Joanna & Bobbie: The Stepford Wives (1975)
It’s suffocating being in a high-control setting that you know is bullshit, surrounded by people who are fully bought in. You can tell that things are off, but you can’t tell anyone, because everyone seems to be fully along for the ride. And, you also can’t talk about your own shit, because then you’d be inconveniently out of step with that system around you. Surely you’re the crazy one, except, you’re not. You just… aren’t.
Oh, what a relief it is when you then find a kindred soul! What a dang blessing it is when you stumble across someone else, or they stumble across you, and the pressure can be loosened a bit. You can joke about the pomposity and all the true believers around you, with a small, receptive audience to play off of. You can let out a, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” like Margot Robbie in the new Barbie trailer, and your new found sibling won’t look at you like a freak.
Joanna Eberhart experiences a version of this in Bryan Forbes’ 1975 psychological sci-fi thriller The Stepford Wives (based on the Ira Levin novel of the same name). Joanna (played by Katharine Ross) moves with her husband and children from New York City to the small, suburban town of Stepford, Connecticut and immediately finds herself emotionally lost in their “perfect” neighborhood.
Joanna doesn’t come to life until she’s abruptly befriended by Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss), a likeminded woman who hasn’t been in Stepford much longer than she has. The Tampax-and-Ring-Ding-carrying Bobbie lets her kitchen remain as imperfect as Joanna’s, and they also share a playful cynicism towards that overbearing Men’s Association their husbands hangout in.
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With the dedication ignited by the spark of their camaraderie, Joanna and Bobbie try to start a rival association of women with the eerily domesticated housewives in their community. A tennis enthusiast named Charmaine (Tina Louise) initially follows along, but the rest of their blank-eyed, conservatively dressed peers have zero interest. To Joanna and Bobbie’s horror, Charmaine herself soon converts to Stepford-style womanhood; between this and learning of the other townswomen’s history, they begin fearing for their own futures.
The Stepford Wives is a genre flick very clearly centered on the experience of womanhood in a patriarchal context, so clearly that the backlash from some second-wave feminists in its day truly boggles the mind. Even with that specificity, though, there’s a heart to this film that parallels other similar experiences within overbearing systems, such as reactionary religion or heteronormativity. (Heck, aspects of that experience even translate to working a shitty dead end job.) For those with experience in any such system, who’ve found at least one likeminded peer while still there, that oasis of friendship Joanna and Bobbie find in each other will be deeply familiar.
I’ve had a handful of different Bobbie meetings over the years, and my goodness does it feel good. The most recent time I met a surprising new Bobbie, I ended up spending hours on the steps of our workplace, sharing in a mutual venting of baggage and jokes that rippled out of my soul for days. That connection is so freeing, it comes as no surprise that in some cases it gets misapplied into “trauma dumping.”
Unfortunately, those friendships don’t always last. One of the greatest tragedies in the film as Joanna slips towards her final act is seeing Bobbie herself turned into yet another eerily domesticated wife. The mechanics of how this happens in the film are sci-fi, nonconsentual, and fatal, but a variation of that experience happens in real life. I’ve seen myself what it’s like to discover a comrade is no longer on the same side of the systemic conflict. That loss is a particularly painful one.
That’s a tragedy Joanna and Bobbie could not escape together, no matter how powerful their found friendship seemed. The good news, however, is that not all such stories end in horror and dread. This sisterhood’s fate is tragic, but sometimes our sisterhoods give us strength to find salvation. Sometimes it’s a union that transforms the toxic environment; sometimes it’s the support to step out and find something new. Whatever the case, we needn’t all be suffocated by bullshit. A better community, one more widely modeled after Joanna and Bobbie’s commitment to each other and the others, is possible.
