[Download] "Body Double As Body Politic: Psychosocial Myth and Cultural Binary in Fatal Attraction (Critical Essay)" by Journal of Social and Psychological Sciences " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Body Double As Body Politic: Psychosocial Myth and Cultural Binary in Fatal Attraction (Critical Essay)
- Author : Journal of Social and Psychological Sciences
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 75 KB
Description
When Fatal Attraction appeared in 1987 it was generally dismissed as a formulaic Hollywood horror movie. The narrative is all too predictable (particularly for those familiar with Adrian Lyne's other work): a happily married Manhattan attorney Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) engages in a weekend sexual encounter with a single woman named Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) while his family is out of town. The woman refuses to relinquish the relationship and threatens to destroy his domestic life. Neither Lyne nor screenwriter James Deardon are interested in investigating the dynamics of marital infidelity or the motivations driving the husband's behaviour. Instead the film retreats to the conventions of the horror-film genre precisely because it is unable to resolve cultural conflicts and sexual anxieties that are split off and 'projected' on to the cinema screen. Just as dreams, fairytales and myths require interpretation to yield their underlying psychosocial significance, so too the monstrous alien forces and violent images of the typical 'slasher' movie contain unconscious and unresolved material that are never commented upon in any conscious way. In its inability to express or wrestle with ambivalence using insight capacities the popular genre film thus exhibits the 'blind spot' that has led to the characterization of the screen itself as 'something of a symptom' by film theorist Mayne (1990, p. 41).