film and yet serious enough and legitimately scary to be thought of only as a black comedy. The movie somehow straddles many genres simultaneously without lapsing into one comfortably and this may account for its staying power.
The movie follows a young couple from Manhattan who decide to move to the slower-paced suburb Stepford in Connecticut. Joanna, played by Katherine Ross, becomes increasingly dissatisfied and disturbed with the homogenous, vacant, and superficial housewives that populate the town of Stepford. One by one, Joanna's female friends in the town transform from interesting, creative, and spirited individuals into drone-like housewives who thrive off of cleaning the house and pleasing their husbands. Frightened by the rapid metamorphoses, Joanna plays detective only to find that the members of the Stepford Men's Club, a secret and elite men's society in the town, have been discarding their real wives in favor of robotic versions, programmed to please their husband's desires.
This movie beautifully portrays two sides of the Uranus archetype: one heroic, the other depraved. Joanna is an example of a Uranian individual among a faceless, colorless crowd. Creative, imaginative, and vital, Joanna prizes her hard-won individuality even when the pressure to conform in Stepford is significant. Joanna displays the remarkably tenacious and praiseworthy capability of people to follow their own internal rhythms and guides when external pressures negate these internal voices at every turn. Moreover, Joanna trusts her intuition—a faculty of Uranus—which states that something is amiss in her new suburb even when the town is colluding against her. It is the wonderful ability to be guided by inner faculties and principles that is often the greatest gift of the Uranus archetype, and Ross's Joanna relies on it first for her own vitality but then for her very life.
However, Stepford Wives shows a very dark and shadowy side of Uranus as well. The Stepford Men's Club displays the Uranian capacity to take a distorted and misinformed idea of a perfect or idealized society and to implement it into reality. Through technology, the men of Stepford destroy their real wives and replace them with robotic wives that will fulfill their desires, ignore their shortcomings, who will be totally compliant and obedient, and physically perfect. This is Uranus at its most fanatical, mad, and unbalanced. As much as Uranus has been correlated with ideas and visions that have truly benefited humanity—democracy, equal rights, desegregation, and women's sufferage, to name a few—there are also examples in history of zealous individuals that become completely consumed with their own particular, warped vision of an idealized and perfected human nature. Hitler, Wagner, Charles Manson, and Joseph McCarthy are examples of individuals with prominent Uranus's in their birth chart, who, each in their own individual way, became all-consumed with implementing their vision of human perfection.
Conclusion:
"It has been a rough time for dreamers" says a rogue bohemian from Waking Life. Indeed, the current cultural climate is one not noted for voicing new freedoms, encouraging civil disobedience, promoting creative experimentation, or celebrating difference. This is a time where Uranus and everything that it symbolizes in us collectively is very much asleep. However, when the genies, Prometheuses, and Pandoras are released, awakened, and unbound again, may we use the creative fires of Uranus wisely and treat the visionary impulses and revolutionary ideas with care. Perhaps we will walk open-minded and curious into a new universe like Wiley Wiggins in Walking Life. Perhaps we will have the audacity to have our freak flags fly and true colors on full display like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show. Perhaps we will create something of earth-shattering genius like Scorsese's Raging Bull or Bergman's Persona. Perhaps we will have the courage of our convictions like Michael Moore. Or Perhaps we will be guided by intuition and insight like Katherine Ross's Joanna in the Stepford Wives. Whatever the case may be, when treated with respect and when in harmony and balance, the archetype of Uranus is a necessary ingredient for a full and rich life—it is the very divine spark of life.
All birth times from the Internet Movie Database or www.thenewage.com
Endnotes :
(1) Hand, Robert. 1981. Horoscope Symbols. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, p. 22
(2) Casey, Caroline. Making the Gods Work For You. New York: Three Rivers Press, p. 138
(3) Peter Frampton was also an individual who experienced the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1975-1976 on his natal Sun. Both Curry and Frampton burst onto the popular scene in a highly dynamic, unpredictable and unprecedented fashion. Frampton's "Frampton Comes Alive" also plays homage to the Promethean-Creator myth in the same vein of Curry's Frank-n-Furter. For more, read this essay.
(4) http://www.soderbergh.net/articles/1996/roughcut.htm
(5) http://www.openix.com/~danb/persona.htm
(6) Bergman, Ingmar. 1988.The Magic Lantern. New York: Viking, p.133
(7) http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2000/11/15/
raging_bull_2000_review.shtml
(8) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/
longterm/movies/videos/rogermerhinson_a0a906.htm
(9) Greene, Liz. 1996. The Art of Stealing Fire.Centre for Psychological Astrology Press, p.33
(10) http://othyrworld.com/zardoz/
(11) http://www.salon.com/people/conv/2001/04/02/boorman/
index2.html
|
