Word: motheral
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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...
...ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. Dan is the basic Hitchcock protagonist, a fairly decent man in a horribly compromised position. And at first glance, Alex, with her cool allure, seems an avatar of Hitchcock's blond ice goddesses. Only later do we discover she is as lonely and lethal as Mother Bates. But with a difference. In Psycho the woman with the knife was really a man with an Oedipus complex. In Fatal Attraction, Alex holds...
...seriously. But when Beth tells Alex she is going to kill her, Alex trembles. And the final battle is between the two women. It is like a return bout from last year's Aliens, except that this time the career woman is the monster, and it's the mother who wins. The movie cleverly plays to both sides of woman. And even though it is hateful politically, it is appealing to women. The film itself has a fatal attraction...
...script. Enlisting the help of three psychoanalysts, including her own, she constructed a detailed and clinically consistent history for Alex that helped her understand and project the character's pain and rage. She decided that someone like Alex probably was sexually abused by her father, despised by her mother and rejected by most of the men she had cared for. Her most recent affair was with a married man and ended traumatically, perhaps when she became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage...
...life now is Producer John Starke, 37, who worked with her on Garp and is her partner in developing film projects. The two are expecting their first child in April or May. Unlike Alex but rather like her favorite heroine, Jenny Fields, the defiantly unwed mother of Garp, Close has no plans to marry...