BEFORE: So far this alternating plan is working out, watching a movie every other day instead of every day - I'm still making progress, just not as quickly, and I think I can stretch out my chain until the end of November before I have to stop until Christmastime.
Nicole Kidman carries over from "Queen of the Desert", and I'm still not done with her chain - one more film tomorrow.
THE PLOT: The secret of a Stepford wife, how women become different and immobilized robots, lies behind the doors of the Men's Association.
AFTER: Looking back through the last few Nicole Kidman movies is very telling - much like Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, they can be separated into two types of films, ones where the lead female characters are strong, decisive and accomplish great things, and then ones where they are in trouble, threatened by men or by forces outside of their control. And that seems to be the underlying fear for the modern woman, fear of not being successful, fear of not being in control, fear of being dominated by men. (I realize that just viewing a small subset of Nicole Kidman movies is not an accurate system for a commentary on an entire gender, but work with me here for just a minute.)
Gertrude Bell is deemed a successful character because she achieves on her own, she goes into the desert and DOES stuff (umm, with the help of male servants...) but without the need for a relationship with a man dragging her down. In "Dead Calm" Rae is a less successful character, because she's not only grieving due to the loss of her son, but she's tortured and manipulated by a man, and has to work hard to accomplish, and find her husband again. In "Ghost Story" Kidman played a mother who tries hard to protect her children, but unknown forces seem to be haunting the house, and prevent her from taking care of them the way she wants to. And then in "Before I Go to Sleep", there's that dreaded loss of control again, as her character is easily manipulated by men who take advantage of her unlikely (and unbelievable) medical condition.
So there's a loose theme here, and it's amped up tenfold in "The Stepford Wives" as she plays a disgraced TV executive who's brought down by a man who appeared on one of her reality shows and lost his wife to the affections of other men on the show. This man went nuts and shot a bunch of people after appearing on the show, so that's the end of her career, since as we all know, the president of the network is ultimately responsible for everything that happens on every show. (Umm, no.) So the only thing for her to do is to move away with her husband (who had a VP role at the same network, I'm not sure how that worked, like who took care of their kids?) to the town of Stepford, CT, to find herself again without the stresses of her former high-profile executive job.
But to really analyze this film, where it's coming from and what it's trying to say, I've got to travel back to a long-past time in history, back when a simple time gender politics were different, back before everything got changed around. Yes, I'm talking about 2004. That's pre-Weinstein, pre-Spacey, pre-Louis C.K., and it might even be pre-Cosby. George W. Bush ran for re-election against the old upstart John Kerry, Jude Law was People's Sexiest Man Alive, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were still together, and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were breaking up. On TV we said goodbye to "Friends" and hello to "Desperate Housewives". And in the middle of all of this, someone thought it would be a good idea to re-make a film from the 1970's that depicted a bunch of suburban women as robotic, mindless sexpots who all cooked, cleaned and served their husbands without complaints, only they'd put a modern spin on it, turn the tables just a bit.
And hey, we'll add a gay couple into the mix, because it's 2004 and there aren't enough depictions of gay people in pop culture yet, so by being more inclusive and diverse we're really going to show how liberal and accepting we are. Only this, more than anything, was really two steps forward and one step back, and I think like many things in this film, it was a huge misstep. Because to depict a gay couple in the framework of this suburban farce, then one of the men has to be overly flamboyant, obsessed with fashion and way over-the-top, and I don't think this really helped. Also, that meant they had to fall back on the butch/femme stereotype, where one of the men is essentially the "wife" in the couple, and I've been told that this is a fallacy. Why can't they just be two husbands together, why does one have to be dominant and the other submissive? And why does one have to be flamingly gay and the other one could pass for straight? Fiction's depiction of two gay men is probably a projection of the whole bottom/top thing, and I just don't think the personalities involved are necessarily that clear cut, and what we get as a result is a straight writer's imagining of what a gay couple is, rather than a depiction based on a real dynamic.
But let me put that on hold for a second and get back to the straight couples seen here. The men are all slobbish, nerdy, losers who are tired of playing second fiddle to their more successful wives, who were all executives, judges, or sports stars who were more successful than them, earned more than them, and so somehow the men moved to this town (after the women were burned out and tired from "having it all") and chose to subject their wives to some treatment that would subvert their personalities in favor of this "happy homemaker/fembot" overlay. And that sound you hear is the women's movement being rolled back toward the 1950's mentality, that didn't work back than, and shouldn't be expected to work again. Whereas it would have been easier for all of these men to go to therapy and learn to deal with their inferiority issues, or at least learn how to accept their wives as successful, instead a costly, experimental medical procedure that would implant mind control chips was seen as the preferred course of action. Forget how illegal this would be, or how immoral to completely remove all consent from a woman for not only a medical procedure, but also the change to her personality, it's just abominable.
Of course, there is the possibility that nothing here is meant to be taken seriously, once a writer creates an implausible or impossible situation, why not go all the way with it, and have the most outrageous things depicted, like a woman being able to spit $20 bills out of her mouth like an ATM, when it would be so much easier for a man to just carry a wallet around? And thus we see that the movie bent over backwards to "solve" problems that weren't even problems to begin with. But again, it's a nonsensical farce, though it would have been easier to swallow if it just stuck a little bit closer to reality, then it might have hit home more effectively. As it is, we're not sure if the women are being transformed, or killed and replaced with controllable clones, or killed and replaced with robots, or what. We're only told that this "process" happens, and suddenly they're happier, healthier and more controllable, and they only lose all of their free will with regards to the relationship. And I'm still waiting for some indication that this was a good basis for a comedy.
Maybe it's just that I'm looking at this 2004 comedy post-MeToo and post-TimesUp, but how exactly is this situation any different from a man drugging a woman to have sex with her? It's the whole town here that took away their women's (and one gay man's) right to say no, and yet someone thought this could be seen as funny? I'm sorry, but that's a comedy fail. Even if it was done to make a larger point, and I'm still not clear on what exactly that point was, this is now a taboo thing to make fun of. The film tried to turn everything on its ear and almost succeeded in doing so, but then it completely tanked it in the end - and the final explanation of who was really behind everything, who set up this town this way and why, well, that made no sense at all. You can't just change everything in the last few minutes and hope that makes up for the sins of the previous 85 minutes of movie.
I'm too tired to even try to tie this one to the election somehow, because I could very easily point out that America still seems to be supporting Trump and his political allies, despite the fact that we're all aware of his long history of degrading women, treating some them as sexual objects, and then ridiculing the appearances of the others. Watch any press conference he holds and you'll notice that he hardly ever calls on female reporters, and then when he eventually does (I'm assuming only at the point where he's answered all the men's questions) he can't stop from interrupting them when they ask a question. This is how bias is allowed to continue, when an obvious sexist is still elected to power and his behavior is not kept in check in any way. We need more women in power, not just for the reasons of equality but because having too many men in power brought us to where we are now, and things aren't looking so great.
Because seriously, is this really the stuff we should be concerned with, men, that our wives are more successful than us? We've only got like 20 years left before half of our coastline is under water, and we're fretting over who in the couple makes more money? Can we prioritize a bit, please, because if we don't start worrying about the right problems, it's game over for everyone. Look, my wife makes more money than I do, but I don't care. I work in the independent film game, and she doesn't, so in a way it's to be expected. I'd have to go into another line of work if I wanted to be the breadwinner - our jobs are equally as stressful, but it's possible that I enjoy mine more, I have more fun, so like anything else, it's a trade-off. Maybe I don't really want to work that hard or struggle more to get ahead. Maybe I just enjoy her picking up the check more often at restaurants, I don't have such an outdated fragile ego that I let that get to me. Besides, anyone with a two-income family shouldn't stress over these things, when there are so many other couples with only one or even zero incomes. Rich people and their problems, am I right?
I think I'm forced now to review my opinion of the film "Get Out", which I watched earlier this year. Because this film came first, and now "Get Out" just seems like a rip-off of this concept, only with racism instead of sexism.
One last thought, this film cast Mike White as a contestant on a reality show, set on a tropical island - and he's on the season of "Survivor" that's airing right now, so a little bit of art imitating life?
Also starring Matthew Broderick (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Bette Midler (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Christopher Walken (last heard in "The Jungle Book"), Glenn Close (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Roger Bart (last seen in "Trumbo"), Faith Hill, Jon Lovitz (last seen in "Matilda"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Loving"), David Marshall Grant (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Kate Shindle (last seen in "Capote"), Tom Riis Farrell, Lorri Bagley (last seen in "The Crew"), Robert Stanton (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Mike White (last seen in "Orange County"), KaDee Strickland (last seen in "Something's Gotta Give"), Lisa Masters, Christopher Evan Welch (last seen in "The Hoax"), Colleen Dunn, Jason Kravits, Dylan Hartigan, Fallon Brooking, Carrie Preston, with cameos from Larry King (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Meredith Vieira, Billy Bush (last heard in "Big Hero 6")
RATING: 3 out of 10 square dances (that should really be a NITPICK POINT, I don't think anyone has done a square dance anywhere in Connecticut in the last 100 years, at least...)
No comments:
Post a Comment