The daughter of Polish immigrants, Pauline Kael grew up in California, where she studied philosophy at UC Berkeley. Her first regular film review column, at the women’s magazine McCall’s, became infamous after she was fired for criticizing The Sound of Music (‘We have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs’).
Kael was uncompromizing then, outspoken, never afraid to speak against the popular tide. Writing for the New Yorker for over three decades, she had a tough, witty, neologistic style that was peppered with biographical and cultural references and would become much copied – not just by other critics, but by political columnists and journalists in general. In the following article Kael eviscerates the film Fatal Attraction, damning its portrayal of women, which, she says, amounts to a ‘hostile version of feminism’.
Fatal Attraction is just about the worst dating movie imaginable – a movie almost guaranteed to start sour, unresolvable arguments – but long lines of people curl around the block waiting to see it. At a New York publishing party, a dull but presentable corporate lawyer (Michael Douglas), a settled married man, exchanges glances with a bold-eyed, flirtatious woman (Glenn Close), a book editor. She’s wearing a Medusa hairdo – a mess of blond tendrils is brushed high off her forehead and floats around her face. She’s made up to get attention, yet she resents it: the lawyer’s plump pal (Stuart Pankin) tries a pleasantry on her, and she gives him a drop-dead stare. We see all the warning signals that the lawyer doesn’t, and when he runs into her again, on a weekend when his wife and six-year-old daughter are out of town, we sense the hysteria behind her insinuating repartee and the hot looks she fastens on him. She makes all the overtures; he’s not particularly eager, but she semi-transforms her frighteningness to sexiness, and he, being frightened, finds it sexy. She makes spending the night together seem casual and grownup – makes him feel he’d be a total wimp to say no – and he goes with her to her loft.
Like a femme fatale in a Cecil B. De Mille picture, she comes from hell: her loft is in the wholesale-meat district, where fires burn in the street. The director, Adrian (Flashdance) Lyne, puts on bravura demonstrations of frenetic passion. The two have sex, with her seated on the kitchen sink, and when she reaches for the faucet and splashes her hot face Lyne shoots it as if the water were wildly erotic. After more sex, they go to a Latin club for some (comically) supercharged dancing, then have sex in the elevator to the loft. By morning, the lawyer has had enough, but she pressures him, and he doesn’t find it easy to get clear of her. When the weekend is over and he’s determined to say goodbye and go back uptown she stops him, temporarily, by slashing her wrists. In the weeks that follow, she hounds him at his office and his home, insisting that he can’t use her and then discard her. The picture is a skillfully made version of an old-fashioned cautionary movie: it’s a primer on the bad things that can happen if a man cheats on his wife.
Once the woman begins behaving as if she had a right to a share in the lawyer’s life, she becomes the dreaded lunatic of horror movies. But with a difference: she parrots the aggressively angry, self-righteous statements that have become commonplaces of feminist fiction, and they’re so inappropriate to the circumstances that they’re the proof she’s loco. They’re also Lyne’s and the scriptwriter James Dearden’s hostile version of feminism. (Dearden’s script is an expansion of the forty-two-minute film Diversion, which he wrote and directed in England in 1979.) Glenn Close expresses the feelings of many despairing people; she plays the woman as pitiable and deprived and biologically driven. But in the movie’s terms this doesn’t make the character sympathetic – it makes her more effectively scary, because the story is told from a repelled man’s point of view. Lyne and Dearden see her as mouthing a modern career woman’s jargon about wanting sex without responsibilities, and then turning into a vengeful hellion, all in the name of love. They see the man as ordinary, sane, hardworking – a man who loves his beautiful homebody wife (Anne Archer) and bright little daughter (Ellen Hamilton Latzen). He’s the opposite of a lech; he was a little tickled at being seduced. Yet the woman plays the Madame Butterfly music and doesn’t regard it ironically; alone in her stark loft, she really sees herself as having been mistreated. When she seeks revenge, she might be taking revenge on all men.
The horror subtext is the lawyer’s developing dread of the crazy feminist who attacks his masculine role as protector of his property and his family. It’s about men seeing feminists as witches, and, the way the facts are presented here, the woman is a witch. She terrorizes the lawyer and explains his fear of her by calling him a faggot. This shrewd film also touches on something deeper than men’s fear of feminism: their fear of women, their fear of women’s emotions, of women’s hanging on to them. Fatal Attraction doesn’t treat the dreaded passionate woman as a theme; she’s merely a monster in a monster flick. It’s directed so that by the time she’s wielding a knife (from that erotic kitchen) you’re ready to shriek at the sight of her. But the undercurrents of sexual antagonism – of a woman’s fury at a man who doesn’t value her passion, doesn’t honor it, and a man’s rage at a woman who won’t hold to the rules she has agreed to, a man’s rage against ‘female’ irrationality – give the movie a controversial, morbid power that it doesn’t really earn.
It’s made with swank and precision, yet it’s gripping in an unpleasant, mechanical way. When we first hear that the little daughter wants a bunny rabbit, an alarm goes off in our heads. And after the lawyer buys the rabbit we wait to see what obscene thing the demon lady will do to it. Educated people may want to read more into Fatal Attraction, but basically it’s a gross-out slasher movie in a glossy format. (It has special touches, such as a copy of Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat next to the bed in the loft.) The violence that breaks loose doesn’t have anything to do with the characters who have been set up; it has to do with the formula they’re shoved into.
The picture has De Mille’s unbeatable box-office combination – an aura of sexiness and a moral message. We know that the lawyer isn’t going to chase after the blonde, because Lyne softens Anne Archer’s features and sexualizes every detail of the cozy marriage. And the movie is edited so that the audience is breathing right along with the husband as he watches his wife put on her extra-moist lipstick. There are also bits of contrast, like the pal’s making fun of himself, or the husband’s experiencing a surreal embarrassment, trying to carry the blonde from her sink to her bed and being hobbled by his pants and shorts, which are caught around his ankles. Lyne uses these moments to break into the dreamlike tension of the male erotic reveries of the soft nest at home and of the tempestuous, kinky sex in the loft. The husband loves his wife and prefers her in every way to the interloper, whose rapacity scares him even before she threatens his way of life, even before she sends him porno tapes full of hate. The movie has its sex in the dirty sink, but it’s pushing the deeper erotic satisfaction of the warm, sweet life at home. The key to its point of view is that dull, scared everyman husband. The woman was ready to go nuts; if it hadn’t been this ordinary guy she tried to destroy, it could have been another. She carries madness, disease, the unknown. This is a horror film based on the sanctity of the family – the dream family. It enforces conventional morality (in the era of AIDS) by piling on paranoiac fear. The family that kills together stays together, and the audience is hyped up to cheer the killing.