You may wonder why I describe my best friend's town, and his life
as Stepford. In essence it's the town where everything is apparently
perfect, but yet still there's somthing wrong.
Here's a description using the term, comparing it to car which aspires
to be a thoroughbred, but cannot escape it's pedestrian roots.
The Acura TSX is the
Stepford wife of sport sedans. Like one of the complaisant clones
in Ira Levin's sci-fi feminist novel (and the deliciously dated movie
of 1975), the new TSX does everything one could ask of it and offers
still more.
If the 2004 TSX has a weakness, it is the same as Stepford's selfless
automatons: an appliance-like vapidity, a soullessness, a gravity for
which there is no center.
Forgettable? It's hard to forget something that you never quite saw
in the first place.
Perhaps it's the TSX's design — lovely without being attractive — that
reminds me of the Stepford wives. Maybe it's the uncomprehending
voice-recognition system built into the navigation system. When asked
to plot a route
to the nearest hospital, the robotic feminine voice directed me to
the North Carolina Central Prison; when I ordered the temperature
down on the climate control, it tuned the radio instead.
In any event, it is worth remembering the movie's ending. The Stepford
husbands were quite content with their soulless and servile surrogates.
If the TSX proves anything, it's that personality isn't everything.