When I first heard that Paramount had made an eight-part TV series based on Adrian Lyne’s 1987 movie, Fatal Attraction, I was less surprised than I might have been. Content is increasingly a problem for streaming services – how on earth to hang on to hard-pressed subscribers? – with the result that more and more of them are raiding the archives. Last week, Netflix gave us Obsession, a four-part series based on Louis Malle’s 1992 film, Damage, in which a man becomes infatuated with his son’s girlfriend (the original starred Juliette Binoche, Jeremy Irons and a wooden floor on which the pair writhed extravagantly). This week, Amazon launches Dead Ringers, a six-part adaptation, starring Rachel Weisz, of David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller about twin gynaecologists (Jeremy Irons was in the first version of that one, too). The hope is, I suppose, that old ideas have what new ones don’t, which is bankability in the form of middle-aged nostalgia – even if sacrilege is sometimes committed in the process.
In another way, though, the decision to remake Fatal Attraction was unfathomable. It was a huge film in its day: a box-office hit (the second-highest grossing movie of 1987) and nominated for six Oscars, including best picture. But it was also a movie of its time: a moment, made large. The story of a New York lawyer (Dan Gallagher, played by Michael Douglas) whose life is nearly ruined by a woman, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), with whom he has sex one weekend while his wife is away, it represents the cultural zenith of an era in which the media relentlessly characterised the single woman as, at best, lonely and unhappy, and at worst, as driven half-mad by all that she’d missed out on: a man, a baby, a clapboard house in the country. The only possible way to remake Fatal Attraction in 2023, it seemed to me, was to give it a feminist reboot. What, though, might that involve? The prospect of Alex happily waving goodbye to Dan, having enjoyed her orgasm-filled weekend a lot but not so much that she wanted to waste any more of her time on a conventional stick like him, didn’t seem to contain nearly enough jeopardy for binge TV.
But all the signs were that I was right, at least at first. The series would, I read, be written by a woman, Alexandra Cunningham, a screenwriter best known for Desperate Housewives, and it would be directed by a woman, Silver Tree, who previously worked on Suits (she appears in the Netflix documentary about one of that series’ stars, Meghan Markle). It would also star, as Alex Forrest, Lizzy Caplan, recently pitch perfect as Libby in FX’s Fleischman Is in Trouble. I began to feel mildly excited. The fact that Joshua Jackson, the actor who would play Dan Gallagher, was more or less unknown to me seemed only to add to the sense that Fatal Attraction 2023 would be fiercely pro-Forrest. So I asked Paramount both for a preview, and for an interview with Cunningham in which I hoped to chew over all the radical decisions I assumed she had made.
What followed was very weird. Fatal Attraction is heavily embargoed ahead of its release, but having now endured it all, I feel free to tell you this is emphatically not a feminist rewrite. OK, Cunningham has given Forrest a backstory in the form of a troubled childhood; she sees a shrink, which doesn’t happen in the film. But since she also behaves even more badly than in her previous incarnation, she is much less sympathetic, too. As for Dan, when the series opens, he’s about to be released from prison having served a sentence for the murder of Forrest – a crime he may, or may not, have committed (what happened between them 15 years earlier is told in flashback). Cunningham, in other words, has it both ways. If Dan is finally punished for his infidelity this time around, it’s still Alex who loses everything, including her life. And here’s the cherry on the cake: the series ends with a coda in which it is suggested that dealing with mad women is a bit like playing Whac-a-Mole. Uh-oh. No sooner have you dealt with one than up pops another, eyes rolling like marbles in a saucer.
Now I was even more keen to talk to Cunningham. But when I went back to Paramount, no one would help, a decision that seemed to have something to do with the fact that the company does not want the series to be too strongly associated with the film. Naturally, I was confused by this. Even odder, Cunningham had, I soon found, already been quoted elsewhere as saying that she had been explicitly inspired by Glenn Close’s regret over the film’s misogynistic legacy: “She [Close] also said that she felt it would be interesting to tell the exact same story but from Alex’s point of view, and I kind of sparked to that.” It felt like she was describing a different show from the one I’d just watched. What had happened? Was history repeating itself?
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It’s hard to convey now, the intense excitement that trailed Lyne’s Fatal Attraction before its release, and the incredible fuss that followed. The days when a movie could cause this kind of hullabaloo are, alas, long gone. In the UK, it arrived in cinemas in January 1988, five months after opening in the US, and by then we were all well primed. We knew of the raunch (Douglas’s pants round his ankles), and the craziness, and that something bad happened to a bunny; we’d heard, too, of the snaking lines of people waiting to see it – though not, perhaps, of the male audience members who, in the darkness, would sometimes call out: “Kill the bitch!” as Douglas wrestled the vengeful Close in her pristine loft. I only heard about those guys, a phenomenon possibly limited to the US, when I came to read Backlash, Susan Faludi’s Pulitzer prize-winning book of 1991 (to which we’ll return).
I saw it as soon as I could, in Sheffield, with my best friend, K, who was back for the holidays – she’d already left home; I would go to university that autumn – and for both of us it was an indelible experience. Certain details stuck in the mind. No, I didn’t notice, then, that a copy of Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat lay on Alex Forrest’s bedside table: a glossy, pseudo-intellectual touch that is typical of Lyne’s film. But down the years, I always remembered the inflatable frog that perches on the frame of the shower as Gallagher washes himself clean of his infidelity – a toy that belongs to his small daughter, Ellen.
When I rewatched the film last week for the first time in three decades, it was remarkable how closely it matched my memory, almost frame by frame: the boiling coffee pot, the stalled lift, the simmering pan. It has this effect on people, its power disproportionate to its quality, which is on the schlocky side. I asked my husband what he recalled of the movie (he hasn’t seen it in decades), and without pausing to think, he delicately mimed wiping cream cheese off the end of his nose (in the film, Alex silently alerts Dan to the fact that he has made a mess of his face while eating a bagel by performing just such a mime, a move that prettily foreshadows the fact that within hours they will be having frantic sex for the first time).
People will tell you that Fatal Attraction, in which a family is almost destroyed by an alien invader, played on the paranoiac fear induced by Aids, and it’s true that even at the time, this notion was in the minds of public and critics alike. In the UK, Princess Diana had recently opened the first ward dedicated to the treatment of patients with HIV/Aids at the Middlesex Hospital. In the US, Pauline Kael’s review for the New Yorker expressly connected the movie’s enforcement of “conventional morality” to the crisis. The bigger thing by far, however, was the film’s naked hostility to what was then known as the career woman.
Alex Forrest, who is single and an editor at a ritzy publisher, is a creature from hell. Outside her loft in New York’s meat-packing district, fires burn in the street; her curling blond hair makes her look Medusa-like. The stuff she robotically spouts first about her “grownup” desires, and later (contradicting what she said initially) about Dan’s “responsibilities” and her refusal to be “used” by him, is a parody of feminism, angry but empty and unearned. Meanwhile, here is Dan’s beautiful, stay-at-home wife, Beth (Anne Archer). Even her (bright, white) underwear looks as though it has been ironed. The only fires burning in her world are the sexual passion that still exists between this saint and her devoted husband – and the one she beatifically sets in the hearth of their gorgeous new country house.
But did I read the film like this aged 19? No, I did not. In the hush, I gripped K’s arm, my predominant emotions fear – it is an unaccountably suspenseful movie – and pity. “It kind of wrenches you to Dan’s point of view,” says Laura Kipnis, an American critic whose cultural writing has taken in both stalking and harassment. But while this is undoubtedly true – we see everything from his increasingly terrified standpoint – back then, I was resistant. I felt, as Close later claimed to have been, sympathetic towards crazy Alex, for weren’t men always saying one thing when they meant another? She needs to play the game; to pretend she is cool with whatever happens between them while his wife is away; that when she tells him she expects nothing, she secretly longs for more. We girls had been doing this since we were about 14, with varying degrees of success. Alex Forrest was a kind of object lesson in what might happen to those who were not able to play the game sufficiently well.
Three years later, though, and my position had changed completely. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, a book now considered a classic of feminism, came out in 1991, just as I was about to graduate, by which time my consciousness had been raised from a low four to a high 10 (being outnumbered by hyper-confident men can do that to a woman). The chapter Faludi devotes almost entirely to Fatal Attraction is painfully clear: Sherry Lansing, the film’s producer, had hoped at first to make a feminist movie, but the studio was against it. “As we went along, Alex became much more extreme,” revealed James Dearden, its screenwriter, of the various drafts of his script. “The intent was to soften the man… you had to feel for him,” added a nameless studio executive. By Faludi’s telling, Adrian Lyne, its director, knew exactly what he wanted to achieve. On the film’s release, he complained volubly about career women, comparing them unfavourably with his wife, who stayed at home. “You hear feminists talk, and the last 10, 20, years you hear women talking about fucking men rather than being fucked, to be crass about it. It’s kind of unattractive, however liberated and emancipated it is. It kind of fights the whole wife role, the whole childbearing role. Sure, you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman.”
I was – I am – a huge fan of Michael Douglas. But even he was at it. “I’m really tired of feminists, sick of them,” Faludi quotes him as having told a reporter. Women, he said, had spread themselves too thin and, as a result, were miserable. “It’s time they looked at themselves and stopped attacking men. Guys are going through a terrible crisis right now because of women’s unreasonable demands.” Dearden, initially anxious about the changes he’d had to make to his screenplay, had by now come round to the view of the other guys. A lot of women in New York were living like Alex, he said, and who would want to spend their life with a person like that? They were only good for a fling.
Most amazing of all, though, was the attitude of Lansing, a woman soon to become chair of Paramount Pictures. She concedes that the feminist mission failed, but she tells Faludi: “The biggest mistake film-makers can make is to say, OK, we’re only going to show women who are together and stable and wonderful people.” Could she give examples of any “together” women she had brought to the screen? She struggled to answer this question.
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I don’t know – yet – what happened with Fatal Attraction 2023. Perhaps Cunningham came under pressure from above, or perhaps she has written exactly the show she intended to. Either way, it says something about where we are now that the series is not only vastly less exciting than Lyne’s film, but so much more conservative, too. Thirty-six years on, and the sexual politics have barely changed. But perhaps we can go further than this. Time does peculiar things to culture, after all. Creativity is often unwitting. We may look more kindly on Adrian Lyne’s film from the vantage point of the 21st century, and this, in turn, may cause us to feel more severely about Cunningham’s update.
“I think Fatal Attraction tapped into the sex positivism that would be such a big thing in the 1990s,” says Victoria Smith, author of Hags, a book about the demonisation of middle-aged women in which she quotes Alex Forrest semi-approvingly. “It was a kind of zip-less fuck film. The good feminist, the true feminist, was supposed to sleep around and not get dragged into wanting a relationship. The message was: you mustn’t catch feelings. You didn’t want to be that kind of stalker woman. Women were under pressure to embrace that narrative, and we were torn, because what if you did [catch feelings]?”
As she notes, sex positivism hasn’t gone away. Our culture is porn-ridden; women are under sexual pressure like never before. Having watched the film only yesterday, she thinks that Close’s performance leaves women, even now, feeling two things at once: if the larger part of them continues to be outraged by the way she is made a monster, they may also recognise – as I did as a teenager – her agony. Believe me, this won’t be the case with the TV series.
The new Fatal Attraction is not (to put it mildly) set to become a classic of the zeitgeist. But perhaps it does speak to its own age, just as the movie did before it – and that age is strange indeed. “Adultery is so much less tolerated now,” says Laura Kipnis. “That’s one result of women being less economically dependent on men. I mean who apologises for the adulterer now, apart from Esther Perel [a psychoanalyst famous for her couples podcast]? They’re practically predatory sex criminals.” She laughs.
All the same, Kipnis is amazed to hear that its producers did not go down a more feminist route. As she reminds me, it’s only five minutes since Promising Young Woman, an explicitly feminist vengeance movie, was up for an Oscar. Won’t making Alex Forrest more obviously mentally unwell simply result in accusations of victim blaming? “What kind of crazy is she exactly?” she asks, leaning slightly towards her screen (we’re on Zoom). At which point, in one last bid to respect Paramount’s embargo, I must leave you to imagine the rest.
• Fatal Attraction is available on Paramount+ from 30 April
• This article was amended on 17 April 2023 to correct the spelling of Lizzy Caplan’s first name.
