Topic summary
bunny boiler
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Fatal Attraction.
Critical response
As referenced in Orit Kamir's Every Breath You Take: Stalking Narratives and the Law, "Glenn Close's character Alex is quite deliberately made to be an erotomaniac." Gelder reports that Close "consulted three separate shrinks for an inner profile of her character, who is meant to be suffering from a form of an obsessive condition known as de Clérambault's syndrome" (Gelder 1990, 93–94). The term "bunny boiler" is used to describe an obsessive, spurned woman, deriving from the scene where it is discovered that Alex has boiled the family's pet rabbit. The sensational 2013 murder trial of Jodi Arias for the grisly killing of her ex-boyfriend in Mesa, Arizona, was widely dubbed a real-life "Fatal Attraction" due to the crime’s graphic nature and hypersexual, obsessive themes.