Fatal Attraction: Ghost Style!!

This weekend I saw two movies, one which has been a long-time favorite, and one which…well…wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Friday night I went to see the new release staring Joshua Jackson and directed by Masayuki Ochiai(remake of a 2004 Thai horror film) Shutter. Saturday early afternoon, I spent a lovely time lounging with my dogs watching the 1987 release starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, Fatal Attraction. What a combo! And I have to say, of all the remakes of Japanese horror films I’ve seen in the theater for fear of being left out, even though I really hate horror movies and even those rated pg13 inspire screams and tears and my hiding behind my own hands, Shutter might have been the best yet. For one, the ghost actually had a motive that I could figure out (hooray!) which meant this movie had some semblance of a plot. Also, HELLO! Joshua Jackson is HOTTT!

SPOILER ALERT!!

Our leading ladies in both films (one of them happens to be a ghost) got a little too needy and a little too demanding, and the men said “enough, ya’ll are getting clipped.” Big mistake, buddies! BIG mistake. A woman scorned will stop at nothing to destroy your life, and she generally lives by the old tried and true “If I can’t have you, no one will” credo. Let’s recap what we’ve learned, shall we?

Affairs are bad! Don’t do it, gentlemen! That’s what we all learned from Fatal Attraction. Why are affairs bad? Not because you might really damage a significant relationship, but because the woman you’re about to sleep with is probably totally unstable, so watch out! She’ll kill your family! Because, being the reasonable, family man you really are, you never meant to continue this affair past that one weekend when your wife was out of town. And she should have known that. After all, she came on to you! She knew you were married, and she knew that nothing could come of this…is it your fault she fell in love with you? No! Bitch knew what she was getting into. She isn’t your wife, whom you would never dream of leaving, and whom you love…you only slept with this other ho because men are weak, and she was totally doing everything in her evil womanly powers to seduce you…and now she’s totally flipped out! So, it doesn’t matter how much they turn on the charm, gentlemen, you’ve got to stay strong! If you slip up, she’ll probably hunt you down, stalk you and your family, kill your daughter’s treasured pet by boiling it on the stove, break into your home, attempt to kill your wife, and you’ll have to eventually stab, drown, and shoot her in self defense so you can get back to your quiet, family living with your family whom, after all, you never meant to hurt.

As it turns out, even legitimate relationships can be quite dangerous, gentlemen, when you’ve decided that things need to come to an end, gentlemen. Just as in those pesky extramarital affairs, sometimes the lady gets too needy, right? She sure did in Shutter, and Joshua Jackson's character, photographer Benjamin Shaw, decided he couldn’t take it anymore, so he enlisted the help of his womanizing friends. She then appears first as a ghostly image on film, then intrudes further and further into his life, totally ruining his first few months with his new wife by haunting them both and driving his aforementioned friends to suicide (or maybe she killed them? I was not totally clear on that). In the end we find that the scary ghost isn’t just haunting the couple because she’s clingy…she’s haunting the man who was responsible for her torture and eventual suicide. His friends drugged her, seemingly raped her, and Joshua Jackson gets it all on film (one reason, perhaps, why the ghost chooses to make her presence known through the camera). What a twist! The other twist comes when we find that the ghost had been with them all along (literally), sitting on her beloved’s back. He was carrying around the weight of what he had done to her! So, go, girl power! Or…maybe not. She is dead, after all, and forced to spend the rest of eternity literally attached to some guy who never even loved her. Who’s really suffering here? She seems to get the bad end of the stick, just like Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, who, after all, ends up dead, while Michael Douglas (we can infer from the final scene) goes back to his comfortable, family life, having learned one valuable lesson about fidelity. At least Joshua Jackson is punished in the end.

Interestingly, in Fatal Attraction we’re always rooting for Michael Douglas, and we are terrified of Glenn Close, happily cheering him on in the final scene when he first drowns her in the bathtub, then when is wife shoots her through the heart as she appears above the water for one final scare. Whereas, in Shutter, throughout most of the film we’re rooting for Joshua Jackson, our hero, and his pretty new wife, hoping the crazy, clingy ghost will just leave them alone. Not until the end do we find that, indeed, the ghost was only trying to warn our heroine about the kind of man she married, and when she leaves Joshua, and he ends up in a mental institution with the same ghost on his back, we feel he got just what he deserved. The scorned women seem to develop for us in reverse fashion, Glenn Close starting off beautiful (or at least I think she was supposed to be beautiful), sexy (again…), and the no-strings-attached alluring vixen then gets scarier and scarier, while the ghost starts off as, well, a ghost, and only becomes for us a frightened, sweet, innocent girl in love as we learn more about her past. However, when the movie ends, she’s still pretty scary, even if we know she’s not really a “bad” ghost.

So, what can we concur about these films? Totally misogynistic, depicting men as victims and women as crazy demons haunting the heroes for their human weakness, or simply cautionary, warning of the inescapable punishment which comes along with hurting those who love you? One thing I think we can all agree upon: the worst way to break up with someone is probably to get your friends to drug and then rape her while you photograph it.

This entry was posted by Brigitte, on Monday, March 31, 2008. You can leave your response.