Perfection is Misleading

I read The Stepford Wives in about one and a half sittings.  It's short.  I didn't mean to do it; it just kind of happened.

I am ashamed to say that I took no notes.  I was too absorbed from the get-go to grab my post-its and pen.  And really, it seemed that what you see (or don't see), that what you sense, is what you get in this case.

I watched the 2004 film several years ago, surprisingly.  I am not one to read or watch anything remotely creepy because I tend to have fearsomely vivid nightmares.  However, I'd hate to label this story as horror.  How would you classify it?  Anyway, I saw the 2004 film starring Nicole Kidman as Joanna and Bette Midler as Bobbie.  And you know what?  I don't remember it.  Sure, I remembered the premise of the story, with the new town and the creepily idyllic housewives and the men running the show.  But did I remember that from the film or from the fact that "Stepford" and "Stepford Wife" have become pop culture terms for towns of conformational, picturesque beauty and uncommonly beautiful wives who whole-heartedly submit to their husbands and spend their time scrubbing the floors wearing high heels and bland smiles?  I can't say for sure.  But after reading a book, I sometimes enjoy watching the movie(s) and verbally tearing them to shreds or nodding along to some of the director's better in-tuned decisions.  This time I remembered that I didn't wish to watch anything scary, especially when my husband was away, and so I Googled it first.

It sounds absolutely off the wall and hardly anything like the book.  Characters were added, characters were subtracted or changed, and I do not know who, but someone is played by Faith Hill.  Probably not worth a second watch.  Rotten Tomatoes says: "In exchanging the chilling satire of the original into mindless camp, this remake has itself become Stepford-ized."  It received a score of 26% on the Tomatometer.

I haven't seen the 1975 film.  It sounds like it follows the story better.

SPOILER: SPOILER: SPOILER::::: DO NOT CONTINUE READING IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK AND PLAN TO!

As I've stated, I didn't take notes as I went.  But I also knew (at least vaguely) what was going to happen as far as the wives in the town not being human.  The shock of the book wasn't a shock to me.  I kind of hope that it was for you because Bobbie's suspicion of some kind of chemical or something being the source of the changes in the women was a good little red herring consideration. 

I appreciated Levin's way of normalizing Joanna.  I mean, she was normal from the beginning, explaining her family's jobs, likes, and dislikes to the welcome wagon lady.  She had normal woman problems, like her relative (was it her mother or her husband's mother) who made the comment that she could take a leaf out of one of Stepford's wives' book and get all fancied up and clean.  She did normal things, like care for her sick kids or write Christmas cards.  It was quite an artful contrast to the single minded ladies else ware in the town. 

And really, the four month timetable worked very well when Joanna finally got it.  Between her family's move to Stepford September 4th and her catching on to the four months it took for women to change, she had a very short window of time to get out of Stepford.  What a nightmare.  Here's how I picture the wives of Stepford (just in the first part of the clip, but I couldn't find a shortened version with just the commercializing):

Bunch of fakes.  But they can't really help it.  Why?

Isn't it chilling to think about a society in which men would betray, murder, and completely redo their wives for their own pleasures?  Design a woman with bigger boobs, a perkier butt, no cellulite, thick, soft hair, and feet that don't feel the pain of the leg toning stiletto heel.  She probably smells like cookies and sunshine. Design a woman with nothing to think about, nothing to distract her from her household duties of cleaning, childcare, and sex.  Design your dream woman and kill off your wife to be with her.  And, yeah.  She's a robot.  Who cares?

That's pretty freaky.  Author Ira Levin painted men to be pretty villainous, right?  Brilliantly wicked.  They even talked Joanna down when they found her attempting to escape.  "You must think we're a town full of geniuses... Believe me, we're not," they said.  And one of the biggest slaps of all to her intelligence was that once they led her to assume that she was nuts, they decided to "prove" to her that the women of the town were real flesh and blood women by taking her to see her best friend Bobbie and asking her to cut herself so Joanna could see the blood, only to have robo-Bobbie finish her off with her enormous knife.  FREAKY!

All right, maybe it is horror, but it's the kind of horror that is more, "Who can I trust?" than anything else.  It did not give me nightmares or leave me tense and sweating under my blankets begging for some rest.  Maybe it would have been different if I had not already at least kind of known what was coming.  Truthfully, the most intense part for me was not the realization, as she dug through the old newspaper articles for clarity, of the conspiracy.  It was the desperate flee she made in the snow.  It was thinking about the safety of her children (though it does not seem that the men harm the children, at least not in any way except to murder their mommies and replace them with over-the-top-perfect machine clones).  It was rooting for the hero who didn't make it. 

She didn't make it.  And that is creepy enough.  That means that this cycle of terror continues and continues and that the men's association's secret stays safe.  They get away with everything.  They're swine.  They're disgusting.

Tell me your thoughts on this book.  I have read lots of other reviews in which the writer said that she was sufficiently freaked out.  Had you seen the movies or known the big surprise before going in?  Did it make you look at your spouse (or yourself) in a new way? 

I'll tell you which dilemma it set for me.  I needed to do some household deep cleaning that day.  After my read-through of this little book, I felt torn between dressing up, putting on my frilly apron my mama made me two Christmases ago, and dusting, mopping, and folding endless laundry or locking myself in my room in flannel pajamas, eating mounds of chocolate, and avoiding housework like the plague.  I'd let you all guess which one I did, but you'd probably guess wrong!  :)

Did you know that Facebook lets you rate books you've read now?  They only give you 5 stars, though.  I like to do 10 because I may like the writing very well but not enjoy the story and then it seems kind of unfair to give the book a 2 or 3, you know?  So, I'll say that this book is about a 7 1/2 or 8 (just like my shoe size) in that I was instantly absorbed, I read until it stopped, and the writing was simple, but well done.  However, it is not a book that I picture myself reading over and over again.  What kind of rating would you do?

I had every intention of posting a picture of a friend of mine dressed as a Stepford Wife for Halloween several years ago, but I can't seem to find the picture I wanted.  And I don't know if she'd like me posting old photos on my blog anyway.  But hey!  Halloween is coming up and a Stepford Wife is a GREAT costume idea!

(Maybe wear a bit more clothing, though!) ;)

Don't forget that our upcoming read is going to be The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst.  I'm pretty sure I don't have any followers in the UK just yet, but just in case I do unbeknownst to me, it was published as Lorelei's Secret across the pond.  And no, we're not reading it just because a character (who is a dog) has a name similar to mine, but isn't that a nice touch?