A bunny, boiled: “Fatal Attraction” and my strange history with it.

Here is an article that I’ve hesitated to write and post for a number of reasons. If you’re reading it, at some point I must have persuaded myself either that confession is good for the soul, or that there’s something therapeutic about writing something that lays oneself uncomfortably bare. Or perhaps it just got to publishing time and I hadn’t taken it out of the queue yet. Ostensibly this article is about an uncommonly dumb but popular 1980s thriller film and its place in cultural history, which I re-watched again recently. But it also stirs up some stuff I don’t like to think about.

First, let’s talk about Fatal Attraction. You may have seen it. A film by British-born director Adrian Lyne, most famous previously for Flashdance, Fatal Attraction was an “erotic thriller” that instantly set the gold standard for that fairly short-lived genre and spawned a number of substandard imitators throughout the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Set in contemporary New York, it involves Dan (Michael Douglas), a lawyer who has an impulsive affair with Alex (Glenn Close), a literary agent whom he initially meets at a work-related cocktail party. The sexy liaison occurs while Dan’s wife Beth (Anne Archer) is out of town for the weekend. Though it’s just a casual fling for him, things turn unexpectedly serious at the end of the weekend when Alex slashes her wrists to prevent Dan from leaving her apartment. Over the rest of the film Alex descends into obsessive madness especially after she learns she’s pregnant with Dan’s baby. One of the things she does to torment the family is to kill Dan’s daughter’s pet rabbit by boiling it in a cauldron on the stove, one of the film’s most notorious scenes. At the end of the picture, which was famously reshot after test audiences hated the original ending (spoiler alert), Alex attacks Dan at his new country house, where, after he unsuccessfully tries to drown her in the bathtub, Beth takes her out with one shot from a .38 revolver. The happy family is reunited, smash to credits.