EXAMPLE:

Arbitrage (Nicholas Jarecki, 2012)

A husband has an affair, which ends when his mistress dies in a car accident. The police suspect that he killed the mistress. The wife and daughter find out. The wife exacts financial revenge.

In the 19th century ADULTERY was a cause for scandal. Marriage was held sacred, an inflexible contract totally biased in favour of the male. This was still a time when it was possible for a husband to have his wife committed to a mental hospital if her behaviour was deemed unacceptable to him. Class was a huge issue. Within the upper classes both men and women conducted discreet extra-marital affairs, but in the lower echelons adultery was deemed sinful, particularly for women.

Despite the continued gender imbalance in the 21st century, our attitudes towards marriage and, therefore, adultery have changed enormously. Statistics tell us of the failure of most marriages (in the West), and the single parent is a fact of life. But despite that, there is still a curious holdover from the 19th century in our attitudes to marriage and its sanctity. When marriage is portrayed in drama, it still has within it the idea of permanence, the concept that ‘love will keep us together’. The fact that the word ‘adultery’ has long since lost its potency in daily life does not mean that it is redundant within contemporary drama.

When two people form a relationship, a partnership, a kind of contract to be faithful and truthful to each other, the breaking of that pact is highly emotional. There are many ways in which a loving relationship can be corrupted and then broken, leaving behind dangerous wreckage.

There are many possibilities when it comes to connecting this situation with the others, but first we must decide:

(a) are we primarily interested in the psychology of the situation? A drama about the principal protagonists, the entire drama to be contained within these specific boundaries, i.e. ADULTERY? Or

(b) are we more interested in a bigger canvas, where the adultery triggers other events – wars are started, murders committed, children traumatised and loyalties questioned?

When we create a period drama, we invariably superimpose contemporary morality onto it. Thus, if the subject is slavery, or women’s rights, or child labour … or adultery, we view these themes from a supposedly more enlightened perspective. To write a dramatically ‘truthful’ period drama, we should really try to immerse ourselves in the generic morality of that period. It’s worth remembering this before beginning to write. The enlightened perspective of the present tense often has a counter-effect: it can distance the audience from the narrative, and characters become caricatures.

Looking at Polti’s original book, I would say that very few of his categories for ADULTERY have much resonance with the 21st century. Gender politics have moved on in that aspect at least. But I have included a few of them because of an interesting trick that can be played with gender clichés – namely, reversing the sexes.

All of these situations are based upon the idea that the protagonist is in a long-term relationship with someone – a partner, husband, wife, etc.

(1) A man has a mistress. He grows tired of her and forms a relationship with a younger man/woman. The relationship has now grown from three people to four. The discarded mistress may have ideas of revenge.

 

Gender flip

A wife has a lover, grows tired of him and forms a new relationship with a younger man/woman.
   (In both cases the official partner has no knowledge of these extra characters, so the idea of revenge often requires letting the innocent party know.)

 

(2) A husband/wife has a lover, experiences guilt and remorse, and finishes the affair. The discarded lover then creates problems (e.g. Fatal Attraction).
   The possible scenarios are numerous and complex. Sometimes it is more powerful in film to focus on the psychological state of the main protagonist.

THE JILTED LOVER

In Fatal Attraction the choice was made to focus on the husband. He had the affair and then jilted the lover, who became revengeful. The wife, after initially being upset, joins forces with the husband to defeat the ‘bunny boiler’ psycho ex-lover. The film could just as easily have focused on the lover and her POV, in which case the portrayal would have been more sympathetic, as follows:

A woman has an affair with a married man. She becomes too attached, which scares off the middle-class husband. He ends the relationship and returns to the comfort of his family. The lover becomes obsessive and crosses over into madness. A victim of love?

We could also have focused on the wife. She discovers her husband’s infidelity through the discarded lover. The perceived threat to her family allows her to support her husband in fending off the threat … but their marriage will never be the same, and at some future date she may punish him by beginning an affair of her own and letting him know this.

The intensity of feelings that can be generated by adultery can lead to extreme behaviour and even madness. In L’Enfer (Claude Chabrol, 1994) a husband suspects that his wife is having an affair, and this possibility slowly drives him mad. Circumstances sometimes suggest that he is correct in his suspicions, but his wife always denies it. By the end of the film we see that he is now paranoid and dangerous. He has tied up his wife and has a knife. Like all great psychological thrillers, we are left with the possibility that he may be right.

In many societies the punishment for adultery continues to be extreme, particularly towards the woman: honour killings and public humiliations, beatings, etc. In certain Islamic cultures women are still stoned to death for adultery. It is the duty of the dramatist to propose alternative scenarios. In One Night Stand (1997) I attempted this at the conclusion of the story by having both couples commit adultery at the same time, thereby neutralising the situation.