Maybe it's just election year politics, but there is a growing chorus of celebrities bemoaning the"Stepfordization" of America in the form of press censorship and growing authoritarianism in America. (See article on my blog). It's not clear whether or not these accusations are founded, but when troubled Americans robotically vandalize my not-at-all-political employer's washroom with conservative talk show phrases like "You &!&@%@# Liberals You Hate America", (see photo here), one has to wonder whether there is a "Stepfordization" of America.

The Stepford Wives, which recently premiered in Los Angeles to mixed reviews, is a remake of the brilliant 1975 cult classic of the same name. Starring the beautiful Nicole Kidman, the 2004 movie takes place in a small Connecticut town in which a secret society conspires to squash the independence of the town's young women by replacing them with obedient robot replicas.

Even if you don't get a chance to see the remake, the 1975 cult classic with Katharine Ross is a must-see for every American. It's available on DVD and VHS from Amazon.com. Critics at the time said the movie was a metaphor for anti-feminism in 1975 America, but I wonder whether the robotization of America depicted in the film wasn't also a metaphor to the slavish roboticism of the Watergate Burglars and the perceived totalitarianism of Nixon's America that still resonated in 1975 America.

Great cinema seeks to resonate with its contemporary audiences, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that film often contains veiled references to current political events, especially in a time of perceived censorship. For example, the German silent surrealistic cult classic, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) (aka Das Kabinett des Dr. Kaligari) is about a somnambulist who kills at the command of his hypnotic master, Dr. Caligari. Film critics have ever since argued that the film was a veiled reference to growing fascism in Germany. (See Kracauer's excellent historical treatise on this point, From Hitler to Caligari, which argues that German films of the 1920s were premonitions of Hitler's rise in the 1930s. The book is available from Amazon.com.) The movie studio recognized the film for the political satire that it was, and forced the director, Robert Wiene, to appease the German censors by adding an ending in which the entire movie is revealed as merely the dream of a madman under the care of a once again benevolent authority: Dr. Caligari, his psychiatrist. This cult classic is available in all regions on DVD and (US NTSC) VHS format from Amazon.com.

The relationship between the robotic Stepford wives and this political expression in early German cinema becomes in the early 1930s as Hitler was coming to power. German filmmakers often chose to make increasingly abstract films about machines and mechanisms as metaphors for the growing machinations of the state. These metaphors sometimes allowed them to escape the dangerous notice of the increasingly repressive censors.