I remember watching this movie back in the mid-1990s from the post-Soviet reality where I then lived and everything about it seemed entirely incomprehensible to me. The main character, a young woman named Allie, wants a husband and a bunch of kids but her fiancé is a cheating piece of garbage. She half-heartedly attempts a life of an independent New York businesswoman. Of course, she ends up inviting a psychotic serial killer into her life and all sorts of crazy things begin to happen.
Even back in the 1990s it was clear to me that the movie betrayed a profound anxiety over the lifestyle that the young women depicted in it were trying to live. It is also clear what creates dysfunction in their lives. The only positive male figure in the movie is Allie’s gay neighbor and he is unavailable as a potential life mate. Men are insensitive, lecherous creeps, the movie tells us, so young women are forced to engineer their lives around that vacuum.
We all know how Allie’s story plays out in our era but the movie is definitely worth watching because it depicts that old New York of myth-making and a thousand movies and books. I never lived in New York but I feel nostalgia for the city that still exists in these old movies. It was a crazy yet magical place. The knowledge that everything we see in Single White Female is gone is not easy to process. The movie is based on a novel but I was never tempted to read it because the visual memory of the city, its buildings, its environment, and its people is a lot more powerful than words.
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