Look who's stalking
Monday, June 8, 2009
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PDF Run to the hills! Another single white female is on the loose! Why does Hollywood believe the scariest thing in the world is an unattached woman, asks Elizabeth Wurtzel
The Los Angeles skyline has a problem: no matter how many times the camera lovingly caresses and pans across the skyscrapers of downtown LA - 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 is the mishaps of modernism and brutalism, played out against an empty sky. It's not that Los Angeles 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 flip side of the fun-in-the-sun we usually associate with SoCal. These are the symbols of LaLa 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 like Double Indemnity and LA Confidential, films meant to remind us that blondes have more fun, particularly if they happen to be murderous tramps.
It's hard to say if the director of Obsessed was hoping his movie would join that great tradition or if he simply meant to make pleasing popcorn crap - or if he wasn't even that ambitious. Unlike, say, the modern archetypal version of the vamp-from-hell cautionary tale - 1987's Fatal Attraction, starring Glenn Close and the long-suffering Michael Douglas - Obsessed doesn't even bother to try to make us like the would-be homewrecker 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 like Brentwood, where the nice people live, Obsessed is, 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 Othello known as the OJ Simpson trial. The most interesting thing about Obsessed is it's supposed to be oh-so demographically correct - the main characters just happen to be African-American, but in post-racial America 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 so well by now: the aforementioned Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Temp, Disclosure, almost any Sharon Stone vehicle from the 90s.
We tend to think of Fatal Attraction as the first of the genre, but really it was just the beginning of movies making a menace of the modern career gal. The villainess film has older antecedents: back when blondes were ballsier than the men they brought down, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Harlow were tough broads back when the Hays Code made the see-through nightie a no-no. But back then, the bad woman was 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 really the portal to hell. These women needed the lonesome male callers, who were easily riled up - 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" - to help off their tedious husbands so they could collect big insurance premiums or heady inheritances. Married women, back then, were much more frightening than their single sisters.
But that all changed, if not before, then surely with Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1970), which is thought to be the basis of Fatal Attraction (since the plot variations in many of these movies are so minor, it's hard to say if that's so). In that case, 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 Attraction came 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 bullet-proof vest to survive an encounter with them. That this dangerous female is alone and vulnerable, compared to everyone else with their spouses and kids and pets and household staffs, seems not to be anything anyone is supposed to notice. Singleness, in these movies, is actually a form of psychosis rather than a relationship status.
Probably the most insulting 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, 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, because she is both destructive and bad at it - in the end she doesn't succeed at wrecking Douglas's home or career, but we hate her all the same. And as if we haven't gotten the overdetermined message by the time of Disclosure's denouement, once Douglas is back in his sunny, happy office and Moore has been deposed, he receives an email 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". 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 don't even need evocation to start making a mess of a married person's life.
I've always had the vague suspicion that those of us who hadn't crossed the nuptial threshold and the ones who had become smug marrieds were in fact residing in opposing 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.
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Look who's stalking
[Source: Good Times Society - by The American Illuminati]
Look who's stalking
[Source: News Channel]
posted by tgazw @ 7:26 PM,
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