Sleeping with the Enemy, the 1991 sequel to Pretty Woman, is rated R for “wife abuse terror and a sex scene.” Said sex scene is itself a piece of wife-abuse terror, coming as the nauseating post-script to the violent beating of Julia Roberts’ Laura, a young, reluctant housewife, by Patrick Bergin’s Martin, an older, finance-psycho husband. (Richard Gere was unavailable to reprise his role.) After retiring from the sex trade and volunteering for her local library, Laura appears to be employed as a performance artist improvising scenes of domestic bliss with Martin at cocktail parties and sailing trips hosted by their Cape Cod neighbours. Away from the floor-to-ceiling windows of their modernist beach home, Martin is a cyclone of physical and emotional violence in which Laura is barely surviving.

The menu items of American cinema’s romantic fairytales often cross over into the stuff of nightmares. Lavish gifts are a form of economic coercion. Spontaneity is a campaign of chaos making and alienation from support networks. One partner’s wealth serves as a gilded cage for the other. ‘Princess’ is not a title granted by birth, but a debasing, infantilizing pet name. The handsome prince is a depraved, misogynist turd.

On top of everything else, Laura’s asshole ex damaged her gorgeous bathroom.

Sleeping with the Enemy takes elements grounded in reality and sculpts them into a taut woman-in-peril terror picture. The establishment of danger at the hands of Martin is mercifully short and effective, making some of the hows of Laura’s flight irrelevant. (She surreptitiously jumps from a sailboat during an unexpected storm, appearing to have drowned. How did she know her neighbour would invite them out under circumstances she could take advantage of at the exact right timing to catch the greyhound bus leaving town?) The point is that it is time to leave, and she does, escaping to the gold-dappled idyll of a leafy college-town in Iowa. Martin, however, discovers her tracks and chases her down, cutting through bright groups of late-summer revelers in an all-black, billowy trench that flutters behind him like a fart he can’t outrun.

One can appreciate a queasy feeling upon learning that the facets of domestic violence have been sculpted into a genre deeply intertwined with exploitation. However, Sleeping deploys its genre tropes to nimbly bypass common and frustrating cultural diversionary tactics from what should be the true focus of intimate partner violence cases: the victim. The film accepts Martin as a monster and does not siphon off our emotional investment in Laura at any time by getting into the hows and whys of who he is. The usual interrogation of victims’ reasons and timelines for staying are neutered for a practical reason: she had to learn how to swim before making her escape! In fact, Laura’s terrorized gaze is the storytelling lens of the film and it rarely lets its guard down.

If we agree real-world nightmares share DNA with the plot details of romantic fantasies, then it fits that we would also lose sleep over the implications of the grand gestures made by male romantic heroes. Going back to Sleeping’s preceding film, Pretty Woman, we can find some chilling examples of subtle, unquestioned male entitlement. At the beginning of the film, a female romantic partner accuses Edward (Gere) of requiring her at his “beck and call,” a charge he denies, though he has only just previously requested she fly from New York City to Los Angeles at a moment’s notice. How will it be different for Vivian (Roberts) after he “rescues” her at the end of the film? Edward has changed his business practices for the better, but his intimate relationships have retained a similar pallor and are, in fact, beyond the realm of forgivable during the events of Sleeping.

Those threadbare jeans should have scored a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

Upon arrival in Iowa, Laura finds a love interest in her next door neighbour Ben (Kevin Anderson), a professor of theatre at the local college. Amy Gentry, in a critique of Sleeping for The Paris Review (which makes many of the same points made here), describes him as the following:

“His idea of a magical first date involves leading her, blindfolded, into the drama department after hours, setting her up on a pitch-black stage, and then watching from the audience as he turns on the spotlight. She fidgets nervously, unsure whether she’s about to be filmed, or possibly murdered; it’s all very romantic.”

Ben has a habit of surprising Laura from the periphery of her vision. He also intuits that Laura has escaped horrific violence and assists her in finding work in her new town under her false identity. He puts his stage skills to good use in concocting a gender-swap masquerade for Laura in order for her to visit her elderly mother, free from Martin picking up her scent. He could have accompanied her to bear witness, to provide protection and run interference if needed. His reasons for not doing so are unexplored. It also must be said that he has an ass that belongs in a remote location so admirers can make arduous, spiritual pilgrimages to it. A question for Laura looms over Ben: is her lingering terror understandably running a vein through what could be a sweet and tender relationship or is it alerting her to a pattern similar to the one Martin previously laid down? Sleeping leaves this unresolved.

He is doing his best to help.

If Martin’s wealth created a gilded cage for Laura, Ben’s ‘help’ constructs a shrouded one for her to occupy. Based as it is on a lie, Laura’s freedom from Martin is precarious. To live life underground is to accept another form of instability and robs Laura of the dignity of fully participating in her community.   Rebecca Solnit, in her essay “A Short History of Silence,” writes of misogynist violence,

“Many women are refugees in their own country; many women are forced to disappear from their own homes and lives and take up secret lives in secret locations.”

Women fleeing violence are forced to trade their voice for their security and Sleeping exploits this truth while also avoiding the administrative details necessary to make sense of it. How, specifically, did she plan and fund her escape without Martin figuring it out? How, specifically, did Ben get her a job in a new town without her social security number nor her references? That there are no real-world specifics to tone and shape the narrative allows us the luxury of thinking that this story is an exaggeration, that the details we are given are to outsized to fit with what we know happens in ‘real life.’ This, too, is silence.

Sleeping With The Enemy was directed by Joseph Ruben.

WORKS CITED

Gentry, Amy. “Setting Boundaries.” theparisreview.org. November 25, 2016. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/25/setting-boundaries/

Pretty Woman. Dir: Garry Marshall. 1990.

Solnit, Rebecca. “A Short History of Silence.” The Mother of All Questions. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2017.