Word: career
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three archetypes for a modern mortality play. Alex Forrest, a career woman whose forcefulness sheathes a precarious ego. Dan Gallagher, a guy who seems to have embraced personal and career contradictions in a big, easy bear hug. Beth Gallagher, comfortable in her roles as wife, mother and natural stunner. But what if Alex is a creature of insatiable lust and leeching possessiveness? And if Dan's amiability has made him too soft to resist Alex's attentions or, later, to protect his family from her vengeance? And if Beth, supermom in disguise, is roused to confront the beast Alex...
...discernible pretensions toward art, no unanimous blessing from the critics -- and not a single teenager among its cast of characters -- luck into the national bloodstream? By tapping the current mood of sexual malaise with a cautionary -- indeed, reactionary -- tale about an errant husband, a faithful wife and a career woman unlucky in love. And by skewing a Hitchcockian domestic thriller into a rousing horror show. Fatal Attraction starts as Vertigo and ends as Psycho. For all its flaws, the picture deftly scares and excites people with fun-house-mirror reflections of themselves. As Director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes, "The strongest...
...movie is sleeker, cannier, luckier -- and more disturbing. No wonder feminists have cried foul over Fatal Attraction: Alex is the '80s career woman as homicidal vamp. Says Marsha Kinder, a film professor at the University of Southern California: "In this film, it is not sexual repression that causes psychosis. It is sexual liberation. For men, Alex's sexuality is a succubus; it saps a man's strength. Fatal Attraction is also about how men fear women. Because in this movie women have the power, positively and negatively. When Alex hears Dan threaten her, she doesn't take it seriously...
...makers angrily deny that Fatal Attraction is antifeminist, but they must be smiling behind their public choler. All the controversy in newspapers and magazines is like a free front-page ad. Every argument at a cocktail party or around an office coffee machine keeps this monster movie alive. Even career women who take the film as libel have to see it, if only to know the enemy up close. Maybe Hitchcock was right when, to smooth the feathers of one of his stars, he cooed, "It's only a movie, Ingrid." Maybe Fatal Attraction is just a nine-weeks wonder...
According to Government statistics, husband-and-wife wage earners now make up 56% of American marriages. Not surprisingly, some traditional expectations are giving way to new realities. It is now the dutiful husband who may find himself resisting the prospect of following his wife's career to a new city. Women, for their part, are no longer as willing to provide unquestioning -- and unpaid -- support for their spouses' career ambitions, a once hallowed given of corporate, academic and political life. Even the military can no longer count on blind obedience from officers' wives. Indeed, two women recently complained that brass...