Ira Levin absolutely admires efficiency and clockwork construction! It's what his books are famous for!
Have you read much of him? I kind of got obsessed and read all his novels and a couple other things. He's wonderful—but his progressive political commitments are pretty ambivalent. (A Kiss Before Dying, for example, is very anxious about young lower class upstarts.)
I've read A KISS BEFORE DYING, ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE STEPFORD WIVES, and THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL—admittedly none of them recently.
While I think he admires efficiency as a writer, I also think he really truly HATES Nazis—actual or *de facto*. The Stepford men, especially Diz, are very much *de facto* Nazis, killing off their wives and replacing them with wind-up housekeeping and sex dolls for not being sufficiently submissive.
That the men win in the end is not meant to congratulate them—that would be like saying that because the Inner Party in 1984 wins, it's a validation of Stalinism. It's meant to be a cautionary tale of the kind of toxic incel (before the term existed) who would only want his wife to be a wind-up housekeeping and sex doll....
the trick is that Orwell makes it clear that the party really is rewriting reality. Levin at the end of stepford wives wants to have it both ways; we don't know whether she's been replaced, or whether she had a nervous breakdown and is now recovered.
Levin's attitude towards the Nazis in the boys from brazil is also complicated. the book is pulp nonsense Nazi-sploitation; it's using Hitler as a plot twist to sell units. It's also obviously framing Hitler as bad! but it's again very much entranced with its own plot machinations, and those to some extent override the moral message.
Again, I like Levin a lot! just...he's not Orwell, who really was primarily focused on moral issues. he was very consciously a suspense thriller writer and he prided himself on keeping one step ahead of the reader. That means his investment in Stepford Wives is somewhat ambiguous, since the obvious analog for his own obsession with mechanism is not the women, but Diz.
I read this when I was young, but now want to read it again!
Ahhhhh.... I think you're overthinking the plumbing here, Noah.
You know who ELSE was really REALLY efficient? The Nazis—or so they were believed to be when THE STEPFORD WIVES was written.
I'm pretty sure Ira Levin isn't admiring of that kind of efficiency in any way, shape, or form.
Ira Levin absolutely admires efficiency and clockwork construction! It's what his books are famous for!
Have you read much of him? I kind of got obsessed and read all his novels and a couple other things. He's wonderful—but his progressive political commitments are pretty ambivalent. (A Kiss Before Dying, for example, is very anxious about young lower class upstarts.)
I've read A KISS BEFORE DYING, ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE STEPFORD WIVES, and THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL—admittedly none of them recently.
While I think he admires efficiency as a writer, I also think he really truly HATES Nazis—actual or *de facto*. The Stepford men, especially Diz, are very much *de facto* Nazis, killing off their wives and replacing them with wind-up housekeeping and sex dolls for not being sufficiently submissive.
That the men win in the end is not meant to congratulate them—that would be like saying that because the Inner Party in 1984 wins, it's a validation of Stalinism. It's meant to be a cautionary tale of the kind of toxic incel (before the term existed) who would only want his wife to be a wind-up housekeeping and sex doll....
the trick is that Orwell makes it clear that the party really is rewriting reality. Levin at the end of stepford wives wants to have it both ways; we don't know whether she's been replaced, or whether she had a nervous breakdown and is now recovered.
Levin's attitude towards the Nazis in the boys from brazil is also complicated. the book is pulp nonsense Nazi-sploitation; it's using Hitler as a plot twist to sell units. It's also obviously framing Hitler as bad! but it's again very much entranced with its own plot machinations, and those to some extent override the moral message.
Again, I like Levin a lot! just...he's not Orwell, who really was primarily focused on moral issues. he was very consciously a suspense thriller writer and he prided himself on keeping one step ahead of the reader. That means his investment in Stepford Wives is somewhat ambiguous, since the obvious analog for his own obsession with mechanism is not the women, but Diz.