During our discussion of The Stepford Wives someone made a point to question just what happened at the end. Did the lead wife die, or was she simply playing along with the "perfect wife" gimmick in order to stay alive?
I'll admit when I started watching the movie I expected to see just an older version of the remake that came out with Nicole Kidman, so when the movie started getting more and more into it's own plot I started second guessing the remake's faithfulness to the original which turned out to be so much better. (The newer one was just corny.) It seems like they took the idea of the original Stepford Wives and just made it into a happy, feel-good movie whose goal it was pretty much to say how we should appreciate the imperfections of each other and value a woman for not being that "robotic-perfect" we all think we need at times. Anyway, in the end of the movie Kidman's character lives and everybody goes home happy, or something like that (and Christopher Walken turns out to be a robot...like no one saw that coming. :-P ).
Because I had seen Kidman's character live in the new one I expected to not only get attached to this lead female (I think her name was Joanna or something like that) in her plight to prove conspiracy while surviving the average wives' purge, but also to see her live at the end of the movie. When the scene comes up that shows her double in the room looking pretty intent on taking Joanna out of the picture we can assume what is going to go down, however they never really show it happen. Instead they go to the next scene at the supermarket and show her functioning with all the other robotic housewives. While I am pretty sure Joanna is toast at this point and that what we are seeing is another robot, the person who brought the idea that Joanna might not be dead raised a pretty good argument. You don't really see Joanna die, however all the evidence is there supporting that Joanna is dead.
I guess what I am trying to get at is that, and I bet this is with anyone who saw the new one first, we grew so attached to the main character that when the end finally came so abruptly like that we wanted to believe that she found a way out, that she survived. It's amazing how films and stories, clearly about fictional characters, can get us to attach ourselves across dimensions from our reality to their fictional one. Perhaps it's not so much the character as much as what the character represents in conjunction with the audience personally?
-MT
I agree. When we feel some sort of personal connection with the main character (or any of the characters for that matter) we feel their emotions more and sometimes almost betrayed by the director/author when they kill off our "friend". I'd always assumed the choice to not show Joanna's death had more to do with the time period the movie was released and the censors than the expectation of the audience for their heroine to survive. I watched the original film first so hearing from someone who watched the remake first definitely gives a fresh perspective and makes me want to watch this again.
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