Fatal Attraction

Fatal Attraction is a 1987 American psychological thriller film directed by Adrian Lyne from a screenplay by James Dearden, based on his 1980 short film Diversion. Starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, and Anne Archer, the film centers on a married man who has a brief but torrid affair with an obsessed woman who refuses to allow it to end and becomes obsessed with him.
Fatal Attraction was released on September 18, 1987, by Paramount Pictures. It received positive reviews from critics, but generated controversy at the time of its release. The film became a huge box office success, grossing $320 million against a $14 million budget, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1987 worldwide. At the 60th Academy Awards, it received six nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (for Close), Best Supporting Actress (for Archer), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.
Plot
Daniel "Dan" Gallagher is a successful, married lawyer from Manhattan. He meets Alexandra "Alex" Forrest, an editor for a publishing company. While his wife, Beth, and daughter, Ellen, are out of town for the weekend, Dan has an affair with Alex. Initially, it seems that both understand it to be just a fling, but Alex begins to cling to him.
Dan reluctantly spends the following day with Alex at her request. When he tries to leave again, she cuts her wrists in a move to manipulate him into staying and saving her. Dan helps her, stays overnight to ensure she is all right, and leaves in the morning.
Alex shows up at his office to apologize for her behavior and invites him to a performance of Madame Butterfly. He declines politely but she continues to call at his office until he informs his secretary that he will no longer take her calls.
Alex insists that Dan meet with her and informs him that she is pregnant, arguing that he must take responsibility. After Dan changes his phone number, she shows up at his apartment, which is for sale, and meets Beth. That night, Dan goes to Alex's apartment to confront her, and they get into a scuffle. She declares, "I will not be ignored".
Dan relocates his family to Bedford, but this does not dissuade Alex. She has a tape recording of herself delivered to him, which is full of verbal abuse. She stalks him, pours acid on his car, and follows him home one night. The sight of his family makes her vomit.
Alex's obsession escalates when Dan approaches the police to file a restraining order, claiming it is "for a client". The lieutenant informs him he cannot violate Alex's rights without probable cause, and the "client" must own up to his adultery.
When the Gallaghers are away, Alex kills Ellen's pet rabbit and boils it on their stove. Following this, Dan confesses the affair and Alex's pregnancy to his family. Enraged, Beth orders him to leave. Dan informs Alex that Beth knows about the affair. Beth takes the phone and says she will kill Alex if she persists.
Alex takes Ellen from school and to an amusement park. Beth drives around frantically looking for her, and gets into an accident, requiring hospitalization. Alex returns Ellen home unharmed.
Dan forcibly enters Alex's apartment and attempts to strangle her, but stops short of killing her. She grabs a kitchen knife and lunges at him, but he disarms her and departs. The police search for Alex after Dan reports the kidnapping. Beth forgives him and the couple returns home.
Beth runs a bath, but before she can get in Alex appears with a knife and explains that Beth is obstructing her from having Dan. She attacks her, and Dan rushes in, appearing to drown her. Alex suddenly emerges from the water, brandishing the knife.
Beth returns with a gun and shoots Alex, who is seen bleeding from her chest, with a look of shock on her face, before dying in the tub. Dan completes his statement to the police and joins Beth in the living room, with a picture of their family in the foreground.
Cast
Michael Douglas as Dan Gallagher, husband of Beth, father of Ellen, and a New York City lawyer who has an affair with Alex Forrest and later regrets it.
Glenn Close as Alex Forrest, who becomes obsessed with Dan after a very brief affair.
Anne Archer as Beth Rogerson Gallagher
Ellen Hamilton Latzen as Ellen Gallagher
Stuart Pankin as Jimmy
Ellen Foley as Hildy
Fred Gwynne as Arthur, Dan's boss
Meg Mundy as Joan Rogerson, Beth's mother
Tom Brennan as Howard Rogerson, Beth's father
Lois Smith as Martha, Dan's secretary
Mike Nussbaum as Bob Drimmer
J. J. Johnston as O'Rourke
Michael Arkin as Lieutenant
Jane Krakowski as Christine, the babysitter
Production
Writing
The film was adapted by James Dearden (with assistance from Nicholas Meyer) from Diversion, an earlier 1980 short film by Dearden for British television. In Meyer's book The View from the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood, he explains that in late 1986 producer Stanley R. Jaffe asked him to look at the script developed by Dearden, and he wrote a four-page memo making suggestions, including a new ending. John Carpenter was approached to direct the film, but turned it down as he felt it was too similar to Play Misty for Me (1971). A few weeks later Meyer met with director Adrian Lyne and gave him some additional suggestions. Ultimately Meyer was asked to redraft the script on the basis of his suggestions, which ended up being the shooting script.
Casting
Producers Sherry Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe both had serious doubts about casting Glenn Close because they did not think she could be sexual enough for the role of Alex. Barbara Hershey was originally considered for the role, Hershey wanted to do it but she was unavailable. Several actresses auditioned for the part, but they were almost all turned down. Lyne had French actress Isabelle Adjani in mind for the role. Tracey Ullman was offered the role, but she declined after reading the script. Miranda Richardson also turned it down as she found it "hideous". Ellen Barkin, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer were considered for the role. Kirstie Alley auditioned for the role. Close was persistent, and after meeting with Jaffe several times in New York, she was asked to fly out to Los Angeles to read with Michael Douglas in front of Adrian Lyne and Lansing. Before the audition, she let her naturally frizzy hair "go wild" because she was impatient at putting it up, and she wore a slimming black dress she thought made her look "fabulous" to the audition. This impressed Lansing, because Close "came in looking completely different... right away she was into the part." Close and Douglas performed a scene from early in the script, where Alex flirts with Dan in a café, and Close came away "convinced my career was over, that I was finished, I had completely blown my chances". Lansing and Lyne were both convinced she was right for the role; Lyne stated that "an extraordinary erotic transformation took place. She was this tragic, bewildering mix of sexuality and rage—I watched Alex come to life."
To prepare for her role, Close consulted several psychologists, hoping to understand Alex's psyche and motivations. She was uncomfortable with the bunny boiling scene, which she thought was too extreme, but she was assured on consulting the psychologists that such an action was entirely possible and that Alex's behavior corresponded to someone who had experienced incestual sexual abuse as a child.
Alternate ending
Alex Forrest was originally scripted slashing her throat at the film's end with the knife Dan had left on the counter, so as to make it appear that Dan had murdered her. After seeing her husband being taken away by police, Beth finds a revealing cassette tape that Alex sent Dan in which she threatens to kill herself. Upon realizing Alex's intentions, Beth takes the tape to the police, who clear Dan of the murder. The last scene shows, in flashback, Alex taking her own life by slashing her throat while listening to Madame Butterfly.
After doing test screenings, Joseph Farrell (who handled the test screenings) suggested that Paramount shoot a new ending.
In the 2002 Special Edition DVD, Close comments that she had doubts about re-shooting the film's ending because she believed the character would "self-destruct and commit suicide". Close eventually gave in on her concerns, and filmed the new sequence after having fought against the change for two weeks. In 2010, during a cast reunion interview, Close shared that she "never thought of [her character] as a villain", stating that: "I wasn't playing a generality, I wasn't playing a cliché. I was playing a very specific, deeply disturbed, fragile human being, whom I had grown to love." Though the ending was not the one she preferred, she acknowledged that the film would not have experienced the enormous success it did without the new ending, because it gave the audience "a sense of catharsis, a hope, that somehow the family unit would survive the nightmare".
The film's first Japanese release used the original ending. The original ending also appeared on a special edition VHS and LaserDisc release by Paramount in 1992, and was included on the film's DVD release a decade later.
Home media
A Special Collector's Edition of the film was released on DVD in 2002. Paramount released Fatal Attraction on Blu-ray Disc on June 9, 2009. The Blu-ray contained several bonus features from the 2002 DVD, including commentary by director Adrian Lyne, cast and crew interviews, a look at the film's cultural phenomenon, a behind-the-scenes look, rehearsal footage, the alternative ending, and the original theatrical trailer. In April 2020 a remastered Blu-ray Disc was released by Paramount Home Entertainment under their Paramount Presents series. Included was a new interview with the director titled Filmmaker Focus, previous rehearsal footage but excluding some of the extra features from previous releases. Paramount released the film on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in the U.S. on September 13, 2022.
Reception and legacy
Fatal Attraction spent eight weeks at number 1 in the US where it was the second-highest-grossing film of 1987, behind Three Men and a Baby. In the UK, it grossed a record £2,048,421 in its opening week and spent ten weeks at number one. In Australia, it was the first non-Australian film to gross A$2 million in its opening week, second to Crocodile Dundee. It grossed $320.1 million worldwide, making it the year's biggest film. This success led to similar psychological thrillers being made in the late 1980s and 1990s. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 73% based on reviews from 60 critics, with an average rating of 6.80/10. The site's consensus reads: "A potboiler in the finest sense, Fatal Attraction is a sultry, juicy thriller that's hard to look away from once it gets going." On Metacritic, the film has a rating of 67/100 based on reviews from 16 critics. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss wrote: "[The film brings] horror home to a place where the grownup moviegoer actually lives." The New York Times’ Janet Maslin said the film would become a long-standing favorite with audiences, writing "Years hence, it will be possible to pinpoint the exact moment that produced Fatal Attraction, Adrian Lyne's new romantic thriller, and the precise circumstances that made it a hit." Fatal Attraction engendered discussion of the consequences of infidelity as some feminists did not appreciate the depiction of a strong career woman who is a psychopath.
Author Susan Faludi discussed the film in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, arguing that major changes had been made to the original plot in order to make Alex wholly negative, while Dan's carelessness and the lack of compassion and responsibility raised no discussion, except for a small number of men's groups who said that Dan was eventually forced to own up to his irresponsibility in that "everyone pays the piper". Close was quoted in 2008 as saying, "Men still come up to me and say, 'You scared the shit out of me.' Sometimes they say, 'You saved my marriage.'" Critic Barry Norman expressed sympathy for feminists who were frustrated by the film, criticized its "over-the-top" ending and called it inferior to Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me, which has a similar plot. Nonetheless, he declared it "strong and very well made, excellently played by the three main characters and neatly written". Fatal Attraction has been described as a neo-noir film by some authors.
Fatal Attraction was the first American film to be distributed by United International Pictures outside the United States. In September 1988, Korean film distributors protested this release by "releasing snakes, setting fire in the theatres, and tearing off the screens."
Psychiatrists and film experts have analyzed the character of Alex Forrest and used her as an illustration of borderline personality disorder. She exhibits impulsive behavior, emotional instability, a fear of abandonment, frequent episodes of intense anger, self-harming, and shifting between idealization and devaluation of others, all of which are characteristic of the disorder. The degree to which she displays these traits is not necessarily typical, and aggression in people with borderline personality disorder is often directed toward themselves rather than others.
As referenced in Orit Kamir's Every Breath You Take: Stalking Narratives and the Law, "Glenn Close's character Alex is quite deliberately made to be an erotomaniac. Gelder reports that Close "consulted three separate shrinks for an inner profile of her character, who is meant to be suffering from a form of an obsessive condition known as de Clérambault's syndrome" (Gelder 1990, 93–94). The term "bunny boiler" is used to describe an obsessive, spurned woman, deriving from the scene where it is discovered that Alex has boiled the family's pet rabbit.
Accolades and honors
American Film Institute recognition
AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills—#28
AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains: Alex Forrest—Villain—#7
Adaptations
Play
A play based on the film opened in London's West End at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in March 2014. It was adapted by the film's original screenwriter James Dearden.
TV series
On July 2, 2015, Fox announced that a TV series based on the film was being developed by Mad Men writers Maria and Andre Jacquemetton. On January 13, 2017, it was announced that the project was canceled.
On February 24, 2021, it was announced that Paramount+ planned to reboot the film as a series for their platform. It would be written by Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes and produced by Cunningham, Hynes, Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank of Amblin Entertainment, Stanley Jaffe, and Sherry Lansing. On November 11, Lizzy Caplan was announced to play Alex Forrest in the new series and Joshua Jackson joined in January 2022 as Dan Gallagher.
See also
Carolyn Warmus
List of films featuring home invasions
Mental illness in film
Basic Instinct, a 1992 film exploring similar themes
Fatal Instinct, a 1993 film parody
References
External links
Interviews with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close about Fatal Attraction at Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Fatal Attraction
1987 films
1987 thriller films
1980s American films
1980s English-language films
1980s erotic thriller films
1980s psychological thriller films
American erotic thriller films
American psychological thriller films
American remakes of British films
Borderline personality disorder in fiction
Features based on short films
Films adapted into television shows
Films adapted into plays
Films about adultery in the United States
Films about self-harm
Films about stalking
Films directed by Adrian Lyne
Films scored by Maurice Jarre
Films set in Manhattan
Films set in Westchester County, New York
Films shot in New York City
Paramount Pictures films