just been watching Fatal Attraction again

[morewashing]

Why is it that Glen Close is made out to be the wrongun, when actually it's Michael Douglas that is the complete asshole.
He completely uses her, casts her aside like nothing had happened, cheats on his wife, yet the focus is on the bunny boiling madwoman who drives a wedge between the family. Then when she is dead they breath a sigh of relief and live happily ever after.

But Alex is pregnant in the film,so not only did they kill her but her unborn child.I do like the film though especially when Michael Douglas character comes home and sees Alex in the apartment.He really flips.

There's a good feminist analysis of it in Misogynies by Joan Smith,

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1908906189/ref=pd_cp_14_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=DM1B5VWPY2K25YMRTJV2

also of Jagged Edge from around the same time if anyone remembers that.

Iirc she suggests the bath scene is reminiscent of ducking witches to see if they survive or not.

finding the Jane Eyre analogy interesting too MaQ.

I like the Jane Eyre analogy, Ma. Susan Faludi has a really good discussion of it in Backlash, in which she points out that the film as originally conceived had Alex as a far more sympathetic character (eventually commits suicide) and Douglas's character as the baddie, but that version did not play well with audiences in the pre-release test screenings.

Forgot to say, it has at least supplied women with yet another "wanker filter" for use when on-line-dating. If a bloke's profile says "no bunny boilers" you know he self-identifies with MD's character, and therefore know to avoid him like the plague.

It was a product of its time. The 1980's were still pretty backward in a lot of ways. Am hoping that if it was ever remade it would be different

That's an interesting observation, Aderyn. I've heard the opposite suggested - that films pander more and more to entrenched gender stereotypes, and that films like, for example, 9 to 5, just wouldn't get green-lighted by studio bosses these days. We get an endless diet of action hero block busters where the female "characters" are cardboard cut-out love interests, and rom coms which focus on the woman snaring her man, but very little other than that from the Hollywood mainstream.

But yes, there are a lot of films from the 80s which make me cringe on re-watching them - not just the ones we knew at the time were crap (like Pretty Woman), but films like Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsy (I rewatched that recently and it's "he's lied to you all the way through, gulled your father into falling in love with his female persona, but what the hell, he's Dustin Hoffman and he's cute, so forgive him everything").

Now you mention it Het, I read a Hadly Freeman book where she talked in part about 80's films and the portrayal of women and she said that women were able to be shown as having abortions, for example and not being judged negatively, in a way that wouldn't happen now. In some respects we have gone backwards (or America has) when it comes to recognising women's autonomy over our own bodies.
I don't know - maybe there was more scope in the 80's to make a variety of films. Was there more money around then, to finance variety?