'Obsessed' is the latest movie in which war is declared on married life by a dangerously unattached woman. The only difference this time is that she is simply raving mad. Elizabeth Wurtzellooks back at a long and dodgy tradition
THE LOS ANGELES skyline has a problem: no matter how many times the camera lovingly caresses and pans across the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles – which it does often in the movie Obsessed– the image is never iconic. There's no Empire State Building or Eiffel Tower to give the orange smog a beautiful beacon; instead, all we see are the mishaps of modernism and brutalism played out against an empty sky.
It's not that LA doesn't have its own beaming signifiers: think of the whitewashed "Hollywood" block letters on a hill off the freeway, or the Capitol Records building at Hollywood and Vine. Those landmarks are loaded with the noir chill and thrill that is the flipside of the fun-in-the-sun we usually associate with southern California. These are the symbols of La-La Land after dark that have given us the great detective novels of James M Cain and James Ellroy, which in turn have given us those eerie, creepy movies, such as Double Indemnityand LA Confidential, intended to remind us that blondes have more fun, particularly if they happen to be murderous tramps.
It's hard to say whether the director of Obsessedwas hoping his movie would join that great tradition or whether he simply meant to make pleasing popcorn crap – or whether he wasn't even that ambitious. Unlike, say, the modern archetype of the vamp-from-hell cautionary tale – 1987's Fatal Attraction, starring Glenn Close and the long-suffering Michael Douglas – Obsesseddoesn't even bother to try to make us like the would-be home-wrecker before we slowly but surely come to hate her. Ali Larter is too skinny as a person and too skimpy as a character from the get-go, not the girl you'd ever want to root for.
Which is why it's surprising that, as the story of a crazy chick set loose to stalk a happy family in some lovely part of LA – such as Brentwood, where the nice people live – Obsessedis, at least, not boring. And the downtown LA setting is kind of perfect for a bad mix-up between a milky blonde and a handsome black man (the most memorable thing to happen in that part of town was, of course, that latter-day Othelloknown as the OJ Simpson trial).
The most interesting thing about Obsessedis that it's supposed to be oh-so-demographically-correct – the main characters just happen to be African-American (though, in the post-racial US, none of us sees colour) and the blonde chick chasing down black dick is not supposed to remind us at all of Mandingo. No, this whole movie is meant to be in the psychobabe tradition that we all know well from such films as the aforementioned Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Temp, Disclosure, and almost any Sharon Stone vehicle from the 1990s.
WE TEND TOthink of Fatal Attractionas the first of the genre, but in truth it was just the beginning of movies making a menace of the modern career gal.
The villainess film has older antecedents, going back to when blondes were ballsier than the men they brought down. Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Harlow were tough broads in the decades when the Hays Code (film industry censorship guidelines) made the see-through nightie a no-no, but back then bad women were more likely to be married than not. Bored housewives installed in lonely houses off California interstates, these were wretched, fleshy sexpots who preyed on the travelling salesmen and bashful insurance brokers who came around pushing their wares, not knowing that the doorway to a femme fatale’s home is truly the portal to hell.
These women needed their lonesome and easily riled male callers to help off their tedious husbands so they could collect big insurance premiums or heady inheritances (as Fred MacMurray says in voiceover when he first sees Stanwyck making her way down a staircase in Double Indemnity: "I could tell by her ankle bracelet that she was hot"). Married women, back then, were much more frightening than their single sisters.
But that all changed with, if not before, Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me(1970), which is thought to be the basis of Fatal Attraction(though as the plot variations in many of these movies are so minor, it's hard to say whether that's so).
In Play Misty for Me, Jessica Walter plays a lost soul and not a capable careerist, but we're presented with new dynamics. The predatory female is nobody's wife, while the man is quite attached; the woman's cushion of safety has been eliminated, while the man has extensive emotional resources.
By the time Fatal Attractioncame along, it set a standard that was understood: a free woman is a loose cannon who is so dangerous that everybody else needs body armour and a bulletproof vest to survive an encounter with her. That this dangerous female is alone and vulnerable, compared with everyone else (with their spouses and kids and pets and household staffs), seems not to be supposed to be noticed. Singleness, in these movies, is actually a form of psychosis rather than a relationship status.
PROBABLY THE MOSTinsulting of all these movies was another Michael Douglas vehicle, Disclosure(1994), an adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel of sexual harassment in Silicon Valley. Demi Moore, omnipresent in uncomfortable women's parts in those days, is a software executive climbing her StairMaster to nowhere. She's so wily that one feels she's an enzyme gone mad, and Douglas is just her helpless substrate, hoping to somehow escape intact.
It's impossible to feel sorry for Moore in this film, because she is both destructive and bad at it. In the end she doesn't succeed in wrecking either Douglas's home or his career, but we hate her all the same. And as if we haven't gotten the message by the time of Disclosure'sdenouement, once Douglas is back in his sunny, happy office and Moore has been deposed, he receives an e-mail from home that is signed: "A Family." Not individual names like normal people use, or even "The Smiths" or – heck, why not? – "Your Family". Just "A Family".
It is as if single career women are a demon disease that could descend by happenstance upon any family. Close your shutters! Lock your doors! Batten down the hatches!
In any case, if there is any novelty in Obsessed, besides of course the convenient mix of skin colours, it's that this plotline has so progressed that it's now in retrograde. Larter is not a scary professional, she's just a secretary. She and her boss don't even have an affair or even a smooch – she starts stalking him because she's stark raving mad and nothing more. The only lesson any man could learn from this movie is pretty much: "Don't get out of bed in the morning, ever!"
The interpersonal terrorism that our poor, benighted male protagonist encounters is not at all his fault – unlike Douglas in Fatal Attraction, he doesn't have so much as a flirtation – so the new paradigm has a world of single women so insane that they need no reason whatever to start making a mess of a married person's life.
I’ve always had the vague suspicion that those of us who haven’t crossed the nuptial threshold and those who have become smug marrieds are in fact residing in enemy camps, but it was a tacit thing kept under control by that all-purpose detente known as the need to get along. Apparently, the faultlines are faultier than I realised.
– Guardianservice
