Recently I rented a house in the state for a weekend with a group of friends, all new parents with children under the age of 2. After putting the kids to bed, we decided to set up a group viewing of “Deep Water” on Hulu – and spent the next 15 minutes in a state of escalating insanity, frantically tossing baby books and tossing couch cushions in search of the lost home remote. This was how desperate we were to feel grown up and experience a now rare form of adult entertainment: an erotic thriller directed by the master of the genre, Adrian Lyne.
‘Deep Water’ unfortunately turned out to be neither erotic nor exciting. (It’s hard to explain how stupid the plot is without ruining it, so fair warning.) Ben Affleck plays Vic, a man who got rich by making “the chip” for killer drones, and now he’s dealing with various brooding hobbies, including tending to a snail colony and editing a poetry magazine. Ana de Armas is his wife, Melinda, whose life’s work seems to consist of cheating Vic with beautiful young men, an activity she barely tries to hide from a haunted (and perhaps slightly agitated) Vic. The couple share a precocious child, Trixie (Grace Jenkins). It’s not clear why these people are together, or why Vic thinks his only recourse is to kill some of Melinda’s suitors in aquatic environments. Most of the sex on screen is between the married couple, who have less chemistry than Trixie’s science projects. Unfortunately, the snails are underused. The water isn’t even that deep!
Adrian Lyne hadn’t made a movie in 20 years and now he’s back without saying a word. His erotic scenarios – gallery owner begins an affair with a sadomasochistic banker (“9 ½ Weeks”, 1986); the one-night stand of the family man ends in fear (“Fatal Attraction”, 1987); billionaire pays husband $1 million to have sex with wife (“Indecent Proposal,” 1993); and housewife cheats on a chiseled Frenchman (“Unfaithful,” 2002) — made for movies that weren’t necessarily good, but were always kind of awesome. The sex scenes were never gratuitous, because the entire movies were about sex – mostly they were about how disastrously pointless sex can be. As one character puts it in “Unfaithful,” “An affair is nothing like a pottery class.”
Part of the thrill of revisiting Lyne’s old movies is that the sexual politics is the most perverse thing about them. While the movies enjoy their explicit sex scenes, they are fundamentally conservative in their values. And while they often feature seemingly insane women, the movies are really about men — white men. Each twist sinks the plots into deeper levels of their masculine fears. In Lyne’s masterpiece, ‘Fatal Attraction’, Michael Douglas plays Dan, a lawyer who enjoys a comfortable family life – he has the wife, the child, the dog, the mansion – until he spends a night alone in the city and ends up in bed. with Alex, a single book editor played by Glenn Close.
Although Alex appears at first to be an independent, feminist woman looking for a little discreet fun, she is soon revealed as a goblin desperate to catch a man and have his baby. After the affair, she slits her wrist, sabotages Dan’s car, kidnaps his daughter, cooks her bunny and eventually arrives at the house with a butcher knife, giving Dan and his wife an excuse to kill her and her unborn baby. This was a horror story that spawned its own discourse: People talked about Alex as if she’d jumped off the screen to stalk America’s fathers. Douglas and Close landed on the covers of “Time” and “People,” who used the film to fuel a trend piece about “real-life fatal attractions.” During the press tour, Lyne chided Hollywood’s “unfeminine” women and praised his “wonderful wife” as “the least ambitious person I’ve ever met”; Douglas said he was “really fed up with feminists, they’re fed up”.
If Alex represented an increasing feminist threat, Dan was the modern man who risked being seduced by her sexuality and humiliated by her politics. The film is infused with fear about hardened career women and softening American men. Dan’s fault wasn’t his infidelity, but his treatment of Alex after their rendezvous—walking his dog with her, taking her calls, comforting her when she tried to kill herself. The last lesson of “Fatal Attraction” was not don’t cheat on your wife† It was, if you cheat on your wife, don’t be decent to the other woman.
Fatal Attraction was such a reactionary document that it became the focus of Backlash, Susan Faludi’s account of the political and cultural assault on feminism in the 1980s. But now the assumptions that fueled the film have undergone such a reversal that Paramount+ is relaunching “Fatal Attraction” as a television series that, as the announcement for the show noted, “reimagines the classic psychosexual thriller” under “the lens of modern attitudes toward strong women, personality disorders, and compulsive control.” Alex has risen and Dan is permanently subjugated Pop culture is tired of these guys really sick of them It’s women like Alex who stay interesting.
It’s rare now that an erotic film gets people talking – contemporary sex on screen and twisted relationship dynamics have largely migrated to television shows like “You” and “Euphoria.” The remaining heroes of Hollywood’s erotic movies are less like Dan defending his family and more like “Magic Mike” sensitive strippers protecting their own tender hearts from breaking. Our last discourse-winning sex movie, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” was “9 ½ Weeks” recast as a ridiculous girlish romance—an affair that really felt like a pottery class. Though the movie’s sadomasochistic heartthrob, Christian Grey, was saddled with cartoonish demons, he was still based on “Twilight”‘s sparkling vampire hunk, a monster too sensitive to suck human blood alive.
In this antiseptic environment, Ben Affleck arrives as a mischievous present. If Douglas represented the endangered family man of the 1980s, Affleck is that man’s shell. He has stumbled into the celebrity of a divorced father who is always caught by paparazzi in sad scenes – here he stares blankly into the sea with a towel slung around his stomach, there he stumbles out the front door and immediately shakes a tray full of Dunkin’. After being knocked down, Affleck’s persona is infused with a humanizing appeal, as the sad Ben Affleck figure radiates a universal terror, enhanced with an oddly appealing emasculation.
This is the dynamic that worked so well for Affleck in “Gone Girl,” the 2014 film in which a femme fatale is animated (this time) by a righteous, albeit deranged, feminist outrage. Amy (Rosamund Pike) stages her own death to frame her cheating husband, Nick, played by Affleck, as a sweaty garbage bag who, in a twist, didn’t actually kill his wife. “Deep Water” tries to flip the trick by portraying Affleck as a seemingly decent man who is an unexpected killer, but this misreads Affleck’s appeal – his dowdy appearance belies a basic innocuousness, not the other way around.
The ‘Deep Water’ press tour suggests a film that hopes to spark no discourse at all. The only player who seems like a game to talk about is Lyne, who herself represents a somewhat dated figure: the controlling male director who wants to rule the film set with his own sexual energy. Lyne’s bizarre directorial antics are well documented, often by Lyne herself: In ‘Indecent Proposal’ he shouted vulgar encouragement at Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson while they simulated sex; on “9 ½ Weeks,” he boasted of terrorizing Kim Basinger in an attempt to cause genuine psychological breakdown, a strategy he said was necessary because Basinger “don’t read books; she’s not really acting.”
Now the culture is also coming for men like him. “It’s a little tense right now,” Lyne complained of post-#MeToo production codes. He was disappointed when the studio installed an intimacy coordinator on the set of “Deep Water”: “It implies a lack of trust, which I hated.”
Lyne doesn’t seem to understand what time he’s living in, and it shows. “Deep Water” isn’t moored: it’s based on a 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith (which helps explain why Vic and Melinda are called Vic and Melinda) but packed with shiny 80s sex scenes and sprinkled with nods to contemporary drone warfare . I wasn’t looking for much – just a campy playground where Ben Affleck could show off his meta-masculinity and his massive back tattoo. But this time the sex was really meaningless.