Girlfriends: Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992)

When I decided to write about erotic thrillers this summer, I made one rule: I’m not doing Fatal Attraction. 

I know Fatal Attraction. You know it. Everyone knows it: Glenn Close, Michael Douglas, bunny boiling, etc. It was less a movie than it was a cultural verdict on The Single Career Woman, an  archetype that had been gaining great and terrible power over the course of the 1970s. Second-wave feminism had created a world where (white, middle-class) women did not have to marry for financial support, leaving them free to marry for love, or — if they wanted, when they wanted — to defer marriage indefinitely. This was, obviously, threatening to a social order which viewed women less as people than as high-end home appliances. Thus, by the 1980s, the propaganda arm of pop culture had swung in, inundating women with stories about how they were going to become ancient unattractive spinsters who would never know true fulfillment unless they put their professional goals to the side and focused on catching a man.

Single Career Women were sad, pathetic, clingy, lonely, eating ice cream by the tub and crying into their Franzia; Single Career Women were cold, bitchy, devouring, castrating, misandrist, letting their ovaries wither while they clawed their way into a corner office. Lots of this cultural anxiety showed up in comedies like Working Girl and Baby Boom, where Career Women could be reformed by learning to care for a baby (as in Baby Boom) or forcibly cast aside and replaced with a more compliant model (like the scary lady boss in Working Girl) in order to learn their lesson. On the other side of the gender divide, there were comedies like Mister Mom or Three Men and a Baby, about men being forced into the “feminine” roles of child-rearing and homemaking, either because their wives had more fulfilling careers than they did (Mister Mom, which my family watched approximately four million times over the course of the 1980s), or because they’re bachelors, stranded like beached whales by the tide of marriage-averse Career Women and forced to propagate the species on their own. 

Fatal Attraction played the story for horror — making the Single Career Woman first a side piece who refuses to know her place, then an active, armed threat against the nuclear family. The implications have been amply parsed, first in Susan Faludi’s Backlash, then by every other feminist with a basic cable package. There is literally nothing new or surprising you could say about Fatal Attraction. So I’m not trying. Sure, yes: The Single Career Woman is portrayed as a social cancer, literally deadly, someone who has to be killed to make society function. But we’ve been there and done that. Surely, there must be some newer, more intersectional misogyny we could cover? For instance, could we add an angle about how all single women are murderous, man-hating lesbians?

Great news: We can definitely do that.  

Let us now proceed to the plot recap, which will be necessary if you — like me, just a few short weeks ago — only knew “Single White Female” as a verb that means “to steal someone’s haircut.” In the opening scene, we learn that (a) our heroine, Allie Jones (Bridget Fonda) is engaged to a generic-brand man (Steven Weber, one of the great made-for-TV faces), (b) he’s cheating on her, and (c) she’s dumping him. In order to keep that no-good Steven Weber from coming back into her life — a hard task, as anyone who channel-surfed between 1990 and 2002 can tell you — Allie decides she needs a roommate. She puts an ad in the paper, and every lesbian in New York shows up at her door, demanding to be let in.