What do Fatal Attraction, Grease, and Dead Ringers all have in common? Well, they’re late 70s/early 80s classic films. And they’re all currently being turned into modern series. Do they need to be remade? That’s a contentious topic.
Some of us are clinging onto nostalgia, and ‘simpler’ times, enjoying the remakes of our youth. Some of us think it’s trite, and wonder why we can’t just enjoy new art, and the old art. Others might be in camp remake because they’re embarrassed of their old favourite films, having viewed them in a modern light, and want a newer version with more contemporary politics.
Before writing this, I wasn’t too sure where I stood. Part of me loathes remakes and re-edits, because of how their existence has been turned into a culture war against the youth. We’ve all heard the moans - “These snowflakes are ruining everything!” etcetera - despite there being no mass calls by Gen-Z for outdated films to be remade.
To figure out my stance on this all, I rewatched the 1978 Grease, the 1988 Dead Ringers and the 1987 Fatal Attraction. Do they make me, a left-wing, progressive, feminist uncomfortable in 2023?
Grease
Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies is landing on Paramount+, April 6th. The series is set a few years before the iconic Grease story, based on the song Summer Nights, with the trailer telling us to ‘witness the rise of the original Girl Gang’. Personally, I thought we’d left the term ‘girl gang’ in 2018.
We all know and love the 1978 musical film, Starring John Travolta and the late great Olivia Newton-John, and it’ll be hard for the new series to stand up to it. Grease 2, afterall, couldn’t. I rewatch the original every couple of years, so sitting down to press play on this film wasn’t much of a culture shock.
The thing about Grease, is that it’s all about how you interpret it. You could say the premise is ‘a young woman changing herself for a man’, or you could see it as ‘a young woman embracing her sexuality and growing into her true self, rejecting society wanting her to be a good girl’. You could argue that the gender binaries are incredibly stark: the women wear pink, the men black leather, the men race cars, the women enjoy sleepovers. But, you could also argue that embracing femininity isn’t inherently anti-feminist.
The original IT girls are back.
Rewatching it, I’m struck by how unappealing Travolta's character, Danny Zuko is to my older self. This once heart-throb is now an idiot who is really not in Sandy’s league. He treats her badly, is misogynistic and sexist and not a catch. On the flip side, I’m so impressed with Rizzo. More so than I remember being as a child.
Rizzo is an incredibly progressive and nuanced character, especially for a film made in the 70s and cast in the 50s. She’s all about bodily autonomy, she rejects slut shaming, and she’s seen as the badass of the group because of this. These lyrics to her solo singing performance in the film, There Are Worse Things I Could Do, are still relevant and powerful:
There are worse things I could do
Than go with a boy or two
Even though the neighbourhood thinks I'm trashy and no good
I suppose it could be true
But there are worse things I could do
I could stay home every night
Wait around for Mr. Right
Take cold showers every day
And throw my life away
On a dream that won't come true
My feelings on Grease is that it’s really not that deep. It’s a fun musical that is layered but largely unserious. Considering that, it’s still quite empowering. Hopefully the new series builds upon this, and delves into characters like Rizzo even further.
As Olivia Newton-John said herself, “I think it's kind of silly. I mean, this movie was made in the 1970s about the 1950s. It was a stage play, it's a musical, it's fun.”
Dead Ringers
The 2023 take on Dead Ringers is a six-episode psychological thriller (which will release in full April 21 on Prime) starring Rachel Weisz in the double-lead role of Elliot and Beverly Mantle. Weisz is taking on the role as twin doctors, who have a fascination with the female body, originally played by Jeremy Irons in 1988. The new adaptation will see Weisz reimagine the doctors as women, something that could add new dimensions to the original plot: a deeper understanding into women's bodies and a new power dynamic. Whereas the male Mantle twins felt opportunistic and exploitative, maybe Weisz' take will feel complex and empowering?
Double trouble.
The synopsis reads: “twins who share everything: drugs, lovers and an unapologetic desire to do whatever it takes — including pushing the boundaries on medical ethics — in an effort to challenge antiquated practices and bring women’s health care to the forefront.”
Like in the original version, directed by David Cronenberg, the twins are groundbreaking gynaecologists. But, unlike the original, their motives seem more feminist and lean more into the science, rather than the original focus on sexual desire and drug-induced-mania. In the trailer, Weisz says “My sister and I do work that is groundbreaking but hopeful, radical but safe. I want to change the way that women birth; it is world-changing.” And “You want me to grow you a baby out of nothing, let’s make it happen.”
Cronenbergian body horror is a specific taste, and not for everyone. His 1988 Dead Ringers is creepy, unpalatable and controversial. This was always the case, and how most people felt when they watched it in 1988. Rewatching it, that doesn’t change.
From Elliot and Bev ‘sharing’ their sexual partners, without their knowledge, by switching places, to the psycho-sexual medical theatrics. The film is based on, and exploring, dubious medical ethics (mutant surgical instruments and all). The incest, the sexualised violence, the combined desexualisation and sexualisation of women without their consent, the misogyny (of Elliot, especially) is all uncomfortable. Intentionally so. David Cronenberg’s body horror often relies on womanhood as a vehicle for fear: imagery around motherhood, cervixes, wombs can be found in ‘The Brood’, as well as Dead Ringers. Is that right? Is it moral? Probably not, no. But I don’t think that’s his aim.
Cronenberg wants his films to provoke. He is known for the weirdest and most controversial body horror films of all time. With that being his aim, it still succeeds. It is not a feminist masterpiece, but it does probe important questions around gender politics, morality in science, and the othering and weaponising of women's bodies and fertility.
After watching the older version, I’m excited to see the remake. It’s a good, complex, creepy story and I’m sure Rachel Weisz will play the twins powerfully, just as Jeremy Irons did.
Fatal Attraction
The 1987 classic thriller, Fatal Attraction, is being transformed into a eight-part series which will be available from May 1st on Paramount+. Written by Desperate Housewives alumni Alexandra Cunningham, Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson portray Alex and Dan, in a “deep-dive reimagining of the classic 80's thriller, exploring timeless themes of marriage and infidelity through the lens of modern attitudes toward strong women, personality disorders and coercive control.”
The film sees Dan Gallagher (played by Michael Douglas) enjoying the good life; he's a successful New York lawyer, he's happily married to his loving wife Beth, and has a daughter. Despite this, he has a casual fling with a book editor named Alex (Glenn Close), and his life is thrown into chaos. The original film paints Dan as innocent, and Alex as a crazed ‘bunny boiler’ (which as a result of this film became slang for a woman who punishes a man because he has stopped being her lover) who stalks him and become more and more aggressive. Literally, she boils a bunny. The most iconic scene from the thriller is when Beth comes home and discovers her daughter's rabbit boiling in a pot of hot water. Which is, err, on the nose. The film ends in a bloody battle, set in a bath tub. Beth ends up shooting Alex, to save Dan, and they return to their happy lives together.
The plot is obviously pretty rife with sexism, but so was the casting. "There was a debate about her sexiness," Douglas said of Close at the time. “They gave me the most beautiful wife you could imagine, and the whole thing was ‘How could you leave this gorgeous woman for Glenn Close?’”
The 80s thriller is getting a modern makeover.
Joshua Jackson is looking to play the role of Dan differently and makes it clear that Dan is not an innocent victim: "The huge difference on the Dan side of the story is we have the time to really delve into the damage that he's causing," he says. "Honestly, the movie is very sympathetic to him. At no point does he seemingly feel all that guilty about what he's done. So we get into what might have happened if we saw all of those characters say five, 10, 15 years after the event, and the damage has now had a chance to seep down into the cracks of his marriage and the rest of his life. He actually has to deal with the repercussions of his actions."
Speaking with Grazia USA, Lizzy Caplan said: “The [original] movie still is great. It’s still scary, and makes you ask big questions, but there were two different endings and there was one ending that Glenn Close preferred, but they ended up going for another one. Audiences saw it very much through a 1980s perspective — this amazing guy makes one mistake and now this horrible woman is trying to ruin his life.” Adding that “It really shows how far we have come. I don’t think that we’ve arrived at any finish line in terms of everything that’s happened with #MeToo and what that set in motion. But the idea that you could never make the 1980s version of this now, shows some degree of progress. I think when they’re at their best, that’s what the reboot would do and hopefully our show does that.”
From the trailer, it seems like a more obvious remake than the aforementioned Grease and Dead Ringers, but through a female-lens.
Glenn Close has been vocal about Fatal Attraction, and how she wishes the character of Alex would have been given a different edit, in 2019 to The Guardian she said “I had so many secrets as Alex. The woman I was playing was not the same one who was perceived by the public. But I didn’t have the dialogue or the scenes to illuminate her backstory. If you did Fatal Attraction from Alex’s point of view, she would be a tragic person, not a dangerous, evil one.”
With my rewatch, I tried to separate what Close has said publicly and my personal reaction to the film. This was the hardest part, and I found that I was unable to. I didn’t find the content of the film all that shocking or anti-feminist, just a little out of date (the Bunny Boiler trope was a snooze then, and it’s a snooze now). Alex is not innocent and her actions are certainly extreme, but neither is Dan - he cheated on his family, and led Alex on. Rewatching, I'm stuck at another character who is generally glossed over - Beth. She deserves so much better, and it's frustrating seeing this narrative of a ‘good wife’ being someone who sticks by an unfaithful and undeserving husband. Justice for Beth, imo!
Above this, I am enraged that the star of the film was not given the creative control she deserved. That, though, doesn’t feel like it’s changed all that much. The percentage of women working as directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers was at just 24% in 2022. In this year’s Golden Globes, not a single female director got a nomination. Is the real problem here, not that the stories are anti-feminist, but that the making of said stories are?
To remake, or not to remake, that is the question
I generally think people are intelligent enough to realise that films made in the 80s may not reflect modern viewpoints, and that not everything needs to be re-scripted; especially when a lot of current remakes are given a very Hollywood, very half-arsed ‘feminist’ makeover, without actually improving on the film OR making it a legitimately nuanced feminist remake. After watching these original films, I was struck by the fact that they aren’t as backwards as people make them out to be. Some of it makes me uncomfortable, but largely these three films are very nuanced and don’t leave me outraged and wanting a redo.
I think, as a society, we like to pretend we’ve come further than we have in terms of mainstream societal beliefs and attitudes. But just spend a second on social media, pick up any mainstream newspaper, or read the latest statistics into violence against women and I think it’s abundantly clear that we have not. Let’s hope the upcoming remakes are more than just virtue signalling, and that they actually bring something new to the table. Casting a woman in a once-male-role or adding some Girl Boss feminist slogans does not a 2023-feminist-masterpiece make.
