Those Middle Commandments

Films: Unfaithful
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There’s something about Diane Lane that bothers me. It’s not that I think she’s a bad actress, because she certainly isn’t. There’s something about her that comes across as artificial to me, though, something plastic. She looks to me like what affluent white women think of when they think of an attractive woman, or the woman they wish to be. I have no explanation for this feeling other than that it’s one I can’t shake. This is relevant because Diane Lane is literally the only reason I sat through Unfaithful. If you think that doesn’t bode well for what’s to follow, you’re probably right.

Connie Sumner (Diane Lane) and her husband Edward (Richard Gere) live a life of the sort that movie producers seem to think is middle class but is actually clearly upper class. He runs a company of some sort and she spends her time fundraising for various charities, they have a massive house in the country, etc. Anyway, the marriage is certainly a loving one, but isn’t very physical, although the presence of their son Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan) would seem to indicate that they’ve had sex at least once.

Cheaters Never Prosper

Film: Fatal Attraction
Format: DVD from NetFlix on various players.

I have something of a history with the film Fatal Attraction. This is not an admission of marital infidelity on my part, nor on stalking someone else. Back in the dark ages, when VHS was the medium of choice, Blockbuster still existed as a going concern, and my wife and I were just dating, we rented this movie. We took it back to her place and we sat down on her basement couch to watch. We got about 30 minutes into the movie before Sue completely wigged out and demanded that I shut the film off. I did, rewound the tape and returned it. Since that day, probably 1988 or 1989, I haven’t so much as touched the box of a copy of this film until now.

But hey, it was time to watch it finally. The story is one you almost certainly know by reputation if not experience. A lawyer named Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) has a one weekend affair with a book editor named Alex Forrest (Glenn Close). Thinking it’s over, he goes back to his wife, Beth (Anne Archer) and daughter, Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen). But it’s far from over. Little did Dan know when he hooked up with the sexy book editor that she was infected with a case of the crazies, and shit’s going to get real.

Fatal Attraction is not the first stalker movie by a long shot. There are plenty of movies with someone completely obsessed with the affections of someone who doesn’t quite return the sentiment. It’s not even my favorite stalker movie—that’s Play Misty for Me, and the woman obsessed with Clint Eastwood in that film is just as deranged as Alex Forrest in many ways. Fatal Attraction, though, goes places no films before it ever did. This film pushed the crazy stalker envelope in ways that, based on how incredibly popular this film became, everyone was ready to see.

See, right away we learn that Alex is a few slices short of a full loaf when she tries to kill herself because Dan prepares to go home after their night of bouncy-bouncy. From this moment on, things are going to get weird. Like we expect it to, it starts nice and slow—phone calls at work, calls to the house, hang-ups when Beth answers, and similar tactics. And then things escalate. She tells Dan she’s pregnant (and she evidently really is), destroys the electrical system in his car, and begins a campaign of harassment that is truly epic in scale.

So I’m going to talk about the rabbit. Everyone knows about the rabbit. People who haven’t seen this film know all about the rabbit. While it’s a terrifying and awful moment in the film, it’s also a truly brilliant one. The reason it’s such a great moment is that it shows us very definitely just how unhinged Alex has become and exactly what she is capable of. While things were weird up to this point, once that happens, all bets are off. Alex Forrest goes from being someone a little obsessive and stalkerish to someone capable of virtually anything.

The film does raise some pretty interesting questions, though. On the one hand, no other film in history has done more for the idea of marital fidelity than this one. Any guy who saw this film and thought for a moment about cheating had second thoughts. Part of this is because Alex was bat-guano-sandwich-eatin’ crazy. Part is because every guy in the world secretly believes that he has the same sort of animal magnetism as Michael Douglas, and thus every woman would immediately go bonkers over him. I kid, but only a little.

What’s more interesting, though, is the feminist reaction to this film. Fatal Attraction. When the film was released, there was a huge feminist outcry against the film. Alex Forrest is an unmarried woman, a woman who has evidently sacrificed family for career…and she’s crazy. It’s fair to say that I didn’t get that reading from the film. I see it, and I understand why some people were upset. What it comes down to is how you take that character. Is Alex Forrest a crazy career woman? Or is she a career woman who happens to be crazy? And, accompanying this is the fact that the stay-at-home mom proves to be the one who fights to keep her family and sanity, and all that. So I see the anti-feminist position. I just don’t think it was intended.

What’s more impressive is how well the film addresses one of the main reasons that people cheat. When Dan and Alex hook up, it’s very much like the start of a new relationship when everything is exciting and new. Your partner, assuming you have one, was never more perfect in your eyes than in that first month or so when you were still discovering everything there was to know about each other. There’s still an effort made to impress—you’re the best version of yourself at those times. But that sort of excitement can’t last, because it would kill us. If we’re lucky, it fades into things like intimacy and comfort and companionship.

But that thrill definitely dies off. When he decides to spend the night with Alex, what Dan thinks is exactly that—that thrill has suddenly returned. It’s back, at least for the weekend, and he can return to comfort and intimacy. In those moments, Alex is (in his mind) perfect. She’s still dressing to impress and looking her best; she’s probably wearing sexy underwear and not something that’s been washed 100 times. She won’t fart in bed, eat garlic, or pick her toes. For that moment, she’s as close to perfect as she’ll ever get. We get this early in the film when it looks like there’s going to be a little boom-boom between Dan and Beth, and he returns to the bedroom to find his daughter in bed. Comfort, sure. Intimacy, yes. Sex? Not so much. And thus Alex becomes that outlet, if only for the weekend.

That said, it’s worth noting that anybody who goes straying when he’s coming home to the 1987 version of Anne Archer is an idiot. Dumbass deserved something just for going there.

Why to watch Fatal Attraction: Because it’s a great example of the crazy.
Why not to watch: You’ll never look at hasenpfeffer the same way again.

It's All in Your Head, Man!

Films: Pi, Jacob’s Ladder
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop (Pi), DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television (Jacob’s Ladder).

There was a time in my life when I was more than good at math. In high school, I studied calculus, and started college as an engineering student. Then I got to multiple variable calculus—pure theoretical math—and it was time for me to switch to something else. If I could wish for anything, it’s that I understood math better than I do.

Darren Aronofsky’s Pi starts with the assumption that math is the center of the universe in all respects, that math can explain anything and that everything in nature is a mathematical construct. We follow the person of Max Cohen, a mathematician searching for something that everyone would love to find: predictable patterns in the stock market. The theory Max works under is that because math is the language of nature, nature itself is a pattern. There must be a pattern in everything, including something as complex and complicated and chaotic as the New York Stock Exchange.

Max is vastly troubled, however. The moment his is introduced to us, we discover that as a narrator, he is extremely unreliable. He frequently takes large amounts of medication, both in pill form and by injection, and appears to have frequent hallucinations. People appear and disappear on the subway, visions come to him at random, and there is virtually no end to his paranoia. A man with a bleeding hand appears in subway terminals, and at one point, Max finds a pulsing human brain on the subway stairs.

Max’s paranoia is evidenced by the extreme number of locks on his door. The locks are there to protect Euclid, his computer, which Max uses to make stock market predictions. Max is also disturbed by a woman named Marcy Dawson from a brokerage who wants answers from him as well as a Hassidic Jew who is searching for numerical truth in the Torah.

While making predictions, Euclid blows a gasket and spits out what Max believes to be a series of random meaningless numbers. He discards the printout only to later discover several important facts. First, his mentor Sol encountered a string of random numbers during his own research with pi, a string of about 216 digits, roughly the same length as the random number string Max got from Euclid. Second, he learns that the Kabala students are looking for a string of 216 digits in the Torah, because this number string represents the true name of God.

As Max continues to push for the 216-digit number his world falls more and more apart and he descends further and further into madness. The answers he wants appear to be everywhere, taunting him, and yet just barely out of his grasp, a fact that drives him on while it pushes him further into insanity, evidenced by the slow progression of the number of pills Max takes at regular intervals.

Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of Pi, although I’m fascinated by it. Much like mathematics itself, I find the film compelling, and yet beyond my grasp at the same time. The black and white cinematography adds a great deal to the film—this film would not be nearly as effective or disturbing in color. The fantastic soundtrack adds to the head trip as well as is the strange camera work. In essence, for me, Pi is what the secret of the 216-digit number is for Max; it’s just out of reach and I can’t turn away from it.

















As with Pi, much of Jacob’s Ladder takes place in the protagonist’s head. Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is a Vietnam veteran whose platoon suffered near total casualties due to a disturbing attack. Singer, back home now, is having a strange series of flashbacks to the night in question. He also has flashbacks to his first marriage and his son Gabriel (an uncredited Macaulay Culkin), who was killed in a traffic accident. More disturbing is the fact that he’s seeing distorted and horrifying creatures virtually everywhere, things that look like demons. Many of them move in disturbing fashions, doing that rapid headshaking thing which prevents one from focusing on the object in question. Despite his Ph.D., Singer now works in the post office with his current lover, Jezebel (Elizabeth Pena).

Singer’s flashbacks intrude on his waking life, and it becomes impossible to tell what is the dream and what is reality. The only solace he has is from his chiropractor (Danny Aiello), who frequently repairs Singer’s back and gives him advice to hold onto. Singer flashes between his life with Jezzie, his former family, Vietnam, and a nightmare world of demons until it becomes impossible to know which reality is the true one.

***HERE THERE BE SPOILERS***

I find it impossible to talk about Jacob’s Ladder without getting into what the movie actually means, or at least means to me, and this means getting into the ending. If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want the ending to be ruined , you should probably skip down to the end now.

The question to be asked when watching Jacob’s Ladder is what each of us will see when we die. The answer the film seems to be giving is that where we end up after our death is our own decision. Moving on means giving up on the life we had, and that clinging to life essentially tortures us and breaks us down. Jacob’s Ladder puts a new spin on the old “it was all a dream” motif, giving us a two-hour ride into a man’s mind as he decides whether or not to make peace with his life or cling to the scraps that remain.

***THUS ENDETH THE SPOILERS***

Both of these movies are difficult to classify in terms of genre. Neither one fits comfortably into any particular type of movie. Both have elements of horror films, and both are unquestionably at least partly psychological drama. Both can also be difficult to watch, although of the two, Jacob’s Ladder is both scarier and more rewatchable.

The human mind is a terrible thing to waste, and a very scary place to get lost in, as both of these films aptly demonstrate.

Why to watch Pi: It’s a head trip like no other, a disturbing, waking dream.
Why not to watch: You’re not ready to be more freaked out by math than usual.

Why to watch Jacob’s Ladder: An old trope given new and terrifying clothing.
Why not to watch: You scare easily.