The 1975 film 'The Stepford Wives'
was one of many films I watched
when television was my window
on the wider world, that my parents
told me that I was never going to reach.
With this film I understood the 'us' the 'them'
and how immersive manipulation,
of a rather forced sort, could be made clear.
In a fictional wealthy American monoculture,
far away, wealth was the property of husbands,
and was measured by the beauty of their wives,
in which the husbands, all plastic surgeons,
who competed with each other, for who had
the most controlled wife. On their own, the wives
competed with each other with how submissive
they could be, under the surgical knives of their husbands.
But, secretly at first one, wife resisted....
Aside from the idea of a utopian economy built
on the plastic surgery skills of omniscient males,
which with hindsight seems somewhat unlikely,
I liked the film for how it ended - with disaster.
I understood the film the way I was meant to,
when family promoted the idea of 'the model child',
as if all children should enjoy being immersed
in them being watched, but living unlistened to,
by the teachers and parents who paid for their lives.
Thus, unwittingly, television taught me more
about the world than my parents could admit to.
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