Denouement Renouement

Tag: paula prentiss

  • Hooptober 12: The Stepford Wives (1975)

    Film #12 — 3/4 Films Based on Novels

    Also filed under: A-One

    By C. Ramsay

    “Tell me about yourself…What does your husband do?”

    Walter, Joanna, and their two young children, Amy and Kim, are finalizing packing their car to uproot from Manhattan to Stepford, Connecticut when they’re first introduced to the audience. Joanna, a photographer, seems distracted in longing for the city before they’ve even left, and the kids are curious of the world around them. When Walter eventually catches up to them with the last of their things, he’s bitter, rushing to take off, and expressing contempt for the liberality of the home the rest of his family has not yet processed giving up. With him driving, they take off for the destination of their new all-white, pastoral, guarded community to start the next chapter of their lives.

    The viewer is transported through the hazy dreaminess of Stepford with a drifting camera that gently follows Joanna as she adjusts to the traditionalism of rural suburbia. People of colour are absent as residents and tokenized when brought up, every woman is expected to be quiet and obedient, and Joanna is the only one who sees the children in the area as people. As her unease about the values of their new town grows to safety concerns, Joanna tries to vocalize her fears to her husband who becomes frustrated, making it clear that decisions he’d previously tried to frame as being mutually beneficial were actually based out of patriarchal conservatism.

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  • A-One: The Parallax View (1974)

    By C. Ramsay

    Spoilers!

    An incredibly stylish overview of individualistic American exceptionalism and the paranoia of established institutions. Beginning with the assassination of a U.S. senator with presidential aspirations, an event witnessed by numerous people including Warren Beatty’s investigative reporter Joseph Frady, the film builds to getting so swept up in its dualities that it begs the viewer to question their own complicity.

    After the opening events of the film, Frady is shown to have had to re-attain his position of employment after having previously faced repercussions for a drinking problem, evoking the American ethos of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. That with enough introspection, application, and grind, self-actualization will be achieved—but with previous faults rendered inconsequential. The emphasis is not on the growth of a person, but their supposed reinvention. It is on their ability to adjust not because of a catalyst, but in spite of it. With any prolonged bout of introspection, though, is the risk of aggrandized self-assurance, something Frady exhibits from the start of the film to its bitter end. 

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