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When Fatal Attraction appeared in 1987 it was generally dismissed as a formulaic Hollywood horror movie. The narrative is all too predictable (particularly for those familiar with Adrian Lyne's other work): a happily married Manhattan attorney Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) engages in a weekend sexual encounter with a single woman named Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) while his family is out of town. The woman refuses to relinquish the relationship and threatens to destroy his domestic life. Neither Lyne nor screenwriter James Deardon are interested in investigating the dynamics of marital infidelity or the motivations driving the husband's behavior. Instead the film retreats to the conventions of the horror-film genre precisely because it is unable to resolve cultural conflicts and sexual anxieties that are split off and ‘projected’ on to the cinema screen. Just as dreams, fairytales and myths require interpretation to yield their underlying psychosocial significance, so too the monstrous alien forces and violent images of the typical ‘slasher’ movie contain unconscious and unresolved material that are never commented upon in any conscious way. In its inability to express or wrestle with ambivalence using insight capacities the popular genre film thus exhibits the ‘blind spot’ that has led to the characterization of the screen itself as ‘something of a symptom’ by film theorist Mayne (1990, p. 41).
In this context, reading the film as cultural myth, manifesting the contemporary collective psyche and socio-political reality of its time, proves a more productive enterprise. Fatal Attraction belongs to a group of Hollywood films that emerged in the postfeminist period of the nineteen eighties and early nineties which might well be called ‘backlash’ films, a popular cultural response to changes in women's economic and political status. Such films as Sea of Love (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), Black Widow (1987), Disclosure (1994) and Working Girl (1988) depict women who eith