Graham Fuller: Fatal Distractions

Graham Fuller is the executive editor of Interview magazine and co-host of the Public Television show "Cinema" (aired on Channel 3 in New York.)

Tracy Quan: I'd like to know more about Hollywood's earliest images of the Other Woman.

Graham Fuller: During the silent era, the Other Woman was invariably a vamp -- a dark-haired wraith -- and the sexual depredations practiced by her were literally vampiristic. Theda Bara was the major incarnation of this phantom. The vamp invariably caused sexual mayhem and social chaos, and she would be condemned at the end of each picture -- after being ostensibly celebrated in the performance and the characterization. The movies had it both ways. This became subtler in the 1920s, when the Other Woman was a flapper. Clara Bow -- the quintessential flapper -- was a hedonistic, liberated woman, although she could also be a pal. So there were "good" flappers, too, primarily in comedies. And before the production code, they wouldn't necessarily be condemned for their promiscuity.

TQ: "Good" flappers -- but no virtuous wraiths.

GF: No, there weren't any "good" vamps.

TQ: How did the Other Woman come to be seen as a blonde? There is still this archetypical '50s joke about finding a blonde hair on your husband's jacket...

GF: I think that's because blonde hairs show up more. Blondes are not the most dangerous sexual predators in Hollywood. Blonde hair usually connotes sexual availability but without any kind of shading or amoral intent. Blondes "have more fun" but they're not dark and dangerous. Jean Harlow was a good time girl and a gold digger, but you don't think of her as an adulteress. Marilyn Monroe, who was a direct descendent of Harlow, might play the mistress but we don't think of her as evil. Throughout Western culture, the dark-haired woman is the temptress. Wasn't Delilah a brunette? In "The Postman Always Rings Twice" Lana Turner is a blonde femme fatale, plotting to kill her husband, but she's an anomaly.

TQ: Have the cheating scenarios changed very much?

GF: In the late '20s and '30s, before the Hays Production Code, the scenarios were racier. Things changed again in the 1960s, and became freer, with movies like "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice."

TQ: But "Bob and Carol" was about swinging, which is not cheating.

GF: Well, they tried to swing but it didn't work. There's a moralistic streak in Hollywood and while "Bob and Carol" was a quintessential free love movie of the late '60s, the message at the end was: Swinging just doesn't work, as any psychoanalyst will tell you. In "Fatal Attraction," you can look at the Glenn Close character as a symbol of AIDS -- which, of course, makes the movie very moralistic. "sex, lies, and videotape" was a fairly hip movie but again, I think, moralistic. The director [Steven Soderbergh] told me in an interview that he had cheated on a girlfriend, and this movie is kind of a guilty confession. Laura San Giacomo's character is a modern '80s femme fatale, who initially has no conscience about cheating -- on her sister, really, because she's sleeping with her sister's husband. But at the end she's contrite.

TQ: Why?

GF: Adultery can never flourish in American cinema. I don't think you can get away with making a movie in which the Other Woman is treated sympathetically. This is still a male-dominated society, and in its images and fantasies of adultery the male gets off lightly.

TQ: Are you saying that bad girls don't have all the fun?

GF: There have been feminist arguments that the femmes fatales of '40s film noir were a liberating force for women -- because women's sexual energy is a way of busting out of the trap of male hegemony and male domination. In G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box," which was made in 1929, Louise Brooks is the Other Woman, a mistress to many, and a free spirit like no other. There's a wild, wanton energy in Brooks. It's an early example of a movie depicting a woman's sexual energy as a powerful anti-establishment, anti- authoritarian force.