#ira levin

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Nestlings

Nat Cassidy: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the nestlings Cassidy: a young couple moves into a historic gothic new York apartment building Cassidy: but the neighbors have sinister designs on their baby Ira Levin:

Ira Levin: hey wait a minute Cassidy: i know but this time it's different Cassidy: there's vampires Stephen King: hey wait a minute

Cassidy: there's another difference too Cassidy: its about a nice Jewish couple Barker: ha ha oh i bet howard has something to say about that Lovecraft: I do, in fact! Poe: no you don't Lovecraft: but i Poe: you don't Poe: clive, don't encourage him

King: oh yeah, i heard there was a discourse about this King: about if vampires are anti-semitic King: like is dracula supposed to be jewish Bram Stoker: we've been over this before Stoker: Dracula isn't anti-semitic, it's anti-sex

Stoker: it's all about how sex is bad Stoker: unlike some vampires come lately Anne Rice: i regret nothing

Stoker: i certainly hope these vampires of yours aren't all sexy Cassidy: don't worry Cassidy: they only reproduce via a meat wall in the basement Stoker: oh good- Stoker: wait what

Lovecraft: so the vampires are jewish right? Cassidy: no! Cassidy: they're rich celebrities who secretly control the world Lovecraft: Lovecraft: so Poe: don't say it howard

Cassidy: these vampires are different Cassidy: first of all, they're a metaphor for the rich parasitically living off the poor Barker: that's all vampires Cassidy: Cassidy: ok but also they're weird bug people Barker: ok yeah that is pretty different Barker: i'll give you that one

Cassidy: as the couple is menaced by vampires, they consider and then discard multiple courses of action Cassidy: just in case you were wondering why they ultimately settled on their decision Cassidy: allow me to explain their logic in rejecting each alternative possibility Cassidy: i anticipated all your questions

Cassidy: the couple uses the door to enter their apartment Cassidy: now you might wonder, why don't they enter through the window? Cassidy: it's because they live on the top floor King: whoa! good explanation

King: you thought of everything! Cassidy: no goddamn goodreads nerd is gonna catch me in a gotcha, i'll tell you that Cassidy: now you also might be wondering Cassidy: why don't they burrow up through the floor

Cassidy: you know, i did a one man show about you, howard Lovecraft: i don't like the idea of an Irishman playing me Cassidy: oh i'm not irish Lovecraft: but then what Cassidy: Lovecraft: what are Cassidy: Lovecraft: [sweats]

[esqueletosgays]

THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975)

Director: Bryan Forbes Cinematography: Owen Roizman

[shelbycarpenter]

[gribbletheturtle]

genuinely terrifying how men do not want an equal partner in life instead they want someone with perky boobs, who is ready to fuck at a moments notice, cleans after them like a maid and has no thoughts, opinions or wants because those are inconvenient

[beautiful-extremities]

Just a simple girl who reads Rosemarys Baby for fun ⋅°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

[weareallfromearth]

Oh something fun I didn’t tell tumblr is that I’ve been really enjoying pregnancy-related horror and dystopia novels while pregnant, and would welcome more recommendations!

I am informed this is an unusual thing to want to read while pregnant, but not by J or P, who seem to get it completely: suddenly a subgenre is more relevant to my actual life experiences and I can read it with clearer eyes, and also who doesn’t love to process their own context through a glass darkly?

Some brief impressions of texts read so far, containing spoilers:

- Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

I didn’t realise Levin had written both this and Stepford Wives until I saw them shelved together at the library. This was a thrilling discovery and you best believe I borrowed them both and honestly I think they should be read together despite being published a decent number of years apart.

Both engage with a conspiracy of all against one, with a sense of being betrayed by your surrounding social milieu including the person you should trust most to protect you and be on your side, and with that being a particularly 1960s-70s woman’s domestic horror.

Both feature an especially exciting and still relatable figure: in both there is a late appearance by a medical or psychiatric professional who is not part of the conspiracy at all. This figure could save you but instead either sends you back to the wolves or fails to validate that you are among the wolves and instead endorses the view that your paranoia is a delusion, thereby dooming you with their cushy expert view. It’s a really cool set of parallels and especially compelling to read one after the other, because the RB version is the blatant patriarchal version and the SW version is the more evolved feminist version and both of them fuck their protagonist in the end.

I loved the way that Rosemary is manipulable via her dutiful attentiveness to her child-to-be, how that drive both lends her power and keeps her in the power of others. I also love how Levin writes the passage of time through mundane familial events, seasons comprised of school costume construction and home decorating. I think the characterisation of almost everyone is stronger in Stepford Wives, but the husband feels truer to me in Rosemary’s Baby than in SW, perhaps because Rosemary is more attentive to him and part of the trick of SW is Joanna’s willingness not to look too hard at her husband.

RB contains bonus pregnancy horror of the unintentional variety because it’s from the late 60s - this woman is out here drinking wine and eating raw eggs and rare meat and on at least one occasion a raw animal heart and I am like “girl your devil spawn is going to get FAS or die of a food borne illness noooo!!!”

- Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

This book helps me better understand the pull of Christianity, which is no mean feat when your book is partly about the imposition of a horrible Christian theocracy and your reader is a Jewish agnostic. I was frustrated by the characterisation early on at times, but decided to embrace our heroine as a person who does things she herself does not understand, and who has a respect for the sublime and incomprehensible that makes her willing to dodge self-examination. This book is wonderful for playing with themes of faith despite evidence and it hits one of my favourite notes in Indigenous sci fi, the idea that Indigenous groups that experienced colonisation have already weathered an apocalypse and this can’t help but influence the response to the next apocalypse.

Barely engages with the essence of its sci fi premise and is much more concerned with the interiority and interrelations of its cast; hell yeah.

Worth being aware that this book is like if The Handmaid’s Tale did not have a happy ending. It is very engaged with ideas of beauty and transcendence and faith in the midst of and despite suffering. Made me want to learn more about Hildegard of Bingen. Gave me patience for the metaphor of a suffering martyr as a religious figure by very clearly analogising Jesus with every person who has ever gone through labour, both accepting torture so that someone else can live. (NB I am generally especially allergic to mother as justified self-martyr IRL because of what it does to us all, so of course I find the phenomenon endlessly interesting to examine in literature.)

Overall just an incredibly compelling text, hard to sleep the night after reading it.

- An overall note

I am struck by how, with the exception of a pain Rosemary experiences which is characterised as unusual and indicative of the great horror to come, these texts are not particularly interested in the early physical horrors of real pregnancy, though they are absolutely engaged with both the pain-horror and perhaps more strongly the disempowerment and uncertainty of birth.

I wonder whether there are non-biographical texts that get into the horror experienced by some pregnant people who discover their body and the phenomenon of pregnancy simply do not get along with one another.

[emeraldspiral]

I know the logic of Stepford Wives can be questionable. Like, why do the wives need to be killed if they're being replaced with robots? Can't the men just leave their wives without murder? Why do the robots even need to be hotter duplicates of their wives? Why don't they all look like Marilyn Monroe or something? But it's easy enough to just suppose that the men don't want to pay alimony or fight for custody of their kids, so they need to maintain the charade that the robots are their real wives.

But I think the bigger underlying issue with the premise behind Stepford Wives is that it feels like the men are motivated solely by selfishness. They make their wives into robots because it benefits them. They want a maid they don't have to pay, a nanny, something they can fuck that will act like they're a sex god no matter how little effort they put in, and no desires or emotions to consider, or flaws they have to forgive. The reason the explanation I gave for why the men murder their wives and use duplicates instead of Hollywood starlets feels like it fits, is because it's based on the assumption that the men are just being ultra-pragmatic. The Stepford Situation is set-up the way it is because that's how it has to be in order for them to gain as much as possible without sacrifice.

But what's missing from all that is the element of malice. Resentment. Straight-up misogyny. And that's why I feel like instead of robots, it should've been mind control. Because it's one thing to murder your wife because you "traded-up" to an inhuman robot who can do anything she can do, but better. It's another thing to strip her of her autonomy and dehumanize her by making her into a robot. And I feel like that's what trad men really want deep down.

They don't want women to be trad wives purely for their convenience. They want to punish women. They resent women's liberation and autonomy. Their ability to reject them, choose someone else, or decide to be alone. That's why they never actually go for trad women who already want to center their lives around being wives and mothers and homemakers. They go for successful or promising women or outspoken, headstrong, liberal women whose views clash with theirs because they love the idea of a goddess giving up her divinity for their mediocre mortal dick. Same reason they want virgins but hate prudes. They want a conquest. Something they feel like they earned by outperforming other males or winning some kind of contest with the woman with their superior masculine brain and masculine charms and strength. So if a woman already wants what they want and doesn't need convincing, they're not interested.

I know in the Nicole Kidman remake they did use mind control, but it was very obviously tacked-on in reshoots after they'd shot the whole movie with the idea of the wives being robots. So it doesn't make any sense. And also they had a half-assed twist at the end where a woman was behind it the whole time. But I feel like that was something that just existed to be a twist and not because anyone was thinking deeply about what it mattered to the core themes or messages. But you know, there's some good bones there.

If I were to remake The Stepford Wives again, I think, in addition to going with mind control instead of robots and pushing the idea that it's really about resentment of female autonomy, not pure selfishness, I would do the twist where one of the wives turns out to be one of the main conspirators, but not in the same way.

I think in the Kidman movie the explanation was that the wife's husband cheated on her and she coped by convincing herself that if she was a more perfect 50s housewife it wouldn't have happened, then decided to impose that on all the other women in town. Which doesn't make a ton of sense, but with some tweaking it could.

Like, it would totally fit as a commentary on modern tradwife influencers if one of the wives was working with the husbands, but not really the mastermind. Like, she's initially presented that way because she made the mind control technology and has the big motive rant about why she wants to force other women to adopt her lifestyle and insists its for their own good. But it becomes clear that she's really been groomed and manipulated. Not just by her husband, but maybe her father, her brother, or her mother even, her whole life.

At some point she was a scientist who developed the mind control tech. But the working environment at her tech start-up company was toxic, and she was convinced to blame feminism instead of capitalism for why she was unhappy. So she became a tradwife to a manipulative piece of shit who convinced her to use her tech to subvert the free will of every woman in town by making her feel like she'd be nothing without his love and had to do anything he wanted or risk losing it.

But even after everything she did for him, he still betrays her. He and his friends are all cuck fetishists who pass their Stepfordized wives around, and she's the only one who doesn't know about it. He also tries to get with Joanna even before she's mind controlled. Because again, it's not really about having all their desires fulfilled. It's about punishing women. This guy likes the idea of getting someone as headstrong as Joanna to submit to him without mind control, but if he actually got what he wanted, he'd get bored of her just like he did with his wife. And when his wife finds out about his betrayal, he instantly turns her technology on her so she can't even express her anger or pain for even a second.

Also, I'd make Bobbie an egg who was just starting to crack when he was Stepfordized. I think that would really serve to enhance the original message, along with Charmaine being asexual, which was explicit in the book but left out of the movie.

Additional extra layers of horror would come from the fact that all the women have bigger boobs like the robots did, but since it's mind control that means the women are being forced into non-consensual plastic surgery (another reason why making Bobbie a trans man would be really effective). I'd also show scenes of the men being angry and violent toward the wives and smacking them around. Not just to show that they're motivated by hatred of women, but that even when they get everything they want, they're still not happy. They resent the fact that they had to use mind control to get their wives to act the way that they wanted. They resent the fact that without it, these women wouldn't love them, wouldn't put up with them, wouldn't choose them. So instead of making them happy, Stepford only makes them more self-loathing, miserable, insecure, misogynistic pieces of shit.