The (Bad) Taste Test: Fatal Attraction and the Remake-Industrial-Complex
Alex Forrest is a character with a complicated legacy. In an episode of the film history podcast You Must Remember This, host Karina Longworth talks about the (literally) violent hatred for her that audiences had during screenings of the original Fatal Attraction (1987). Forrest even had the misfortune to create a certain kind of shorthand when describing stereotypical ideas of intense, troubled, or crazy women: The Bunny Boiler. So, when a cute white rabbit appears a couple of episodes into the Paramount+ remake of Fatal Attraction, you know that things are about to take a turn into a more uncomfortable direction.
Remakes are a tale as old as time; whether it's the wave of American adaptations of early 2000’s Japanese horror films like The Grudge and The Ring, or the more recent decision to take old films and turn them into TV shows. Things like Fargo, Friday Night Lights, and even Buffy. But the question that looms over all remakes is the same: Why? The answer is often the same as well: Money. But crude capitalistic desires aside, it’s possible for remakes to provide meaningful new interpretations of classics; Fargo takes the vibe of the Coen Brothers original film and pulls it in all sorts of interesting directions. And so, with a character like Alex Forrest, you’d think that a remake of Fatal Attraction might be able to do something engaging with its source material. Yet while the show isn’t bad, it unfortunately never manages to get out of the shadow of Adrian Lyne’s 80s erotic thriller. But the reason for that doesn’t seem like Alex at all, but male protagonist Dan Gallagher.
Fatal Attraction uses the TV format to try something different with its structure. The pilot begins after the end of the narrative as we know it, which is to say that Alex is already dead. And Dan, the former family man who’s been serving fifteen years for her murder, is just about to get out on parole. Once this happens, Dan becomes a man on a mission: to prove that he didn’t kill Alex. This feels like Fatal Attraction falling over itself at the very beginning, as if its shoes were tied together while it waited for the sound of a starting pistol. By telling us from the beginning that Alex is dead, it already hampers its ability to go in new or interesting directions, with Alex’s fate staying the same over thirty-five years later. More than that, by establishing two timelines — one with Alex and one without her — it means that whenever we move from one to the other, we’re losing the most compelling thing about Fatal Attraction: Alex herself.
When I saw that there was to be a remake of Fatal Attraction, one thing was at the forefront of my mind: what would they do with Alex? The original character was so much a product of the anxieties and sexism of the 80s, that to see a version for a new millennium had a certain promise to it. The impulse to say “good for her” whenever a woman transgresses in the media was one mine that the show would need to dodge, along with pandering to the worst thoughts of (male) audience members. The show seems to do both. The thorny sides of Alex’s personality are cut away from Alex in the first episodes of the show; she’s less intense looking than Glenn Close’s version of the character, literally less rough around the edges. But the show knows what direction Alex is going in, and it knows that the audience knows too.
The first interactions between Alex and Dan are harmless. They’re flirtatious, but not quite intimate. Each time it looks like things might cross a line, the tone of the show seems to change. Every step towards transgression sees Fatal Attraction morphing into a horror film. While some of this comes from Dan’s adulterous affair with Alex, it seems like the show is more obsessed with reminding us just exactly who Alex is and what she’s capable of. As the two get closer, Fatal Attraction relies on the horror-tinged synths you’d find in a John Carpenter film, as if Alex would be more likely to stab Dan than want to kiss him.
All of this comes to a head in Fatal Attraction’s third episode, the first one where we spend meaningful time in Alex’s head. Where episodes one and two have been about Dan — both with Alex, and after her death — it’s still Alex who carries the show on her back. Lizzy Caplan’s performance is fascinating for how subdued it is; and no matter how hard the show wants to push you in the direction of Alex being a monster, Caplan keeps you on side: she’s charming, funny, self-deprecating. But in The Watchful Heart, everything changes.
It’s here that we see the depths of how troubled Alex is — her self-destructive behaviour, the combative relationship she has with everyone that leaves her — and it’s here where Fatal Attraction both tries something new, but remains tied to the past. As we (re)watch Alex in a cheap Italian restaurant near the criminal courts, Dan’s flirtatious words to her (“maybe this is the place where I always am”) repeat in her head, distorted, a quick cinematic shorthand for madness. All the things that might make Alex more dynamic instead simply stack up like evidence presented against her at trial.
In one scene, Alex and Dan are drinking margaritas, talking about their dads. The smoke alarms go off, and the two run from the torrential bar. It would be a rom-com moment if not for the tension in the soundtrack. And then, in The Watchful Heart we return here from Alex’s perspective. The way she leans over to pick something up, watching as Dan stares at her cleavage, is given new emphasis. We watch as she goes into the bathroom, lighting a small fire that will, inevitably, set off the sprinkler system. There’s a desperation to Alex, in her desire to hold on to something when she feels that everyone around her has left.
It’s interesting; not as simple as a crazy woman, or as unnecessarily revisionist as a hand-wave and a “good for her,” yet the show itself doesn’t seem to know what to do with this version of the character. It’s no wonder that, when she goes to collect a package from one of her neighbours, and sees that they have a pet rabbit, the show leans back into the language of horror.
In Fatal Attraction, a lot of characters talk about Jung. In the sections that take place after his imprisonment, Dan’s daughter is studying psychology, and talks a lot about the concept of The Shadow and what it means to acknowledge it. To do so means, according to the show, “acknowledging our capacity for darkness.” And if there’s one thing everyone knows about Alex Forrest, it's her capacity for darkness, but in the early episodes of the show, she seems to be the only character for whom this is true; Fatal Attraction wants us to feel bad for Dan when he doesn’t get a promotion, and to be afraid for him as the layers of Alex’s psyche are peeled back. The problem is that we’ve seen this story before, and already know how it ends.
Words: Sam Moore
