by Susan Faludi
A writer takes his wife to the station in the morning with their child and sees them off. Then he picks up the phone and rings a girl whose number he’s got. He takes her out to dinner, takes her to bed. He thinks that’s the end of it, but the phone rings the next day and it’s her. So he goes over to see her and spends Sunday with her. And Sunday evening she freaks out completely and cuts her wrists. . . . He stays the second night and gets home early in the morning. His wife gets back. The phone rings and it’s the girl. He fobs her off and the phone rings again and the wife goes to pick up the phone and you know that’s going to be it. She’s going to find out about the affair. The wife picks up the phone and says hello, and the screen goes black.
Dearden says he intended the story to explore an individual’s responsibility for a stranger’s suffering: he wanted to examine how this man who inflicted pain, no matter how unintentionally, must eventually hold himself accountable. In 1979, Dearden turned his screenplay into a forty-five-minute film called Diversion, highly acclaimed at the Chicago Film Festival the following year. In the early ’80s, American producer Stanley Jaffe was in London looking for new talent, and he paid Dearden a call. The former president of Paramount had recently teamed up with Sherry Lansing, former president of production at 20th Century Fox, to launch an independent movie production company that would be affiliated with Paramount. Lansing had left Fox in 1982, where she was the first woman ever to be put in charge of production at a major film studio, because she wanted more authority than Fox was willing to grant her. Jaffe returned from London with a stack of scripts for Lansing. “I kept coming back to Diversion,” she recalls. It was the film’s potential to deliver a feminist message that appealed to her most, she says:
I always wanted to do a movie that says you are responsible for your actions. . . . And what I liked in the short film was that the man is made responsible. That there are consequences for him. When I watched that short film, I was on the single woman’s side. And that’s what I wanted to convey in our film. I wanted the audience to feel great empathy for the woman.
Lansing invited Dearden to Los Angeles to expand the story into a feature film, a story from the woman’s point of view with a turning-of-the-tables message: The Other Woman shouldn’t be getting all the blame; let the adulterous man take the fall for a change.
But Paramount didn’t want to make that kind of movie. “[Paramount president] Michael Eisner turned it down because he thought the man was unsympathetic,” director Adrian Lyne recalls. When Eisner left Paramount in 1984, Lansing tried again, and this time the studio agreed to take the film. Almost immediately, however, the old objections were raised. “My short film was a moral tale about a man who transgresses and pays the penalty,” Dearden says. “But it was felt, and it was a feeling I didn’t particularly agree with, that the audiences would not be sympathetic to such a man because he was an adulterer. So some of the onus for the weekend was taken off his shoulders and placed on the girl’s.” With each rewrite, Dearden was pressured to alter the characters further; the husband became progressively more lovable, the single woman more venomous. Dearden finally did away with the man’s little black address book and made the single career woman the initiator of the affair. “As we went along, Alex became much more extreme,” Dearden says. “She ended up having a kind of predatory quality. It weakened her case and strengthened his.”
“The intent was to soften the man,” a studio executive who was involved in the development discussions explains. “Because if you saw him shtup a different woman every week, then people would see him as cold and deliberate, and obviously you had to feel for him.” Apparently no one had to feel for the single woman. The feelings of another man were involved, too: Michael Douglas, who was cast early on to play the husband, made it clear to Fatal Attraction’s producers that he was not going to play “some weak unheroic character,” Dearden recalls.
With Douglas on board, the next task was finding a director. Adrian Lyne was the producers’ first choice—a peculiar one for a film that was supposed to empathize with women. Of course, they chose him not for his perspective on the opposite sex but for his record at the box office. In 1983, Lyne directed Flashdance, a hit MTV-style musical in which the dancing women’s rumps received far more screen time than their faces.
Following Flashdance’s commercial success, Lyne had also directed 9½ Weeks, which attracted media attention for its glossy depiction of sadomasochism and for a particularly graphic episode, ultimately excised from all but the video version, in which the masochistic woman is forced to grovel for money at her stockbroker boyfriend’s feet. During the filming, the humiliation continued between takes. Kim Basinger, the actress who played the woman, was cringing not only before her character’s lover but also from the ministrations of Lyne, who waged an intimidation campaign against the actress—on the theory that an “edge of terror” would “help” prepare her for the role. At one point, heeding Lyne’s instructions that “Kim had to be broken down,” co-star Mickey Rourke grabbed and slapped Basinger to get her in the mood.
Much as he would later invert Fatal Attraction’s theme, Lyne tried to reverse the original message of 9 ½ Weeks. The story of that film was drawn from a real woman’s 1978 memoirs, which recounted her devastating descent into sexual masochism. In the original script, the woman finally rejects the humiliation and walks away from her tormentor. But Lyne tried to change the ending so that she winds up learning to love the abuse. Only a mass protest by the women on the set prevented Lyne from shooting this version.
“Where is the new Kim Basinger?” casting agent Billy Hopkins recalls Lyne demanding throughout the auditions for Fatal Attraction. “Get me the new Kim Basinger.” The casting agents went after several name actresses, including Debra Winger and Jessica Lange, who turned them down. Meanwhile, they kept getting calls from Glenn Close’s agent. Close was determined to have the role; she was even willing to come in for a screen test, an unheard-of gesture for a major star. Close was anxious to shed the good-girl image of her previous roles, from the nurse-mother in The World According to Garp to the lady in white in The Natural. And late-’80s Hollywood offered actresses only one option for breaking typecasts: trading one caricatured version of womanhood for another.
Once Close was hired, the casting agents turned their attention to the character of the wife. In the original script she was a side character, unimportant. But the producers and Lyne wanted her remade into an icon of good wifery. Producer Stanley Jaffe says, “I wanted her to be—and I think this is the way she turned out—a woman who is sensitive, loyal, and acts in a way that I would be proud to say, ‘I would like to know that lady.’” Casting agent Risa Bramon recalls that she was told to find an actress who “projected incredible warmth and love and strength in keeping the family together.” Meanwhile, Dearden was sent back to his desk to turn the two women into polar opposites—as he puts it, “the Dark Woman and the Light Woman.” Originally the wife, Beth, had a job as a teacher that she was anxious to resume. But by the final version, all traces of a career were excised and Beth transformed into the complete Victorian hearth angel (a la the prototypical Victorian “Beth” of Little Women), sipping tea, caressing piano keys, and applying cosmetics with an almost spiritual ardor.
Concurrently, Lyne was pushing Close in the other direction, transforming her character, as he describes it, into “a raging beast underneath.” It was his idea to dress her up in black leather and turn her apartment into a barren loft in New York’s meat market district, ringed by oil drums that burned like witches’ cauldrons.
To inspire this modern vision of the Dark Woman, Lyne says he “researched” the single women of the publishing world. “I was mostly interested in their apartments,” he says. He looked at Polaroids of dozens of single women’s studios. “They were a little sad, if you want me to be honest. They lacked soul.” His “research” didn’t involve actually talking to any of the inhabitants of these apartments; he had already made up his mind
about unmarried career women. “They are sort of overcompensating for not being men,” he says. “It’s sad, you know, because it kind of doesn’t work.” Sadness, however, is not Lyne’s dominant feeling for single professional women, particularly when it comes to the handful of career women he confronts in Hollywood.
I see it with the executives within the studio area. The other day, I saw a woman producer who was really quite powerful; and she railroaded, walked all over this guy, who was far less successful and powerful than her. She just behaved as if this man wasn’t there because her position was more powerful than his. And it was much more disconcerting because it was a woman doing it. It was unfeminine, you know?
In Lyne’s analysis, the most unfeminine women are the ones clamoring for equal rights:
You hear feminists talk, and the last ten, twenty 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 child-bearing role. Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman.
For his ideal of the “feminine” woman, he points to his wife:
My wife has never worked. She’s the least ambitious person I’ve ever met. She’s a terrific wife. She hasn’t the slightest interest in doing a career. She kind of lives this with me, and it’s a terrific feeling. I come home and she’s there.
Michael Douglas harbored similar ill will for feminism and its effects. He told a reporter:
If you want to know, I’m really tired of feminists, sick of them. They’ve really dug themselves into their own grave. Any man would be a fool who didn’t agree with equal rights and pay but some women, now, juggling with career, lover, children [childbirth], wife-hood, have spread themselves too thin and are very unhappy. 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.
Even Dearden appears to have come around to Lyne’s view of the single career woman. “I think there are many women in New York who live like Alex Forrest,” Dearden says.
Maybe that thrusting career woman looks rather attractive for a brief fling, but in reality you don’t want to spend your life with a woman like that. Because they have their careers and their careers would probably conflict with your career and there probably would be rivalry and it wouldn’t be that kind of mutually supportive relationship.
Lyne’s and Dearden’s views on women alone did not shape the movie’s ultimate message. Close consulted three psychiatrists, who assured her “this kind of behavior is totally possible.” And market research had the final cut. Originally, Fatal Attraction was supposed to end with Alex in deep despair over her unrequited love, committing suicide by slitting her throat to the music of Madame Butterfly. But when Paramount showed this initial version to test audiences, the response was disappointing. “It was not cathartic,” Dearden recalls. “They were all wound up to a pitch and then it all kind of went limp and there was no emotional payoff for them. They’d grown to hate this woman by this time, to the degree that they actually wanted him to have some retribution.” Suicide, apparently, was insufficient punishment.
The film’s creators immediately decided to redraft the ending with an audience-pleasing climax—a last-minute revision that would cost them $1.3 million. Alex’s death would be a homicide, they decided—and the Light Woman would kill the Dark Woman. They set the climactic blowout in the home, “the final sanctum,” as Dearden describes it. The evil Alex invades, clutching a meat cleaver, and Dan grabs her by the throat, tries to drown her in the tub. But it is up to the dutiful wife to deliver the fatal shot, in the heart. The film ends with a slow pan of a framed family portrait, the family restored—the Gallagher family anyway. (For all their domestic sentimentality, the filmmakers gave no thought to the fact that Alex was pregnant when Beth shot her.)
What of Lansing’s original objective—to make a feminist film? Lansing concedes that by the end of the film, “Your allegiance is not with Alex. It’s with the family.” But she contends that the film is on Alex’s side to a point. “I do sympathize with her up until she dumps the acid on the car,” Lansing says. She realizes, though, that most male viewers don’t share her feelings. In one scene in the movie, Alex sits on the floor in tears, compulsively switching a light on and off. “I just found that tragic,” Lansing says. “But in the screenings that often gets laughter. That surprised me.”
Still, Lansing maintains that this remains a story about “the moral consequences of a man’s actions.” For the straying husband, she says, “his whole life turns into a horrendous nightmare.” That may be true, but it’s a nightmare from which he wakes up—sobered, but unscathed. In the end, the attraction is fatal only for the single woman.
“I think the biggest mistake filmmakers can make is to say, okay, we’re only going to show women who are together and stable and wonderful people,” Lansing says. In late ’80s Hollywood, however, there didn’t seem much danger of that. Asked to come up with some examples of “together and stable and wonderful” single women in her films, Lansing says, “Oh, I’ve made plenty.” Such as? “I’m sure I’ve shown characters like this,” she repeats. Pressed once more to supply a specific example, she finally says, “Well, Bonnie Bedelia in When the Time Comes [an ABC television movie] was just this functioning, terrific Rock of Gibraltar.” But then, Bedelia was playing a young woman dying of cancer—another Beth of Little Women. Lansing’s example only underscores the point driven home in the final take of Fatal Attraction: The best single woman is a dead one.
THE ’70S: UNMARRIED WOMEN AND BRILLIANT CAREERS
For a while in the ’70s, the film industry would have a brief infatuation with the feminist cause. Just as silent-era Hollywood gave the movement a short run—after a series of low-budget pro-suffrage films turned into big hits—movie studios in the late ’70s finally woke up to the profit potential in the struggle for women’s independence. In films like Diary of a Mad Housewife, A Woman Under the Influence, An Unmarried Woman, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Up the Sandbox, Private Benjamin, and The Turning Point, housewives leave home, temporarily or permanently, to find their own voice. At the time, the female audience seemed to be on a similar quest. In New York movie theaters in 1975, women were not sitting placidly in their seats. They were booing the final scene of the newly released Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, because the script rewrote the best-seller’s ending to marry off the single woman—to a doctor, of course, who would presumably cure her of her singles sickness.
Eventually, filmmakers came around to the boisterous audience’s feminist point of view. The end of Private Benjamin, where the heroine rebuffs her domineering groom, is a case in point. “It was very important to me that she walk out of that church,” recalls Nancy Meyers, who created the film with Charles Shyer. “It was important to write about women’s identity, and how easily it could be lost in marriage. That sounds almost old-fashioned now, I guess. But I know it mattered to many, many women.” After Private Benjamin came out, Meyers was inundated with letters from women “who saw themselves in her character.” It was a liberating event for the film’s leading actress, too: Goldie Hawn had been typed up until then as a blond bubblehead.
In Private Benjamin, Hawn plays the single Judy, whose “life’s desire”—marriage—comes crashing down when her husband dies on their wedding night. “If I’m not going to be married, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with myself,” she says. She winds up enlisting in the army, where basic training serves as a metaphorical crash course in emotional and economic independence. Over thirty but not panicked about her single status, Judy goes to work and lives on her own in Europe. Eventually she meets a French doctor and they are engaged, but when she discovers his philanderings, she calls a halt to the wedding in midceremony, flees the church, and flings her bridal crown to the heavens. The scene recalls the
famous ending of the 1967 The Graduate; but in the feminist version of this escape-from-the-altar scenario, it was no longer necessary for a man to be on hand as the agent of liberation.
The women who go mad in the 1970s women’s films are not over-thirty single women panicked by man shortages but suburban housewives driven batty by subordination, repression, drudgery, and neglect. In the most extreme statement of this theme, The Stepford Wives, the housewives are literally turned into robots created by their husbands. In Diary of a Mad Housewife and A Woman Under the Influence, the wives’ pill-popping habits and nervous breakdowns are presented as not-so-unreasonable responses to their crippling domestic condition—madness as a sign of their underlying sanity. What the male characters label lunacy in these films usually turns out to be a form of feminist resistance.
Women in these ’70s films do not turn to male “doctors” to cure them: in Private Benjamin, when her fiancé (who is, significantly, a gynecologist) offers to give Judy a shot to help her “calm down,” she slaps his face. Instead, these heroines seek counsel from other women, who dispense the opposite advice of traditional male clinicians: take action and speak up, they urge. The housewife in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman seeks advice from an independent female therapist, who tells her to go out, enjoy sex, and “get into the stream of life.” In Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the housewife turns to a wisecracking and foul-mouthed waitress for wisdom. “Once you figure out what it is you want,” the waitress advises, “you just jump in there with both feet and let the devil take the hindmost.”