But all the while they keep meeting for increasingly obsessive trysts. Of course, this dangerous triangle can t last forever, and it ends badly for all concerned. If you thought of Josephine Hart s 1992 novel Damage, or the Louis Malle film based on that book, score two points. But, if you also remembered a 330 year-old opera by Cavalli called Hercules In Love, you can go to the head of the class. Someone once said that there are really only 12 plots in all of fiction, and that every so-called new novel, or movie, or television program, is only a variation on one of them.
REAL love displays none of the characteristics of obsession.
At bottom, obsessive love seems to be more a type of mental illness than a form of deep and abiding affection. The clinical term for it is erotomania. But whatever the term, it s turned out to be a pretty popular form of entertainment. And then there s Fatal Attraction. In this one, married man Michael Douglas almost doesn t live to regret his weekend fling with that seriously disturbed Glenn Close character.