Just as Jaws initiated a string of rip-offs as soon as it was released in the summer of 1975, Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction made a genre of its own in 1987. Spielberg made everyone look in the water for other things that killed: Alligator, Piranha, Gator (which has nothing to do with alligators, it’s a sequel to White Lightning and Burt Reynolds is named Gator); Lyne’s film resonated in a far more personal and perverse way, offering a pressure valve for a consumer society stifled by the necessary sexual caution spurred by the AIDS epidemic. Although Fatal Attraction is commonly understood as both an AIDS and anti-feminist allegory, that reading is undermined by Glenn Close’s terrifying performance. She’s completely insane, a sociopath, the evil version of Wendy Robie’s Nadine on Twin Peaks. The idea that Michael Douglas deserves the hell he gets simply because he cheated on his wife, and that Close’s maniac deserves anything but the bullet that Anne Archer plugs her with, is beyond belief. Yet, Close, along with plenty of critics and academics, see her character as tragic. Please.
Nevertheless, Fatal Attraction provided a beautiful framework for the late-1980s and early-1990s: a marriage is attacked, one partner cheats, their trial begins, suspicions abound, the killer is finally revealed, banished, and killed themselves as the marriage continues stronger than ever. Alan J. Pakula’s Consenting Adults, released in 1992, might’ve felt creaky compared to that year’s Basic Instinct, itself a conscious recalibration of the Fatal Attraction formula, once again with Douglas in the lead; but today, it’s as clear a blueprint for the genre as you’ll find. These movies aren’t made anymore: the specter of AIDS isn’t what it was 30 years ago, and marital anxiety hasn’t been a media concern in years. American cinema’s too obsessed with maintaining a certain level of “decorum” or “manners” or “taste,” even in supposed “erotic thrillers” like Babygirl. Contemporary filmmakers and executives would balk at this setup: Kevin Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are happily married with a daughter we hardly ever see, and Kevin Spacey moves in next door. His hair is blond and he’s oily and obviously a con artist, but even after he allows himself to be hit by their car—so that he can scam his own insurance company out of $30,000, most of which he gives to Kline & Mastrantonio—the couple don’t distance themselves or even stop hanging out with him and his wife Rebecca Miller.
Kline’s wandering eye leads him to agree to a wife swap, where he and Spacey take walks to the other’s house at night and climb into the other’s bed and fuck the other’s wife. Kline gets screwed by Spacey, who brains his wife with a baseball bat and immediately blames Kline. Mastrantonio believes Spacey, and the latter starts becoming a surrogate father and husband for Kline’s suffering family. The disease is inside the house, and remember that Spacey is blond in this movie. He plays this character so swish, I was taken aback when he mentioned his “wife,” but even if he’s textually heterosexual, Spacey plays the guy totally flaming, and that’s what makes Consenting Adults the proper representative of the Fatal Attraction genre, much more so than Fatal Attraction itself. This is a movie about AIDS anxiety among affluent heterosexuals at the end of the Reagan era, a movie whose tagline comes from the Bible. “THOU” “SHALL NOT” “COVET” “THY NEIGHBOR’S” “WIFE” all appear in a series of zooming title cards in the trailer, set to booming synthesizer strings and drum machines, reminding the audience what’s really important and where its values come from.
More than a woman whose stairs don’t reach the attic, it’s Spacey’s implicitly gay schemer who best defines the villains and dangers of these movies. It’s not infidelity per se, it’s a certain kind of infidelity—don’t stray, don’t walk on the wild side, don't do drugs, and never fuck another man. YOU WILL DIE. If only there were a string of contemporary films that illuminated today’s anxieties and preoccupations that were this distinctive.
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