Stepford Wife: You've Come the Wrong Way, Baby

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet
Posted on June 18, 2004, Printed on November 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/18980/

Spoiler Alert: The following article reveals details of the movie's plot, including its conclusion.

The highly anticipated remake of The Stepford Wives arrived in theaters on the heels of deafening hype only to sink rapidly into cultural irrelevance over the space of a weekend.

The movie was preceded by a high-brow media debate over the state of feminism and fashion. Maureen Dowd, for example, weighed in on its significance a full year before its release. Her verdict: "But the real chiller is that the evil husbands in the original did not need to murder. They just needed to wait. In the long interval between the two movies, women have turned themselves into Stepford wives."

Dowd's judgment, as it turns out, is also the consensus of the cultural intelligentsia, whose various members have weighed in over the past couple of weeks, pointing to the favored signs of feminine malaise: botox, plastic surgery, reality shows, and so on.

No wonder there was little to say once the movie was finally released. (It has barely warranted a mention other than the obligatory review since its unveiling.) Why bother with the execution when the very premise is sufficient excuse to air predigested ideas about gender relations.

This isn't to say that Stepford Wives, Take Two, isn't addled, inane and uninspiring. But it is all these things for a good reason, i.e. its staunch refusal to address the central idea that inspired the original. Far beyond the nip-and-tuck culture of present-day femininity, it reveals how the F-word, feminism, has over the course of 30 years become the great unmentionable -- so much so that the remake of a movie structured wholly around the battle of the sexes must work so hard to elide it entirely.

What Battle of the Sexes?

According to its creators, the script was "updated" to suit our modern sensibility by recasting the original Stepford women as high-powered executives. Nicole Kidman, the new Joanna Eberhart, is no wannabe photographer dabbling in Betty Freidan, but a well-coiffed, tough-as-nails president of a major television network. The men now have every reason to feel cowed and overwhelmed by these alpha females who are a '70s male nightmare come true.

The movie sets up a modern-day gender war, however, only to backpedal strenuously from its own plotline over the next two hours. The central premise is in trouble almost from the first scene when Joanna strides on to the stage to unveil her new brainchild -- a crass reality show -- to her white-collared troops. Her plastic smile, corporate sloganeering, and almost robotic enthusiasm have the unfortunate effect of making the transformation that looms ahead seem more a matter of changing the props than robbing her soul. Stepford executive, Stepford wife; same difference.

Then there is the 'butch' lawyer plotting to replace his flamboyantly 'femme' mate. The yuppie gay couple has the effect, intended or otherwise, of changing the terrain of engagement from gender roles to consumerism -- a point further reinforced by one of the movie's trailers that spoofs luxury car commercials. The desire for the perfectly acquiescent mate in the remake is no longer about male anxiety. It's just that we all want a Stepford wife now, a spouse perfectly engineered to meet our every need. That's exactly what Mike Wellington (Christopher Walken), the head of the Men's Association, tells Joanna: "You're just angry because you didn't think of it first!"

As it turns out, the women did think of it first. The movie's final coup de grace is the revelation that the mastermind behind the plot to replace independent, ambitious women with docile zombies is Mike's wife, Claire Wellington (Glenn Close). The true villain of 21st century Stepford is not an insecure, vengeful man, but a betrayed wife.

The movie's ambivalence toward the thorny business of gender relations is evident not just in its script but also in the publicity that heralded its arrival.

"This is not a remake. This is from a whole different angle," declared director Frank Oz. The new 'angle' has safely little to do with cultural expectations placed on men and women: "The movie's about the acceptance of imperfect love ... The heart of it is about this couple trying to work things out, and I think we can all relate to that." Oh gee, it's a love story.

Gloria Goodale in the Christian Science Monitor notes how the movie's leading stars were at pains to deflect any attempt to detect a broader message. "We're not into heavy social commentary here," said Bette Midler. Leading man Matthew Broderick went one better: "There are some questions about whether men would create perfect wives for themselves if they had the choice, but this film is meant mostly as entertainment."

Nothing to learn here, folks. Please keep moving.

In the month before its release, the movie went through a series of edits and reshoots, including a new happy ending that lets the couples live happily ever after. There is no reason to let all that silliness with the robots get in the way of true love. It is a measure of our progress that thirty years later, "Stepford Wives" has to be transmuted into an inoffensive romantic comedy in order to see the light of day in Hollywood.

The result, in New York Times reviewer A. A. Acosta's words, is a movie "intended not to provoke but to soothe, to tell us, once again, that we can have it all, that nobody's perfect, and that if there is trouble in the world, or in our own homes, it's nothing we need to worry our pretty little heads about."

Stepford Wife: A Female Fantasy

The desire to be soothed is seductive, indeed. For all its timidity, Stepford Wives does unintentionally stumble into one moment of truth. At the movie's dénouement, when a lacquered Claire Wellington, swathed in flowing ball gown, rails about the lost days of "tuxedos and chiffon," she sounds eerily familiar.

It is the voice of the anti-feminist, motivated not so much by self-loathing as nostalgia for a simpler time when men were men and women looked fabulous, aka the '50s.

Claire, once an over-achieving geneticist, yearns for the halcyon days when a woman was not required to choose her own identity nor negotiate the consequences of her choices. Her descent into pathology is sparked by what she sees as the one such consequence of her professional success -- catching Mike and her research assistant in flagrante, so to speak. As she surveys the shambles of her life (and the body of her dead husband across the breakfast table), Claire has a veritable epiphany. She reconstructs Mike not as a devoted, faithful husband but a smooth, manipulative alpha robot. Oozing old-fashioned machismo, he is just the right candidate to persuade other men of the wisdom of reclaiming their position as head of the household.

The Stepford Way is not about oppressing women, Claire assures us, but recognizing our "true happiness." It helps us find our way back to an Eden, where both men and women know their place and are content to remain within it. Step one is, of course, getting those uppity wives back into the kitchen where they belong. Once the women start baking cookies and serving up sex on demand, it is only a matter of time before men step into their assigned role of provider and protector.

Much as we may want to pretend otherwise, this vision of old-fashioned domestic bliss is not just a male-constructed fantasy. In her conviction that the road to fulfillment lies in reclaiming our much-maligned feminine mystique, Claire is no different than Dr. Laura or the advocates of the "surrendered wife." Nor are these ideas the preserve of low-brow talk show hosts and self-help gurus catering to Middle America. Caitlin Flanagan, the newly appointed staff writer at the New Yorker and one of the most visible and erudite commentators on all things female, waxes just as rhapsodic about the lost domestic virtues of the "traditional marriage."

As the resident book critic at The Atlantic Monthly in 2003, Flanagan wrote approvingly of the '50s housewife who "understood that in addition to ironing her husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was -- with some regularity -- going to have relations with the man of the house." For Flanagan, the Wife, in the most old-fashioned sense of the word, represents all that is good and worthy about femininity. This icon of feminine virtue is not to be confused with "high-achieving women" who "are going to get exactly what they want, and damn the expense or the human toll."

Whatever the problem at hand -- sexless marriages or exploited nannies -- Flanagan can be relied on to trace the source of the malaise back to feminism. And it is the sign of our times that while feminism is virtually unmentionable in Hollywood, it can be repeatedly invoked and demonized in some of our most influential magazines.

The working women in Flanagan's writings sound a lot like the "castrating Manhattan career bitches" that the Stepford men are eager to replace. More to the point, her version of the '50s woman is just as mechanical and self-constructed as Claire's robots. This is the "rare woman -- the good wife, and the happy one -- ... who maintains her husband's sexual interest and who returns it in full measure," mostly by virtue of "orderly and successful housekeeping." It's perhaps why Flanagan inevitably relies on how-to (please your husband, save your marriage, etc.) manuals to make her arguments than real women themselves.

But to attack Flanagan and her ilk as misogynists is to miss the point -- and reinforce her recent claim that feminists "are very much like adolescents, they get hysterical so often." Better to understand her as someone much like Claire, who represents the part of us that wants to throw in the towel, to give up the good fight in the hope that surrender will bring a better, more perfect happiness than the contradictions and confusion of a partly-liberated life.

Thanks to the women's movement, we have more freedom to choose, but these choices remain difficult as we negotiate the arduous business of both wanting and doing it all, be it motherhood, career, love, or pleasure. What's more, we've exchanged a rigid yet uncomplicated definition of the good life for the pervasive anxiety about doing the "right" thing.

So no wonder some of us want to turn back the clock. We want to believe, like Claire or a newly surrendered wife, that fulfillment is just a batch of cookies away. Even Nicole Kidman, one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, hopes, as she put it to Red magazine, "someone will come along and sweep me off my feet. Then I would stop doing the career thing as much." Not surprisingly, she doesn't want a man who will do the dishes but "who would step in front of someone and take a bullet." It isn't then far-fetched to imagine that the Stepford wives are indeed an expression of a woman's desire.

The truth, sad or otherwise, is that the Stepford Way is just another kind of snake oil. The good news is that at least some of us now get to choose to stay at home or go to work, play the traditional wife or the liberated kind. Whatever we do, however, there is no guarantee of happiness, there never was -- how much ever the hardy band of anti-feminists may insist to the contrary. The Stepford paradise is not just irretrievably lost, it does not exist -- except perhaps in the next issue of the New Yorker, courtesy of Caitlin Flanagan.

Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of Alternet.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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