Rachel Cooke was looking forward to a TV reboot of the controversial 1987 thriller – only to find that, despite being made by a team of women, its attitudes have barely changed
When I first heard that Paramount had made an eight-part TV series based on Adrian Lyne’s 1987 movie, Fatal Attraction, I was less surprised than I might have been. Content is increasingly a problem for streaming services – how on earth to hang on to hard-pressed subscribers? – with the result that more and more of them are raiding the archives. Last week, Netflix gave us Obsession, a four-part series based on Louis Malle’s 1992 film, Damage, in which a man becomes infatuated with his son’s girlfriend (the original starred Juliette Binoche, Jeremy Irons and a wooden floor on which the pair writhed extravagantly). This week, Amazon launches Dead Ringers, a six-part adaptation, starring Rachel Weisz, of David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller about twin gynaecologists (Jeremy Irons was in the first version of that one, too). The hope is, I suppose, that old ideas have what new ones don’t, which is bankability in the form of middle-aged nostalgia – even if sacrilege is sometimes committed in the process.
In another way, though, the decision to remake Fatal Attraction was unfathomable. It was a huge film in its day: a box-office hit (the second-highest grossing movie of 1987) and nominated for six Oscars, including best picture. But it was also a movie of its time: a moment, made large. The story of a New York lawyer (Dan Gallagher, played by Michael Douglas) whose life is nearly ruined by a woman, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), with whom he has sex one weekend while his wife is away, it represents the cultural zenith of an era in which the media relentlessly characterised the single woman as, at best, lonely and unhappy, and at worst, as driven half-mad by all that she’d missed out on: a man, a baby, a clapboard house in the country. The only possible way to remake Fatal Attraction in 2023, it seemed to me, was to give it a feminist reboot. What, though, might that involve? The prospect of Alex happily waving goodbye to Dan, having enjoyed her orgasm-filled weekend a lot but not so much that she wanted to waste any more of her time on a conventional stick like him, didn’t seem to contain nearly enough jeopardy for binge TV.
