders of the women in order to replace them with lifelike fakes who would be perfect substitutes pleasing in every way to the men. The final scene shows Joanna, who has caught on early to the terrible plot, being led by her husband to the place where her barely completed android lookalike strangles her to death.

I know nothing of the poster of the video or his philosophy, but for some reason he never mentioned the dialogue in the movie where some Mens’ Club members are connected with high tech Disney-type robotics and advanced knowledge of plastics. He made little or nothing of their murderous designs.

This film said to me that the false dream of perfection in a human mate was a dream of males as well as females. A nightmare all around, in any case. Perhaps the takeaway should be that perfection does not exist in any creature this side of Paradise.

Laura writes:

Thanks for writing. That’s interesting. He definitely should have mentioned how it ended.

But doesn’t that part of the plot — I have to admit I have never seen it in full — fit in with the general theme of demonization of men? It’s kind of a perfect feminist fantasy.

Pan Dora writes:

Wow, we are talking about a member of a serial-killing cult, and he’s worried that she hit him with a fire poker. Boo-hoo. I wish she’d kept hitting till he was dead. In all seriousness, the problem with this film is it should not have been moved from the book to the big screen.

Laura writes:

But it was — and people are still watching it, so it’s worth analyzing.

Zeno writes:

I watched the video review, which was interesting. I had previously watched the full movie, but it was a few years ago, so I don’t remember it all. But I think the film is really more intended as  social satire than pure horror. Well, I am not sure how seriously you are supposed to take the ending that the women are being killed and substituted by robots.

I think the point of the movie is very simple, almost pedestrian. It’s saying that those happy, obedient, conservative suburban wives are all robot-like. It’s making fun of them. They are not independent, “empowered”, educated, artistic or career-driven women like the protagonist (I think the term “empowered” was still not used in the 70s, but the idea is the same). Also it is saying that men are afraid of independent women, and the only way they can get those women is by transforming them into robots.

But the film has a major plot hole, which is this: if the men (in 1975!) had the technology to create those amazing life-like robots, then why did they have to kill their women at all? Couldn’t they just create the female robots from scratch and live happily with them, without bothering anyone? Unless they were using their brains or some part of their bodies in the process, but the film just implies that they merely replace the women with identical artificial replicas, so it is not clear why they need the real women at all.

Laura writes:

People use the term “Stepford Wives” to mean shallow, conformist housewives.

Jim writes:

I wanted to mention that I felt like the guy commenting on the Stepford Wives movie was way off the mark, and it made me think that perhaps you personally had never actually seen the movie, because of your comment that he had made some “excellent analysis.”

He seems to ignore the fact that in the movie, the “changed” women are not actually human any longer, the actual wives have been evidently murdered, and replaced with exact replica robots whose behavior has been predetermined by the leader of the Stepford Men’s Association. So although their behavior is in our eyes commendable, and the virtues that this Black Pill guy applauds are desirable qualities, he never mentions that the real former wives of these men have been murdered, in exchange for beautiful, ageless, “goddesses” as he calls them, who haven’t developed these personalities out of a Christian upbringing in “the nurture and admonition of the Lord”, but solely through the mind of one horrific man who, if he was willing to murder women to obtain this result, would obviously not program these women to be such as yourself Laura, tenacious truth seekers.

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