Cinema: Killer! Fatal Attraction strikes gold as a parable of sexual guilt

Let’s Be Naughty — Witty, athletic, adventurous Manhattan book editor, 36, with Medusa tresses and a Circe smile. A whiz in the bedroom and the kitchen. Loves children, roller coasters, opera (esp. Madame Butterfly), gourmet food and cutlery. Hates rabbits, saying goodbye and meeting guys through a personals column like this one. But God put too many married men on this island, so let’s have some fun. Just be smart, sexy, fearless and potentially unattached. Photo and resume will get a response from the woman of your dark dreams. Give me a chance and I’ll love you to pieces. c/o ALEX.

What Am I Doing Here? — Lawyer, personable, nice job, great wife, cute kid, very happily married . . . (well, reasonably happy, I mean, O.K., I’m fortyish and I don’t even want to think about approaching mid-life, let alone a mid- life crisis, but still) . . . seeks . . . (no, not ‘seeks,’ maybe ‘is willing to entertain the notion of meeting’) . . . attractive woman who might want to spend a weekend over drinks, dinner and dishes. Or not. Your call. Uh, wait! Don’t call — at home or the office. Instead, write me if you want. c/o DAN.

Last of the Red-Hot Mothers — And wife too. Gorgeous homemaker, spirited, nurturing, a vision of chic domesticity. Has loving, personable husband (whom I trust explicitly), an adorable child and a quiet new suburban home. Seeks more of the same, forever and ever. Amen. Will I protect my brood, come hellion or high water? You bet your wife. c/o BETH.

Three archetypes for a modern mortality play. Alex Forrest, a career woman whose forcefulness sheathes a precarious ego. Dan Gallagher, a guy who seems to have embraced personal and career contradictions in a big, easy bear hug. Beth Gallagher, comfortable in her roles as wife, mother and natural stunner. But what if Alex is a creature of insatiable lust and leeching possessiveness? And if Dan’s amiability has made him too soft to resist Alex’s attentions or, later, to protect his family from her vengeance? And if Beth, supermom in disguise, is roused to confront the beast Alex has become? Oh, and what if somebody made a movie about this trio of ’80s Everypersons?

Somebody did make Fatal Attraction. And this fall, what if became wow! Striking moviegoers with the startling power of a madwoman in your bathroom, Paramount’s lurid romantic thriller is the zeitgeist hit of the decade. It has been box-office champ for each of its first seven weeks in release, and shows little sign of slackening. Last week it reached the $80 million mark, to rank as the year’s second highest grossing film. It’s the movie with something for almost everybody. Says Michael Douglas, who plays Dan: “People leave saying ‘I laughed, I got turned on by the sex scenes, and I got scared.’ You can’t ask for more than that.”

But Paramount, which also released the year’s No. 1 and No. 3 films (Beverly Hills Cop II and The Untouchables), is getting more than that. People can’t stop talking about this movie, arguing about its characters, seeing in Dan, Beth and Alex creepy visions of themselves and their old flames. “Everybody can identify with obsessive love,” says Co-Producer Sherry Lansing. “All of us have made a call in the middle of the night when we shouldn’t have, or driven by somebody’s house when we shouldn’t have. I’ve never boiled a rabbit, but I’ve made phone calls.”

And some come to visit. Glenn Close, who plays Alex, was recently approached by a mid-40s woman with her husband in tow: “She had enjoyed Fatal Attraction, and was taking him to see it ‘so he’ll never cheat on me.’ And he goes, ‘Huh-huh’ — this nervous little laugh.” Sidney Ganis, Paramount’s marketing boss, observes, “There is a fever out there. It is more than a movie. It’s part movie, part real life.” Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, is amazed by its reach: “The movie is almost like a living thing that feeds off the public and takes on new shape.” In other words, Fatal Attraction is a monster hit.

But who is the monster? Alex Forrest, creature of the id. And who are the heroes? An American family, right or wrong, weak or strong, Dan or Beth. And how does a film with no surefire stars, no space-age special effects, no ringing affirmation of the human spirit, no discernible pretensions toward art, no unanimous blessing from the critics — and not a single teenager among its cast of characters — luck into the national bloodstream? By tapping the current mood of sexual malaise with a cautionary — indeed, reactionary — tale about an errant husband, a faithful wife and a career woman unlucky in love. And by skewing a Hitchcockian domestic thriller into a rousing horror show. Fatal Attraction starts as Vertigo and ends as Psycho. For all its flaws, the picture deftly scares and excites people with fun-house-mirror reflections of themselves. As Director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes, “The strongest human emotion is fear. It’s the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman.” Or woman.

One instant indicator of a pop phenomenon is the parodies and rip-offs it inspires. Fatal Attraction’s success has already been validated by a skit on Saturday Night Live. Last week NBC aired a TV-movie thriller with the sounds- like title Dangerous Affection (originally Hit and Run); for Nov. 30, the network has scheduled a mystery called Fatal Confession (originally Father Dowling). And the title of Larry Cohen’s detective movie Love You to Death was changed before release to Deadly Illusion. Perhaps, even at this moment, some literate mogul is optioning the Don Quixote epilogue, in which a man, sure of his wife’s fidelity, persuades his best friend to woo her, and the result is hot sex and violent death. Hollywood could even keep Cervantes’ title for the tale: Fatal Curiosity.

Like any phenomenal film, Fatal Attraction transforms a theater full of strangers into a community: confidant to Dan, cheerleader to Beth, lynch mob for Alex. And they leave the movie with golden word of mouth. “I saw a lot of couples looking at each other sideways as they walked out,” says Jim Stegall, 35, a Miami ad salesman. “The meaning of that look was obvious: Don’t even think about having an affair.” Director Lyne says, “I’ve had men ring me up and say, ‘Thanks a million, buddy, you’ve ruined it for us.’ ” A Manhattan psychoanalyst told Co-Producer Lansing, “I know the picture is a hit, because out of my seven patients, five have brought up the movie.”

Audiences can be led, stretched, manipulated, but ultimately each moviegoer makes up his own movie, finding motivations that are unvoiced in the picture, explanations for behavior undreamed of by the screenwriter. Fatal Attraction is an astonishing beneficiary of this consumer creativity. The picture is like Velcro: any theory can attach itself to the story and take hold. As Lansing says, “It’s a Rorschach test for everyone who sees it.” Is Alex worth our sympathy, pity, fear, loathing, or all of the above? Outside the Evergreen Theater in suburban Chicago, Rochelle Major says, “I had to believe that Alex had been hurt deeply before. She was lonely, didn’t have a family like Dan did, and when he wanted to get her out of his life, she just went nuts on him.” But once the horror-movie mechanism begins turning in the last two reels of Fatal Attraction, the audience revels in its hatred of Alex’s villainy. “Alex is sick,” says Ned Tanen, president of Paramount Pictures, “not some predatory creature feeding on men. No one ever doubts that she is pregnant with Dan’s child. Yet at the end you hear the audience screaming ‘Kill her! Kill the bitch!’ “

Ever since the movie industry ceded to TV its place as the American family art form, Hollywood has believed in this truism: the basic unit of movie audiences is the dating couple; the woman usually chooses the movie, and the successful picture will be the one she wants to take her man to see. Even in the ’80s. Especially in the late ’80s, a time of retrenchment along the sexual front lines. Pandemic viruses are imposing a puritan morality on the would-be- wild young. Sleeping arrangements are seen as a matter of life and death. Folks on dates don’t know whether to cross their legs or their fingers. So, dear, what’s playing at the Cineplex tonight? Answer: a host of movies, mostly in the newly revitalized thriller genre, that exploit the itch and edginess in right-now relationships. Fatal Attraction is the leader, but others have similar themes and might deserve similar titles. Among them:

“Naval Attraction.” In the summer-fall hit No Way Out, an officer in U.S. naval intelligence (Kevin Costner) has a dangerous love affair with the Washington mistress (Sean Young) of the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman). It begins as hot reckless sex in the back seat of a limo and climaxes in death and betrayal. No Way Out keeps escalating past passion into mortal power struggles, in which the guilty are forever eliminating the slightly less guilty. But the film rescores, in melodrama’s high pitch, the lament of any bright woman with a healthy carnal appetite: Why do men insist that you be either Donna Reed or Donna Rice?

“Fatal Infection.” In Kathryn Bigelow’s bleak, gross, great-looking horror movie Near Dark, an Oklahoma farm lad falls for an alluring blond from parts unknown. She seems interested in him, so why won’t she give him a little love bite? Because, as he realizes too late, he will end up with the world’s most toxic hickey. His dream girl is a vampire, and abstinence is the only sure precaution against infection. It takes several harrowing nights with her rambunctious vampire pals, who kidnap his kid sister, before he can escape from the Land of the Undead. Near Dark has filmmaking finesse to spare, but puts its dank characters on display rather than cadging sympathy for them. It is the Blue Velvet of date-night spook shows.

“Fatal Abstraction.” In Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me, a cop (Tom Berenger) is assigned to guard a rich woman (Mimi Rogers) who witnessed a murder. He loves his wife but is seduced by the lady’s wealth and vulnerability. And then — can you hear it coming? — his child is kidnaped. The cop must wake up to his duties and rely on his wife’s cunning to help outwit the killer. Ironically, this exercise in high style may have gone lame with audiences because of its accidental echoes of Fatal Attraction. It’s too close, but without the kick. Scott lays an abstract ’40s feeling on an ’80s theme and gets lost in the mists of film noir.

“Fatal Repulsion.” In Andy Anderson’s minimalist revenge drama Positive I.D., a Texas real estate agent (Stephanie Rascoe) is raped. When she learns that the rapist is up for parole, she devises a second identity for herself, that of a good-time gal named Bobbie, and hangs out at a bar owned by the rapist’s uncle. She soon sees that Bobbie is a more suitable, rewarding part than the quiet housewife she has been playing for too many years. She might be Fatal Attraction’s Beth, now cosseted and corseted by marriage, who’d rather be a free and healthy Alex. As it turns out, Bobbie’s a killer too.

“Datal Attraction.” The thriller is not the only genre chilled by contemporary sexual skirmishing. In Armyan Bernstein’s comedy Cross My Heart, two nice people (Martin Short and Annette O’Toole) endure the Date of Death. He borrows his best friend’s car and apartment; one is stolen, the other trashed. She gets a leg cramp while they make out; he sees his shirt get singed on a nearby lamp as they make love. She won’t tell him she has a young daughter; he won’t tell her he has just lost his job. This sweet, slightly strained film finds knowing laughs in all the frustrations of modern romance. The couple must proclaim themselves free of herpes and AIDS before easing into bed, she with her diaphragm, he with his condom (or is it hers?). They both know that in an age of erotic malaise, the mating dance is often an audition for a show that gets rotten reviews and closes on opening night. As O’Toole sighs, when her sister tells her to have fun, “Dating isn’t fun!”

Dating, or even tiptoeing outside the cathedral of wedlock for a weekend tryst, isn’t supposed to be deadly either. But drama is often the imagination of disaster, and horror is the escalation of primal anxieties (pregnancy, puberty, even dentistry) into touchstone fantasies (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Marathon Man). Says Fatal Attraction’s screenwriter James Dearden: “I wanted to take every situation to the worst-possible-case scenario and see what happened.”

So his plot is worth parsing, right up to the “surprise” ending that most Americans must by now know by heart. (No peeking at the next five paragraphs if you haven’t seen the film.) Start with a Manhattan marriage, radiant in its yup-scale domesticity. Beth (Anne Archer) gets dressed for a party — sexy. Dan walks the dog — cute. Daughter Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen) crawls into bed with Mom — poignant. To an outsider, their life must look like a New Age greeting card.

The outsider is Alex, who meets Dan at the party. A business conference and a rainstorm reintroduce them that weekend while Beth and Ellen are in the country house hunting. Across the restaurant dinner table, Alex seems so hungry for him that you can hear her stomach rumble. “You’re here with a strange girl being a naughty boy,” she tells him, perhaps before he has even flirted with a naughty thought. But Dan is a man, and pathetically ordinary. From curiosity or concupiscence, from boredom or weakness, he goes to her apartment. Next thing, they are making mad sex by the kitchen sink. Dirty dishes clatter under her buttocks. Tap water lubricates their lust.

“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,” wrote Byron in Don Juan; ” ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” Dan’s fling is of Dan’s marriage a thing apart. He can shrug off the sentiment as he showers off the sweat. No love for Alex, no guilt toward Beth. Thanks, hon, gotta run. After all, as he tells Alex, he’s happily married; he has a six-year-old girl; “I’m lucky.” When Alex pops the question — “So what are you doing here?” — he figures he can squirm out of it. But Dan has underestimated her fatal attraction to him. Before he leaves, she has slit her wrists.

It is the first of many cries for help. The first calls are to the office — she has two tickets to Madame Butterfly, would he like to come? — then to his home. She reveals she is pregnant with his child; he renounces her. He arrives home one evening to find Alex chatting airily with Beth about purchasing their apartment now that they are moving to the country. She pours acid on his car hood, and still he cannot confide in Beth. Fretting at his living-room desk one night, he glances up at Beth reading a fairy tale to Ellen. He still believes in his picture-pretty life. To tell Beth about Alex would be to deface the greeting card. He must deal like a man with the crisis he has helped create.

But Dan is not a man, at least not the John Wayne movie man. He is a soft guy in a tough spot. Even after Alex boils Ellen’s pet rabbit on the country cottage stove, Dan cannot inform Beth that he and Alex were lovers; Beth has to elicit the fact by asking him directly. The women have the cojones in this picture. It is Beth who will earn the movie’s first cheer when she tells Alex, “If you ever come near my family again, I’ll kill you, you understand?” And Alex who will take Beth up on her dare, swiping Ellen from school for an almost innocuous afternoon kidnaping. The outraged husband tries taking matters into his own hands by strangling Alex back in her kitchen — be a movie man, Dan — but he can’t finish the job. This demon will have to be destroyed by the only pure spirit left.

Back in the cottage, while Dan makes tea downstairs, Beth prepares her bath. With her robe she erases steam from the bathroom mirror. Alex is standing behind her, carrying a knife. Softly, she asks Beth, “What are you doing here?” In her frayed mind she may already be Mrs. Dan Gallagher, her hubby in the kitchen, their imminent child asleep in her womb. Who is this presumptuous intruder in Alex’s dream cottage? Someone who doesn’t deserve to play happy family. Someone who deserves to die. Their struggle for the knife finally alerts Dan, who rushes upstairs, overpowers Alex and forces her into the full tub. She struggles, then ceases, blood rising from her mouth. But you can’t keep a bad woman — or a citation from the landmark French chiller Diabolique — down. Alex springs screaming from the tub and slashes at Dan, as Beth appears brandishing a handgun and kills Alex with a bullet through the chest.

Fatal Attraction was conceived by English Screenwriter-Director Dearden eight years ago as a 45-minute film called Diversion. In 1983 Producers Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe hired Dearden to write a feature-length script based on his idea. (Later, Screenwriter-Director Nicholas Meyer rewrote some of the scenes involving Dan’s family, which Paramount executives had thought insufficiently sympathetic.) Michael Douglas was in on the project early, but Close arrived only after Debra Winger had rejected the role and Barbara Hershey was unavailable. The film began shooting in September 1986 under Lyne’s direction. Flashdance had proved that Lyne knew which buttons to push for a multimedia smash, and 9 1/2 Weeks, a flop at the U.S. box office but a hit at the video stores, showed his fascination with the theme of sexual dependency at the borderline of pain and pleasure.

Last spring Paramount sneaked Fatal Attraction to preview audiences. Their response was positive except for the ending. In that version, Alex committed suicide to the strains of Madame Butterfly and left Dan’s fingerprints on the knife, thus framing him as her murderer. Ironic, Hitchcockian, certainly fatalistic and pretty darned Japanese — but not satisfying. Says Lyne: “It was like having two hours of foreplay and no orgasm.”

So the filmmakers tried for something more crimson. “We sat in a room for four days,” recalls Dearden. “Obviously the present ending makes Alex a complete psycho. It works well as a piece of cinema but makes her less authentic.” In July they were back in Mount Kisco, N.Y., for reshooting. Dearden wrote the new ending, “because I wanted to maintain some degree of influence over it.” (The original ending may be used when Fatal Attraction is released in Japan next year.)

The new ending works, though, not only as a jolt for the audience but also in resolving the drama on its own perfervid terms. Once Alex, the nightmare shrew, has threatened the dream family, she must be faced down by the family. Once Dan has sinned, only Beth can forgive him, by saving his life. Once Alex has invaded the home, she must be killed by the homemaker; the Wife must destroy the Other Woman.

There is just one little problem. In killing Alex, Beth also kills the child — Dan’s child — inside her. The first wife saves her family by destroying the potential family of the woman who wanted to be Dan’s second wife. One woman movie executive, who is disgusted by Fatal Attraction’s message, offers this bitter coda: “Dan and Beth should be put on trial for the murder of Alex’s unborn child.”

By any critical standard, Fatal Attraction is no masterpiece. The plot has holes you could drive Beth’s station wagon through. (How does Alex get Ellen out of school? Why didn’t the family dog bark when Alex breaks into the Gallagher house? Why can’t Dan hear the final struggle a floor above him, and why does the bathroom tile floor leak water?) The threat to Ellen’s pet rabbit can be smelled three reels away from payoff; that hare is high. Lyne’s visual style, with its grab bag of slick thrills and cheap tricks, is clever but unoriginal — hack chic. And you needn’t be a critic to get restless during the longueurs of the film’s first hour. Just listen to the crowd. Until Fatal Attraction removes its mask of psychological drama to reveal a familiar horror-movie face, audiences can be often heard giggling in apprehension and + impatience. Something scary has to happen soon, they must think, because nothing is happening now.

But when it happens, it happens big. And there are earlier, subtler pleasures: the understated idealizing of the Gallaghers’ homelife, the funny- horny touches in the sex scene. Douglas and Close are nicely cast, attractive opposites. His all-American-boy bafflement suggests a Gary Cooper stripped of moral authority and ill at ease in a grown-up dilemma. Her intimidating energy recalls the young Katharine Hepburn but with a voracious libido. And behind them both stands another more portly silhouette: the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. Dan is the basic Hitchcock protagonist, a fairly decent man in a horribly compromised position. And at first glance, Alex, with her cool allure, seems an avatar of Hitchcock’s blond ice goddesses. Only later do we discover she is as lonely and lethal as Mother Bates. But with a difference. In Psycho the woman with the knife was really a man with an Oedipus complex. In Fatal Attraction, Alex holds her own.

In its every strategy, Fatal Attraction is a cagey blend of old and new Hollywood, of current obsessions and conservative solutions. Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, The Untouchables) calls the picture a “postfeminist AIDS thriller.” But unless Alex is the disease, Fatal Attraction is not about AIDS. Indeed, the story, stripped to its essentials, is the stuff of many an old movie weepie. Boy meets girl for a brief encounter; boy gets girl pregnant and disappears; girl falls in love with boy and tries to get him back. In those films, though, the lovesick female was the heroine and a rogue male was the villain. Fatal Attraction switches genders and, presto, becomes a homily for our times.

In traditional melodrama the ostensibly weak must triumph over the seemingly invincible. And that usually means a clash between a good woman and an evil man. But this time Dan is the vulnerable one — in De Palma’s provocative term, a “feminized male” — partly because of his position as head of the family. And his adversary is scarily strong, a masculinized female even in name — Alex. She is the stalker, the demon, the sexual adventurer.

That profile is familiar too. For Alex is the latest in a long Hollywood line of women whose sexuality makes them both super- and subhuman. Vampires. Or, in Hollywood’s word, vamps. Since 1915, when Theda Bara starred in A Fool There Was (based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Vampire), the American movie screen has been pocked with predatory femmes fatales. What made them evil? Usually, that they liked sex as much as men did, if they were decadent Europeans played by the likes of Garbo and Dietrich. Or, if they were homegrown, that sexual frustration twisted them into satanic schemers.

The mid-1940s brought a plague of these film-noir harpies, from Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven to Barbara Stanwyck in almost anything. Edgar G. Ulmer’s relentless Detour (1946) cast Ann Savage as a harridan from hell — the worst pickup of poor Tom Neal’s life — whose grating voice is, finally and poetically, strangled by a telephone cord. And as feminism found its voice in the early ’70s, Hollywood shouted back. In Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me (1971), Jessica Walter is a woman who has a brief affair with a Carmel, Calif., disk jockey (Eastwood) and is soon threatening him, abducting his girlfriend and coming at him with a knife. Sound familiar? It sounded so familiar to Carpenter and De Palma that they passed on directing Fatal Attraction at least partly because of its echoes from Eastwood’s film.

The new movie is sleeker, cannier, luckier — and more disturbing. No wonder feminists have cried foul over Fatal Attraction: Alex is the ’80s career woman as homicidal vamp. Says Marsha Kinder, a film professor at the University of Southern California: “In this film, it is not sexual repression that causes psychosis. It is sexual liberation. For men, Alex’s sexuality is a succubus; it saps a man’s strength. Fatal Attraction is also about how men fear women. Because in this movie women have the power, positively and negatively. When Alex hears Dan threaten her, she doesn’t take it seriously. But when Beth tells Alex she is going to kill her, Alex trembles. And the final battle is between the two women. It is like a return bout from last year’s Aliens, except that this time the career woman is the monster, and it’s the mother who wins. The movie cleverly plays to both sides of woman. And even though it is hateful politically, it is appealing to women. The film itself has a fatal attraction.”

The movie’s makers angrily deny that Fatal Attraction is antifeminist, but they must be smiling behind their public choler. All the controversy in newspapers and magazines is like a free front-page ad. Every argument at a cocktail party or around an office coffee machine keeps this monster movie alive. Even career women who take the film as libel have to see it, if only to know the enemy up close. Maybe Hitchcock was right when, to smooth the feathers of one of his stars, he cooed, “It’s only a movie, Ingrid.” Maybe Fatal Attraction is just a nine-weeks wonder. More likely, though, it will linger in the American central nervous system. A single woman may have to go to the personals column for her next beau. A married man may sit on his lust the next time an attractive woman says, “Hi.” And next time he and his wife go out on the town, he’ll pick the movie.