Brett's Stepford Wives Notes

Stepford Wives (1975)

Background

Based on a novel by the suss Ira Levin, who also wrote Rosemary’s Baby. Levin penned a dystopian novel called Perfect Day, about a global society run by a supercomputer and managed by a technocratic class of administrators. All biological processes are subject to technological control, and people are kept in line, inter alia, by drugs and a pseudo-religion that collapses Christianity into Marxism and technology worship. The “two pillars of the official state ideology are depicted on its coat of arms, with a cross and sickle.”

Almost all of his novels adapted into films.

Imdb:

Critics speculated at the time of its publication that 'The Stepford Wives' was inspired by an older short story by Ray Bradbury, entitled "Marionettes Inc". The story is about a man who rents life size robotically powered marionette duplicates of both him and his wife, in order to solve his marital problems. Eventually the marionettes destroy their masters and wind up replacing them, much as the Stepford Wives did.

It may have also been partially inspired by account in Frazer’s The Golden Bough about the men’s societies in primitive/horticulturalist societies in South America, Australia, and elsewhere that use sacralized chicanery to awe the women and prevent them from organizing and tapping into their spiritual power and using it against the men.

Director Bryan Forbes is major suss. One of the acknowledged architects of the post-WW2 British film industry, “He completed four years of military service in the Intelligence Corps and Combined Forces Entertainment Unit.” This is where he met future James Bond actor Roger Moore in Germany in 1947. Forbes was later himself offered to direct Dr. No (with Sean Connery as Bond) by his friend Albert “Cubbie” Broccoli, the mob-connected producer of the Bond series which was made partially through subsidies from the British government. “He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for his services to the Arts in the 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours List.” His very last directorial credits, in 1989, are for a British miniseries on MI6. He made some Tory party propaganda at one point.

William Goldman, who adapted the screenplay, was one of the most celebrated screenwriters of the era, winning multiple Academy Awards. He wrote All the President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Goldman interviewed Betty Friedan and other feminists while writing the screenplay.

Brian De Palmawas originally slated to direct this film but was scratched because William Goldman objected.

The mansion that houses the Men’s Association is the Lockwood-Mathews mansion in Norwalk, Connecticut. In the film, it is said to be built by a “railroad tycoon.” This is true to life, as the mansion was built for LeGrand Lockwood, a Gilded Age banking and railroad tycoon.

Femininistsploitation

Everyone associated with the film insists that it’s pro-feminist, notwithstanding contemporary feminist complaints (more under Psychological Interpretation).

Almost a template for red-pill programming: the “powerful” traditionalists don’t want you to experience the liberation of single life and sexual license. Marko is the “liberated, free-spirited” woman whose Achille’s heel turns out to be that she’s married (her husband replaces her with a Stepford bot).

Joanna has given up or put on hold her dream of being a photographer in the big city for her husband’s pseudo-idyllic traditionalist fantasy which is really a sublimation of or cover for his desire to dominate and control his wife.

The plot conceit is obviously comparable to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but weaponized here to make people fear traditionalism instead of posthuman collectivism. Very much inversion and gaslighting.

Inverting the “moral panic” over the sexual revolution

“Daddy, I just saw a man carrying a naked lady,” the little girl says to the dad. “That’s why we’re moving to Stepford.” So here we have an apparently parodic response to the visible post-60s decadence and associated urban blight, as if trying to escape from this tends toward dehumanization and mind control through pseudo-idyllic neo-traditionalism. It is obvious, applying Psyop Cinema hermeneutics, that this is a deliberate inversion of the fact that the sexual revolution was a psyop actively demoralizing society and associated with and employing forms of mind control.

The most evil messaging of the film is implicit in Joanna’s decision, in the climactic scenes, to go back home to retrieve her kids, rather than hiding out for a few days as the female psychiatrist recommended. If not for her primitive attachment to the children she was forced to have, she would have retained her humanity. The message is “Don’t let them trap you by making you have kids and saddling you with a brood of rugrats from which you’ll never escape, never be yourself, never live up to your potential…you’ll be no better than a robot, a mind control slave, a ‘Stepford Wife.’” So pro-abortion, anti-natalist, pro-child abandonment.

Hypnotic mind control and initiation

In the opening scene in Manhattan, the face of the mannequin being transported is covered.

The leader of the Men’s Association, the cult, is nicknamed “Dis” because “he used to work at Disneyland.”[1]Joanna tells the female psychologist later that she fears the women will all become “like robots in Disneyland.” That Disneyland is more than an amusement park and, by extension, that the Invasion of the Body Snatcher robot-wife program is more than a wish fulfillment fantasy for “traditionalist” men is indicated by a line from Dis in the final scene, when he tells Joanna, “You were a very good subject, brighter than most.” It was an experiment for him. What is the experiment? What does he hope to learn?

In the scene where Dis is introduced, when several men from the Association come to Joanna and Walter’s house, it appears that she’s being hypnotized or brainwashed, perhaps the initial, “alpha” programming. The scene is very reminiscent of the one in The Manchurian Candidate where the soldiers are being brainwashed in front of a group of Communist officials while they think they’re sitting in on a women’s garden party. Remember too that Walter says “nothing happened” at his initiation (which was perhaps a lie but perhaps also he was programmed to forget).

Given these indications of initiatory mind control and that the final “transformation” doesn’t occur until the end of the film, perhaps this first scene with Dis is alpha programming. He sketches her during this scene (presumably to model her replacement) and the sketch appears in one shot to be a repeating image of a fragment of her face, a telltale signifier of dissociation.

This film makes a deliberate connection between macro and micro mind control: the Stepford wives are programmed by the advertising industry and they imitate the socially hygienic female consumers from the TV ads as they push the products themselves. Advertising is still primarily directed at women, and daytime TV advertising was almost exclusively directed at them.

The men are evidently programmed in some way as well as part of their initiation. This is indicated, among other ways, by the wooden puppet representing Walter that is installed in the couple’s living room and which parallels the female mannequin seen at the beginning of the movie and on the cover poster (the latter is a porcelain figure that is partly shattered, symbolizing dissociation). Note that the figure of the puppet links the robot and mind control tropes, since puppets are used to symbolize both (think Spielberg’s use of Pinocchio for AI).

More Monarch references, from imdb: “When Joanna goes to the city to show her photos at a gallery, the large black and white photo in the gallery window is of Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland.”

A scene toward the end underscores the role of gaslighting in mind control, when Walter tries to make Joanna feel crazy for wanting to leave Stepford “just because” all the women are perfect wives.

Is Joanna hypnotized by the female psychiatrist as well before she reveals her true suspicions? That long silent moment feels a lot like the apparent hypnotism in the first scene with Dis.

“King’s Highway Pharmacy.” This feels like initiatory language.

Robot-Marko does not know the word “archaic,” although human-Marko was lively and intelligent. Cf. Bambi Sleep-style hypno porn that lowers the IQ.

In the scene where the redheaded woman is revealed as brainwashed/replaced, there appears  to be a work of abstract art possibly depicting a masquerade mask with one eye.

Psychological interpretation

Many feminists claimed (and claim?) not to care for this film. A lot of this sentiment is the same sort of narcissistic ideological fastidiousness that led certain far right German thinkers (like Oswald Spengler) to be dissatisfied with Hitler.

But another reason may be that they were unconsciously triggered by the collective psychological implication of the film, namely, that all the newly “liberated” women in post-60s America are repressing a desire to return to a traditional female role.[2] The principle of psychic compensation, which Jung calls enantiodromia, explain why this repressed desire comes back in such an exaggerated and frightening form, represented above all in the final doppelganger confrontation where Joanna is killed by her “shadow,” signifying (again, in Jungian terms) the autonomy of the shadow, its swallowing of the personality. In short, the film plays on deep-seated fears and repressed desires that feminists especially in this newly liberated period surely harbored—and many didn’t like the experience.

In the remake, the psychological messaging, both intended and unconscious, is directed toward the Men’s Association and its leader to a much greater degree than in the original. The leader, played by Christopher Walken, turns out to be a robot designed by his “wife.” Before the big reveal, and after the brain chips have been deactivated and all the wives are in high dudgeon against the men, he declares, “While you were pretending to be men, we were becoming gods.” This applies, not to men in general circa 2004, but to the Hollywood superclass whose psycho-spiritual pathologies comprise our culture—to the “men who would be kings.” And, as Horsley so astutely discerns, “the men who would be kings are men who turn themselves into women” (16 Maps of Hell, 441), not because they want to be females but because they want total possession of the female body to the extent that women are superfluous:

The creation of a surrogate reality to escape into and rule over, a matrix-womb that is a simulation of the lost maternal body, is achieved through the meticulous and painstaking assemblage of a mosaic of eidetic memory images, a celluloid (and cellular?) panopticon made up of copies of reality. A matrix.

Odds and Ends

As she tries to escape the mansion, Joanna discovers what appears to be a religious statue, a female figure with a wreath on her head (I believe).

[1]Joanna says she doesn’t believe him, which can be read subtextually as public disbelief that Disney could be involved in social engineering and mind control.

[2]Note that, in the 2004 remake, the real architect of the Stepford project is Glen Close, an engineering genius with “top secret contracts” for deep state agencies and big tech (which we now know are all on the same team).