Madonnas, Whores, and the Women of ‘Fatal Attraction’ [Fatal Femmes]
Jenn Adams
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If you identify as a woman, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the Madonna/Whore complex. A term coined by Sigmund Freud, this dichotomy divides all women into two categories: Madonnas, symbolizing purity and virtue, and Whores, manipulative seductresses who endanger men with their feminine wiles. No film embraces these reductive archetypes and pits them against each other quite like Fatal Attraction.
Adrian Lyne’s 1987 erotic thriller follows family man Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) and the two women who fight for his love. In the decades since its release, the divisive film has been dissected many times with each passing year offering more sympathy for the maligned Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), Dan’s ill-fated mistress. A new series from Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes updates the film by showing both the original affair and its present-day legacy in parallel timelines. Unfortunately, by clinging to the man as the story’s ultimate victim, this interpretation winds up reifying Lyne’s original narrative that women can only be innocent or evil and concludes that they’re more likely to be evil.
Dan Gallagher is a confident lawyer who has a weekend fling with Alex, a curly-haired editor who’s just started working at his company. When Dan’s wife Beth (Anne Archer) returns from a trip, Dan believes the affair has run its course and tries to break things off on friendly terms. But Alex wants more. She slowly invades Dan’s life and alternately tries to win him back to her bed or punish him for rejecting her in the first place. The original film paints Dan as a good guy who simply falls victim to his masculine urges and tangles with the wrong woman. He is treated as the most important character in the film and we’re supposed to view his life as the one worth saving.
Looking at this character through the lens of 2023, it’s easy to see Dan as a narcissistic coward. While it’s true that Dan never hides the fact that he’s married, he spends a significant amount of time with Alex while his wife is out of town. It’s not far-fetched for her to believe he might want more than a one-night stand. Dan hasn’t done anything specifically wrong, but he fails to consider how his lover feels about a relationship he has no plans to continue and tries to drop her without a second thought. When Alex tells him she’s pregnant, Dan expects her to have an abortion because it’s what’s best for his life. It never occurs to him that she might want anything else.
That’s not to say Alex’s reaction to the breakup is rational. She clearly suffers from an unnamed or undiagnosed mental illness and is a danger to herself and others. Close’s portrayal of Alex is scary, but it’s also relatable. She’s frustrated to have so little power in the relationship and pissed that Dan never considers her a serious romantic partner. She’s the Whore he has fun with while his Madonna wife is away. Conventionally beautiful and maternal, Beth Gallagher is Alex’s polar opposite.
She represents the domestic ideal and seems to have no interests outside of her family and maintaining Dan’s picture-perfect life. Alex on the other hand is wild and untamed. As Dan’s colleague, she has as much professional power as he does and it’s possible part of his attraction comes from a need to dominate this headstrong woman. If he can’t do it in the workplace, he’ll make her dependent on his attraction and then cut her off to show that he’s still the ultimate authority.
Having had his fun taming the Whore, Dan returns to his Madonna. He may be afraid of getting caught but seems to feel no guilt for his infidelity. He only tells Beth about the affair when he has to and immediately shifts his family’s collective blame to Alex. Dan calls her with Beth by his side. He then hands the phone to his wife who threatens to kill her husband’s mistress if she won’t leave them alone. Beth is so busy blaming Alex for the affair, that she allows Dan to paint himself as the victim.
Fatal Attraction was originally supposed to end with Alex dying by suicide while framing Dan for her murder; getting her revenge from beyond the grave. When test audiences were underwhelmed, Lyne changed the ending to show Dan choking Alex in a bathtub full of water until she appears to die. Like the best Scream villains, she bursts back out of the water and lunges at Dan. Before this monstrous woman can stab him, Beth appears out of nowhere and shoots her in the chest. This double death not only compounds Alex’s suffering but gives both husband and wife the chance to kill her, punishing the Whore for intruding on their domestic bliss.
The frame then shifts to a photo of the happy Gallagher family implying that order has been restored. When Beth shoots Alex, she’s not just defending her man, but everything that man’s love entitles her to. As the virtuous Madonna, she is the one deserving of a beautiful house and a happy family. She must right this crime against the patriarchal order by killing the Whore who’s trying to steal her position of power within the home.
The updated version of Fatal Attraction tries to have its cake and eat it too. The season opens with a jaw-dropping revelation. Dan (Joshua Jackson) sits at a parole hearing and confesses to causing Alex’s (Lizzy Caplan) death. He was convicted of her murder and has spent the last fifteen years in prison thinking about the woman who ruined his life. Within the same episode, we learn that his admission of guilt is a lie. He believes he is completely innocent and plans to reopen the case in order to clear his name. The new update of Fatal Attraction has many flaws, but chief among them is that Cunningham and Hynes can’t seem to decide if Dan is the victim or the villain. Therefore they place way too much importance on his point of view.
Though the initial affair plays out mostly the same as in Lyne’s film, the show’s third episode reveals a deeply disturbed Alex who has been orchestrating everything behind the scenes. From chance run-ins to causing a fire in the bar that sets off the smoke alarms, she’s an expert manipulator and has done this dance before. Rather than slit her wrists when Dan tries to leave, she fakes an overdose to keep him from going home. Dan drives Alex to the hospital when she tells him she’s taken all of her medication, but once they get there, Dan cautions her not to go in.
While sitting in his car, he reminds her that a documented suicide attempt will most likely lead to the loss of her job. What he really wants is to keep his own name off of any medical forms and to avoid a long night by Alex’s side. This event encapsulates the way Cunningham and Hynes want us to view both characters. Because she lied about taking the pills, Alex is the villain while the man who convinced her not to seek treatment for an overdose he doesn’t know is fake seems like the rational party.
In the original Fatal Attraction. , Dan and Beth could conceivably walk away from the whole affair wounded but mostly ok. They can blame the whole thing on a “crazy” woman and continue with their lives. However, Cunningham and Hynes up the ante and punish Beth (Amanda Peet) for her husband’s affair. When Alex shows up at Dan’s house, she finds Beth’s mother house-sitting and impulsively drowns her in their backyard pool.
The original film shows an Alex who acts erratically but enters the affair with Dan in good faith. She’s hurt and genuinely falls apart when he rejects her. The newer version of Alex has done this before. She has a history of dangerous manipulation and Dan is just the latest victim to fall into her web. Not only does she murder his mother-in-law, but she also files an anonymous sexual harassment claim against him and sets fire to the house Beth is designing. This effectively makes Alex more sinister and Dan more sympathetic. Sure, he may have engaged in adultery and assault, but he would never commit murder!
This version of Beth has more agency. Not only is she a more developed character with interests that don’t include Dan and her daughter, but she pieces together the affair on her own. When Dan finally confesses, Beth walks out on him. Not willing to kill for a man who betrayed her, she takes Ellen and moves in with her newly widowed father. The two women face off in a tense confrontation that kicks off the season finale, but rather than a rational conversation about how Dan has hurt them both, Alex throws her pregnancy in Beth’s face and feigns pity for the woman whose husband she’s trying to steal. They are not human beings who both feel betrayed, but Madonna and Whore; distracted from considering Dan’s bad behavior by their territorial pissing match.
When Alex disappears, Dan is the likely suspect. He hides the affair from the jury and claims that Alex is an unhinged stalker who essentially invited her own death. Several of Alex’s friends and coworkers hide evidence that could exonerate him because they are so enraged by his victim-blaming defense strategy. One by one, characters lash out at Dan for his shoddy treatment of Alex, oblivious to the fact that Cunningham and Hynes are blaming Alex for her death as well. By continuing to vilify this obviously unwell woman and presenting Dan as a good man who simply made a mistake, they are essentially showing us that Alex is so unhinged that she deserves to die. Not only has Dan gone to jail for a crime he didn’t commit, but even in death, Alex has turned everyone against him by daring to die.
The penultimate episode of Fatal Attraction leads us to believe that Beth is the killer. Had this turned out to be true, it would be a fascinating twist and a significant enhancement to her character. Not only would she take out her romantic rival and her cheating husband in one fell swoop, but she would free herself to marry a rich husband. Beth would simultaneously be pure and sinister; nurturing and manipulative, transcending the Madonna/Whore archetypes with complex humanity. Unfortunately, Beth simply confides in her best friend Arthur (Brian Goodman) who takes matters into his own hands. This gentle and selfless man murders Alex to defend Beth’s family. After the trial, Arthur tries to confess to the murder in order to reunite Dan with his family. Even the man who murders Alex in cold blood is presented as more virtuous than she is.
The Fatal Attraction series depicting life 15 years after the affair presents an interesting opportunity to see how Dan’s misdeeds have affected his daughter Ellen (Vivien Lyra Blair, Alyssa Jirrels). The film’s young Ellen does little more than go to an amusement park with Alex and mourn for her dead rabbit, but the show’s final episode reveals a conversation that seems to change the trajectory of Ellen’s life.
On a walk by the pier, Alex tells Ellen not to trust anyone; to always keep her guard up because no one will ever give her love she hasn’t earned through manipulation. It seems that this single conversation with a woman she’ll never see again is enough to plant the seeds of the Whore in Ellen’s young mind. The series ends on a cliffhanger as Dan’s adult daughter confronts her male professor with an evil look in her eye and a message she’s pieced together faking his declaration of love. She lives in a world where women can only be two things: Alexs or Beths. As it turns out, Ellen is an Alex.
The Fatal Attraction show egregiously misses an opportunity to rewrite a dated narrative by clinging too strongly to the belief that Dan is a good guy. It misses an even bigger opportunity to humanize Alex. The two episodes written by Cunningham offer a glimpse into her life, showing a complex, but dangerous person in need of help. Unfortunately, most of the episodes revolve around Dan and his struggle to redeem himself, something we’ve already seen in Lyne’s original film. With so much attention focused on the male character, all attempts to humanize the women in Dan’s life fall by the wayside. With time running out, Hynes simply falls back on the tired dichotomy of Madonna and Whore, eventually sorting each of the show’s women into these two narrow categories. The new version of Alex may be a killer, but she deserves better.
Categorized:Editorials Fatal Femmes
