Fatal Attraction’s protagonist Dan (Michael Douglas) has seemingly been tightrope walking between urban young adulthood and grown suburbanization for the last little while, but he’s getting closer than ever to having to go full suburbia. Soon there will be a big old house in the country, near the in-laws, replete with a rabbit hatch for their young daughter’s latest pet.
When Dan meets Alex (Glenn Close), she’s nothing like what’s on the horizon for him. She’s smoky make-up, she’s a chic, creative job in the city, she’s direct and unflinching expressions of desire. When Dan’s wife goes out of town to look at their potential new home for the weekend, Alex and Dan have a torrent affair. They have sex so raw, so hard, that it can look nearly painful; bodies crammed together, yanked and pushed about in passion.
When Dan tries to shuffle back to his quieter reality, Alex refuses to let him go. Her life becomes consumed with her desire for him, a need to get him back using any tactic possible; harming herself, stalking Dan, and threatening his family.
At moments, Alex’s characterization can near the stereotype of the scorned woman. But for the most part, I see Alex as a louder version of the average internal experience during early attraction. I can count on my fingers the amount of times I’ve felt a genuine pull to someone upon first meeting. It often surpasses language. It often feels based entirely in the gut. If we’re lucky enough to bed the person, and it’s as pheromone-ridden as meeting them felt, it becomes nearly impossible to say it’s “just sex” and believe it. Even if we frame the casual set up with a wave of a hand, those raw hormones are all-consuming.
But Fatal Attraction cannot let Alex succeed. For her to succeed in attaining Dan means systems like marriage, big houses, and the presumed “natural” progression in the narrative we have been offered over and over of a “proper” life, all become worthless. Not only can she not win the guy, she has to be killed; drowned in Dan and his wife’s bathroom, their family pictures careening off the walls with her struggle.
Fatal Attraction, in this sense, ultimately reads as a reassurance to those deep in suburbanite monogamy. Alex screeching around Dan’s home is a deterrent of bad but fun behavior, a promise that you do not miss the chaos of singleness, of youth, of the city. You do not miss the rush of a first date or a casual fuck. You do not miss the busy city streets. Quiet at-home dinners with the same friends over and over are enough. Your kid sleeping in your bed, keeping you from ever having sex with your pretty wife, is enough. And yet, and yet. Those first few times between Alex and Dan sure do seem like fun.
