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The Household
Movie

The Household

1974 • Unknown

Woke Score
5
out of 10

Plot

A butler for wealthy clients has a problem--he can't seem to stop getting sexually involved with the wives and daughters of his bosses.

Overall Series Review

The film presents a sharp, often crude, satire on the moral bankruptcy and sexual hypocrisy of the wealthy elite. The narrative is driven entirely by the sexual chaos created by the working-class butler's inability to stop sleeping with the wives and daughters of his wealthy employers. The wealthy masters are consistently undermined and emasculated by the butler's sexual vitality and lower-class agency. The narrative structure portrays the privileged women as sexually unfulfilled and trapped in passionless marriages, using their affairs with the hired help as a means of personal rebellion and liberation from conventional roles. The core conflict is a social and class-based critique that uses sexual transgression as the vehicle to expose the rot at the core of the Western bourgeois family unit and the spiritual vacuum of the upper class.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics3/10

The narrative's central tension is rooted in class conflict, contrasting the sexual agency of the working-class butler with the incompetence of the wealthy, established masters. The vilification is of the wealthy elite and the bourgeoisie, not specifically of 'whiteness' or forced intersectional categories.

Oikophobia8/10

The film functions as an excoriation of the Western bourgeois family, portraying the core institution of the wealthy household as fundamentally hypocritical and corrupt. The butler acts as a subversive catalyst that exposes the moral and spiritual decay of the established home culture.

Feminism7/10

Male characters of authority (the husbands/fathers) are universally portrayed as sexually impotent, bumbling, or incompetent, directly leading to their emasculation by the vital, working-class butler. Wives and daughters are shown escaping their unhappy, traditional family roles through sexual liberation, suggesting motherhood and marriage are prisons of the bourgeoisie.

LGBTQ+2/10

The sexual transgression is entirely centered on the breakdown of the male-female nuclear family unit through heterosexual infidelity. The film does not center alternative sexualities, nor does it contain explicit messaging about gender ideology or 'queer theory' concepts.

Anti-Theism5/10

The core of the film is a moral satire that highlights the spiritual vacuum and hypocrisy of the elite class. While it does not explicitly attack religion, the universal lack of morality, conscience, and objective truth among the family suggests a culture defined by subjective, self-serving power dynamics and a hedonistic view of life.