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‘Fatal Attraction’ Finale Finally Does Justice to Alex Forrest


In the first unreleased version of Deadly charmpopular 1987 erotic thriller about a deadly love affair, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) commits suicide with a knife with Dan Gallagher’s (Michael Douglas) fingerprints on it, and Dan is arrested for the murder. The ending offers a kind of melancholy, poetic justice in which Alex dies but Dan still has to face some consequences as a result of his actions. However, the test audience supposedly hated it.

According to the great power Paramount Sherry Lansing’s 2017 Biography, the audience wants to see Alex brutally killed at the hands of Dan’s wife, Beth (Anne Archer). “They wanted us to end that bitch with extreme prejudice,” Lansing recalls saying another Paramount executive said.

The ending is filmed and Alex encounters a violent ending, in which she shows up at the Gallagher family home with a knife and attacks Beth. After Dan tries to drown her in the bathtub, Beth gets a chance to shoot the woman dead. The film ended up being a huge success and eventually dominated 3rd at the US box office that year. The new ending was widely praised, with the exception of Close, who—in a oral history associated with the film’s 30th anniversary— criticized the decision to turn a character she loved “into a murderous psychopath.”

“When I watch Glenn Close’s performance, knowing all the work she has put in [playing a] full version of that character, with psychology, research and talking to mental health professionals, I can see it all. And that breaks my heart,” Alexandra Cunningham, host behind the show new Deadly charm TV series, told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed in a video interview. “Even when she engages in the most extreme behavior on screen, I see only pain and isolation.”

The tendency to delve deeper into Alex Forrest is the driving force behind the Paramount+ series, which will air its final episode on Sunday. In a modern setting, Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson) and Alex Forrest (Lizzy Caplan) once again fell into a vicious love spiral that turned toxic as Dan tried to break things. While the show contains many of the ostensibly specifics of the original (Caplan provides a killer take on the iconic line “I won’t be missed, Dan”), the core of the story has change. The focus now is on the father-daughter relationship, Dan’s shortcomings, Alex’s fundamental story, and most profoundly, psychology and mental health. The new lens follows Cunningham’s initial hesitation when she was first approached about the project.

“Paramount asked me if I wanted to make it into a series and my immediate reaction was ‘no,’ because it’s so iconic. [and] have such an influence on culture,” she said. “There seem to be all kinds of pitfalls that I don’t even think about.”

Fellow executive producer Silver Tree, who has directed several episodes of the series, is similarly wary of touching existing IP.

“I think I had an equal reaction to [Cunningham],” Tree told Beast. “It’s scary to think about retelling this kind of story.”

But after joining Zoom with Cunningham, in which the host shared some of her hopes for the direction and central theme of the show, Tree began to see the big picture.

“She was always ingrained in her character,” says Tree, “and I was immediately excited to be a part of that.”

Both EPs respect the original, recalling its cultural impact, and Cunningham notes that she’s only interested in uncovering the story if she feels she has something new to say. look at Deadly charm “with a gap for 2020,” things started to settle down for the presenter.

Number one priority? “Personalize Alex Forrest and her struggles,” says Cunningham. “In order not to turn her into a psycho, it is necessary to ending with extreme prejudice.”

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“To make sure we put on screen a real person being destroyed by someone’s narcissism and selfishness, that’s the most important thing,” she added, stressing that she needed to do it. that “with respect and empathy.”

The series attempts to do that by quickly determining that legitimate mental health issues underline all of Alex’s actions, emphasizing her harshest moments with fleeting glimpses. of mental anguish and suffering.

In this version, Alex has gone to therapy and is aware of some of her problems (although she still doesn’t like having them pointed out to herself). Her extreme actions (in some cases even more serious than those of her film counterpart) are never excused, but an explanation is given in the form of her narcissistic father. Dan, too, is painted in a slightly less heroic light, and the consequences of his affair and subsequent arrest have taken a toll on his family’s mental health. Although most of the characters were never definitively diagnosed, much of Cunningham’s research for the show revolved around Cluster B personality disorders and their theorized genetic component.

“There has to be a genetic pathway in your neurology for any of this to take root in the first place,” she says, a research theory easily tied to passion. her fascination with family ties. “And I’m also really interested in fathers and daughters, both in life and on screen, sort of the extent of those relationships. If your father is seen as your protector, archetypal, and what he teaches you is to keep love a secret and that you are not worthy of love… all that begins to arise. in thinking about the character Alex.”

The film is also split into two timelines — during the 2008 incident and after Dan’s parole, 15 years later, for allegedly killing Alex — and chaotically alternates past and present. In addition to the dual timelines, viewers also see flashbacks and different perspectives several episodes apart. The “non-linear approach to storytelling,” as Tree describes it, helps capture the messy and often confusing way trauma can affect people.

“To me, she was just a traumatized child turned adult trying to fix those mistakes,” Cunningham said, later adding, “When you think about it, she really is. never having a chance.”

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