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That profile is familiar too. For Alex is the latest in a long Hollywood line of women whose sexuality makes them both super- and subhuman. Vampires. Or, in Hollywood's word, vamps. Since 1915, when Theda Bara starred in A Fool There Was (based on Rudyard Kipling's poem The Vampire), the American movie screen has been pocked with predatory femmes fatales. What made them evil? Usually, that they liked sex as much as men did, if they were decadent Europeans played by the likes of Garbo and Dietrich. Or, if they were homegrown, that sexual frustration twisted them into satanic schemers.
The mid-1940s brought a plague of these film-noir harpies, from Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven to Barbara Stanwyck in almost anything. Edgar G. Ulmer's relentless Detour (1946) cast Ann Savage as a harridan from hell -- the worst pickup of poor Tom Neal's life -- whose grating voice is, finally and poetically, strangled by a telephone cord. And as feminism found its voice in the early '70s, Hollywood shouted back. In Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), Jessica Walter is a woman who has a brief affair with a Carmel, Calif., disk jockey (Eastwood) and is soon threatening him, abducting his girlfriend and coming at him with a knife. Sound familiar? It sounded so familiar to Carpenter and De Palma that they passed on directing Fatal Attraction at least partly because of its echoes from Eastwood's film.
The new movie is sleeker, cannier, luckier -- and more disturbing. No wonder feminists have cried foul over Fatal Attraction: Alex is the '80s career woman as homicidal vamp. Says Marsha Kinder, a film professor at the University of Southern California: "In this film, it is not sexual repression that causes psychosis. It is sexual liberation. For men, Alex's sexuality is a succubus; it saps a man's strength. Fatal Attraction is also about how men fear women. Because in this movie women have the power, positively and negatively. When Alex hears Dan threaten her, she doesn't take it seriously. But when Beth tells Alex she is going to kill her, Alex trembles. And the final battle is between the two women. It is like a return bout from last year's Aliens, except that this time the career woman is the monster, and it's the mother who wins. The movie cleverly plays to both sides of woman. And even though it is hateful politically, it is appealing to women. The film itself has a fatal attraction."
The movie's makers angrily deny that Fatal Attraction is antifeminist, but they must be smiling behind their public choler. All the controversy in newspapers and magazines is like a free front-page ad. Every argument at a cocktail party or around an office coffee machine keeps this monster movie alive. Even career women who take the film as libel have to see it, if only to know the enemy up close. Maybe Hitchcock was right when, to smooth the feathers of one of his stars, he cooed, "It's only a movie, Ingrid." Maybe Fatal Attraction is just a nine-weeks wonder. More likely, though, it will linger in the American central nervous system. A single woman may have to go to the personals column for her next beau. A married man may sit on his lust the next time an attractive woman says, "Hi." And next time he and his wife go out on the town, he'll pick the movie.