Editor's note: The following contains major spoilers for both the TV and movie version of Fatal Attraction.Adrian Lyne's 1987 erotic thriller Fatal Attraction is not kind to its villain, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close). Because the movie is intended to be scary, Alex is portrayed as threatening, and menacing: a dangerous, insane killer whose motives defy understanding, a bit like Michael Myers. The 2023 miniseries, on the other hand, takes a very different approach to Alex (Lizzy Caplan) and, by extension, to her mental illness. Less horror movie villain and more complicated character. We don't exactly root for series Alex, but we certainly have sympathy for her.
Many critics have theorized that Alex has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a mental illness that, like all illnesses, can present differently from one person to another, but is often characterized by severe mood swings, unstable relationships in which the individual's feelings about another person can change rapidly from one extreme to another. People with BPD can have difficulty establishing their own identity or sense of self, and a tendency to view everything in black and white. They may also have a powerful fear of abandonment, acute anger that can border on rage, self-harm, suicidal tendencies, impulsive behavior which may include promiscuity, and a tendency to dissociate. People with BPD are not more likely to harm others, despite what Hollywood would have you believe.
Any viewer who has seen both the film and the series will note that while movie Alex shows some of these symptoms, series Alex shows all of them.
The Movie Version of 'Fatal Attraction' Makes Alex Into a Horror Villain
Whether the creators intended her to have BPD or not, movie Alex is clearly mentally ill. But because she's portrayed as scary, her unusual behavior is presented as disturbing rather than sympathetic. Her first instance of self-harm, in which she cuts her wrists so as to force Dan (Michael Douglas) to stay with her, is manipulative, intended to horrify both us and Dan. The famous scene in which she sits alone in a room, listening to Madame Butterfly and turning a light off and on repeatedly, could be read as dissociating, but she's doing so in the creepiest way possible.
By the end of the film, Alex has become completely delusional — not a symptom of BPD. She believes that Dan actually loves her and that his wife, Beth (Anne Archer), stands in the way of them being together. She self-harms again, this time almost absentmindedly poking herself in the thigh with a knife — again, creepy and disturbing — before trying to murder Beth.
We never learn anything about the movie Alex's background. Does she have a history of unstable relationships or obsessive behavior? Did something in her past trigger her illness? We don't know. Like so many horror movie villains, she seems to have simply sprung fully formed out of the ether, ready to latch onto and ruin the life of the first man who gives her the attention she appears to crave.
Alex in the Series' Behavior Is More True to the BPD Experience
Series Alex is a far more fleshed-out character. This is due in part to the length of the series, which gives the creators more time to explore her backstory and perspective, but they also seem to be making a concerted effort to ensure her behavior conforms more closely to real-life symptoms of BPD.
Series Alex self-harms, but not to manipulate others (she does manipulate people, but not in the same horrific way that movie Alex does). Instead, like many real people, she uses self-harm as a coping method: we even see the moment in her past when she apparently discovers that physical pain helps her to ignore or push aside her emotional pain. She also dissociates — at least once while replaying her emotionally abusive father's words over and over in her head, another form of self-harm — but it's shown as a simple time jump, rather than something disturbing to watch. To be fair, though, her murder of Beth's (Amanda Peet) mother also seems to happen during an episode of dissociation: she appears to be completely detached from reality as she closes the pool cover to drown the intoxicated woman.
Series Alex also struggles with her identity, a common symptom of BPD. Her neighbor, Dr. Paul (Josh Zuckerman), who we later learn has been illegally dealing pills, describes how she took on aspects of his identity after they became friends: claiming to share his interests, imitating his laugh, even writing with her left hand as he does. In the second half of the series, we learn more about Alex's backstory. We discover that at a young age, her mother abandoned her, and her father became extremely verbally abusive — two major risk factors for BPD. She has had numerous unstable relationships throughout her life, and her own behavior — her tendencies to get deeply attached to people very quickly and to lash out when upset — has resulted in people distancing themselves from her, which exacerbates her condition. When she's hurting, she reaches out to her father; though she knows he will verbally abuse her, she also knows that, unlike many others in her life, he will always pick up the phone.
Alex Is a More Fleshed-Out Character in the Series Than in the Movie
As opposed to movie Alex, series Alex isn't a one-dimensional, pure evil character. Her obviously difficult childhood and young adulthood make her sympathetic, even pitiable. She's incredibly kind and patient with the crime and abuse victims that she works with, and her boss, Conchita (Toks Olagundoye), speaks highly of her work. Clay Bishop (Michael Cassidy), who Alex briefly dates, seems to understand what she's dealing with due to his own family history, and he does his best to treat her with care and kindness. This backfires, unfortunately, causing her to turn on him immediately in a fit of rage (a symptom of BPD) and cut him out of her life, and for this, he blames himself.
If just a few things had happened differently in series Alex's life, we can imagine her going down a very different path. In an attempt to distance herself from her abusive father, she moves to California, and her former therapist is no longer able to treat her. Had she continued therapy, or had she perhaps met Clay at a different point in her life, she might not have ended up in a tumultuous affair with a married man (Joshua Jackson).
In the movie, we see Alex as an evil villain waiting for the right victim. In the series, we see a woman who has dealt with terrible trauma and never learned to cope with it in healthy ways; as Clay put it, someone who is "unstable and scared and lost," that others are only too eager to characterize as "evil." But while movie Alex is meant only to be feared and not understood, it's reasonable to assume that series Alex would have turned out a very different person had her parents not saddled her with this terrible trauma.
Although the series does make Alex far more sympathetic and, by extension, more interesting as a character, she's still a murderer. She intentionally drowns Beth's mother and sets fire to a house in which multiple people are working who could have easily died. In this respect, she's arguably even more dangerous than movie Alex, meaning that the series perpetuates the same misleading stereotype about mentally ill people that the film does. In reality, people with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators, despite movies and TV constantly telling us otherwise. But at least the series does Alex the courtesy of giving her a history that explains, even if it doesn't excuse, her behavior.