Infidelity’s lure: cautionary and illicit entertainment

We cannot get enough of peeking into other people’s affairs -- their extramarital affairs.

The rather uncharitable fact of the matter is that adultery is entertaining, provided it can be experienced from the comfortable distance of the TV-room couch or a seat in the cineplex. As a fresh crop of adulterers in pop-culture attests, we are a nation that loves our cheaters.

The characters in Mike Nichols’ new film, “Closer,” join a recent lineup of the unfaithful. Over the course of the film, a wife betrays a husband by having an affair with a man who is simultaneously cheating on his longtime girlfriend. Earlier this year, John Curran’s drama “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” dissected the damage done by a college professor’s affair with his best friend’s wife, and Tod Williams’ drama “The Door in the Floor” featured Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges as married partners who find reasons to stray.

Television, meanwhile, offers up a steady stream of straying adults. The Style network’s “Diary of an Affair” juxtaposes interviews with adulterers and their partners alongside gauzy documentary-style re-creations of their actions to chronicle real-life stories of betrayal. On the network hit “Desperate Housewives,” Eva Longoria’s very married Gabrielle Solis is carrying on an affair with a studly young landscaper. “Sex and the City” reruns recently featured the episode in which Charlotte has a dalliance with her husband’s gardener, and Carrie experiences guilt and fears “karmic retribution” for renewing her affair with her now-married ex-boyfriend Big. “Oprah” regularly features programs devoted to the damaging effects of infidelity -- from November’s “Secret Sex in the Suburbs” to the Kobe Bryant confession that led to a program titled “How I Found Out My Husband Was Cheating.”

On book racks, adultery never goes away. Penelope Lively’s May release, “The Photograph,” begins as a widowed husband finds an envelope marked “Do Not Open” in his wife’s handwriting. He opens it to find a photograph of his late wife holding hands with her sister’s husband. His discovery prompts a rearrangement of everything he thought he knew of the woman who was his wife. Elizabeth Berg’s new novel, “Say When,” opens as a wife of 10 years tells her husband she has been having an affair and wants a divorce, a circumstance that propels him to reexamine their marriage and choose whether to fight for it. British author Jane Green’s new novel, “To Have and to Hold,” pivots around the actions of a heroine who finds herself married to a serial philanderer.

However it may seem, adultery is not a new cultural fixation. Literary classics such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 “The Scarlet Letter,” Tolstoy’s 1875-77 “Anna Karenina,” D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” all explore aspects of deceit. John Updike’s oeuvre could scarcely exist without it.

Motion-picture archives are also loaded with unfaithful characters, in such films as 1944’s “Double Indemnity,” 1946’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” 1970’s “Ryan’s Daughter,” 1978’s “An Unmarried Woman,” 1987’s “Fatal Attraction,” 1989’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” 1998’s “A Perfect Murder” and last year’s “Unfaithful.”

Adultery is entertaining because it traffics in the illicit, the selfish and the naughty. Unless an affair is conducted in the open, it is a game that derives some of its excitement by the fact that it is hidden and forbidden. Individuals -- real or fictional -- who indulge in extramarital affairs are choosing to do what all of us know we should not: They are breaking vows, breaking hearts, failing to resist temptation. Statistics given at the start of each “Diary of an Affair” episode suggest that few do resist: The program says that roughly 60% of married men have affairs and 40% of married women do.

In a culture of cellphones and chat rooms, a culture in which the logistics of staging an affair have become altogether too easy, adultery stories function as a kind of preventive medicine. They are cautionary tales designed to show us that behind the temptation of a new sexual partner or love affair lurk the consequences of betrayal. Sure the stories titillate and unnerve us -- they are as voyeuristic as the soft-focus dramatizations on “Diary of an Affair” -- but the majority ultimately warn against transgression by giving voice to outrage and pain and dramatizing the devastating violation of trust that each affair ultimately represents.

The fact that most stories of betrayal follow a familiar pattern does little to dim the collective enthusiasm for these scenarios. Nor does the fact that very few adultery stories come with happy endings. Nichols’ characters in “Closer” each suffer the pain of betrayal and its ugly aftereffects. The unfaithful partner in “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” a family man, must weigh the consequences of losing his loving wife and children against the satisfactions of an ongoing erotic love affair, and he stands to lose something either way.

Some adultery stories exaggerate the dangers of an illicit affair, providing dramatic metaphors for moral punishment. In “Presumed Innocent,” an unfaithful husband must live with the fact that his affair has turned his wife into a murderer. The film’s last line is like a sentence: “There was a crime; there was a victim; and there is punishment.” In “Fatal Attraction,” a married man’s erotic affair becomes a dangerous liaison when his lover, Glenn Close’s bunny boiler, proves herself psychologically unstable and capable of murder.

In some of the darkest stories involving adultery, those who stray beyond the bonds of marriage are not punished. In the noir world of “Double Indemnity,” an adulteress tempts her lover into murdering her husband and then leaves him responsible for the crime. In “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” a businessman who has an affair and subsequently has his mistress murdered gets away with it.

Where adultery is drawn in a complex fashion, the moral conventions that attend it are subject to the same scrutiny brought to bear against the adulterers. Hawthorne dares to sympathize with his faithless characters in “Scarlet Letter.” His young wife, Hester Prynne, falls in love with the Rev. Dimmesdale, and their bond, tested in countless ways, proves true.

Hawthorne’s villain is not Hester but rather her vengeful husband, the small-minded townsfolk who sit in judgment over her and her actions, and the social conventions that keep her tied to an unloving husband and separated from her lover, who is the father of her child. Hawthorne’s novel is also the ultimate dramatization of the manner in which punishment can come from within. In Dimmesdale, he creates a man literally destroyed by the power of shame and conscience.

D.H. Lawrence takes the part of the lovers in “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” dramatizing the importance of sexual compatibility to any union. Lady Chatterly dares an affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, who has none of her husband’s social standing or fortune but whose hold on her outweighs those material possessions.

On film, “Closer” and “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” attempt to get audiences inside the heads and hearts of the individuals having affairs and to show all sides of the story. Likewise “Diary of an Affair.” But if understanding all of the points of view increases sympathy for all concerned, it does not erase the fact that a betrayal involves one person’s willfully deceiving another.

Hawthorne was careful to build in a justification for Hester Prynne’s affair: Her husband had been gone for two years and was presumed lost at sea. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly was confined in a marriage to a man who, having returned from World War I in a wheelchair, was paralyzed and embittered. Couples on “Diary of an Affair” offer a number of justifications for their actions: A spouse was too busy with work and young children; a “friendship” developed at work; life had become too routine and lacked excitement.

The self-help section of every bookstore attests to the agony suffered by anyone who has been betrayed by a spouse or longtime lover. Titles including Janis Spring’s “After the Affair,” Jane Greer’s “How Could You Do This to Me?” and Rona Subotnik and Gloria Harris’ “Surviving Infidelity” suggest how difficult it can be to overcome a partner’s deception.

If movies and books and Style’s “Diary” confessions are any indication, the pain of adultery has less to do with the sex involved than with the lying and deceit. In “Kinsey,” Bill Condon’s recent film, title character Alfred Kinsey has a sexual affair with a man. He immediately tells his wife, Mac, in order to avoid deceiving her, the thing he regards as the greater sin. Mac responds by explaining that temptation exists but that you resist it, because loving someone means you agree not to hurt them.

When “Diary of an Affair” debuted this fall, executive producer Linda Ellman, an NBC news veteran, told TV writers that in 25 years in the business, “Diary” had been the hardest show to book. “It took a lot of outreach and a lot of begging and pleading to get people to open up their lives,” Ellman wrote in a memo to TV writers. Those who did come forward were generally “people who wanted to talk about it so they could help others from falling into the same situation.”

Ellman added that she wanted “Diary” to avoid easy moral judgments. “Society has changed to the point where I don’t think [adultery] belongs in the closet. Everybody is better off once the truth is told.” The prevalence and enduring popularity of stories about adultery suggest that audiences agree -- even if most would prefer the experience to be vicarious.

Deborah Hornblow is a film critic at the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.