(7 of 8)
There is just one little problem. In killing Alex, Beth also kills the child -- Dan's child -- inside her. The first wife saves her family by destroying the potential family of the woman who wanted to be Dan's second wife. One woman movie executive, who is disgusted by Fatal Attraction's message, offers this bitter coda: "Dan and Beth should be put on trial for the murder of Alex's unborn child."
By any critical standard, Fatal Attraction is no masterpiece. The plot has holes you could drive Beth's station wagon through. (How does Alex get Ellen out of school? Why didn't the family dog bark when Alex breaks into the Gallagher house? Why can't Dan hear the final struggle a floor above him, and why does the bathroom tile floor leak water?) The threat to Ellen's pet rabbit can be smelled three reels away from payoff; that hare is high. Lyne's visual style, with its grab bag of slick thrills and cheap tricks, is clever but unoriginal -- hack chic. And you needn't be a critic to get restless during the longueurs of the film's first hour. Just listen to the crowd. Until Fatal Attraction removes its mask of psychological drama to reveal a familiar horror-movie face, audiences can be often heard giggling in apprehension and + impatience. Something scary has to happen soon, they must think, because nothing is happening now.
But when it happens, it happens big. And there are earlier, subtler pleasures: the understated idealizing of the Gallaghers' homelife, the funny- horny touches in the sex scene. Douglas and Close are nicely cast, attractive opposites. His all-American-boy bafflement suggests a Gary Cooper stripped of moral authority and ill at ease in a grown-up dilemma. Her intimidating energy recalls the young Katharine Hepburn but with a voracious libido. And behind them both stands another more portly silhouette: the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. Dan is the basic Hitchcock protagonist, a fairly decent man in a horribly compromised position. And at first glance, Alex, with her cool allure, seems an avatar of Hitchcock's blond ice goddesses. Only later do we discover she is as lonely and lethal as Mother Bates. But with a difference. In Psycho the woman with the knife was really a man with an Oedipus complex. In Fatal Attraction, Alex holds her own.
In its every strategy, Fatal Attraction is a cagey blend of old and new Hollywood, of current obsessions and conservative solutions. Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, The Untouchables) calls the picture a "postfeminist AIDS thriller." But unless Alex is the disease, Fatal Attraction is not about AIDS. Indeed, the story, stripped to its essentials, is the stuff of many an old movie weepie. Boy meets girl for a brief encounter; boy gets girl pregnant and disappears; girl falls in love with boy and tries to get him back. In those films, though, the lovesick female was the heroine and a rogue male was the villain. Fatal Attraction switches genders and, presto, becomes a homily for our times.
In traditional melodrama the ostensibly weak must triumph over the seemingly invincible. And that usually means a clash between a good woman and an evil man. But this time Dan is the vulnerable one -- in De Palma's provocative term, a "feminized male" -- partly because of his position as head of the family. And his adversary is scarily strong, a masculinized female even in name -- Alex. She is the stalker, the demon, the sexual adventurer.