A television adaptation of the 1987 hit erotic thriller Fatal Attraction is landing on screen in just a couple of days.
The new show has been causing a lot of buzz, just as the original film divided critics but thrilled audiences with its heart-pumping story of a married up-and-coming lawyer Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), who has brief affair with publishing editor Alex Forrest (Glenn Close).
She then starts to pursue him, long after he has told her the affair is over: she turns up at his work, cold calls his house, tells him she is pregnant and destroys his car – and that’s only the beginning...
Even as the film soared at the US box office, it came under heavy criticism for its unsophisticated portrayal of a woman scorned. The picture is pretty clear: Alex is nuts, Dan is the victim. The film would have been a lot more interesting if Alex’s actions had been a little more nuanced, said some critics.
Maybe its remake could prove to be a good corrective, with a more nuanced 2023 take? Well, according to one newspaper reviewer, it hasn’t: “Fatal Attraction is back, and still stuck in the Eigthies.”
If you haven’t seen the original, but are intrigued about what all the fuss is about, here’s our recap of five of its main moments to look out for in the new adaptation. One thing is sure, as Alex says in the trailer, echoing one fo the most famous lines from the original film: “I won’t be ignored.”
The affair
The affair in the film lasts just one weekend. Dan’s wife, Beth (played by Anne Archer) and their six-year-old daughter, Ellen, go away for the weekend but Dan has to stay in New York to finish off some work. One of his cases involves a book that’s about the be published by the company that Alex works for, so she ends up being in the same meeting as Dan. Well, one thing leads to another, they have a very flirty dinner, and at the end of it, they go back to hers.
In the morning he slips out, but she rings him. She says he should come back over later, after he finishes his work, which he does. They take the dog out to play in the park and later make love again. And that’s the entirety of the affair.
It’ll be interesting in the remake to see whether the affair is set over one weekend again, or whether they make it more long-term. Time is important in Alex’s framing: part of what made her seem so deranged was that she spent less than a weekend with Dan before getting so attached – the longer the affair lasts, the stronger her case is.
The pregnancy
In the film, Alex gets pregnant, which also massively bolsters her case against Dan. Dan can certainly attempt to ignore a woman with whom he had a short fling, but a woman who he’s having a child with? Many argued that the preganancy made this an entirely different situation.
Dan says he’ll help Alex out, and that he’ll pay for the abortion. She says that she doesn’t want to have an abortion. He hates her even more for this, which is obviously because his mistake to sleep with her will tie them together permanently. She’s going to be part of his life forever.
So will she become pregnant in the series as well? With abortion and contraception both hot topics in the US at the moment, it’ll be fascinating to see how Paramount+ approaches the subject.
Bunny boiling
Even if you haven’t seen Fatal Attraction, the likelihood is that you will have some concept of this scene. Dan’s daughter Ellen is given an albino bunny as a present after much begging. But Alex, who at this point appears to have lost the plot completely, manages to break into the Gallaghers’ new country house and boils it in a pot.
The scene became so famous that the phrase ‘bunny boiler’ is now an actual entry in the dictionary. Collins describes the term as, “A person, esp a woman, who is considered to be emotionally unstable and likely to be dangerously vengeful.”
So will the new series try and recreate the notorious scene? In a way it’s a lose-lose. If they do, it’s likely to fall short of the iconic original. But if they don’t, it’s Fatal Attraction without the bunny boiling. It’s a massive question mark hanging over the new show.
Beth’s character
Beth is the hero of the 1987 film. She’s confident, dignified and tough, which is important because it reinforces what a massive halfwit Dan has been by sleeping with Alex. In comparison with Dan and Alex, who spend much of the film fighting (in many scenes physically), Beth is a class act. At one point Dan says to Alex that he loves his family, and that he’s very lucky. “What are you doing here then?” asks Alex.
When Beth finds out that Dan has cheated on her, she momentarily swallows the news for the benefit of her family. So when Dan shamefully asks her to come to the phone to speak to Alex to prove that he’s told her about the affair, she does, and tells Alex that she’ll kill her if she comes near her family again. She then asks Dan to leave her and Ellen.
Later she ends up in a car crash that’s caused, in a roundabout way, by Dan. At the film’s denouement it’s Beth, not Dan, who ends up shooting and killing Alex. In the end Dan’s decisions almost destroy the family, while Beth saves the family.
So how will Beth be portrayed in the TV series?
And the most important question of all: will he kill her?
The trailer shows Dan in prison for murder of the second degree. But the trailer closes with him saying “I did not kill that woman, and I’m going to prove it.”
It’s an interesting twist on the original: one of the biggest question marks that hung over the film was whether Dan or Beth were ever charged for Alex’s death – even if the shot was fired in self-defence, they did kill her.
So what will happen in the series? Has Alex framed her own death and done it in such a way that makes Dan out to be the killer? Has he actually killed her? Is Beth involved again this time?
