Adrian Lyne
1941-
Foxes (1980); Flashdance (1983); 9 1/2 Weeks (1985); Fatal Attraction (1987); Jacob’s Ladder (1990); Indecent Proposal (1993); Lolita (1997); Unfaithful (2002)
Adrian Lyne was part of the British invasion that transformed Hollywood in the 1980s. Alongside brothers Ridley and Tony Scott, Alan Parker and Hugh Hudson, Lyne came from an advertising background. Hudson failed to develop a lucrative American career after his epic of American independence, Revolution, flopped disastrously at the box-office despite the star presence of Al Pacino. The Scott brothers quickly established themselves as amongst the best of contemporary film directors. Ridley made an enormous hit out of the film Alien, crafted with assistance from co-producers Walter Hill and David Giler, and cemented a career in cultdom with Blade Runner whilst Tony signed with producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson to become perhaps the finest practitioner of Hollywood action movies, beginning with the epochal Tom Cruise vehicle Top Gun. Parker in the meantime courted the Academy Awards with Mississippi Burning before helming Madonna in Evita after Oliver Stone bowed out of the project.
Lyne’s career parallels the Scott brothers in particular, as Hudson and Parker returned to England, though differs greatly in subject and style. While they concentrated on big budget action and genre spectacle in the bombastic Hollywood blockbuster sense, Lyne favoured smaller, though equally glossy, morality plays exploring American socialization, the gender politics of sexual fantasy and the morality of marital monogamy. It was on that subject that Lyne found immense box-office success with a trio of what can be described best as modern morality plays – Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful. This trio encapsulated the moral and ethical dilemmas facing American married couples in the “yuppie” era of family values, sexual fidelity and material prosperity: morality, couple-hood and the upper middle-class American Dream of home, family and wealth – the “ideal” saturating American advertising and political propaganda in Reagan’s America, which saw to it that Fatal Attraction became the must-see thriller of the 1980s and turned actor Michael Douglas into a household name.
Jennifer Beals in Flashdance
Socialization, ethical behaviour and even economic determinism underlie many of Lyne’s films, from the spectrum of teenage girls facing maturity in his debut work Foxes, which gave actress Jodie Foster her best opportunity since Taxi Driver and the opportunity to virtually carry a feature movie (though it was pushed as an ensemble piece), to the couple willing to compromise their sexual fidelity for a lifetime of financial security in Indecent Proposal. After two films which dealt with young women creating a life for themselves in a Patriarchal American culture – Foxes and the smash hit Jerry Bruckheimer produced Flashdance which became Lyne’s first screen phenomenon of the 1980s – Lyne created a stir of controversy with the steamy 9 1/2 Weeks an erotic fantasy of sexual role-playing which critics felt merely reflected Lyne’s more indulgent superficiality and thematic recalcitrance. The dynamics of the sexual obsession between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger in that film led Lyne to examine similar themes of sexual need but specifically within the confines and associated traditional values of mature-age, stable, affluent upper middle-American marriage, for Fatal Attraction.
With Fatal Attraction, moral malleability and its repercussions became recurrent themes in Lyne’s work, which thereafter examined relationships through an ethical frame of reference rooted in conventional marital monogamy. Far from superficial couples erotica, Fatal Attraction struck a social nerve and made Lyne an A-list Hollywood director. Traditional values and ideals of couple-hood are always under threat in Lyne, finally inverted and even mocked in his remake of Lolita which managed to better the Stanley Kubrick version of Vladimir Nabokov’s much-banned book, which Kubrick presented as black comedy and Lyne as tragedy. Indecent Proposal followed up Fatal Attraction and made a timely issue of newlywed financial insecurity and moral compromise, whilst Unfaithful examined sexual need and fidelity within the context of long-term marital stability and sexual fantasy. 9 1/2 Weeks proved Lyne’s skill as a glossy soft-core eroticist, first glimpsed in his staging of the contrast between routine strip club dancing and sexual self-expression through bodily movement in some of the dance sequences in Flashdance. Lyne’s mildly titillating erotica would prove influential, particularly on director Zalman King, though he turned away from overt displays, preferring morality over sexuality: however, narcissistic 9 1/2 Weeks star Rourke considered himself a sex symbol and subsequently appeared in Zalman King’s Wild Orchid.
Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez are Unfaithful
Lyne detoured from his marital monogamy trilogy twice. Firstly for the spell-binding fantasy of identity dissolution in Jacob’s Ladder, cleverly juxtaposing schizophrenic identity dissolution with the dying process in images of vibrant hallucinatory intensity found nowhere else in his work. Although the script was at the time the most highly sought after in Hollywood, the film flopped. Indeed, with most of his films anchored in sexual morality and moral behaviouralism, Jacob’s Ladder stands out as a sole indulgence in imaginative speculation, a departure from the themes obsessing him, and it befuddled his critical supporters, most of whom dismissed it as a mere anomaly. Also a departure in that it is Lyne’s sole period film – thereby foregoing the contemporary relevance that made him an A-list Hollywood director – was the tragic examination of paedophilia in the controversial remake of Lolita, a film that was protested by Christian moralizers as condoning child sexual abuse and being nothing less than child pornography masquerading as art: charges which had greeted the original Stanley Kubrick version and since accompanied any film exploring adolescent sexual socialization, as Louis Malle discovered when he released Pretty Baby displaying a naked adolescent girl, Brooke Shields.
Lyne’s sympathy for the arguable sex offender, his sense of incipient adolescent sexual awakening in sly, even adolescent-sexualizing imagery and the sheer ambivalence of moral codes in respect of the variances in individual human behaviour made sure that Lolita emerged his finest and most complex work, though the protests ensured that it received no cinema release in the USA, being almost banned in Australia at the bequest of vocal Christian “wowsers” led by such pious organizations as the Festival of Light, traditional advocates of censorship. Lyne takes years developing his feature projects and despite his most recent film Unfaithful being a clever Americanization of French art-house cinema (another remake, this time of a Claude Chabrol original, La Femme Infidel) Lyne remains an elusive, sporadic presence on the American film scene. His films are always visually sophisticated, glossy, fluid and morally provocative although it was in the unique context of American materialism and marital morality in the 1980s that he found popularity and critical attention. Of the British advertising invasion, he was the most willing to question traditional American social, sexual and ethical values as opposed to the aesthetic embrace of genre filmmaking craft that made the Scott brothers prolific.
Adrian Lyne Interview re: Fatal Attraction
(courtesy of YouTube embedded video)