Adapting the Stepford Wives with Sarah Archer
Added 2024-11-05 18:55:19 +0000 UTCA very special election day episode for the rushed, sloppy, irritated, and alive. There are two movie adaptations of Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives, and midcentury scholar Sarah Archer came by to talk about both of them--and why this story just keeps getting more relevant.
Extra credit reading/viewing:
Premilla Nadasen's "From Widow to 'Welfare Queen': Welfare and the Politics of Race" on JSTOR
Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
Comments
oooo, I've thought about Twilight A LOT. As someone who read those books as a teen (when they came out) and then had a persistent stalker in my early twenties, I think that they, and actually a lot of paranormal romance/romantasy, prime women to identify abusive and stalking behaviors as love. "He's obsessed with me" "he called me a hundred times today" "he says he'll die without me" are all things I've unfortunately said out loud. The fantasy of having power by giving up power can be fun, or fuck, just relaxing, but it DOES NOT translate well to reality and I don't think we talk about it enough!
Elizabeth Gunn
2025-01-05 00:49:17 +0000 UTCHuh. I never ever thought about that but you are absolutely right.
Elizabeth Gunn
2025-01-05 00:25:53 +0000 UTCMy mom and I went to see the remake in theaters and our shared look of absolute horrified bafflement at 'the reveal' is a cherished memory for me.
Elizabeth Gunn
2025-01-05 00:22:59 +0000 UTCNot the only one who thought uncanny valley was a place…. I still think this tbh
Florence Hargreaves
2024-12-17 11:40:13 +0000 UTCThis was cut for time but it's bc he is vibing in his apartment making a nice stir fry in a wok FOR HIMSELF and listening to jazz when Brooke Adams shows up to talk about her pod people concerns. And wearing a lovely sweater tooooo
You're Wrong About
2024-12-12 21:53:43 +0000 UTCWe can only hope for a YAG episode to tell us 😂
Nikki Robison
2024-12-12 16:12:46 +0000 UTCDonald Sutherland’s domestic life in IOTBS is my lifestyle goal.
Nikki Robison
2024-12-12 16:10:50 +0000 UTCthey get off at a greenwich exit on the merritt parkway
mish the fish
2024-12-09 19:47:47 +0000 UTCDoes anyone on here need a ticket to see Sarah and friends at the Aladdin Theatre (Portland) on Wednesday night THIS week? I have an extra. Pls respond to get in touch with me!
Amy Sullivan
2024-12-03 00:37:44 +0000 UTCWait, but why is Donald Sutherland your domestic icon? You never got to describing it. You segued on to Pauline Kael instead.
Flo Saxby
2024-11-19 07:34:32 +0000 UTCGood luck!💛
Cameron Hines
2024-11-17 02:21:05 +0000 UTCHi! I just wanted to thank you, Sarah and Sarah, for this episode, and share a personal anecdote: I started graduate school in fall 2019, and spent a long weird couple Covid years working the reduced-density imposed night shift (4p - 2a) in a chemistry lab. I was desperately lonely and spent a lot of time listening to podcasts, and the Stepford Wives episode of YWA is totemic of that era for me. I would listen to that episode when I was doing something scary, or feeling isolated (often, while washing lab dishes and watching the sun go down). I'm defending my PhD on Thursday, in another weird destabilized time, and having this episode come across my feed felt really like coming home. Thanks!
Hannah Wendlandt
2024-11-16 23:20:24 +0000 UTCYes a true crime to stage to screen with Leopold and Loebe and Rope as a play and film.
Liz
2024-11-16 17:26:43 +0000 UTCMe too! When I saw it last year I felt like I was going nuts because I was like...is this not the Stepford Wives?!?! With some tweaks!? And was shocked to find that it wasn't even considered "inspired" by the Stepford Wives. So so so similar!
Heidi
2024-11-15 22:36:57 +0000 UTCYes, me too!! Especially since I largely found that movie lacking when I first watched it...Would love to hear Sarah Squared's takes on it. I was thinking about it constantly while listening to this episode and was so hoping it would get a mention!
Hailey Neal
2024-11-14 10:04:25 +0000 UTCOh yes. I’ll put that into the ether
Emily Benson
2024-11-13 21:10:06 +0000 UTCThat last 15 minutes post election. Phew. About both sisterhood/female friendships and women as foot soldiers for the conservative movement. That hit my solar plexus
Emily Benson
2024-11-13 21:08:30 +0000 UTCI love when Sarah name drops Peg Bracken, and such a deep cut this time! 😍
Emily Hunter
2024-11-12 05:54:54 +0000 UTCRe: discussion of the writing tasks AI can effectively complete. Quick love letter to an element of writing that many think can be handled by robots but contains craft and specificity all its own: copyediting! Especially in creative works, that same sense of specificity and recognizing a writer’s goals and finding rhythm with them is very much present. Yes, we love search tools and implementing global document changes in one batch. And we (grudgingly) benefit from spell-checking software (though its funny errors are pretty legendary too), but copyeditors really love making a human connection with an author’s work.
Jackie Dever
2024-11-11 22:26:59 +0000 UTCOne of my favourite recent episodes ❤️ sarah squared x ira levin is hard to beat! I'm trying to find a legitimately intellectual reason to suggest an episode on the twilight franchise... coming up blank here but god would that make my life
Jessica Murray
2024-11-11 21:11:20 +0000 UTCListening to this in the wake of the presidential election was interestingly relevant. I’m no scholar or researcher, but as a housewife in the face of potential fascism, my literal first thought was that the best way to protect my family would be to fully assume the Stepford wife position of smiling happy person who works to set the emotional tone of the home so that my husband and preteen sons can go forth and do their best in this scary new landscape. I can’t fully assume that position, though, because I do have the capacity to work and I will need to in the coming years. But it is incredibly comforting to see that this role was constructed a long time ago, and is reconstructed all the time. And what that tells me is that I can build my life in the manner that works for me and my family. I fight the urge to think “this is just what the bastards want out of me” vs “ I don’t care what it takes. I will do whatever I have to do to protect my family” and I needed the reminder that this isn’t an either/or situation. I am far from a tradwife (SM’s note on do husband’s love their wives for what they do for them is laughable in my case because I am very Neurodivergent and will happily walk past the same pile of laundry for a week) but I need re-examinations of what I fall into the pattern of thinking is just “life” so that I am reminded of what has been survived before and what can be thrived through now. Between comforting my parents through their panic attacks and trying to answer my sons’ uncomfortably prescient questions about what their future holds, I really needed this. Thank you so much.
Elizabeth Huang
2024-11-11 19:11:05 +0000 UTCI have seen 30 rock like 7 times through and i just wanted to let Sarah know that I really deeply appreciate all of the references lately.
Krystal Taylor
2024-11-11 03:22:20 +0000 UTCI watched the 1975 movie today for the first time. I loved it. The two main characters have me Mary Tyler-Moore and Rhoda feel. I love all of the analysis from this episode from both Sarahs.
Michelle Rose
2024-11-10 21:05:12 +0000 UTCThis was a beautiful episode. It really made me feel hopefully. I’ve been so sad for the last 5 days that this is a nice pick me up.
Michelle Rose
2024-11-10 18:14:49 +0000 UTCI can get you copies of The Stepford Husbands and The Stepford Children (starring Barbara Eden!) and maybe Revenge of the Stepford Wives, if you like!! My mom deals in rare movies and I have copies of them 🤣 I'm named after Katharine Ross and Katharine Hepburn. I first read the book in high school and grew up with the original film, because of my mom. One of my biggest film fears was that scene of Paula Prentiss in the kitchen, making coffee. "Why would you do that, Joanne? I was just making you coffee. I thought we were friends".
Katie Larson
2024-11-10 17:12:29 +0000 UTCGreta Gerwig and Stepford Wives would be amazing. ❤️
Shannon
2024-11-09 18:40:14 +0000 UTCI came here to say the same exact thing!
Jessica Adkisson
2024-11-09 16:22:41 +0000 UTCWould love to hear your thoughts on Don’t Worry Darling being basically another stepford wives remake!
Kayleigh Gauthier
2024-11-09 01:36:01 +0000 UTCSo excited about this. I’ve gone on an Ira Levin kick. Would love to hear you talk about the Boys From Brazil
Kerrie Murphy
2024-11-08 21:57:03 +0000 UTCthere was a book by Nichola Yoon called One of Our Kind published this past year that basically uses the same plot scaffolding as Stepford Wives but the main character is part of a young couple who moves from LA to a new, wealthy suburb designed by Black people for Black people. It brings up a lot of the questions around the possibility of solidarity and how wealth changes your proximity to power even when you're physically vulnerable in a violent society. There's some things about it that I thought could have been improved with another editorial pass (the protagonist is often just quoting statistics to her friends, who does that) but I think it'd be a really solid follow up if you enjoyed this episode and how remakes interact with original texts!
Andy Lindquist
2024-11-08 14:39:13 +0000 UTCI’ve been listening to old eps with Mike, and two subjects you mention wanting to do eps on that you haven’t done yet are The Lindburgh Baby and Leopold & Loebe! would killl for either of those eps
Julianne Fox
2024-11-08 08:26:57 +0000 UTCI LOVED this episode. Feels so very needed in this time where, it feels like it’s becoming more and more mainstream that if a woman threatens a man’s freedom, it’s a perfectly logical conclusion to simply kill her. It feels to me that an episode on the Watts family murders might be a good companion to this one, weirdly.
Carly Ann Braun
2024-11-07 21:01:39 +0000 UTCI haven't seen TO MANY people talk about this, but I found it pretty jarring how the sexism I recall growing up with in the early 2000's that supposedly was "biological truth" went along the lines of NO real red-blooded man wants children! NO real man wants marriage! REAL MEN just want to sleep around and WOMEN want to ruin it by tricking and manipulating you into getting married and becoming a boring dad with a boring SUV with boring children instead of a cool perma-bachelor with a motorcycle. BUT THEN, as it felt to me, pretty suddenly, it's supposedly the MEN who are "biologically wired" to want not only A child but AS MANY AS POSSIBLE and women who don't want kids are LITTERALLY STEALING THAT FROM MEN who ALL just want a stable suburban life now apparently. It's like Charlie Harper and Barney Stinson never ever existed...
Ronin Fredricson
2024-11-07 20:09:16 +0000 UTCfor someone who was too scared to finish stepford or rosemary as books: ty for this pod ❤️❤️❤️ rushed sloppy irritated & alive reporting 4 duty!
alexa 🌼
2024-11-07 17:50:01 +0000 UTCWhat amazing episode!!!! please more Sarah and Sarah!!!
Mayara Pereira
2024-11-07 17:23:27 +0000 UTCMy absolute favorite thing in the world is Sarah talking literary adaptations. Absolute heaven.
Jessica K
2024-11-06 23:19:35 +0000 UTCHave to share a family story that sheds a little hope for the modern man. After watching the 1970s film with my little brother in the 90s, he turned to me and asked, 'That's it? The men just win?' Yep. Totally got it.
Liz
2024-11-06 09:06:08 +0000 UTCIf you ever have another “Stepford Wives” discussion, and I hope you do, I think it would be so cool to look more closely at the Simone de Beauvoir quote that opens the book and at “The Second Sex” and “The Stepford Wives” as companion texts or SW as a one-to-one adaptation of SS in and of itself. SW takes all of the existentialist fears of “The Second Sex” and makes them literal, material, manifest— like how the Subject Joanna is murdered by the Object Joanna, and that all of the women are both Subject and Object with the two competing for the woman’s life. A big thing for de Beauvoir is the existential complicity of women (like the Glen Close character, but also like all of us) in the diminishment of our own freedom/will/subjectivity, because authentic freedom and expressing ourselves in the world, “assuming authentic existence,” is in some ways more difficult than being a passive Object in our lives and letting someone else justify our existence. It would kind of just be easier for Joanna’s photography to slip into the background, for her to recede into Stepford life instead of continuing to push herself out into the world through her projects. I think the original text of SW is about how, in some ways, we are actually “responsible for what we become,” and the death of Johanna’s true self at the hands of her shadow self who’s complicit with the men is a direct example of that.
Cameron Hines
2024-11-06 00:03:38 +0000 UTCOh, Sarah, how I love that you love Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, movies and books. Rosemary’s Baby is one of my very favorite movies, and I love your analysis of it. 🩵
Sally Jordan
2024-11-05 22:32:14 +0000 UTCThe Stepford Wives have an uncanny valley personality instead of appearance
Ellen
2024-11-05 22:19:00 +0000 UTCI was genuinely looking at the main feed longingly this morning thinking, "I could really use some Sarah Marshall this election day!" Making dreams come true out here!
Nicole
2024-11-05 22:02:59 +0000 UTCJust to thank you. Exactly what I need.
Vicki Johnson
2024-11-05 21:25:33 +0000 UTCSame!
Kristi Renfrey
2024-11-05 21:19:38 +0000 UTCMaybe a way of putting the Vance/Trump dichotomy is the Madonna/Whore dichotomy? Vance wants Madonnas, and Trump wants Whores
Cristina Anderson
2024-11-05 20:03:35 +0000 UTCI love Sarah and Sarah pod. Sarah Squared.
Danielle G
2024-11-05 19:33:38 +0000 UTComg I revisited the original Stepford Wives episode just the other day. The timing couldn't be better for me!
Tim Horsfield
2024-11-05 18:59:36 +0000 UTCI just read an Ira Levin book last week let's do this
Zoey Charlemagne
2024-11-05 18:59:12 +0000 UTCIn excitement
Zoey Charlemagne
2024-11-05 18:58:56 +0000 UTCHow I YELLED
Zoey Charlemagne
2024-11-05 18:58:50 +0000 UTC
