Line #6 Fridge/TheStepfordWives


1	!!FridgeBrilliance:
2	* Charmaine is the first and only person who actually "changes" before Bobbie and Joanna's eyes. But Charmaine was already beautiful (she's compared to Creator/RaquelWelch, widely considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses in the world), so her robot version wouldn't need much alteration; it's her attitude that needed adjusting. If she had undergone a dramatic physical change as well as a personality swap, Joanna and Bobbie might have caught on to the robot angle sooner. [[spoiler:By the time Bobbie "changes" and the physical alterations are undeniable, Joanna is left alone to witness it and she's trapped.]] Charmaine ''had'' to be extraordinarily beautiful for plot reasons!
3	** The reason Joanna and Bobbie didn't balk at Charmaine's personality changing? They did speak of her as being a bit shallow (albeit to the level of someone who'd watch a marathon of Talk Shows and Reality TV rather than someone who is more invested in surface appearances with no character), has a ItsAllAboutMe view of life, and Joanna seemed to agree with Walter about how Ed needed to "lay down the law": as friendly as they are with Charmaine, they probably thought she needed to make more effort into her home and focus on subjects outside herself and her interests.
4	*** Though this one depends on whether you read the book or watch the film. In the book, Joanna and Bobbie are both deeply unnerved when Charmaine paves over her tennis court, as Ed had wanted her to do previously, but they don't have any physical evidence that it wasn't simply her choice (as she insists it was).
5	* How was Joanna in the 2004 film able to emulate a Stepford Wife so perfectly? As she put it to Bobbie, she used to work in television! Whether she started out as a fledgling actress into a media mogul or climbed the career ladder, Professional Joanna knew how to play whatever game she needed to play in order to reach her goals, even changing her persona to suit her needs. She was probably at one time a very guileful and sweet assistant, knowing she'd have to tone down her aggressive personality if she wanted to make it to the top!
6	** Given how flirtatious she was with Mike at the ball, one wonders if she might have been as coquettish in her younger and hungrier years, relying on her sex appeal and brains to get ahead. Or rather she knew how to tell people things they want to hear.
7	** Given the real life example of Marilyn Monroe (and how she "played her card" on her career).....This idea of Joanna being good at "acting it" is kind of realistic.
8	* In the book, Walter's performance in the bedroom becomes increasingly worse as he becomes increasingly indoctrinated into the Stepford ideology. Why? The Stepford Wives are little more than glorified slaves and sex toys with no free will or humanity, and thus the men don't ''have'' to work to earn the love of their "wives." Despite their hypermasculine fantasies, replacing their wives with robots weakens the men in the long term since they are not inclined to do the things that would impress women, like business success, staying in shape, or behave in a gentlemanly manner. It ties into the idea that no real man would ever trade a real woman for a Stepford Wife.
9	* [[spoiler: Claire]], a woman, being in the whole scheme makes sense since [[FemaleMisogynist women believing other women should only be in feminine roles]] is a very much TruthInTelevision. One of the biggest proponents of "traditional families" was Phyllis Schlafly, who infamously supported [[StayInTheKitchen a woman's "true" role]] despite having no problem with having a career and a life outside of the house herself.
10	* Stepford is a supposedly wholesome community where "family values" are held up. The fact that, in the book, the Wives are glorified sexbots shows how hypocritical the reactionary mindset of Stepford is since the men prefer over-sexualized androids over living and breathing women.
11
12	!!FridgeHorror
13	* In the 2004 remake, [[spoiler:the men can brainwash their wives to absolute control]]. What if it could be applied to human trafficking? And that's not even getting to things like [[RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil marital rape.]]
14	* If the men kill off their wives simply to have versions of them that had no hobbies or lives of their own, who's to say they wouldn't do the same when their daughters were old enough? And suppose they groomed their daughter's boyfriends/husbands or their own sons into the practice? The whole thing could conceivably go on for generations!
15	** Or even worse, they could just replace everyone else that doesn't agree with their views, regardless of gender. What if some of the husbands are actually robots themselves programmed to agree with the chauvinist elite of the Men's Association?
16	** The whole society consists of the psychotic view [[PsychopathicManchild "If you don't do and act as I wish, I can just kill you and replace you with a clone/robot who will!"]] How long do you think a town of pseudo SpoiledBrat serial killers would truly last? It seems probable that the populace will slowly decrease into robots until too few humans exist to keep the project under control. And if it seeps outside of the village in the process...
17	** Speaking of the kids, what happens when they get old enough to realize that their "mothers" aren't aging and that other women aren't buxom, wasp-waisted hausfraus who speak solely in stock phrases about how great housework and supporting your husband is? What will the Men's Association do to protect that secret? And what about the trauma from realizing that your father killed and replaced your mother and you didn't even know for years?
18	* The Pilgrim family who previously occupied Joanna and Walter's house moved out after only two months. It takes three months to build a robot wife, so clearly, the Pilgrims wanted out before the process could be completed. What happened there? Did the husband get cold feet? Did the wife have a realization like Joanna's and escape? Or maybe...[[KilledToUpholdTheMasquerade they didn't actually move out]].
19	* More FridgeSadness than Horror. Several of the original wives were Moms, like Joanna and her friends, they even visit a Stepford Wife who says she has several young children with the youngest being three. It hits you that the husbands are so selfish and callous, that not only do they not regard their wives as people with their own interests and right to live life to their fullest, but they care more about their wants than about their children. Robots can't really emote, empathize, or give realistic advice; Stepford will not only be a town full of sex toy/housecleaning robots and serial killer misogynists, but also of really confused and broken kids who didn't know they lost their mothers.
20	** Veers back into Horror after the conversation Joanna has with one of [[spoiler:Bobby's]] children, who's unaware that his mom's been robotized. The kid ''likes'' that his parents seem to be getting along better than ever and that his mom stays home, makes hot meals, and never yells at them anymore--as any kid would, even though he's suspicious about the reasons: "I hope it lasts," he tells Joanna, "but I bet it won't." This is a little boy who is very likely going to grow up believing that this is how women ''should'' behave...leading to another generation of Stepford Wives.
21	* Almost all the families in Stepford have young children, and judging by the way the realtor plays up this fact, it seems very likely that they encourage couples with kids to move there. Why? [[spoiler: Robots can't have children. If you plan to be a family man, you'd better already have 'em when you get there.]]
22	** It's also likely that younger kids wouldn't be as suspicious about any changes [[spoiler:in their moms,]] and even if they are, they're too young to make any serious effort to discover why.
23	** There are few teenagers in town (the girl who babysits the kids one night) but it's implied they may be rather self-absorbed to notice anything up with their parents.
24	*** Or it's possible that the older kids are the children of the town's original founders. They grew up with perfect, devoted, stay-at-home robot moms and think it's the ''outsiders'' who are weird for leaving their kids with strangers.
25
26	!!FridgeLogic:
27	* In the original, the villains have a means of perfectly duplicating and programming women. Why don't they start producing {{sexbot}}s and [[CutLexLuthorACheck make gajillions of dollars]] [[TheRuleOfFirstAdopters selling them to the public]]?
28	** Because [[spoiler: Claire wasn't motivated by the need for wealth, but madness spawned when she caught her husband fucking another woman and killed both of them. She only played up the sex bot angle to get the men to go along with the plan, with full intention of having them be stepfordized once she got enough couples in the town to satisfy her plot to run a town filled with stepfordized people.]]
29	*** Well, that's the answer in the remake. As for the original, possibly because the government and the media would get involved, and the husbands would then face consequences for murdering their wives?
30	** While never explicitly stated, it appears that Stepford was specifically created as an enclave for recruiting a very particular demographic: successful, well-off family men with liberated feminist wives. All of the men in Stepford are family men in established marriages; all are comfortably upper-middle-class; all are in lines of work that would particularly benefit building the robots (often in surprising ways: an illustrator famous for drawing pin-up art now does the prototype sketches of the future wives; a world-renowned linguist does voice recordings not only to make the robot voices natural, but also to create a vocabulary algorithm that prevents the wives from having any but a limited set of ideas and interests). The one thing their success couldn't get them? A compliant, devoted wife. Short answer: money was never the issue. Having exactly the sort of life they felt they deserved was. And as the person above points out, why would you risk exposure and prosecution when your life's perfect?
31	*** Okay, but why not just dump their wives instead of killing them?
32	*** Because then who would do all the work? The men work in offices, sure, but the women do all the housework, raise the kids, and then look after their husbands. Being single/divorced would just lump the husbands with a lot of extra work ''and'' alimony payments on top of it. It wasn't about their wives or just lust - it was about obedience.
33	** In the 60s and 70s, the idea of marriage just being about love was cosidered 'not enough'. Before 1969, with the no fault divorce bill getting passed, it was extremely difficult to go through the process of divorcing - and public attitudes were that it was better to uphold the image of a nuclear family regardless of whether husband and wife liked each other. It's also caught up in the zeitgeist of Second Wave Feminism, meaning most of these men grew up in conservative households with particular views on how women should behave - while the women are younger and have embraced feminism, which the men see as this dangerous new thing. The attitudes of the time were that sure the women could have jobs if they wanted but their priority was being a wife and mother, and how dare they deviate from that. The men don't split up with their wives because that would mean they'd look bad from a societal point of view. Plus most of these couples have children, and attitudes were that it was better to stay in a loveless marriage for the sake of the children than potentially traumatise them with a divorce. That kind of thinking shifted before the 70s were even over, so the movie and book are caught in a very specific time period. In short, the wives of these men were not wanted as people but as objects to present the image of success to the world (Charmaine was blatantly a trophy wife).
34	** The matter is in fact addressed in the book: when Joanna figures them out, the men of the Association counter her accusations with this very question — if they are able to make amazingly realistic robots, as she suspects, why haven’t they turned it into a billion-dollar industry? Joanna is baffled and can’t really find an answer. It looks like the men really do have some ''serious'' issues and would rather KillAndReplace their wives and live in a modest suburbia than simply get filthy rich and get divorced or separated.
35	** And if they turned it into an industry, they would become public figures, and people will eventually start to notice how their wives don't appear to age, and someone will start questioning their whole operation. So turning it into a money making racket could blow the whole thing.
36	* If the wives in the remake are [[spoiler:just regular people with microchips implanted in their skulls, then how come they're resistant to fire? How come they can work as an ATM?]]
37	** Some of this can be explained through {{nanomachines}} (it's mentioned briefly during the scene where Walter [[spoiler: reverses the "Stepford Programming"]]. No explanation for the ATM bit, however.
38	** I think that the only explanation was that SOME of the Stepford wives were actual robots for the men who lack wives, and these were the ones with the ATM installed along with the more robotic features. The other men who already had wives were ones that were modified with the microchips. We know that the villains could build lifelike robots, in the case of [[spoiler: Christopher Walken's character.]] It just makes sense.
39	** There's also the possibility of many of the wives becoming [[HollywoodCyborg cyborgs]] which would still account for some things.
40	** It is very likely that the women's essence and brainwaves were transferred intro their robotic counterparts, meaning they could still act like their normal selves without the chips, which would make them repressed. Simply put, their old bodies are gone, but their old personalities lie within the robotic ones.
41	** The remake is one of the films that [[RuleOfFunny things being a comedy and borderline parody means logic can go totally out the window.]] The remake expects its audience to be familiar with the source material, and thus get the jokes of the ATM and boobs, and then at the end [[MST3KMantra be too glad that an infamously depressing story now has a happy ending to care that this adaptation that wasn't designed to stand on its own, well, doesn't.]]
42	* Joanna, Bobbi and Roger are pretty awful people in the 2004 version, yet we're supposed to side with them because...?
43	** They're the only ones interested in stopping the conspiracy.
44	*** Can't they stop it by dying? Horribly and painfully? Because they're so bad they make RootingForTheEmpire the default mode for the movie.
45	*** Because you don't deserve to have your willpower taken away and to be subject to the whims of someone else because of minor character flaws. Even being unsympathetic, they were still human beings. Perceived flaws aren't a justification for domestic abuse. A teacher can't hit a student for misbehaving. The bad thing is still bad separate from the impetus.
46	** UnsympatheticComedyProtagonist: The original main characters were feminists, so the farcical remake made them {{Straw Feminist}}s who are put up against worse antagonists, and are intended to go through CharacterDevelopment to become better people.
47	* If [[spoiler:Claire wanted revenge for her husband cheating on her ]], then wouldn't it make more sense to just [[spoiler:Stepfordize the husbands instead]]?
48	** The Stepford program and process didn't exist yet at the time, it was only ''after'' the deed was done that things started to come to our villain.
49	** In [[spoiler: Claire's]] words "That's next."
50	** In her already gone crazy mind, she want to "rescue/release" the wives from this high-pressure, modern day career-driven lifestyle. Than take a revenge on the husbands. So she can have her "perfect" world that was heavily based on the so called "good ol' days".
51

Context Fridge / TheStepfordWives