Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) is a movie that is fated to be remade every couple of decades or so, though the original still resonates more than its successors as a clear-eyed and totally earnest horror film about heterosexual domestic servitude. Perhaps this is because it’s not saddled by any post-feminist baggage. It is unabashedly second wave, for better or worse. Made shortly before the rise of Reaganism in the United States, The Stepford Wives explores the masculine response to women’s liberation: a desire to contain the threat by keeping women at home. The film explores these fears via the science-fiction trope of the fembot and the Stepford Wives are maybe the most famous cinematic examples of embodied artificial intelligence since Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
The plot of The Stepford Wives is one that most people know, not necessarily because they’ve seen the film, but because they understand the titular trope. In the film, Joanna (Katharine Ross) and Walter (Peter Masterson) leave their life of relative spousal equality in New York City for the suburbs of Connecticut.Joanna soon comes to suspect that the male community leaders are turning all of the wives into mindless sex and housework robots. She finds solace in Bobbi (Paula Prentiss), another recent arrival to Stepford, but even Bobbi is replaced by an unheimlich cyborg replica. In the iconic last scene of the film, a newly Stepford-ified Joanna serenely pushes her cart through a grocery store, but when the camera closes in on her eyes the audience is left wondering if she is only pretending to assimilate to save herself from her friend’s fate.
The technology of The Stepford Wives is clearly influenced by Disney and its lifelike animatronics; Stepford President Dale “Diz” Coba (Patrick O’Neal) is a former Disney executive who uses his industry knowledge to build the perfect woman for Stepford’s husbands. Given Walt Disney’s propensity for proposing various “cities of the future,” The Stepford Wives is as critical of capitalism as it is of misogyny. The last scene positions the grocery store as a liminal space. Joanna’s impassioned arguments to Walter, Bobbi, and her therapist are particularly potent set against a town that looks like the backdrop for a mid-century family-friendly television show. She is the only one who demonstrates any sort of emotional irregularity, because when a Stepford wife “malfunctions” she is taken away for an oil change.
But the most horrific feature of The Stepford Wives is the men’s association, which bears an eerie resemblance to the men’s rights movement of today, particularly the online groups of young men who identify as incels. Unlike the wives of Stepford who perform perfect Western femininity, the men are just run-of-the-mill. They are not expected to conform to a standard masculine physique, and they are not especially threatening or powerful. Their power lies in the technological innovations they wield to subjugate their wives; without it, they wouldn’t be such formidable villains.
While watching The Stepford Wives I could not resist drawing comparisons to the modern iteration of the phrase: trad wives, women who revel in traditional gender roles and move to rural locations to homestead, all while documenting the entire thing on social media, of course. One of the most poignant things about the film is how the women of Stepford convince themselves that their subjugation has made them happier. Indeed, Bobbi remarks, “Maybe we’re the crazy ones!” But if The Stepford Wives as a second wave feminist text can teach us anything, it’s that we are never truly post-feminism. Whether it’s AI-chatbots or sex doll girlfriends, the fembot doesn’t die out, we just reinvent it.
The Stepford Wives screens tomorrow evening, January 17, and January 18, at Film Forum on 35mm as part of the series “AI: From Metropolis to Ex Machina.”
