While his family are away, Dan (Michael Douglas) has a short affair with a colleague, Alex (Glenn Close).
Dan thinks it is just something he can put away, but Alex has other ideas…
While I enjoy erotic thrillers, it is embarrassing to admit I have never seen this movie before.
It is such a cornerstone of the genre, and I did not have that many thoughts about it.
It is also a prime example of the “[blank] from hell” genre - a strain of eighties and nineties thrillers based around taking familiar archetypes and turning them into villains: The Stepfather (the stepdad from hell), The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (the babysitter from hell), The Temp (you get the idea).
Here we have the spurned lover from hell in Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest.
While I had never seen this movie before, I was aware of the character and her impact. On this viewing, I found it impossible not to empathise with Alex.
I love Douglas - mostly because much of his star persona is based on how inherently sleazy he is. But that quality kind of works against him here. That quality is so potent, he cannot be sympathetic. Meanwhile Close’s performance is so specific, too rooted in a sense of pain and trauma, Alex never comes off as an out and out villain.
In a movie that was leaning into its contradictions, and the messiness of people, these things would not be problems. But Fatal Attraction does not want to be that movie.
The film is well-directed - the ‘bunny boiler’ scene and the final showdown are well-paced and shot - but the movie is kind of inert. It is too afraid to follow the trajectory of the original story.
In the original ending, Alex gets her vengeance by killing herself - this finale is foreshadowed by an early scene in which Dan and Alex bond over their love of Madame Butterfly.
I do not know if the film would have worked with that ending - it probably would not have been the huge hit the final film ended up being.
But while it works as a set-piece, the final confrontation carries no punch.
Fundamentally, there is no getting away from the hypocrisy at the heart of the movie: Dan gets away with it.
Even the final shot - a roving camera moves through the house before ending on a photo of the family - feels like the filmmakers are trying to show how Alex’s death has saved the family. It is a full stop on the story that feels like it wants to veer away before having to deal with the messy aftermath of Dan’s actions.
No blowback, no irony, no lingering unease about the stability of the family unit.
The only vaguely interesting aspect of the movie was something I had noticed in other examples of the [blank] from hell genre: a racial subtext.
This is a familiar dichotomy from a lot of Hollywood movies, creating a racial and moral divide between the suburbs and urban environments.
It is most explicit in Unlawful Entry, where the film opens on a helicopter shot that moves from a murder scene involving a dead black man in the city to the protagonists’ home in the suburbs.
What was more unsettling with Fatal Attraction is the way it aligns black people and their spaces with sexuality and deviance.
After their first tryst, Dan and Alex are shown dancing in an Afro-carribean club - we are introduced to the scene/location by close up shots of sweaty black couples, before Douglas and Close are shown.
I do not know if I would have noticed this if I had not also watched Cape Fear (1961) around the same time. A progenitor to the [blank] from hell genre, Cape Fear includes an early scene in which the villainous Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) enjoys hanging out at a blues bar.
The dancing scene is maybe the only time we see anyone non-white in Fatal Attraction - certainly the only scene in which our central characters are the minority in a scene. The fact that it is this scene, in the context of two characters engaged in an affair, shows the way the film aligns different spaces with different values.
The suburbs are the domestic space, the non-sexual space, while the city is more diverse, and offers space for erotic exploration (see also the seduction in the industrial lift to Alex’s apartment).
While it offers a lot to analyse and write about, I found Fatal Attraction to be kind of boring. The bluntness of the finale is stifling on the film’s themes, it kind of put me off trying to dig more into it.
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