Posted on 06/30/2004 7:09:11 AM PDT by dead
The fatal flaw of The Stepford Wives, opening in Sydney this month, is that Nicole Kidman plays an urban power-bitch so well you can quite understand why her long-suffering husband and kids would want to replace her with a robot.
As Joanna Eberhard, she begins the movie as a skinny, black-clad, amoral, ball-busting television network president with no redeeming qualities. She doesn't care about ruining the lives of contestants on her reality-TV shows any more than she cares about her two children or her pathetically fawning husband, except as accessories to her glittering career.
When she loses her job, the family moves from Manhattan to the idyllic town of Stepford, Connecticut, where all the wives are beautiful, vacuous, perfect homemakers who dote on their husbands in every imaginable way, and are, of course, robots.
When the first Stepford Wives movie was released in 1975 at the height of the feminist revolution, it came to represent every feminist nightmare - the domestic-goddess robot supposedly secretly preferred by every man over the troublesome real wife with ambitions of her own.
But in the 2004 remake, The Stepford Wives degenerates into just another lame attempt by Hollow-wood to pillory conservatives. It is saturated with such hostility for suburbia and family values and, in fact, women, that it has more in common with an Alexander McQueen fashion show than the Ira Levin novel on which it is based.
Targeted for special malice are conservatives, suburbanites, stay-at-home mothers, attractive women, blondes, women who bake, rural folk, men who are faithful to their wives, and conservative gays: a gay with a bad haircut.
No greater tragedy befalls Stepford than when the movie's flamboyantly gay character, Roger, a witty, stylish and ironic architect, is transformed into a Republican political candidate wearing a button-down suit, standing in front of the American flag and saying: "I believe in Stepford, America, and the power of prayer."
It's no surprise the movie was reportedly plagued with unrest - Kidman complaining about the script, Christopher Walken arguing about scenes, the re-shooting of the ending, last-minute rewrites, the director temporarily walking out in a huff - and may explain its incoherence.
Even so, it was clearly intended as a sneering backlash against the new feminism, which involves women reclaiming marriage, motherhood, femininity and domesticity as valid feminist choices rather than some sort of betrayal of gender.
This new feminism can be charted from 2001, when Newsweek ran a cover story with a picture of a pregnant woman and the headline: "The truth about fertility: why more doctors are warning that science can't beat the biological clock."
It was about that time young women started to confront the false belief their fertility would last well into their 40s and they could put off having babies for decades. American fertility specialists were so worried they launched an advertising campaign advising women who want children to have them in their 20s or early 30s.
The next year came Sylvia Ann Hewlett's celebrated book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, which claimed that one-third to one-half of professional women were childless at 40 and for most of them this was not the way they had wanted their lives to be.
An associated sign of 21st-century domestic yearning was the phenomenal success in 2000 of an apparently boring 884-page guide to housework, Home Comforts: the Art and Science of Keeping House. There had been indications women were backing away from gender-war feminism as early as 1995 when The Rules, a handbook of retrogressive dating advice, became a runaway international bestseller, aimed at armies of women who couldn't get a decent date. But The Rules was nothing to 2001's The Surrendered Wife, in which the author, Laura Doyle, instructed women to be submissive, allow their husbands to control the finances, and talk less. In 2002 Professor James Tooley, of Britain's University of Newcastle, claimed in his book The Miseducation of Women that women would be much happier if they focused on home and family.
These books pushed beyond the acceptable extremes of the feminist backlash by attempting to force women into passive roles. But they spoke in some way to a generation that was the product of broken families and baby-boomer selfishness, the daughters of mothers who cracked under the pressure of being super-women and of fathers unshackled from their traditional responsibilities.
New feminists didn't want to be surrendered wives obeying a new set of rules, but neither did they want their lives dominated by an ideology that demanded they suppress their maternal desires and demonise the nuclear family.
Last year The New York Times Magazine ran "The Opt-Out Revolution", a hotly discussed article about the surge of high-powered, highly educated, accomplished women who were opting to stay home and raise their kids, working, if they did at all, part-time. Books such as this year's Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life, by Daphne de Marneffe, rejected the notion that women had to separate themselves from their children in order to be fulfilled.
New Domesticity has become a boom business, with housekeeping books selling by the truckload, along with cookbooks, parenting manuals and a resurgence of home baking. Fashion went feminine and floaty and the mood became - shock, horror - family-values conservative.
Hence the inevitable backlash, as epitomised by the new Stepford Wives film. But, like the attempted irony in the film's opening images of the retro, cliched 1950s housewives drooling over new kitchen appliances, it backfires. New feminists don't have to drool over their babies and their appliances.
They don't have to wear the flirty feminine Stepford-esque fashions in the shops this summer, if they don't suit them. They don't have to give birth, or get married. They don't have to be CEOs or run their own successful businesses.
The secret of the new feminism is that, thanks to the sacrifices as well as the mistakes of their feminist forebears, women have the freedom to make the choice that suits them best.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
Ira Levin's story should be rewritten to include the interesting question--What do men want? The cliche is the submissive housewife, but I see younger men who want a hot sporty playmate who earns a big paycheck of her own. Does the typical young man really want kids and a perfect home? Or does he want a fishing boat that she pays for and someone to watch the game with him--and who'll fetch the beer obligingly?
And don't ignore the fact that the young man wants more than one "robot" in his harem.
The movie is based on a false assumption. The new man doesn't want to be the breadwinner and doesn't care much about a home-cooked meal--and I don't think he wants kids, either.
As a former Connecticut (Republican!!!!) wife, I'm offended even by the depictions of this movie I've seen in the media so far. Totally UGH.....
Sorry Nicole, I don't give a rat's if you're a countrywoman of mine and all, this is one movie I'll wait the three or four years for until it gets to network TV.
FMCDH(BITS)
Besides, why on earth would you set a movie which "tries to pillory conservatives" in the "LiberalHell" (hi Chris, wherever you are!) of Connecticut? TALK ABOUT LLLLL-LLLAME....
Then the "new man" is an idoit who won't last long.
Clearly the movie needed more cowbell.
He DID have a fever, and there WAS only one cure...
C'mon babe! I...got to make the dough! I know...it's not exactly "Biloxi Blues", but still. I gotta' make the dough!
Seriously, I can't think of any possible reason that someone would feel compelled to pony up over ten bucks of their hard-earned cash to see this piffle, which is essentially an awful remake of an already eminently forgettable film.
And because of that it won't work. I read the book when it was first published, and enjoyed it as good fiction. I think most women who are intelligent will do the same with the movie.
Hollywood is scum. Now Nicole is working in a movie where she has a romantic encounter with a 10 year old boy in the shower. She believes he is her late husband, who has been reincarnated.
She should have stopped with "The Others". At least in that movie she murdered her two children, instead of molesting them.
This turkey will be a bomb at the box office. Hollyweird still doesn't get it.
Pffft! That lady was a piker! I mean: why didn't she just strap them into their car seats so that they couldn't escape, send the auto careening into a river, and then blame it on a perfectly innocent black man? Oh yeah! And then become a "born again" Christian?(!)
My reaction to Kidman: !!!!! 8-[]
"Then the "new man" is an idoit who won't last long."
_______________________________________________________
Yep.
He's a lazy, stoolbrained illiterate raised on MTV. His parents (more likely one parent) made their own happiness a priority and have no concept of sacrifice.
Apparently, philandering Democratic tri-sexual beauticians who live in the hood are gonna looove this movie.
OH NO! A MINUS SIGN AND AN EMPTY SET OF BRACKETS! AAAAAHHHHHH! WHAT AM I EVER TO DO NOW?(!)
The last one is targeted at Andrew Sullivan. Must be checking his haircut today. LOL!
But "attractive women" and "blondes." Thems is fightin' words!
Call out the artillery folks!
By the way, where's F 14 Pilot?
Shouldn't you guys be backing each other up?
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