Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ever since the movie industry ceded to TV its place as the American family art form, Hollywood has believed in this truism: the basic unit of movie audiences is the dating couple; the woman usually chooses the movie, and the successful picture will be the one she wants to take her man to see. Even in the '80s. Especially in the late '80s, a time of retrenchment along the sexual front lines. Pandemic viruses are imposing a puritan morality on the would-be- wild young. Sleeping arrangements are seen as a matter of life and death. Folks on dates...
...every strategy, Fatal Attraction is a cagey blend of old and new Hollywood, of current obsessions and conservative solutions. Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, The Untouchables) calls the picture a "postfeminist AIDS thriller." But unless Alex is the disease, Fatal Attraction is not about AIDS. Indeed, the story, stripped to its essentials, is the stuff of many an old movie weepie. Boy meets girl for a brief encounter; boy gets girl pregnant and disappears; girl falls in love with boy and tries to get him back. In those films, though, the lovesick female was the heroine and a rogue male...
That profile is familiar too. For Alex is the latest in a long Hollywood line of women whose sexuality makes them both super- and subhuman. Vampires. Or, in Hollywood's word, vamps. Since 1915, when Theda Bara starred in A Fool There Was (based on Rudyard Kipling's poem The Vampire), the American movie screen has been pocked with predatory femmes fatales. What made them evil? Usually, that they liked sex as much as men did, if they were decadent Europeans played by the likes of Garbo and Dietrich. Or, if they were homegrown, that sexual frustration twisted them into...
...almost anything. Edgar G. Ulmer's relentless Detour (1946) cast Ann Savage as a harridan from hell -- the worst pickup of poor Tom Neal's life -- whose grating voice is, finally and poetically, strangled by a telephone cord. And as feminism found its voice in the early '70s, Hollywood shouted back. In Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), Jessica Walter is a woman who has a brief affair with a Carmel, Calif., disk jockey (Eastwood) and is soon threatening him, abducting his girlfriend and coming at him with a knife. Sound familiar? It sounded so familiar to Carpenter...
...movie people, you're a bunch of spoiled brats!" yells a man whose car has just been rammed by a star's convertible. Yes, we nod in agreement, and they're phony too, and beneath the glamour not very happy. Tales from the Hollywood Hills, a trio of short-story adaptations set in Tinseltown during the 1930s, trots out all the beloved stereotypes while flavorfully recapturing Hollywood's legendary golden age. Then, boldly, the mini-series abandons the legend and goes for a more subtly shaded truth...