The remake starring Nicole Kidman
I rewatched the remake of The Stepford Wives by Frank Oz last night and was so surprised by how much I LOVED the movie.
The actors were hilarious, the set design was beautiful, and the film touched upon some heavy themes concerning the power structure between men and women despite the somewhat slapstick nature.
In the remake, the main character Joanna Eberhart (played by Nicole Kidman) has it all – she’s president of a major television network AND married with two children.
However, she never sees her family and after getting fired because of some bad television picks, has a nervous breakdown. Her husband Walter decides to move the family to Stepford, an ultra-rich, exclusive community in Connecticut.
While there, Joanna realizes that not everything is right in the town and SPOILER ALERT the men are turning the women into robots. (The remake is inconsistent about whether the women are robots or just have chips in their heads but that’s not important. All you need to know is that the men make the women completely submissive to them).
After Joanna discovers this, she understandably freaks out and demands an explanation. Below is an excerpt from the script with Walter and the other men explaining why they do this.
Joanna: How could you do this?
Walter: Ever since we’ve met, you’ve beaten me at everything. You’re better educated. You’re stronger, you’re faster. You’re a better dancer, a better tennis player. You’ve always earned at least fix figures more than I could ever dream of. You’re a better speaker, a better executive. You’re even better at sex. Don’t deny it!
Joanna: I wasn’t going to.
Walter: Well, don’t I get anything?
Joanna: You got me.
Walter: No, I got to hold your purse. I got to tell the kids you’d be late again. I got to tell the press that you had no comment. I got to work for you.
Joanna: With me.
Walter: Under you. All of us. We married wonder women. (Hey that’s the name of my blog!) Supergirls. Amazon queens. Well, you know what that makes us?
Joanna: Smart, worthy, lucky.
Walter: We’re the wuss. The wind beneath your wings. Your support system. We’re the girl.
Other men: And we don’t like it. No, we don’t!
Joanna: And this is your answer, to kill us?
Mike: Oh no. Nothing like that. We help you. We perfect you.
Joanna: By turning us into robots? Does any fraction of these women still exist?
Walter is clearly miffed that he’s taken a back seat to Joanna all these years and she was the one wearing the pants in the relationship. He has never explicitly stated that he was unhappy with this arrangement but after being surrounded by men in the Stepford Men’s Association for several weeks, they’ve convinced him to come out and say so. Even more, they’ve convinced him to change his wife so that he will finally be the one in power.
Frank Oz stated in the DVD commentary that Walter has obviously gone insane by agreeing to essentially murder his wife but says that this decision unfortunately didn’t seem unusual to Walter because he is surrounded by men – “the pack” – who convince Walter that he’s correct.
The original starring Katharine Ross
The remake ends differently than the original, 1975 version that adapts faithfully to the Ira Levin novel, but I felt like I (and most women today) could relate more to the remake. The original was done at a time when the majority of women were still housewives and beginning to question their roles in life – “Am I going to spend the rest of my life cleaning, looking after my children, and helping my husband to advance in his career?” Most women today would object to that lifestyle because we’ve been brought up to believe that we can achieve just as much as a man.
Trailer for the original 1975 film – it was much darker than the remake and took itself seriously, which was perhaps why the film was so effective and why people hated the comedic remake:
The original is definitely dated – Joanna is a typical housewife but she happens to have a photography habit that Walter disapproves of. All the (unchanged) women in the original film don’t have jobs but don’t really do much work around the house which prompts the husbands to change them. I had trouble accepting that – Walter essentially has his wife killed and replaced with a robot just because she wasn’t a completely subservient wife. They had a pretty good relationship and she was a decent housewife, but he didn’t like the fact that she would sometimes argue back and spent time taking photos as an amateur photographer. Clearly, turning her into a robot was the right thing to do. But then again, this was back in 1975.
I relate more to the remake because in this version, the men change their wives because they are threatened by their wives’ success. They are threatened by how their wives completely overshadow them in every capacity. I’m not saying that’s a better reason to change their wives, but it does make more sense as to why they would do something so horrific. Or perhaps it signifies the changing of the times. In 1975, if your wife spoke back to you, that was unacceptable. In 2004 (when the remake was released), if your wife was more successful career-wise than you, that was unacceptable. Either way, their egos are bruised and they have some fixin’ to do.
The Stepford Wives is clearly not meant to be taken seriously – it is “a sort of chauvinistic dystopia … the depiction of subservient, robotic women is intended as a satirical statement against traditional gender roles.” But the story does touch upon concrete issues that come up between men and women – who has the power and how does the other party really feel about being in the background?
We can perhaps also view the film as a warning since the human robots depicted in the story will be completely realistic one day. Let’s just hope we don’t use these robots in the manner depicted in the films.
