Fatal Attraction (1987)

and the Ending They Reshot

A thriller that made the other woman a monster, and was reshot so the audience could cheer. What it teaches about self-harm used when someone leaves, the emergency that's really a boundary, the man the film let off, the fear of being "that woman," and the wife who was told last.

Fatal Attraction (1987). Directed by Adrian Lyne, written by James Dearden from his own 1980 short film, Diversion. Michael Douglas as Dan Gallagher, Glenn Close as Alex Forrest, and Anne Archer as Beth Gallagher.

“I wasn’t playing a generality. I wasn’t playing a cliché. I was playing a very specific, deeply disturbed, fragile human being, whom I had grown to love.”

Glenn Close, on Alex, in 2010.

A note before you read. This page discusses a film with a suicide attempt, stalking, violence in a family home, a child taken from school, and a pet killed. Nothing is described in detail, and no method is named. If you are thinking about suicide, or someone has threatened it, call or text 988, any hour. If someone is following or frightening you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788; they help with stalking too. Every current number is on the Resources page.

This page belongs to Plot Twist. The backlog’s rule leaves out films where the pattern is the villain and nothing else, and this film was let in on purpose, by the author’s decision, for two reasons. It shows patterns almost no other film in the series reaches. And it taught a generation something about women that is worth looking at twice.

Like every entry on the Plot Twist page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. That rule matters more here than anywhere. Alex has been diagnosed by psychiatrists, critics and a whole culture, for decades, on the strength of a character. This page won’t. It reads what she does, what Dan does, and what the film does with both of them.

The Story

Dan Gallagher is a married lawyer in Manhattan. While his wife Beth and their daughter Ellen are away for the weekend, he has an affair with Alex Forrest, an editor he’s met through work. She begins to cling. He reluctantly spends the next day with her, and then ends it, and she attempts suicide. He helps her, and leaves in the morning.

Alex apologizes and invites him to the opera. He declines. She calls his office until he tells his secretary he won’t take her calls. She insists they meet, and tells him she is pregnant, and that he must take responsibility. He changes his home phone number. She comes to his apartment when Beth is there, posing as a buyer. She sends him a tape full of abuse. She follows him, damages his car, and watches his family through their window.

Dan goes to the police, pretending he’s asking for a client. He’s told they can’t act without cause, and that the client will have to admit his affair. When the family comes home to find Ellen’s pet rabbit killed on their stove, Dan finally tells Beth everything. Beth throws him out, and tells Alex on the phone that if she ever comes near the family again, she’ll kill her. Alex takes Ellen from school to an amusement park; Beth, searching for her, crashes her car. Ellen comes home unharmed.

Dan breaks into Alex’s apartment and starts to strangle her, and stops. Beth forgives him and comes home. Alex attacks Beth in the house with a knife, and Beth shoots her dead.

Fatal Attraction was the second highest-grossing film of the year in the United States, and was nominated for six Academy Awards.

The Story Before the Story, and the Ending They Reshot

The film did not originally end that way. In the first ending, Alex dies by suicide and tries to make it look as if Dan killed her; Beth finds a tape that clears him. Test audiences disliked it, because Alex seemed to win. So Paramount shot a new ending, in which the wife kills the other woman. Anne Archer was “appalled.” Glenn Close fought the change for two weeks before she filmed it.

The writer, James Dearden, later said he regretted the theatrical ending, which he found sexist. He had wanted Alex to be “a sad, tragic, lonely woman, holding down a tough job in an unforgiving city.” Susan Faludi, in Backlash, argued that the story had been changed to make Alex wholly negative, while Dan’s carelessness barely came up at all.

The ending audiences cheered was the one they asked for. That’s worth knowing when you ask what the film taught.

What It Gets Right

Some things. It shows how frightening it is to be followed, and how little help the law offered: Dan can’t get protection without telling the truth first. It shows that a threat to a child is a line. And in Beth, it shows a wife who is told the truth last, and still decides for herself what happens next.

What It Teaches

1. When he tried to leave

The first thing Alex does when Dan ends it is attempt suicide. The film moves quickly past it, to the thriller. This page won’t.

The Decoder’s Card 29, Suicide Threats, is “Emotional hostage-taking through self-harm threats,” and it names the timing: “Dramatic gestures when you attempt to leave.” It also says the thing the film never does. You are not responsible for another adult’s choice to live or die, and you can’t hold it. When someone threatens or attempts to harm themselves as you leave, the card’s answer comes before any reading of the pattern: call 988 or emergency services, don’t try to manage it yourself, and then still leave if you need to leave. A threat can be coercion and real danger at the same time. The response is the same.

If you’ve stayed with someone because you were afraid of what they’d do to themselves if you left, you weren’t weak. You were put in a position no one can hold alone. There are people whose job is to hold it with you.

2. “This is a real emergency”

When Dan changes his number, Alex calls the operator for it: “Operator, this is a real emergency please. You need to give me that number.”

The Decoder’s Card 10, The False Urgency, is “Manufacturing crisis to control your time.” Calls he won’t take, a meeting she insists on, news that can’t wait, a number that must be given up now. Each one says the same thing: your boundary is the emergency, and it has to come down.

And then there’s the line people quote: “I’m not gonna be ignored, Dan!” The pursuit after a clear no is Card 44, Boundary Testing, at its end point. Each step goes a little further than the last: the office, the home phone, the apartment, the car, the family. By the time it reaches the family, it isn’t testing anymore.

3. The man the film let off

Dan cheats on his wife, ends it, stops taking Alex’s calls, changes his number, and lies to the police about who’s asking. He tells Beth only when there’s nothing left to hide. When Alex refuses his pity, he tells her she’s “sick.”

None of that makes what Alex does anything but frightening. But notice how little of it the film asks us to look at. One of its taglines called the affair “A mistake he’ll regret.” Faludi’s point was that Dan’s carelessness, and his lack of responsibility, raised almost no discussion. The film made one person carry the whole story’s darkness, and it wasn’t him.

4. What it taught about the other woman

Here is the lesson that went out into the world. A single woman with a career, who wants more than a man is willing to give, is dangerous. Her hurt, if it’s loud, is madness. And the happy ending is the family closing ranks, with her gone.

Many women learned from this film to be afraid of being “that woman.” To swallow the hurt when a man they’d slept with stopped calling. To apologize for wanting an answer. To be very, very calm, in case anyone thought they were crazy.

What Alex does is not a model of anything. But wanting an answer isn’t madness, and neither is being hurt. The film fused them together so tightly that for decades you couldn’t have one without being accused of the other.

5. Told last

Beth is the one person in the film who did nothing wrong, and she is told last. She finds out from her husband only after her daughter’s pet is dead. She throws him out. Then her daughter is taken, she’s in a car crash, and the film brings her home to forgive him.

She’s allowed to decide for herself, and the film respects that. But notice who pays for Dan’s affair: his wife, his daughter, and the other woman, in that order. And notice that the ending audiences asked for makes the wife the one who has to end it.

Who Carries the Story, Side by Side

	Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)	Fatal Attraction (1987)	The First Wives Club (1996)
Who the film makes dangerous	The husband	The other woman	Nobody; the film laughs at the husbands
Who pays for the man’s choices	His wife	His wife, his daughter, the other woman	The wives, until they stop paying
How it ends	He is killed	She is killed	The women build something together

Three films about what happens after a man’s choices. Only one of them ends without a killing, and it’s the one where the women stopped being set against each other.

If You Grew Up on This

Many of us saw this young, and were frightened of the wrong person. Nothing on this page asks you to stop finding it gripping. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Has someone’s threat to hurt themselves ever kept you from leaving? Who helped you hold it, or who could now?
Has anyone told you something was an emergency, again and again, whenever you set a limit?
Were you ever afraid of being “that woman”? What did you swallow so you wouldn’t be?
In the stories you grew up with, who carried the blame for a man’s choices?
If you were Beth, who would you want to hear the truth from, and when?

The film was reshot so the audience could cheer. The people who made it spent years saying they wished it hadn’t been.

You’re the audience now. You can see all three of them.