[On one level, another good film for limited thinking, just “basic entertainment” amid a night’s unhealthy snacks and beer or some similar fluid. On another level, food for important thought.]
[This review is updated/edited, 5/29/12, after I re-viewed the movie days after the original version of the posting. Edited a bit more 6/1/12.]
I meant this to be a fairly easy review on a movie I didn’t want to think about too much, or view anew too many times. It came out in fall 1987, while I was in grad school, and I recall (on seeing it shown in a DVD extra) my first impression of the film from the associated Time magazine cover picture of Michael Douglas and Glenn Close…I think I had the impression the movie was a fairly broad, and slightly preposterous, thriller. I think part of what made the initial-promo notion kind of wacky was the starring of Michael Douglas, who has long struck me as a simpatico, well-meaning, slightly nerdy guy [see end note 1]; for him to be presented as some kind of stud half of a couple in a steamy sex-related picture seemed off-kilter. That was what I thought when I was about 26; obviously, take it for a grain of salt. (I did not see the movie when it came out, but only years later; I’ve seen it, I think, twice over the years before this week; not sure when.)
All these years after 1987, and with diligent commentary from various parties on the 2002-released DVD, it would seem the movie stirred up hornets’ nests (not all so bad) on a few fronts: it upset feminists, with Close’s Alex character seeming a slur on single professional women (an earnest female producer, Sherry Lansing, admits being taken aback by this reaction, and identifies herself as a feminist, and even says she consulted informally with Gloria Steinem on the reaction). (Alex was even seen as a forerunner for Erika Christensen’s constricted-emotions character [also with an androgynous name] in the similar, youth-oriented stalker flick Swimfan of 2002.) The film led some to ask, as if it were in the direction of a clinically based treatise, what kind of problem did Alex have—borderline personality disorder? (My initial short answer: No.) It led to the popular concept of the “bunny boiler,” which seems especially used in Great Britain—a joking reference to a spurned woman in a romantic context. And of course, part of the reason the movie stimulated so much discussion and cultural ephemera is that it was (I think) the second biggest hit of 1987.
Another thing I associate with this movie is a sort of sniggering attitude, held in later years, toward Adrian Lyne, its director (a Briton), who seems quite astute about the film in DVD commentary. That is, when Unfaithful (2002) came out, it was “diligently” noted that its director (and producer) was the same Adrian Lyne who had directed Fatal Attraction—as if this fact were a sort of negative reference for the newer film. What I recall about Unfaithful, which I think I only saw once (when it came out), was the (intended) preposterousness of the sex scenes in a public restroom, particularly the sound, which (if I recall rightly) seemed more attuned to wildness in a stable with an invading bear than to humorously titillating, snigger-ready light porn. I don’t want to get into the issue of what is, or is not, good erotica, and how smart Mr. Lyne is about this; I think, in general, the sex aspect in Fatal Attraction, as the movie is overall, is handled with enough taste, in terms of making the movie stylish and giving it a sort of polish (as well as a healthy puncturing humor) as background to its eventual horror.
Two angles: blunt genre horror; and a more intelligent look at a kind of stalker
I am not a big erotica fan; and anyway I think Fatal Attraction is more notable for exploiting a sort of genre concept, particularly a kind of horror/thriller genre, and that related to psychological aberration, which makes it no more or less objectionable than, say, Psycho (1960) is about a man with (more or less) dissociative identity disorder (as the DSM now would label it). But also, FA treats a theme that is riper for serious modern discussion: the female stalker.
In the following, let’s first look at FA as an instance of psych horror. And here we can conclude that, first, Mr. Lyne does a serviceable enough job through most of the film (so that if it had its original, Alex-commits-suicide ending, it would have had a sadly, semi-European “study” integrity to it). (I viewed the original ending today, May 29, and found it surprisingly well done, technically.) Further, where the film caves in to prerelease audience-reaction demands, to add a goofy kill-the-monster scene, is where we assess how strong the movie is overall. (The kill-the-monster aspect probably makes it good enough for cheap holiday-weekend viewing.)
Story situates horror in familiar, cozy setting
The James Dearden screenplay is based on an earlier, more truncated story along similar lines (also by Mr. Dearden, for a British-TV film), which appealed to the two producers (also including Stanley R. Jaffe). Michael Douglas plays a lawyer (of a city firm) named Dan Gallagher, and his attractive wife Beth is played by Anne Archer. There is also a precocious moppet daughter with short hair that makes her look slightly boyish. The early scenes, orienting Dan and family in their city apartment, offer a kind of key framework to this kind of horror picture, produced by popularly-understood “red-label” Paramount: the family is upscale, with all sorts of cozy touches to the domestic life—which the film’s overall photography and set design make almost dreamlike, but more romanticized than fantastic. Coming about 20 years after Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and seven years after The Shining (1980), both of which oriented horror-type developments in domestic settings relatable-to by the middle class, FA maybe shows the high-water mark of this kind of film: the upscale home-nest maybe seems too idealized, too much a thing of high-end lifestyle-magazine photo spreads. But it’s exactly this sort of “how could you go wrong?” environment that helps set off how bad the horror to come is, especially when it’s developed by Alex Forrest, the unmarried associate editor of a book publisher, played by Glenn Close.
Dan is at a book-signing party—his firm has done all the legal work for the book publisher Alex works at—with his wife and a friend who is a fellow attorney. His friend gets a cold look when he flirts with Alex, and that—in the ever-so-subtle way Dan and Alex cross paths—is what sets up Alex’s connection to Dan. Later, Dan encounters Alex at a bar at the party, apologizes for his friend’s behavior, and does small talk to be nice. He heads out; no further strings attached are expected. Some day or so later, he finds Alex in a business meeting when he is at the book publisher, he as lawyer, and she there as an editor. This further builds her being intrigued by him. (Business talk, operating as a none-too-subtle plot indicator, about a Congressman suing the publisher over an affair’s being depicted in an apparent roman a clef, which he alleges being about him, offers some thematic resonance/foreshadowing within the story.) So far, so typical for what sets up the initial tiny grounds for an affair, you might say. Things get more ambiguous when Alex and Dan meet for dinner while Dan’s wife is away.
Aspects of marital story are handled sensitively; Alex as a crazy varies
The whole story is pulp-ish, but the script, in terms of especially the extramarital affair—which can only be handled seriously in this kind of film—is articulate enough. And the acting is good throughout. Glenn Close especially handles her role well, which deviated from her previous types of roles, and for which she (the DVD extras indicate) consulted with psychiatrists to find out what kind of motivation lay behind Alex’s behavior. Up until the last violent scene (which, based on preview reactions, was a rewrite and reshoot of the film’s ending, which Close vigorously objected to before agreeing to do it), Close gives a tasteful performance that, early on, shows the normality of such a person seen at first, with touches of the imperious (“What happened? I wake up, you’re not here, I hate that!” and later her demand in a phone message “Don’t disappoint me!”). Through all this, including her insidiously cementing a close relationship with Dan (which she sees more herself as close and meant-to-be than Dan does), she seems consistent with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. (When she gets more cartoonishly violent, this is definitely less consistent with typical BPD. Also, actual slashing of wrists in an apparent suicide attempt is less frequent, I think, in BPD than is the phenomenon of "cutting," which is a matter of stress reduction or an expression of despair, and usually doesn't physically risk actual death.)
Later in the movie, especially when Dan confronts her in a knife-wielding scene at her apartment before the final, more operatic showdown, and Alex ends up sitting inertly against a wall, with a gone-goofy simpering expression on her face, Close is playing the character more as a “crazy” who is opaque: a movie crazy, someone who is more a plot device than someone we are invited to try to figure out as to motivation, and to sympathize with. And this is when the film becomes simple pulp, genre stuff: when she is more of a movie crazy—fitting the stock cinematic technique of “the mentally ill person just for pop-cinema purposes,” the most classic example of which is Norman Bates sitting in a police holding cell, with cannily glowering eyes and wicked, upper-teeth smile, while his mother’s voice is presented (as his thinking), incidentally showing what monstrosity he’s settled into, and his face eventually is melded with a superimposition of the mother’s corpse’s skeletal face, then there is fading in of the final shot of Marion’s car being towed out of the swamp. Other examples are the Stanley Kubrick crazies, giving an unambiguously menacing look—with Alex the delinquent/misanthrope in A Clockwork Orange (1971), or breaking-down Jack Torrance brilliantly played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining, or the bullied G.I. “Gomer Pyle” leering on a toilet in Full Metal Jacket (1987).
If all you want is basic horror, with a troubled female as the monster (without CGI, or demonic possession, or outer-space interlopers), I’ve touched on most of the points of note in the movie. One can consume it (with snacks of choice) as a cheap pastime, and be done with it.
Alex’s most important meaning today: as a female stalker; and with this, adultery theme gets overshadowed
Feminists were irked over its depiction of a single career woman in Alex, and for their own parts, even men didn’t like how Dan revealed aspects of their sex’s way of having an affair, to roughly sum what point Douglas makes in a DVD extra. Some less sexually partisan have criticized how Dan didn’t get quite the comeuppance he should have for consenting to the affair. (Indeed, he seems weak in how he lets Alex seduce him at a restaurant into a later steamy sexual encounter—while Dan’s wife is away in the country looking into possible property for them to move to for a new home.)
I think one thing that makes the film worth more than a cheap thrill is in bringing up the issue of the female stalker. Indeed, this probably was a very new concept in 1987—I certainly don’t remember talk from then about such a thing. And indeed, all the public consciousness of stalkers, and laws passed regarding same, has been a development of the past 20 years or less. As it happens, most talk today of stalking—following how any innovation in addressing certain human ills takes on a banal conceptualization among the less enlightened—is about men stalking women. But of course, women can stalk, too—not just stalk men, but also other women. (See this article for some clue into their being recent studies on this phenomenon.)
The theme of adultery also is brought home as a serious topic, and a point where Anne Archer engages in her best acting in the film, when she reacts with understandable tumult to Dan’s finally revealing his adultery, in order to explain the increasing craziness Alex is visiting on the family when Dan won’t cement a relationship with her, Alex, more to her obsessive liking. This is one thing touching about the film, and not merely soap-opera-ish. But of course, the film is primarily about a stalker, and the adultery theme—somewhat as it would be in real life, a sort of thing maybe this film doesn’t examine well enough—takes a back seat to the fact that the current threat to the family is a crazywoman, regarding whom Dan’s wife Beth ends up making common cause with him—first in a “ballsy” female warning to Alex on the phone, and later, finally, when it is Beth who puts the final stop—with a bullet—to the almost supernatural spectacle of Alex being hard to kill when Dan prodigiously tries to drown her in a bathtub in the couple’s country house.
Film’s different sides may appeal to different audiences
I’ve told a lot of plot points, and I’ve touched base on a lot of the broader features of the film. I don’t think I’ve spoiled it for those who haven’t seen it, by revealing the killing of Alex: this is one of the things the film is famous for, and it also has been controversial as being considered to mar an otherwise not-bad film. (The original ending is included with the DVD.) I think viewers can still go to this film and admire the craft and care with which it was made, by director and main actors. (Intriguingly, Fred Gwynne, who played Herman Munster in the TV show The Munsters, shows up as a lawyer colleague of Dan’s—Gwynne seems suited to this, as he plays a no-nonsense Southern judge in the amusing film My Cousin Vinny [1993]. But his scene is so short as almost to be a cameo, yet he is listed in the opening credits as if he has a semi-featured part.)
How this film impresses viewers may vary—depending on tastes—along the lines of its qualities as (1) a tastefully handled story on a familiar kind of marital problem, and (2) more pulpish fare, and (3) more boneheaded horror. But when it is good on what it treats, it’s definitely worth a viewing. And when its makers talk so earnestly on the DVD about what it took to get the film made, and so on, it isn’t like a group of now-much-older contributors trying to dignify (without complete success) a past pop-culture sometimes-self-parody, but it’s like a group of pros who, fitting with Hollywood’s familiar occasional prostituting of itself, had started to make what they might have felt was glorified genre stuff, but ending up serving multiple purposes despite itself, or having unexpected consequences: among them, grounds to discuss what it means to be a female stalker, and how well popular movies do, and should, treat this sort of thing.
End note 1.
