September 4, 2004
Because I was bored (and feeling heavily masochistic) I recently downloaded a pirated copy of the move "The Stepford Wives". Ugh.
I knew it was going to be bad... but dear GOD, I didn't think it would be that bad.
The original story (by Ira Levin) is suspense fiction which goes into a bit of social satire. The original Stepford was a pleasant middle-class suburb whose men, threatened by the mild feminism of their wives, killed them and replaced them with robots. But the present iteration is a farcical comedy.
The film starts-out with our heroine, a tv network vice-president, unleashing her new lineup of shows: all of which are reality-style TV game shows which seem somewhat rigged for the female contestants to get one over on their doofus husbands and prove (once again) how infinitely superior women are to men, and how little they need them.
But after our heroine suffers a nervous breakdown, her well-meaning husband takes her to a suburb where everything seems just about perfect... a little TOO perfect. She befriends the other two outcasts of the town (a loudmouthed female author and a mincing, foppish gay stereotype) and they spend much of the movie making snarky quips about the other women in town while congratulating themselves for being so 'with it'. (H'yuk! H'yuk! H'yuk!)
Yes, our heroine can't seem to accept the idea that when the little lady stays at home, it isn't necessarily an example of sinister male domination. I can see why our heroine would find the Stepford wives to be so objectionable: hot-tempered crabbiness means nothing to them!
Meanwhile, her husband spends much of his time funning it up at the town's Men's Association where the beer, ESPN and video games are always on tap. (Yes, all men spend their daytime hours doing that. Didn't you know?)
To make a long story short, it turns-out that the flesh & blood women win at the end. We all learn the story's moral: that flesh and blood non-robotic women are far, far superior to the artificial kind. What with their bitterness and their nagging and their slovenliness and their loud mouths and the infinite, saintly patience they have for their sexist, dweeby, oppressive husbands who (as you probably wouldn't expect) get their come-uppances at the end. Now there's a shocker. Naturally, you can't possibly make a movie about sexual politics where the oppressed little darlings don't win in the end-- that would be insane!
The major difference between the original story and the remake is that mild feminism was the original animus behind robotizing the women. In the remake, it's because the husbands simply can't tolerate not being on top and all the women are simply too brilliant and high-flying for their wussy and ineffectual husbands. So men have to oppress somebody out of sheer spite. (And even though the movie's husbands are clearly not good, they didn't really seem evil either. Dorky, yes. But it was hard to really hate them.) What irritated me so much was the tired old subtext that men see no value in high-achieving women owing to their outdated and sexist expectations of what women should be like. More likely is that women see no value in non-high-achieving men owing to their outdated and sexist expectations of what men should be like. (Try to find that idea articulated by any movie.)
It'll just be a matter of time before this movie hits Japan (and I'll be feeling incredibly embarrassed when it does) and I can't help but wonder how the audiences will react?
Well, I don't think the movie will go-over very well. Why? For three reasons.
First of all, the movie is not especially funny.
Second, gaijin humor doesn't always carry-over very well. For instance, many Japanese really didn't think the Austin Powers movies were funny (well, I have to agree that the last two certainly weren't). And when Monty Python vids were first introduced to Japan, there had to be little brief explanations displayed on the side of the screen (ie: through song, the lumberjack starts to reveal that he is a homosexual.) There are a few jokes in Stepford Wives about things like gay Republicans and Hanukkah. I guarantee that these jokes will not be understood.
Third, much of the 'humor' in Stepford Wives comes from a number of assumptions about the relations between men and women and these assumptions may or may not exist in the same form here. One of the assumptions is that women have traditionally been oppressed by their husbands. Another assumption is that voluntarily being a housewife is shameful, pathetic or laughable and that no real woman would voluntarily do such a thing.
Many Japanese women (in fact, many young Japanese women) don't think that being a housewife is shameful, pathetic or a position of powerlessness. Many of them actually seem to want that kind of life. The film's heroine, who represents something like the American ideal of how women ought to be, will probably come off as shrill, condescending and miserable to live with.
We'll see what happens. My guess is that the movie won't last for more than a week or two at the cinema.
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