Fatal Attraction and the endurance of the ‘bunny boiler’, dating culture’s most toxic stereotype

Michael Douglas’s Dan ultimately ends up with his life and family (save one fluffy pet) intact. And as the erotic thriller progressed through the 1990s, Douglas would star in other problematic examples of the genre, which positioned powerful, independent women as a threat, including Basic Instinct (1992), in which he played a detective lusting after an enigmatic crime novelist and serial killer played by Sharon Stone, and Disclosure (1994) with Demi Moore. Longworth describes the latter as “a female boss sexually harassing her male underling as part of a scheme to cover up her own professional incompetence. So you get to have it both ways in terms of the panic. To express the fear of the strong woman in the workplace and satisfy people who think that women in a position of power over men must be incompetent and probably did something dastardly to get there.”

But outside of Douglas’s oeuvre, the figure of the “bunny boiler” became even more absurd as the culture, and its cinema, did some ludicrous mental gymnastics to cast men as women’s victims. The ’90s saw the media cast Monica Lewinsky and Anita Hill as the manipulative obsessive seductresses of a president, Bill Clinton, and supreme court judge, Clarence Thomas, respectively. And Longworth’s current series of You Must Remember This, Erotic ’90s, will discuss films like Poison Ivy (1992) and The Crush (1993) where grown men face “bunny boilers” that are 16 and 14, respectively. “I have several episodes that I’m doing about what I call the ’90s Lolita’ which was a really prevalent trend,” she says, with a sigh. For Longworth, while the way Fatal Attraction treated Alex left much to be desired, she was at least a 36-year-old adult – whereas, she says, the films of the 90s that followed suggested that “if you are a sexy teenage girl, if you have the power to turn on an adult man, you should be treated like an adult woman.”

While this particularly noxious variety of Fatal Attraction spin-off may have been a short fad, the wider concept of the “bunny boiler” endured and has had a pernicious effect on further generations of women. “I do work in the domestic abuse sphere as well and the ‘mad ex’ is very powerful tool for grooming a new victim,” Conroy explains. “Saying, ‘oh, you know, I’ve got this really difficult ex-partner. She’s crazy. She just lies all the time.’ You see it all the time with multiple abusers.” 

A disappointing remake

For those coming to the post-#Metoo Paramount adaptation, thinking that the fact it was developed by and directed by women would mean a new approach to the “crazy ex”, and that this time Alex would not be such a “bunny boiler”… well, there is bad news. If anything, from the episodes I have seen, Caplan’s Alex is less sympathetic, and more maniacal than her predecessor – while Jackson’s Dan is sweeter, more endearing and ultimately painted as even more of a victim of women’s wily schemes than Douglas’s incarnation. As for that bunny? Showrunner Alex Cunningham has confirmed that while a rabbit does appear, there will be no rabbit murder at any point in the new series, though it does give a nod to that infamous scene.