Body double as body politic: psychosocial myth and cultural binary in Fatal Attraction.

Kales, Emily Fox

When Fatal Attraction appeared in 1987 it was generally dismissed as a formulaic Hollywood horror movie. The narrative is all too predictable (particularly for those familiar with Adrian Lyne's other work): a happily married Manhattan attorney Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) engages in a weekend sexual encounter with a single woman named Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) while his family is out of town. The woman refuses to relinquish the relationship and threatens to destroy his domestic life. Neither Lyne nor screenwriter James Deardon are interested in investigating the dynamics of marital infidelity or the motivations driving the husband's behaviour. Instead the film retreats to the conventions of the horror-film genre precisely because it is unable to resolve cultural conflicts and sexual anxieties that are split off and 'projected' on to the cinema screen.

Just as dreams, fairytales and myths require interpretation to yield their underlying psychosocial significance, so too the monstrous alien forces and violent images of the typical 'slasher' movie contain unconscious and unresolved material that are never commented upon in any conscious way. In its inability to express or wrestle with ambivalence using insight capacities the popular genre film thus exhibits the 'blind spot' that has led to the characterization of the screen itself as 'something of a symptom' by film theorist Mayne (1990, p. 41).

In this context, reading the film as cultural myth, manifesting the contemporary collective psyche and socio-political reality of its time, proves a more productive enterprise. Fatal Attraction belongs to a group of Hollywood films that emerged in the postfeminist period of the nineteen eighties and early nineties which might well be called 'backlash' films, a popular cultural response to changes in women's economic and political status. Such films as Sea of Love (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), Black Widow (1987), Disclosure (1994) and Working Girl (1988) depict women who either through sexual seduction or professional power seek to dominate and destroy a male protagonist by their drive to possess, devour or annihilate him. Psychoanalytic interpretations of the cinematic convention of the predatory woman stalking a helpless male (Lurie, 1981-2; Modelski, 1988; Gabbard and Gabbard, 1993) have suggested that Hollywood mainstream cinema, for the most part produced and directed by males (although Fatal Attraction was co-produced by a woman, Sherry Lansing), are projections of male anxiety about their 'castration' and loss of potency--i.e. loss of exclusive dominance and entitlement in the workplace, the bedroom, the military and other institutional domains. As such, these films represent a form of cultural myth-making which seeks to regain a sense of control over the social forces threatening traditional patriarchal order and stability. The myth in these backlash films is embodied in the cinematic image of the female predator, who represents the monstrous or murderous nature of feminine power, and the social message behind the myth is that women who have large appetites for competition, exertion of will and assertion of their own needs must indeed be monsters--unnatural, grotesque and most decidedly 'unfeminine'. Ultimately, they must be destroyed and contained if order--i.e. male-dominated order--is to be restored. Thus Fatal Attraction's use of the horror-genre template goes beyond cinematic convention to serve as an expression of the unconscious need to kill off the invading monster who would destroy not only hearth and home but also the fundamental organization of power and dominance in domestic life, where a man's home is indeed his castle. The female 'monster' in Fatal Attraction becomes, in the most literal and symbolic sense, a man's worst nightmare.

Beyond the psychosocial context, however, which must also include acknowledgment of mounting anxiety in the nineteen eighties about the AIDS epidemic, it is the film's projected subjectivity of husband/lover Dan Gallagher as he relates to the two women in his life that best reflects the gendered binary informing the cultural construction of the feminine. And since that construction historically splits the maternal and the sexual--the good and bad woman of the traditional Madonna/whore dichotomy--the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position (1946) provides the most useful psychoanalytic model to apply to an investigation of the unconscious anxieties of both the film and its audience. Gallagher's inability to fuse the aggressive and nurturant parts of his psyche or to merge his disparate needs for safety, security and order, on the one hand; and the drive for sexual excitement, destruction and the orgiastic possibilities within the darker side of disordered experience, on the other, thus appears on the screen not only as a projection of his own subjectivity but also of his culture's split construction of sexual difference. Alex Forrest's sexual promiscuity and aggression, her dangerous manipulation and seductiveness, is continually contrasted to Gallagher's wife Beth, the domesticated 'good' woman who represents the moral center of the family and source of maternity, order and stability. The cinematic vehicle that serves as a visual code expressing this split is the motif of the double, in which mise en scene, cinematography and narrative structure illuminate the polarization that the two females images represent. In the primitive psychic territory the film recreates, where the experience of persecution cannot co-exist with safety or love, the two women shadow each other as embodied projections of the husband/lover's inability to manage aggression while maintaining relationship and trust.

Each woman is associated with two contrasting worlds, the urban and the pastoral, a doubling that is played out in the film's settings and imagery. In the opening shot, the camera slowly pans across the New York cityscape of rooftops and watertowers silhouetted against a lurid orange sunset, while an eerily silent soundtrack is broken only by sounds of traffic rising from below--the rush of a train, honking cars--as the camera closes in on a window in an apartment building to reveal the Gallaghers getting dressed for a party, a scene designed to immediately establish the family's happy equilibrium. Gallagher's wife Beth uses her sexuality to cajole her reluctant husband into buying a suburban domestic refuge, whereas Alex uses it for seduction and sexual possession. The new family home is imaged in the film as a veritable pastoral idyll--complete with lush foliage, spacious gardens and the proverbial white picket fence. Inside, the hearth burns cheerily; the little daughter romps with the family dog; homey colonial furniture and paintings adorn the spotless kitchen. In stark contrast to this tidy bucolic paradise, Alex Forrest dwells in an urban Hades: she lures Dan to her loft in the bowels of the city, a meat-packing district where fires burn in trash barrels ghoulishly illuminating raw and bloody carcasses. Shadowy figures of nighttime revelers emerge and disappear into dimly lit alleys. After dancing all night at a nightclub, Alex engages Gallagher in a wild sexual orgy while riding up a huge creaking freight elevator. In short, Alex Forrest is a denizen of the urban underworld--and looks the part. Her fingernails are long and painted red; her hair is a wild tangle of loose curls; and in one scene she greets Gallagher wearing an undergarment straight from a bordello wardrobe; she is depicted as the 'wicked woman', a modern-day siren who would lure the innocent husband from his happy home.

The doubling motif underscores the duality between the two women in Gallagher's life in another major aspect of the feminine, that of the maternal. Much of the narrative revolves around Alex's insistence that she is pregnant with Gallagher's child, for which she demands his responsibility as she continues to stalk him and his family. The film contextualizes the possibility of her maternity as unnatural and highly suspect--she will stop at nothing to get her man--and she is so pathological and monstrous in her rage at rejection that the prospect of maternity is designed to repulse the viewer. The doubling of the maternal as nurturant and sinister, reflecting the Kleinian (1953) 'good breast/bad breast' split projection of loving and destructive self objects occurs in a peak moment in the film when Alex disappears with Gallagher's daughter. Here the editing continuously cuts from shots of the panic-stricken 'real' mother searching for her abducted child to the false mother taking the child on a wild rollercoaster ride in an amusement park. The little girl screams in combined terror and delight at the thrilling danger of the ride--yet another doubling: this time of her father Dan's ambivalent attraction to the wild freedom Alex represents. As the imposter-mother drops off the child after their escapade, she asks for a goodbye kiss. The child dutifully responds, as if she accepts this stranger as a sufficiently recognizable facsimile of her 'real' mother.

The relationship with Alex Forrest forces Gallagher to confront his own sexual animalism and aggression as she displays her own. Here the images of the film suggest the conflicted subjectivity of its protagonist through doubling of scene and setting as the camera cuts constantly between the two worlds of the urban loft and the suburban home. The first sexual encounter with Alex, depicted as a moment of wild abandon, takes place in Alex's loft kitchen--literally on the sink filled with dirty dishes. Later Gallagher returns to the same kitchen, this time in a murderous rage, and the ensuing struggle with Alex for a kitchen knife generates the same sexual energy as when they had made love. His face contorts with brutal fury as he grips her neck and smashes her head against the bathroom tile while the sounds of breaking glass and furniture are amplified in the best horror-genre tradition. Both are sweating and gasping for breath, much like they were depicted in the earlier scene of sexual passion; here once again, Alex turns on the faucet in the kitchen sink and splashes water on her face, providing yet another doubling image. And, after Gallagher releases her, Alex's face takes on a smile of gratification as if she has just had an orgasm.

The return to the loft kitchen also allows us to 'double back' in time to trace Gallagher's descent into increasingly more unrestrained behaviour. As he struggles to push back against the desire of forbidden untapped passions and aggressive drives, his only resolution to the conflict would appear to be to destroy the woman who embodies these desires. As Cowie points out in her discussion of the femme fatale in film noir:

The violent retribution so often enacted upon the femme fatale by the plot and/or the male hero bears witness not so much to patriarchal ideology as to the man's inverse desire to control and punish the object of desire who has unmanned him by arousing his passive desire (1993, p. 125).

And indeed, Alex 'unmans' Gallagher after arousing that desire. At their very first encounter at an office cocktail party she taunts him for his domestication: 'Better run along', she teases as his wife beckons from across the room. The ensuing scene shows him very much domesticated: his desire for sex with his wife must be postponed for household chores--walking the dog, attending to his daughter; later he stares longingly at his wife's body in her underwear as she dresses for dinner but his initiation of lovemaking is interrupted by the arrival of their guests. Although the film takes pains to idealize the erotic possibilities of the marriage, it never allows for their sexual fulfilment; and, in fact, there are no scenes showing the conjugal couple making love. Beth Gallagher remains an elusive object of desire, thus representing the 'immaculate' maternal aspect of the feminine split off from the sexual.

Conversely, Alex Forrest both encourages Gallagher's sexual desire and challenges him to risk the security of his domestic ties; she is the knowing adult, the sophisticated woman of the world, who sees his vulnerability and mockingly chastises him for 'being a naughty boy'. Initially Gallagher is intrigued and allows the seduction, but he is also frightened by his new lover's wild energy and exhausted by her sexual appetite. His impotence to stop her advances is most apparent in the scene where he discovers she has gained entrance to his New York apartment and stands helplessly trapped as Alex brazenly weaves her spider's web of deception with his unsuspecting wife. Gallagher is indeed lost in this Forrest-spun web; he is, after all, a 'babe in the woods' in her experienced hands. As Alex continues to stalk her prey, invading his suburban sanctuary, killing the family's pet rabbit and blowing up his car--yet another assault on his masculinity--the film's cinematic elements dramatize Gallagher's heightened fear and sense of loss of control over his domain: the telephone's shrill ring shatters the peace of his Edenic home, the editing and pacing of scenes becomes more jagged and the camera angles tilt and distort spatial planes, employing Dutch-angle shots to reflect not only Alex's psychological imbalance but also Gallagher's own confusion at a world fast spinning out of his control. This is the nightmare vision of a disruption in the social order which would render him passive victim, conquered by the sexual power and dominance of unrestrained female energy--the cinematic reification of both intrapsychic and collective cultural fear of persecution and annihilation in the form of the invading alien Other of the horror-film genre.

Male anxiety at the prospect of impotence in the face of such destructive energy is underscored by the climactic bathroom scene. The interplay of doubling between Gallagher's two women finds final expression here as Alex and Beth struggle symbolically not only for the man but also for their lives. Wiping the fog from the bathroom mirror, the wife gazes at her face only to see the reflection of the Other Woman. Here the exchange of identities in the mirror image is illuminated by Rank's early work on the doppelganger in literature in which he theorized its function as the embodiment of repressed or unacceptable aspects of the self which stalks and terrifies, just as Alex Forrest shadows the Gallaghers. Ultimately, says Rank, this 'alien guest' must be destroyed: 'The impulse to rid oneself of the uncanny opponent in a violent manner is an essential feature of the motif' (1914, p. 17).

In the ensuing battle, the knife-wielding Alex asserts her possession of the home and the man: 'What are you doing here?' she demands of the terrified wife. To add to the confusion of identity, the scene is shot with sufficient ambiguity that, despite Alex's grimace as she rips a white robe, it is difficult to discern whose body she is cutting--her own or that of her rival. It should be noted here that not only has Alex cut herself in a previous scene--slashing her wrists when Gallagher attempts to leave her loft--but also that the film works hard to establish her psychopathology as a textbook case of borderline personality disorder. While the narrative strives to provide sufficient symptomatic evidence for the diagnosis, including demonstrations of mood instability, self-mutilation and impulsive behavior, Alex's mental illness serves an equally important function in the unconscious psychosocial unease embedded in the film: its anxiety about the power of a strong and passionate woman is contained by her marginalization as the alien 'other'. What more effective way to accomplish this process than to transform the initially independent and assertive professional into a madwoman, driven to acts of terror and violence? Alex's descent into insanity is signaled by two images in the film: in the first, she slashes her wrists wearing a white dress which looks very much like a hospital straight-jacket; while in the second, floating in the bathtub in another flowing white gown, she reminds us of nothing so much as the drowned Ophelia after she too has gone mad for love.

While Gallagher would appear to have regained his prior place as head of the household and protector of its occupants (he is seen locking all the doors to keep out the alien invasion from the Other Woman) it is in actuality his wife who ultimately vanquishes Alex Forrest. True to the Hollywood horror-genre formula, the monster does not die readily: Gallagher once again attempts to destroy her using the knife, before strangling and drowning her, but she rises from the watery bathtub depths for a final assault--only to be killed at last by a gun fired by Beth Gallagher. Indeed, all Gallagher's efforts to protect his family and home from the invading predator prove ineffective, symbolic of his inability to resolve conflicting fears and desires. In the end it is left to his wife to make good on her threat, announced in a previous scene, in which she tells Alex Forrest: 'If you ever come near my family again I'll kill you, you understand?' To quote Gabbard and Gabbard: 'Once again ... Hollywood has recuperated a maternal phallic woman at the expense of a trangressively non-maternal one' (1993, p. 436).

This impotence of the male protagonist to defend and defeat the female predator is connected to yet another doubling in the film subtext--that of gender duality. This appears at the outset with the film's choice of the name 'Alex', which could denote a man as readily as a woman. And throughout the film she represents not only the gendered stereotype of femininity--seductive, manipulative, changeable, emotionally intense and 'irrational'--but she is also depicted as aggressive, independent and assertive, traditionally 'masculine' gender traits. Significantly, it is when Alex manifests the male-identified traits of aggression, anger and violence that the film portrays her as monstrous and out of control. In this sense, Gallagher's subjectivity--threatened and revolted by Alex's 'unfeminine' nature--mirrors the larger cultural construction of gender identity into rigid binary codes both between as well as within genders. The power of the behavioural code within genders also finds expression in Alex's attack on Gallagher's sexual orientation. Enraged at his rejection of her advances, she sends him a vitriolic tape in which she assaults his masculinity. She calls him a 'flaming fucking faggot' and taunts: 'I bet you don't even like girls, do you?' She goes on to suggest he is 'probably scared' of girls, a statement in this case not too far from the truth in that we have already noted that he recoils at the strength of Alex's sexual energy and erotic impulsive behaviour. He listens to the accusatory tapes with grim fascination, only torn away by his wife's invitation to bed and with it the reassurance of his masculine sexuality.

Ultimately, despite the chaotic undermining of traditional gender roles and the assault on male dominance, social and familial order is restored. In the film's final scene the alien intruder is vanquished and peace descends once again upon the Gallagher home, 'framing' the tale back to the opening shot of domestic tranquillity. We see Gallagher re-enter the protected confines of the white picket fence, close the stained-glass front door, which features a red heart in its centre(!), and turn to embrace his wife. As soft nostalgic music swells, the camera slowly pans in and lingers on a family photo in the hall as credits roll up the screen. Gallagher's nightmare is over; he has regained his dream of marital bliss while the primacy of domestic life is reaffirmed for the viewing audience. It is easy to read this final image as simply the formulaic conclusion of the horror-film genre, where the restoration of natural order typically follows the defeat of a monstrous destructive force. It is also possible to read it as the appropriate conclusion of a 'cautionary' film tale (Kael, 1994, p. 1150) that serves to warn potentially erring mates about the dangers of infidelity with strangers. Thus the film allows the viewer to indulge in a fantasy of sexual adventure while simultaneously providing the opportunity to identify with its moral condemnation of such dangerous and destructive exploits. It is also of interest in this context to note that the film originally was scripted with a different ending in which Alex Forrest commits suicide with the knife that had Gallagher's fingerprints on it, thus implicating him in her murder. Apparently that ending met with disapproval from sample audiences (Wedding and Boyd, 1999, p. 78) and was replaced with the climactic bathroom scene and the subsequent restoration of domestic harmony. No doubt leaving the male protagonist in danger, still controlled by Alex's malevolence from the grave, would have been too unsettling for the sensibility of the psychological undercurrent that runs through the film. If Fatal Attraction and other films of this period are indeed the manifestations of male anxiety at the perceived threat of loss of social and political power, then the cultural myth of the destructive and devouring predatory woman demands her clear and unequivocal defeat. The male hero may have been sorely tested and tempted, but in the end, he (and his wife) overcome the forces that would subvert the traditional order. Thus he maintains a safe distance from the destructive half of his own internal 'double' nature which, while it may remain forever unintegrated within his psyche, gets 'projected' on to the screen of the popular horror-film genre, which here splits off aspects of sexual and gender conflict into formulaic embodiments of the 'good' maternal and 'bad' sexual woman. In turn, Dan Gallagher's intrapsychic split is 'doubled' by his contemporary culture's inability to fuse the erotic sexual with loving nurturant aspects of the feminine. In this regard it is worth noting that in the Kleinian model (1953) the primitive paranoid-schizoid state is followed by the more developmentally advanced depressive position which allows for integration and reparative balance between libidinal and aggressive drives, and points the way toward mutuality and awareness of the relational other. Despite dismal news from Lyne's latest film Unfaithful (2002) perhaps we can look forward to replacing cinematic images of cultural binarism and rigid gender codes with more fluid possibilities of human sexual experience.

Keywords: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Freud

Originally published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2003) Volume 84, Issue 6, pages 1631-1637 Available at http://www.ijpa.org/

Reprint permission granted by the "[c] Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, UK

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Professor Emily Fox Kales

30 Bartlett Avenue, Arlington, MA 02476, USA

E-mail address efkales@comcast.net