FATAL ATTRACTION
- benwharton
- Feb 23, 2019
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 8, 2019
The End You Want, But Is It The End That You Need?
Alternative endings are something we often dream about in our lives, but film test screenings can make them real.
Film executives want us to walk out of the cinema feeling elated, high on news to tell others. "Go See This Movie I Just Saw!" And so what a test screen audience thinks of the culmination of the multi-million production thet just made is pretty key.
Fatal Attraction, the film that chucked the prejorative female descriptor 'Bunny Boiler" into the lexicon, is one of the better known alternative endings that the audience literally screamed for. And one the studio delivered.
The original tale of obsession was to end with Alex Forrest [Glenn Close's opera-loving femme fatal] taking her own life in the manner of Madame Butterfly's main figure. A death staged so as to implicate Dan Gallagher [Michael Douglas] family man in murder. A tape from Forrest possibly proving her death was suicide suggests that the straying Man could still be saved despite his betrayal, but the final image and emotion was given to Forrest.
This was a statement about mental illness and the its tragic effect on those without support.
And yet when audiences shouted to 'Kill The Bitch' in the closing stages of the original cut, film execs couldn't resist a re-shoot of the film's emotionally disquieting fade out. Now, the audience got to vicariously live through the act of killing an unstable, sexually-assertive woman, by seeing wife Beth Gallagher [Anne Archer] pull the trigger on the dangerous outsider, the one who dared to threaten the ideal, idolised 80's family unit.
This was now an ending that finished on a framed photograph of the Gallagher family, its gilt-edge suggesting that apart from the poor bunny, everything was now back to normal, the father's actions forgiven for the greater good.
Fatal Attraction was designed, within genre conventions, to be a cautionary, tragic tale. A new ending made it a pulpy feel-good revenge rush - and a massive box office hit.
What did audiences want in the 80s and what did they need?
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