The Stepford Wives 1975

[7.4/10] I’m a fan of the 1970s horror-tinged paranoid thriller. Films like The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers all thrive on the tension of something undeniably off under the surface that you nonetheless can’t quite prove. Like much of the horror genre, they also reflect the cultural anxieties of their time, making them an engaging cultural time capsule for deep-seated concerns. The blend of text and subtext makes them a winning subgenre across the time period.

Those sublimated anxieties may be the best part of The Stepford Wibes. The film tells the story of Joanna, a wife and mother of two who moves from New York, at her husband’s behest, to an eerily perfect, “archaic” little town out in the suburbs. The town of Stepford is a throwback to the 1950s, where all the men are in control, all the women are docile, and no one dares disrupt the order that’s ossified in the sleepy little berg.

The premise remains strong. You don’t have to be immersed in the zeitgeist of the times to comprehend the setup as a grim reflection on the women’s liberation movement running aground against a revanchist backlash from men in particular, trying to return to a status quo that tilted in their favor.

The film isn’t subtle about its themes on that front. Joanna is a free spirit. She has artistic interests as a photographer and wants to be remembered on her own terms (and by her maiden name no less). She doesn’t keep a spotless home and her kids (who look fine, by the way), apparently resemble ragamuffins. She doesn’t wear a bra. She and her best friend (and fellow recent city transplant) Bobbi have the temerity to try to start a women’s “consciousness-raising” group where they can, at a minimum, vent to one another about their problems with their husbands. She is a symbol of the women who cast off the domestic expectations that loomed over American women in prior decades.

And the town is a bulwark against exactly that kind of thinking. It’s a place where, one by one, the wives are replaced with complaint substitutes. They devote all of their time to cleaning the house, taking care of the children, and praising their husbands. They not only wear brassieres but have enhanced figures and are readily available for intercourse whenever summoned. They don fancy old-fashioned dresses and act as though lobotomized. In brief, they’re sripped of their agency and thrust back into the cult of 1950s domestic bliss.

You don’t have to look hard to discern the ideas at the heart of the film, or the inherent critique of the everpresent desire to return to “the good old days” and the male reaction to feminism. But the themes still have power in the present, where sadly the same battles are being fought, and the same social pathologies and nostalgia for a past with far darker sides that are elided in the popular consciousness, are internalized to this day.

Using the paranoid thriller to explore the resistance and backlash to women daring to assert themselves and give up traditional “duties” works well in the shadow of those in positions of power seeking to hold onto it in the face of those who were (and are) marginalized increasingly asserting themselves. It’s no shock that this film was an inspiration for Jordan Peele’s superlative Get Out, which traffics in similar notions, even when pointing them in a different direction.

Some of the subtler thematic points raise an eyebrow as well. There’s an inherent fear of technology here, that all of these newfangled companies with their complicated tech are going to strip the humanity and independence of the populace. That same concern dovetails with a broader fear of corporatization generally. The robotic duplicates of the wives all speak in cliches like they’re right from a T.V. ad, representing the sheen and polish of a television commercial. And bundled up in all of this is a critique of Disney, with its weaponized nostalgia, cultural hegemony, and a brand practically fueled by a longing for an idealized “simpler” time, even if that time wasn’t, in fact, so simple. While the thematic meat of the film hinges on feminism and chauvinist reactionaries, the natural offshoots of the idea are just as compelling.

There’s only one catch to all of this. While many of the notions that anchor the film are, unfortunately, as salient now as they were in 1975, the premise is now a known quantity. The concept of Stepford, what it represents on both a thematic level and a narrative one, are so ingrained in the public consciousness that it hurts the vaunted tension that is the lifeblood of the paranoid thriller. Even if you’ve never seen the film before, it’s become a cultural touchpoint and idiom to where there’s little the actual movie can do to surprise fans.

It doesn’t help that Joanna, the film’s protagonist, is kind of a drip. She’s fine, but feels like more of a cipher with generic characteristics than a well-rounded character whose loss is fully felt. Candidly, the loss of her friend Bobbi, a firebrand with personality and gumption out of the wazoo, was much more poignant and tragic. Her husband eventually becomes terrifying, but a big part of the film’s vibe is a fly-on-the-wall view of the mundane turned into the macabre, so for much of the runtime, he’s a standard issue not-great husband without much to distinguish him. Diz, the out-and-out villain of the peace, is appropriately creepy, but gets little screen time until the climax.

Which is all to say that when the mystery isn’t much of a mystery, the characters don’t have a ton of life to keep you engaged without the potential for narrative surprises. Neither does the cinematography. While there’s a few neat framings, there’s a workmanlike quality to how the film is shot, which befits a certain 1970s-style naturalism, but it means the camera is a flat window into this world rather than a tool to help make meaning and convey the story’s key takeaways.

The exception to all of this is the film’s final act. When Joanna discovers the truth, and the Stepford Men’s Association unleashes their evil plan, The Stepford Wives finds another gear. Joanna becomes desperate and resourceful in a way that brings her psychology to the surface. Her husband becomes a terrifying predator, as does the monologuing Diz. Nothing in the film makes your skin crawl like the unnerving Bobbi-bot malfunctioning in a way that reveals how she’s a system of convenient inputs and outputs rather than a full-fledged person. A convenient but atmospheric thunderstorm and the darkened confines of the Men’s club HQ leads to some moody lighting and horrifying shadowplay. And the way the black-eyed Joanna bot advances on our protagonist, transitioning to the spitting image of our heroine with a thousand yard stare, drips with tragedy.

The movie spins its wheels a little too much before putting its cards on the table and leaning into that rollicking final reel. But even then, it lays those anxieties bare, letting the tense energy release with terrible consequences and exposing the horror of the fate many would wish upon a movement that asked for more for the women of this country, in spirit if not in literal fact. The paranoid thriller has the power to entrance and provoke, and particularly in a time of social and political upheaval, the power of the form reached its peak, even as we grapple with the same, intractable problems today.