Fatal Attraction Pt 2: She's not going to be IGNORED, Dan!
Saturday, March 29, 2025 at 7:20PM 
by Nathaniel R
In Act 1 of Fatal Attraction (for a three-part retrospective), we met the happily married Gallaghers and their longsuffering dog Quincy, who was neglected for almost a whole weekend. The cause was Husband Dan's (Michael Douglas) sexually explosive weekend with a new co-worker Alex (Glenn Close). Dan ignored a handful of fire-engine red flags.
When we left our players, Alex was suicidal and Dan was headed back to his normal life. He will now attempt to pretend that nothing at all has happened. You can guess how how that attempt plays out!
"What are you doing here? It's 8:00 AM."
40:08 As we return to the film in progress, Dan tells his executive assistant Martha that he's 'in the shitter' and way behind at work. That's what happens when you fuck Glenn Close all weekend...
Martha is played by Lois Smith who has toiled around on the margins of American entertainment for so long (1951 to the present!) that she has surely caused thousands of after-entertainment headscratching conversations over the seven decades of her professional life. 'Who was that? She looked so familiar. What did we see her in?'
40:35 Returning home from work, Dan is greeted by a very excited Ellen who is talking so fast that it's hard to make out a word she's saying. Well, we can make out that she wants a bunny rabbit -- that always emerges from the din! When Dan sets his daughter down, and embraces his wife, there's a cute reaction shot of Ellen leaving the room while staring at the embrace. She's clearly dragging her dad's briefcase as if she knows she's not supposed to play with his things. As we amply covered in Part 1, this movie is jam-packed with those off-topic details that make all the difference in immersing you in the world of the characters.
-I've missed you.
-Liar"
40:54 -During a deep hug, Dan proclaims "I've missed you" sincerely to his wife, who responds with a chuckled "Liar". This screenplay becomes more impressive once you age with it; So many smart moments feel everyday real but they also read differently due to their context within the plot. That simple exchange is 100% authentic, even in the best of circumstances for any romantic partnership. But here, in the worst of circumstances, it's uncomfortably funny and thought-provoking. Did Dan truly miss Beth -- we have no doubt that he loves her -- but isn't this merely a subconcious rejection of the very not-safe weekend of volatile thrills he's just had, embracing the comfort of his normal again?
Oh, no she said the "R" word."
42:10 Later during dinner, little Ellen is recreating some card trick her grandpa taught her, and the subject of that bunny rabbit she just has to have comes up again. Dan is clearly starting to cave on the rabbit idea as he begins to joke with her about it. Little Ellen is so real in every scene. Ellen Hamilton Latzen, who played the daughter and acted for about five years thereafter on film, television, and stage, was six at the time of filming and had never acted or even auditioned before the open casting call which led her here. How do they tell a six year old novice 'pretend these are your parents and this is your dog and you have lived your whole life in this apartment!' and have it spill out this effortlessly from all three humans and dog, while they're surrounded by cameras and lights and sell the reality of a whole family unit who have been together for years right here in this room? Acting is sorcery.
44:00 - We get a tranquil shot of a lovely home and yard. And Dan and Beth explore the place they're considering buying. This shot screen-capped above, when Dan discovers an attic like den for himself, will get a darker call back in part three of this retrospective.
44:48 - The pacing of this movie! It knew exactly when to really slow down, calming you (and Dan) down with four minutes of comforting domesticity before breaking the spell. This reaction shot/shot (it's a reversal) slaps you awake again, reminding you of the reason we're all watching this movie. Dan certainly wasn't expecting to meet this "new client" when returning to his office.
45:12 - It'll seem strange to point out this non-descript shot above but it's a perfect example of Adrian Lyne's machavellian control in this movie (Best Director Nomination, Earned) . As Dan escorts Alex back to his office we shift almost imperceptibly to a hand held camera when we've been gliding along previously with dolly shots. Note how tight and cramped the space feels; the whole effect is that your heart sinks and the journey from reception desk to private office feels too long even though we're talking just a few seconds of screentime. What is Alex up to? What kind of explosion will happen when they're behind closed doors again?
45:18 On a windy walk to Dan's office --what a weird office layout - they pass Jimmy who wonders if he's met Alex before. "I don't think so," our Medusa responds with an easy smile. Since Douglas is also in the shot (bless these medium shots and two-shots!) it's so uncomfortable; Dan's memory, after all, is crystal clear on the night they all met. My friends probably wish I would stop talking about medium shots and two-shots (and maybe you readers do too) but this scene would be so much flatter if it was just Jimmy then Glenn's face in interlocked double-take closeups.
45:57 - Kudos to the set decorator and whoever else dreamt up this shot. Finally alone in Dan's office, The Other Woman sits down in front of The Wife (all over Dan's desk). It's like both women are facing us and pleading their case. This also puts us firmly and complicitly in Dan's POV, which is quite mean of Lyne. This movie is a constant confrontation, isn't it? This scene does not go as we're expecting given the protacted tension build leading to it. Instead Alex apologizes for her behavior and Dan appears relieved. That is until she follows the apology with a "peace offering" in the form of tickets to Madame Butterfly.
47:52 -- Dan makes so many bad decisions in this thriller --but this might be the worst one after cheating on his wife. What possessed him to hug Alex goodbye when she actually seemed to be releasing him? His pathological need to not be the villain despite his philandering is in some ways his undoing.
48:09 --With a cut to a closeup of unused Madame Butterfly tickets, we watch a nearly catatonic Alex on the floor turning a lamp on and off. Here Fatal Attraction toys with a reinvention, leaving Thriller behind to become a Tragedy. The devastating sequence is cruelly intercut with Dan, Jimmy and their wives laughing and carrying on at a bowling alley without a care in the world. But we return to Alex's lonely tear-strained face as the light goes out again and again.
We continue to see Dan at work a bit and learn that Alex hasn't stopped calling. I like that Fatal Attraction rarely spells out a time frame. If you're really triggered at this point you might assume it's been months. We later learn a couple of weeks.
You're so beautiful.
52:24 - Whenever Dan is upset we retreat to scenes where he escalates his passion for his wife. He's clinging now to this happy home that feels more fragile.
52:57 - Just when we think we're getting a marital sex scene to bring the sex back to the movie that sparked the erotic thriller craze to life, we're interrupted by the Gallagher's friends who they must have invited over earlier. During this scene we learn that everyone is expecting Dan to be elevated to a partner at his firm and Dan jokes that they'll have to leave their besties behind as the social classes don't mix.
[Trivia: Jimmy's wife Hildy is played by Ellen Foley, who, like babysitter Jane Krakowski spotted in the first few minutes of the film, was a musical theater actress in NYC at the time. Ten years before Fatal Attraction she'd made her Broadway debut in Hair (followed by a role in the 1979 film version), and shortly after this film she starred in a Me and My Girl revival on Broadway followed closely by becoming the fourth (and last) replacement for Bernadette Peters as the Witch in the original Broadway run of Stephen Sondheim's legendary "Into the Woods".]
55:04 / 55:53- Bringing the mood down at the party is a phone call. Beth answers but there's only silence on the other end. We know as an audience member that it's Alex. Beth has no clue. Later that evening (2:13 AM to be exact) the phone rings again waking Dan up. Alex isn't so silent this time. Please note the symmetry of these two shots less than a minute apart (with mostly darkness inbetween them as we briefly see the Gallaghers asleep) one of The Wife Beth and the other of The Other Woman Alex. They're both holding phones and pacing and pissed off. They're both framed with vertical lines like they're trapped in this circumstance.
On the phone Alex refuses to take no for an answer and demands a meeting at 6:00 PM "Don't disappoint me." she threatens.
"I'm not trying to hurt you, I love you."
I'm pregnant."
57:01 During an extremely hostile conversation at 6:00 PM, right on schedule, Alex alternates between threats and attempts at winning Dan back. She tries an awkwardly public proclamation of love at a subway entrance. She announces she's pregnant when he calls their love affair imaginary. And so on.
Close continues to find the exactly right shade of line reading to keep you (and Dan) entirely off balance; Alex is sometimes obviously full of it, sometimes genuine, and often times both at once. Hostility and affection, guilt trips and mic drops are all shaking out of her all over Dan, over seasoning him. Without any discernible emotional rhythms, and with only one foot in reality, Dan is feeble in his attempts to reel the situation in.
Alex just think about what you're saying.
59:21 - Reasoning with Alex is clearly a fool's errand but Dan is a fool so he keeps on trying. The scene ends with another request from Alex that sounds like a threat just as in the phonecall that preceeded it. "You play fair with me, I play fair with you."
01:03:05 - After breaking into Alex's apartment looking for something -- he isn't sure what -- Dan confesses everything to his pal Jimmy between the law stacks. Including that he confirmed the pregnancy with Alex's gynecologist. Jimmy knows Dan is screwed and grasping at straws.
01:04:40 In this shot of Alex, punching numbers into her phone, the costume design warns us that Alex has now completely lost it. Previously she was always in all black, all white, or greys. For the first time, she isn't presenting as hero or villain but has lost her own thread -- both at once? HEAVENS! She screams "Fuck you" at an operator when she realizes Dan has changed his phone number. In the smart next cut to drive the point home, Dan is also unravelling lost in hiw own thoughts and almost walks right into traffic.
01:06:12 Dan's worst nightmare. He returns home to find Alex in his apartment (still mixing black and white!), chatting with his wife Beth. I can't screencap all of it but every cut and shot choice is perfection from Dan's back turned to the camera when he hears her voice, to the handheld camera (back for an encore!), to Glenn's merciless subtle head tilt as Alex taunts Dan with "haven't we met somewhere before?" to the twice repeated shot of her scarred wrists.
a small Oscar aside:
Best Editing
Best Actress
The editors Michael Kahn (who had won six years earlier for Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Peter E Berger (first and only nomination) lost the Oscar for Fatal Attraction. I maintain that if there was one Oscar the film inarguably deserved from its six nominated shortlists, it was this one. Yes, yes, Glenn Close is genius as Alex Forrest but the 1987 Best Actress lineup is an absolute banger. We're talking arguably the best of all Best Actress lineups from 96 years of this circus. Not a single one of those star turns is less than jawdropping and fully formed. Convincing passionate arguments could surely be made for any of the five.
1:07:48 - As Dan makes an excuse for leaving the conversation, Alex smiles. One of the choices I find most fascinating about Glenn's interpretation is that while she is clearly sympathetic towards Alex's mental health problems -- she neither judges nor sugarcoats. Close is also deeply honest about Alex's sadism. This woman would get a kick out of torturing Dan, even if she didn't feel personally victimized by him in some internal dialogue kind of way.
1:08:02 - Beth unwittingly gives Alex her new phone number (in frame, thank you, which only adds to the drama) while Dan tries the paralyzing death glare that Alex started the movie with in Part One of this analysis. Dan's is less effective and lacks the kind of purpose needed to maintain for the uncomfortable length of time needed. One of my favourite details in Michael Douglas' performance in this sequence is how long it takes him to really look at his nemesis. His eyes are downcast for most of the scene.
1:09:33 More exquisite acting in the follow-up scene. After taunting Dan with a "who?" and an "oh, so now you want to talk?" when he comes knocking later that night, Alex acts as if nothing is wrong and offers her former lover a drink. When the married man explosively shouts at her, she flinches as if genuinely startled. As if they were having a lovely evening up until now!
The extent to which Alex believes her own lies is in the text but Glenn's icing on the character cake is this hyper detailing of the woman's pathology. It's not so much the gaslighting of self that's her problem, but that flip switch from reality to fantasy and back again, just like that light in her room flicking off and on in an earlier scene. How real is anything if it can vanish or appear, consume you or be forgotten, at any moment. You can also see this troubling on/off switch in her emotional insightfulness. It's like she force forgets her victim/abuser's specific feelings in any moment, even if she's immediately clocked it against his will in the first place. It's really such a genius throughline to her escalating madness. While Alex Forrest is a well written character, so much of the intricate madness is clearly born directly from Glenn Close's superlative gifts.
I'm not going to be ignored, Dan.
1:10:05 Flipping back to reality, Glenn sears this line into memory (there's a reason it's the most quoted line from the film). She utters it with such finality and precisive force right smack dab in the middle of a long scene that you'd think she'd derail the setpiece fight or force it into anti-climactic flatness. But no. There's more reality/fantasy flipping to come. It's like a gymnast sticking a blind landing after a tumbling run only to immediately start tumbling again.
Don't you remember our weekend?
1:10:21 A flip back to fantasy, with a extra dollop of wistfulness. Though this doesn't last either. Dan fights back verbally. When Alex's reality/fantasy flipping hits a dead ends she dares him to hit her. Dan, clearly not a violent person, begins to leave which prompts more desperation from Alex. Eventually uncharacteristic violence from Dan arrives as he slams her against the wall and threatens to kill her.
1:11:35 I'll forgive the scene this canted angle finale and pretend that the force of Glenn Close's acting has accidentally bowled the cameraman over.
1:11:53 We cut from Alex's diagonals to the flatter shots of suburban home. The Gallaghers are moving in to their new home. While I know I have been somewhat lukewarm on Anne Archer's performance in the Supporting Actress Smackdown a few years back, that's strictly based on the lack of complexity required for the role. I do admire her light touch in scenes like this. One of her lines in this scene is "Dan was in such a hurry to get out of New York". It's easy to imagine most actors placing too much weight on that, thereby killing the small talk vibe of telling a loved one something that's puzzling you before even parsing it yourself to see why you're puzzled. Too much weight on that line -- which is more for the audience than for her mother -- would also kill the sympathetic obliviousness. We hurt for Beth because we know she's about to be blindsided by the fallout of her husband's actions.
1:13:00 Dan gets the rabbit for Ellen and talks to Beth about it. I don't know why it took me so many viewing to clock how often the bunny rabbit is mentioned in the movie, but it's a surprising amount! In hindsight (and after multiple viewings) it's now Fatal Attraction's Chekhov's gun. The poor thing even gets a toxic closeup all to itself as Dan discovers his car smoking and destroyed in the parking lot.
1:17:11 Dan opens up a tape from Alex and plays it on a moody late night drive to his new home, unaware that Alex is following behind him, in a strangely lengthy driving sequence (given the movie's usual perpetual forward lean). Alex ends the taped monologue by hurling homophobic insults Dan's way (sigh, it's the 1980s).
1:20:22 Alex watches the Gallagher's slightly forced domestic bliss (Dan is really pushing a return a normalcy) from outside the house like a good stalker. She doesn't take the living Normal Rockwell painting very well. The second third of Fatal Attraction ends with Alex blowing chunks. That's how disgusted she is by Dan's ability to exist without her. (People are always vomiting in movies when they're upset and not from food poisoning or illness). Is she this revolted by happy families or is this just pregnancy talking? By this point in the film, Alex has become so unhinged and her abillity to stay within reality so compromised that I always thought it would have been a more fascinating choice for the screenplay to leave the pregnancy issue as an ambiguity -- something Alex believed with no way for us to fact check.
WHEN WE RETURN
In the final third of Fatal Attraction, Dan's sins will be exposed, that innocent bunny will be sacrificed to the cruel demands of Thrillers, and Glenn Close will prove to be a spectacularly good sport giving her all to an ending she didn't want for her instantly iconic character.
Reader Comments (8)
I am lovin’ this!
God, I miss top tier Nathaniel Rogers’s brilliance.
I am loving this,maybe cos it's a film I thought I was so familiar with.
Love the mob wife at a funeral look she has going on for the office visit,I wondered first time watch if she was going to take it off and reveal some underwear or maybe nothin at all.
The way you are detailing everything and putting forward your interpreatation that makes me see it a whole lot differently
Does she love him? I never really know if it's love or just the thought of losing him.
The one detail that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the pregnancy due to the ending and Alex's fate thus the child's.
Lyne is excellent at creating intimacy,co workers,friends,children,wives,just brilliant casting and control of every actor,they all feel like people you could know or be friends with.
Ha Ha Ha at the canted angle wit.
It's a good line up but it's not as great as 1995 cos 1987 has Meryl as a weak link and i'm not a fan of Kirkland the other 3 are all timers..
I maintain that Lloyd,Dunaway,Smith,Levin,Hunter in R/Arizona and the Davis/Gish combo are leagues ahead of her.
One thing Close couldn't do and a lot of actors can't is vomit convincingly.
My favourite bits of acting by Glenn and Michael is the house hunting scene,the smile and scratch of the head is real character detailing,she is loving this,Douglas should have been nominate for this role
Reminds me hen Leo was nominated for his role in Blood Diamond when the more complex work was going on in The Departed.
I am warming more and more to Archer,she really is the films stealth weapon,if she doesn't work the whole film doesn't,we have to feel what Dan is losing and fighting to maintain.
I don't think i've been this enthused about a subject on here for a while now,well maybe Demi's Oscar loss.
I also want to note when she tells Dan "I love you" in that wistful naive way on the subway she follows it up with another "I love you" which sounds like she is trying to convince herself and not Dan.
Same line different subtext,the sign of a great actor.
Glenn has so many great line readings in this but only the "Ignored" is the well known one.
I also love the "My place or yours" response from the call handler.
Lois acts as if she may have seen this type of behaviour before but maybe i'm reading too much into Smith's body language.
I love that "PLAY ME"
She might as well have had that emblazoned on her shirt the first time she met Dan.
Bravo, Nathaniel—loving this whole series and format, fantastic.
I’ve always thought of myself as a Holly Hunter voter but you’re selling me on Glenn. You’re right that it was an incredible year.
Also, love the love for Michael Douglas. He, Richard Gere and William Hurt are my holy trinity of actors-working-with-actresses. Most of their more decorated peers have NEVER been half as generous or confident letting their female costars shine.
The "I'm not going to be ignored, Dan" moment is so iconic. The line reading, the movement, it's surprising and also singular.
I appreciate you pointing out how Alex switches off and on, just like in the Madame Butterfly scene. Lyne is really doing fantastic work here.
Hunter still gets my vote, but Close is phenomenal. Lyne's works with her (and later Diane Lane) really brought out something new and unexpected.
'87 and '88 are the rare Best Actress years that any one of the five nominees would be a totally worthy winner (with the caveat that I haven't seen Kirkland).
This revisit is reminding me that Glenn Close's nomination and loss paved the way for Kathy Bates' win a few years later.
Also:
Two of my faves: East of Eden (1955), Next Stop Greenwich Village (1976)
...also appears as a guest vocalist on The Clash's Sandinista! (1980)
Yes, but I remain partial to 1950, 1962, 1971-74 and 2006.
Welcome to the USA, 2025.
See Anora (2024).