Science Fiction and Film and Television Paper Assignment

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Science Fiction in Film and Television
The American film The Stepford Wives was produced in 1975 as a science fiction film. It is based on a novel with the same name written by Ira Levin and that was published in the year 1972. Bryan Forbes directed the movie, which involved Katharine Ross, Peter Masterson and Paula Prentice in the starring roles. The movie is about a woman, Joanna Eberhart who together with her husband and children moves to Stepford town famously known for being a quiet place. The overly perfect state of the town is quite questionable especially its women. The fact that they are too committed to doing housework and completely submissive to the wills of their husbands, increases the curiosity of Joanna (Katherine Ross). In effect, she collaborates with Bobby, a transplant, to try to find out the reason behind these strange behaviors of the wives in Stepford town. The discovery proves some horrific details. This paper analyzes the movie using the modes of the rhetorical, genre, feminism, intertextuality and reflection.
On the rhetorical side of the movie, it is evident that the author was trying to communicate the feminist fears of that period within which the work was produced. These fears were confirmed by the fact that the men in Stepford attempted to replace their wives with robots that were hypersexual and which they could easily domesticate. Accordingly, this process of “killing” the women and replacing them was usually done against their own consciences. Undoubtedly, this would be a real horror to any woman at the time as Chattaway points out, (Chattaway).The film was trying to pass across the message about the prevalence of gender stereotyping in the 1970’s that was guided by the traditional views about gender roles. The film tries to show how society at the time believed that women belonged to the kitchen or were only suitable for housework while their men were meant to take up work in the other commercial fields. Notably, in the film, it is revealed that the men secretly organized to have their wives transformed into robots that would largely give their concentration to performing household chores along with fulfilling the sexual desires of their men. This fact shows the way society thought of the women at the time and the fear that if the women were allowed to rise to the same level as men, then they would forget their original roles as wives. Evidently, the replacement was done despite the fact that the real, flesh and blood women were modern-minded and intellectually gifted just like the men. This aspect also reveals a determination by men to keep the woman at the bottom despite her attempts to fight for her place at the top. Overall, the film was successful in its intended purpose especially since it helped revive the motion about equal rights for everyone regardless of their sexes.
In terms of genre, the film The Stepford Wives belongs majorly to the science fiction genre even though it also has some elements of a horror movie. As a science fiction, the movie involves the use of non-human characters in it in the form of robots. Ideally, the film shows the ways in which women are killed and subsequently replaced by robots or an...