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Marital infidelity is widespread in every culture. Men and women have evolved with an urge to philander, anthropologists reason, because varying one's sexual partners increases one's probability of producing offspring.1 Perhaps this is why we have had plots about infidelity as long as we have had spoken stories. Audiences obviously enjoy witnessing from a safe and superior distance sexual love's potency, which is often shown to be damaging or destroying others' lives. Because of the impeachment trial of Clinton and the American media's interest in politicians' personal lives, it seems that adultery has become a national obsession. Before our reputation for prudishness becomes unquestioned, however, it is wise to examine our current popular entertainment. Of late it suggests Americans are actually quite sympathetic to adulterous affairs. Prime-time television clearly reflects society's greater willingness to tolerate adultery: now television dramas depict affairs without obvious homewrecking villains, and extramarital affairs are apt to go unresolved for months (James 1).2 Films are following suit: for instance, the recent Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love both invite us to enter into the excitement of a relationship only to discover it is an adulterous one. Nowadays a winning formula seems to be to depict adultery not only generously, but also downright sentimentally.
To determine the frequency of this theme, I culled the top five money-making films from 1947 (the first year with reliable figures) to 1996.(3) This list of 245 films yielded seven serious dramas with adulterous unions at their center: From Here to Eternity (1953), Not as a Stranger (1955), Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf (1966), The Graduate (1967), Dr. Zhivago (1966), Ryan's Daughter (1971), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Disclosure (1994).4 Of these, only Dr. Zhivago sympathetically depicted a relationship in which one or more married persons find phenomenal passion and emotional satisfaction in an affair. Indeed, the relatively recent Fatal Attraction and Disclosure paint severely negative pictures of affairs; on the other hand, as John Orr has argued, these films are more accurately classed as "male professional anxiety" films, which (like other '80s films such as Working Girl, The War of the Roses, Wall Street, and Basic Instinct) suggest fearful consequences will result from ambitious women entering the high-prestige workplace (Orr 190). Examining high-grossing films filtered out many popular...