The Furious Spinner

After a couple of days of being sick with vertigo, I got into a car and drove to Portland. Luckily the road didn't spin too much. No, really. It was safe; I only took up two lanes. Beware! Movie ending spoiler within.

I saw the original Stepford Wives with my friend Sue in 1975. This was a few months before the Fall of Saigon. The country had recently experienced gas lines, inflation, and Watergate. Nixon had resigned, and Gerald Ford was president. Ms. Magazine was a only a few years old, and a woman’s right to have a legal abortion was even younger. I was still a teenager, just shy of my twentieth birthday.

After the movie, Sue and I decided we needed a drink. I don't think in my life up to then I had ever thought I needed a drink. But I was in shock. We shook our heads in disgust as we drank our beers. I said, “That’s what men want? Katherine Ross with bigger breasts and without a mind of her own?”

I got the Katherine Ross part. She was beautiful. Tall and thin. I’d grown up when Twiggy was the biggest thing around, and girls were just discovering anorexia. I had even gone through a short spell of anorexia bulimia myself when I was fourteen and starting high school—before the media and most doctors had heard of it. I knew what every girl knew: I could only survive
high school if I was popular and joined the right group, and that could only happen if I was skinny.

Fortunately, my brain was developing along with my body, and I decided I didn’t want to be perfect. People were going to have to love me as I was. I mean, come on, it was the end of the 60’s, going into the 70’s: peace and love, tie-dyed clothes, and really bad haircuts. We had school sit-ins to get the administration to change the dress code, and they did change it. I was allowed to wear slacks to school; boys could let their hair grow. At college campuses all over the country, students protested the war. More important things were going on than how I looked.

I was no cookie-cutter Stepford teenager, but I was on the student council, and my boyfriend was the captain of the football team. I was involved with all those school things. At football games, I sat serenely in the stands watching my man play. People congratulated me when the team won. I could see my life spinning out before me. I would marry my high school sweetheart. We would stay in this town forever. I would never travel. I would never know the world. I would suffocate, surely.

So in the fall of 1973, after graduating as one of the best and the brightest from my high school, I shocked my family and friends when I quit college after three days, started working the midnight shift at a local restaurant, broke up with my boyfriend, left home, and became homeless for several weeks before I moved in with a young man I had just met. I left him after several months of learning how the other half lived, started college at my father’s alma mater studying journalism and literature, and moved home for a few months while I saved some money for my own place. This was about the time I saw the Stepford Wives.

Although I was now a rebel without a bra, I imagined I would one day find a fella who would love and cherish me. After seeing this movie, I wondered if one of these fellas might want to kill me. It was clear in the movie that the men killed their wives and substituted them with perfect robot replicas. I might have been cute, I might have had the requisite breasts, but I was never going to keep my mouth shut, do as I was told, and cook and clean for my man. Did that mean I was going to end up all alone? This was a burning question for a twenty year old. Besides that, I didn’t understand the logic of the movie: it wouldn’t occur to me to want a man to act a particular way or else I’d have him changed into a robot.

Yes, I understood it was only a movie, but it highlighted my own fears (and the fears of other young women I knew): if I got married I could turn into a Stepford Wife without even knowing it. I had watched bright and intelligent women friends marry and lose all ambition, all desire to do anything besides cook, clean, and take care of their man. I decided I was never going to get married.

Well, I did get married, to someone who didn't expect or get perfection. I didn’t lose my ambition or my creativity, and I’ve never had an unnatural desire to cook and clean. But over the years, I’ve watched most of my friends struggle to have their own careers and their own ambitions while still doing nearly all the domestic chores and child care. I recently wrote to my friend, Sue, who saw the movie with me all those years ago to see if she remembered. She said she thought men still wanted women to be robots. And she was tired of trying to keep up and doing everything.

I rented a copy of the original movie last night, to see what I thought of it now. The Katharine Ross character seemed almost infantile. But the movie was still horrifying. (It also appeared to be a city person’s articulation of his/her fear of the country life. I’ve lived in cities, and I’ve lived in small towns. They both have their Stepford qualities.)

This morning I drove to the city to watch the remake. I thought about the times we live in now. We’re in the midst of a war. Gas prices are spiking. Unemployment is high. No one trusts the government after too many lies and scandals. Men and women are still struggling with their roles in relationships. The world feels fragile and on fire—not too different from 30 years ago. Only now we have personal computers. Email. Cell phones. Etc.

The remake is funnier than the original, but it appeared that they couldn't decide if the movie was satire, horror, or straight comedy. Whoever wrote it apparently didn’t understand the genre and/or has never read a science fiction book in his life. In the movie, Nicole Kidman sees her “robot” self, but then Christopher Walken explains that the women aren’t killed, they are reprogrammed—and later, Matthew Broderick “deprograms” the women so that they’re all normal again. So what was with the robots?

This time when I left the theater, I wasn’t horrified, terrified, or in need of a drink. I was a bit confused by the glitches in the story—i.e. the robot stuff, etc.In the original film, the men were clearly the villains, the women the victims. This time, the women had more power. The men weren’t villains—more like hapless dweebs and nerds who wanted super models as wives. The men weren’t murdering their wives. Women weren’t murdering their husbands either (with one exception).

I got a kick out of Glenn Close being the power behind everything. Even though having her essentially go insane because her husband cheated on her seems a bit dated. Nicoles Kidman's character bounced all around, coming off as shrill and bossy one minute, loving and vulnerable the next. Of course, real people do have those kinds of minutes. The main difference between the movies was that in the 2004 version, it was taken for granted that women are powerful, and men who can't handle that power are infantile and—eventually—powerless. That seems like a step forward.

Now, I've really got to go and clean something.

0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.