Feminist writer Susan Faludi, in her groundbreaking book of essays Backlash, condemns the film as widely misogynistic and emblematic of a particular misogyny of the 1980s, one that condemned the single, career-minded, modern woman who had erupted after the third wave of feminism with the best, most wide-ranging tool available: the movies. The ending of Fatal Attraction, the pointed choice of having Beth kill Alex in her home, was decried by Faludi: “It’s a nightmare from which he [Dan] wakes up sobered, but unscathed. In the end, the attraction is fatal only for the single woman.”
