Neo-noir: Impulse

Impulse is one lousy film but it is one of a very few films to try presenting a woman's sex drive getting her into trouble as we find men doing in neo noir. For that reason it's worth a bit of study even though it's painful to try and watch.

It's Hollywood at its worst. Steal the concept from a previously successful film and reset it. Thus, Blue Crush was Flashdance on surfboards. The concept behind Impulse was "Let's do something like Fatal Attraction only reverse the sexes of the two principals."

If you didn't see Fatal Attraction, you're not missing much, but here is the gist of it. A man married to a very sexy woman bizarrely has a one-night stand with another, less attractive but wilder, woman who turns out to be an obsessed stalker who nearly ruins his entire life.

Here is the essential point though: the troubles and the drama for Michael Douglas's character in Fatal Attraction all take place after he cheats. That calls for an interesting moral response from the audience. We have remain sympathetic to him even though he cheats on his wife. The film would fail utterly if we saw him as largely deserving his fate. It's not just that we sympathize; we want him to get away with it.

This isn't an unusual or difficult thing to bring off in a movie. There are dozens of films in which our sympathy is with men who are married to a loving and caring woman and cheat on her and yet retain our sympathy. We will feel that what he has done is wrong but we don't want him to get caught. If he does get caught we will root for him as he attempts to regain his wife's love. But how many films can you think of in which a woman cheats on her faithful and loving husband and yet the audience's sympathy remains with her?

Keep that in mind as I tell you about the set up for Impulse:

• A woman loves her husband deeply but feels something is missing from their sex life.
• She becomes aware that something is missing not because she wants sex but because she wants a baby and their efforts to get pregnant are hampered by his lack of interest in sex.
• She suggests that they try a little role playing in which they each assume romantic sounding names.
• He initially fails to respond and then tries clumsily to do so.

Got that? So here is what happens next. She goes on a business trip and while she is sitting in the hotel bar she sees her husband walk in dressed as if in character to role play. She walks up to him and tells him she wants him. They go up to her room and have wild fantasy sex. And then, as he leaves, she tells him where and when her next business trip is.

Things are looking good right? What possibly could go wrong?

Well, it turns out that the man in the bar was not her husband but his absolute doppelganger  and that he will also turn out to be an obsessed stalker. This is, of course, utterly implausible. It couldn't happen. Even if he were physically identical, husbands and wives have so many shared secrets that she would unfailingly spot that he wasn't her husband in minutes if not seconds.

But why do it that way? Why not just have her simply cheat on her husband and come to regret it? Well, we can see the answer to that if we imagine, hypothetically, that a wife could be fooled in this way. If that could and did happen, then she wouldn't really have cheated. A woman in such a a position has simply made a mistake. She thought she was having sex with her husband.

The point being that we simply do not treat men and women the same when making moral judgments. A man who has an affair is in the wrong can still a be sympathetic character. A woman who does the same will not win our sympathy. It shouldn't be that way but it is.

And that tells you a lot about why there has not been a truly great neo noir with a woman in the lead role. The public simply isn't ready for such a thing yet.