In 1987’s “Fatal Attraction,” Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest, just awakened from what must have been a deep sleep, the kind that comes after intense psychic upheaval, doesn’t look into Michael Douglas’ Dan Gallagher’s eyes when she asks him if he will call her sometime. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she says, her voice hoarse and tired.
You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’ve said these words a few times to men I have liked more than they liked me. It isn’t so much to give them an out as it is a final burst of hope. Maybe he will suddenly realize he has feelings for me and he will stay, if I give him another chance to think about it. It’s magical thinking, and Close’s Alex knows it, which is why she doesn’t look into Dan’s eyes. “No, I want to,” he says with a croak in his voice, just saying something to avoid a repeat of last night. Close, still not making eye contact, smiles a shallow smile that makes the sadness within Alex legible. When Dan asks her to promise him that she will go see a doctor, she nods like an obedient child, the smile, a feeble dam, still in place holding back sobs that would burst through otherwise. She is being good. If she is good and obedient, maybe he really will call.
When “Fatal Attraction” came out, Alex Forrest terrified men.
In an essay called “Fatal and Fetal Visions: The Backlash in the Movies,” featured in the seminal Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi recorded a few things she witnessed men saying during screenings of the film in the late ‘80s. “Punch the bitch’s face in,” said one man. “Punch the bitch’s lights out! I’m not kidding,” said another. “Do it, Michael,” said yet another, speaking to Douglas through the screen, “Kill her already. Kill the bitch.” She still continues to terrify men. In 2008, Close told an interviewer that men often come up to her to say, “You scared the shit out of me.”
Written by James Dearden and directed by Adrian Lyne, “Fatal Attraction” is often described as a film about a one-night stand that continues to “haunt.” Successful literary attorney Dan Gallagher has a picture-perfect family—a beautiful stay-at-home wife Beth (Anne Archer), a darling daughter Ellen (Ellen Latzen), and a sweet labrador retriever whose tail is always wagging—that would have been the ideal in Ronald Reagan’s America, where men worked, and women stayed at home to mind the family. One weekend, when his wife and daughter are out of town, Dan comes across Alex at a work meeting and the two feel an instant attraction that is so powerful he throws caution to the wind; he has the affair. They spend a sensual weekend together, having a lot of sex, running in the park, listening to Madame Butterfly, eating pasta, drinking wine. When Dan tries to leave Alex on Sunday, she attempts suicide, and matters become more dire from there. Endless phone calls, stalking, and a minor case of kidnapping build up to the film’s final scene: Alex breaks into Dan’s home and attacks Beth, who finally manages to shoot Alex. The witch is finally dead, and order is restored. As Lyne’s lens slowly zooms in on the Gallagher family portrait, credits roll.
The film made more than $100 million in its first four months and even Lyne, Faludi writes, knew about how audience members yelled at the screen. “This is a film everyone can identify with,” Lyne said, according to Faludi. “Everyone knows a girl like Alex.” But Lyne didn’t take into account that, for the most part, those who yelled “Beat the bitch! Kill her off now!”(as a teenage female concession worker told Faludi) were men. “The women, you never hear them say anything,” the girl said. “They are all just sitting there, real quiet.”
As she is framed by Lyne and as she is seen by Dan, Alex is the film’s villain. She functions in the film as a femme fatale—with her audacious autonomy, self-assuredness, and heavily-kohled eyes, Alex is the dictionary definition of the archetype—a function that gives her a sinister sheen. She is a dangerous specter that haunts, a hangover that refuses to take a hint. As a product of the ’80s—an era with strict, almost post-WWII-like gender roles delineated by the Reagan administration as a backlash to feminism’s gains, and re-articulated by Hollywood, which was incentivized, Faludi notes, to leave the status quo unchallenged because it received much of its financial backing from the rich, who Reagan favored with his policies—Alex, a single woman with her own income and a clear understanding of her desires, is cast as a threat to the married man’s way of being, to patriarchal ideals, and therefore needs to be punished. Lyne held the Reaganite understanding of gender: he thought single women in the publishing world were “sad” and “lacked a soul,” while his own wife, a woman who “has never worked,” quotes Faludi, has no ambition nor an interest in a career, simply lives with him, and so is “a terrific wife. […] I come home and she’s there.” Just like Dan’s wife Beth. Accordingly, by its end, the film brutally snuffs Alex out.
But as she is portrayed by Close, Alex is also the film’s victim. Just as Lyne didn’t hear about how women, for the most part, remained silent during screenings, many don’t hear Alex’s words throughout the film. Time and again, she articulates exactly what it is she wants; time and again, she asserts her humanity, but it is ignored by Dan, silenced by the film itself. When considered with the respect that she demands, it’s fairly easy to see that Alex is not so evil, her desires and wants are not so terrible. She is not a calculating and machinating monster existing solely to ruin a man’s life. She is a woman who is aching and vulnerable and scared, quick to fall in love, but most importantly, she is a woman who refuses to be used by a man, used and discarded as though she were an object.
For Alex, the weekend she spends with Dan is all sweetness and light. When Dan leaves her bed Sunday morning before she wakes, she calls him back immediately. He says he has work, he has to walk the dog, she tells him to bring both over, she’ll cook. She’ll be good and let him work, she says. As she makes spaghetti, they listen to Madame Butterfly, the opera by Giacomo Puccini, which they both discover they share as a favorite. It’s based on a short story of the same name by John Luther Long about an American Lieutenant in Japan who marries a geisha named Cho-Cho-San only to have his duties take him away from Japan; he promises her that he will return, and she waits for him, giving birth to his child in the interim. He marries a white woman abroad and returns with her, and when Cho-Cho-San learns of this, she commits suicide by slitting her throat.
As Dan tells Alex that when his father took him to see Madame Butterfly when he was a child, he was so terrified by Cho-Cho-San’s suicide that he hid under his seat at the theatre, Alex looks at him with a sweet, dreamy smile and glassy eyes. It’s an expression that conveys that she has irrevocably fallen in love with this man who not only enjoys fine art like she does, but also is unafraid to be vulnerable. She says later she feels like she knows him, and I think what she means is that she finds his soul familiar, understands him in the way that intuition allows. Over dinner, she initiates the important conversation about where they stand.
“So what are you doing here?” she asks him. Why is he having an affair with her if he is happily married? He doesn’t have a good enough answer. “I’d like to see you again,” Alex goes on. “Is that so terrible?” It isn’t, Dan confesses, but he stresses to her that he can’t see her again because he is married. He explains why a few moments later in the film.
They have sex again, and when he dresses to leave, Alex gets upset and tries to tear his shirt off. “Let’s be reasonable,” Dan says. As if there is any reason in an affair. But of course what he means is that it is completely logical for a man to have an affair under the prevailing understanding of gender; for a man to have an affair is an assertion of his virility, especially important for a man as artsy and literary, coded feminine, as Dan. Alex scoffs at Dan’s “reason,” at his attitude that asks of her, in so many words, to “be a man.”
“The opportunity was there and we took it,” Dan explains. “We’re adults now, aren’t we?” he says, and Alex retorts with what I immediately thought, what I imagine many women thought: “What’s that supposed to mean?” He says he thought they could have a good time. It’s easy to read Alex’s outburst as a childish tantrum, especially as Dan, with his steady and insistent lawyer’s tone, limns maturity and adulthood, a way everyone ought to be. But really, Alex is standing up for herself in the face of Dan’s forceful attempt to bend her to his way of thinking.
“No you didn’t,” she fires back. “You thought you’d have a good time, you didn’t stop for a second to think about me.” Dan calls her crazy, tells her she knew the rules. “What rules,” she says incredulously. And she is right. What rules are there to this? What Dan wants is for everything—the affair and Alex—to become a mere memory as soon as he walks out of her door, he wants it to be as easy as flipping a switch and turning off the light. He wants to slip back into his happy family, have a quiet life, but that is not so possible, you can’t just turn people off. Alex continues to exist, she is a whole person, and as she says later on in the movie, she deserves respect for her individuality.
One of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes is one that comes later on, after Dan has rejected Alex’s invitation to a showing of Madame Butterfly. He is out bowling with his wife and friends. He is the life of the party, generous with hugs and kisses for Beth and jokes for everyone else. But spliced amongst Dan’s play is Alex’s loneliness—she is at home alone weeping silent tears and listening to the opera, a feeble attempt to replay the weekend she shared with Dan. This is what I mean when I say you can’t turn people off—Dan is so happy and he is probably not thinking about Alex, but she is suffering so much anyway and because of his actions. Faludi writes that audience members laughed during this scene.
As he’s heading for the door at the end of their first weekend together, Alex feebly offers an olive branch, asking to still be friends, and the way she cries, her eyebrows knitted and her lips pursed, is very familiar to me. With her eyes locked to his face and tears streaming down her cheeks, she is afraid that it is the final time she is seeing him. In Dan she saw, for apparently the first time, someone worthwhile, someone who interested her, in whom her love for art was mirrored. She has slit her wrists, and I don’t think this is something she planned to do; rather, it feels, to me, like something she felt to be inevitable. Everything after such bliss feels meaningless as a black hole. I won’t deny that it is manipulative and cruel that she does this, especially after Dan tells her about his fear of Cho-Cho-San’s suicide.
Dan bandages her up and spends the night watching over her. We get a glimpse of Alex in bed, blue light from the window above her head falls on her and we see her clearly, she looks so small and tired. I wonder how people see her as a villain and not a victim in desperate need for help here. I see myself in her and I want to protect her. Then we see her as Dan sees her—he’s on the phone with Beth and looks at her sleeping form. She still looks small but now she is shrouded in darkness, and the score swells and strains, it becomes dire and tense. With this turn in framing, it is easy to see now how the film works to villainize her—even as she is asleep, because the gaze has now become antagonistic to Alex, she becomes something dangerous, a darkness that contains all of Dan’s guilt and fear. A receptacle for all of Dan’s negative feelings, she has become a problem needing to be taken care of, erased.
Dan tries time and again to silence Alex, but she refuses to disappear, because she simply can’t. “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan,” she tells him at one point. She will not allow herself to be used; for her, the affair was special, and that Dan feels as though he can discard her after using her is unconscionable for Alex, it sullies the beauty she saw and felt. What’s more, she wants Dan to confront his own culpability, she wants him to understand the weight of what he has done to her and to Beth. “I’m just asking you to acknowledge your responsibilities,” Alex says on a tape she records for Dan. “Is that so bad? […] You thought that you could just walk into my life, and turn it upside down, without a thought for anyone but yourself.” And she’s right to demand that Dan claim responsibility. He came into Alex’s life—it was he who asked her out for a drink—and showed her kindness and tenderness and care, things epistemically positive that mean something to Alex. She carries her experience of his kindness within her; you can’t make nothing out of this something.
Because the weekend was perfect, because that perfection was possible at all, Alex finds it possible to believe that it could happen again. For her, it is reasonable to believe that when she tells Dan that she is pregnant with his child, he might want to be a part of her and the baby’s life. After all, isn’t this what inductive logic is? Because we have seen something happen in the past, we can, with a certain degree of justification, expect to see it again in the future. Isn’t this what hope is? I am not denying that Alex does terrible things, that she has moments of delusion, especially as the film goes on, and especially as Dan repeatedly tells her to leave him alone. She definitely does commit dangerous and criminal acts—she throws acid on Dan’s car, kills Ellen’s bunny, kidnaps Ellen. But I am saying that I understand her psyche, I understand her logic, in the way that many male viewers understood and continue to understand Dan’s skewed, patriarchal reason.
Faludi writes that Dearden originally wanted the film to “explore an individual’s responsibility for a stranger’s suffering.” But according to Lyne, Michael Eisner, Paramount’s president at the time, “thought the man was unsympathetic.” So Lyne made Dan sympathetic. The film has an alternate ending to the one we’re familiar with. Alex slits her throat after Dan leaves her apartment for the final time, making it seem as though Dan murdered her, but when Beth finds the tape that Alex made for him, it absolves Dan. This ending, closer to Madame Butterfly, was poorly received by test audiences; it wasn’t sympathetic enough. Accordingly, it was changed to the current one: the good wife, crucially not Dan, shoots Alex in the abdomen.
While Lyne thought little of Alex, Close dove in with a greater deal of respect, consulting with psychiatrists to understand the woman, to delve into her psyche and grasp her morality. Close’s care is evident in Alex’s softness, her voice, as she is expressing a desire to see Dan or confessing her love for him, is small, apprehensive of his anger, which does often strike her. Close was very upset with the new ending, refusing to do reshoots for two weeks; ultimately, though, she credits the current ending for the film’s commercial success. Through Dan, men’s anxiety about taking responsibility for missteps is not only articulated, but also and ultimately by the end, coddled. The ending shows that it is possible to keep your family after such a transgression, the ending facilitates catharsis, it elicits a heavy sigh of relief, perhaps even applause.
If you go onto the film’s Wikipedia page, under the “Critical Response” section, you will see that there are many attempts to diagnose Alex. According to some, she has borderline personality disorder, to others she has “erotomania,” a delusional disorder that leaves a person convinced that another is obsessed with them. Because of Alex, we have the term “bunny boiler,” a derogatory phrase used to describe a vengeful, spurned and scorned woman; a 2014 article for The Telegraph about Dearden’s London stage adaptation of “Fatal Attraction” uses the term in its title.
It makes me uneasy when so many labels are heaped onto Alex, because I’m a girl like Alex. I don’t mean the crime-committing Alex. I mean the Alex who says, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to” with a voice so small it lodges a sob in my throat. Throughout the film, it feels as if Alex is crying out that she is real, that her feelings are valid. It’s as if she’s crying out, “What about me?” But the film punishes her for her voice, for her persistence, her refusal to disappear. It makes me uneasy when labels are stamped onto Alex because they obfuscate her humanity, first and foremost. She isn’t the flat trajectory of her diagnosis, she isn’t an archetype. She is a person full of life and passion and desire. I am proud of Alex for putting up a fight, for refusing to be forgotten.
Once, in the direct aftermath of a particularly rough break-up, I let all my anguish and messy feelings of anger and grief spill out of me into a river of black and hit send on the text message. I immediately keeled over, feeling disgusted with myself for being so loud. Having been brought up by a culture that still shares Dan Gallagher’s belief that cool rationality is mature, I felt such intense shame for voicing my emotional view of the scorched landscape my ex had turned my insides into. I felt scared that I had done something bad and wrong in expressing my feelings, even if it was for the last time.
When the phone rings throughout “Fatal Attraction,” it’s framed with a shrillness, like a death knell, and Dan looks at it with fear and trembling. It’s Alex calling again and again, and Dan won’t pick up. He won’t let her speak. The first time I watched Alex say “I’m not going to be ignored” to Dan once he finally does pick up, it felt as though a light flickered on in my brain. It’s okay to demand respect, Alex seems to say. It’s okay to not remain silent and to express to another how they made you feel. Watching Alex allowed me to feel confident in claiming authority and responsibility over my past actions, over that text message. I don’t feel shame anymore at the feelings I sent along in that text; if anything, I feel lighter for the closure it allowed me. Alex has allowed me to feel lighter, to see loudness as liberating, as honoring the self.
Justice for Alex Forrest.
