An ‘Indecent Proposal’ Remake Could Never Recapture How Scandalous The Original Was

Last week, as reported by Collider, we began to get word of a possible remake of the 1993 film Indecent Proposal, written by The Girl on the Train screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. The original film starred Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore as a happily married couple whose lives are disrupted when Moore’s character catches the eye of a playboy billionaire, played by Robert Redford, who boldly offers Harrelson a million dollars for the pleasure of sleeping with his wife. It’s a 25-year-old movie that wasn’t all that great to begin with — it “won” the Razzie Award for Worst Picture in its year, in fact — so what’s with the fervor to remake it?

In my opinion, only a Millennial or younger would even think to ask that question. I wrote on this site a few weeks ago that the children’s Halloween film Hocus Pocus represented one of the dividing lives between Generation X and Millennials. Simply put, as I observed when this news trickled out …

It’s a handy guide for anyone born in a borderline year. Any younger than junior high (which I was at the time), and you wouldn’t have been able to appreciate all the cultural fuss that arose over Indecent Proposal. And that fuss was everywhere. The simple question the movie implicitly asked its audience — What would you do? A million dollars for one night with your spouse? — has people talking for months. There were of course the anti-Hollywood, anti-sex religious types, of course. Those people had their pitchforks at the ready for any new film by Adrian Lyne, since he’d already established himself as the king of Hollywood sex cinema, between 9 1/2 Weeks and Fatal Attraction. In fact, after Indecent Proposal, Lyne would goon to remake Lolita in 1997 and direct Unfaithful in 2002, helping Diane Lane to her one and only Oscar nomination in the process. Lyne was an expert provocateur, and in Indecent Proposal he provoked everyone, from Oprah to talk show hosts to the cast of the second season of The Real World. That show is sadly not streaming anywhere, so I can’t go for hard proof, but I vividly remember Tami bringing up the subject of the movie and then beginning to ask “Would any of you…” before Dominic jumped in and said, “In a second.”

Pop culture was a far more tightly closed circle back then, so we were all experiencing relatively the same things. Which is probably why I won’t be the only one whose memory of Indecent Proposal is indelibly linked to Sadé’s “No Ordinary Love,” which was used heavily in the marketing campaign.

So why did Indecent Proposal strike such a nerve? It’s been 25 years, but let’s hazard a few guesses:

• Basic titillation. Again, Andrian Lyne knew how to play this game, and crossing the classic ’70s heartthrob Robert Redford with Moore and Harrelson, two of the hottest movie stars of the early ’90s was a masterstroke.
• The visual of Demi Moore naked in bed, rolling around atop a million dollars in cash is about as succinct a visual to represent Hollywood as we’d ever seen.
• Coming off of the recession of the early ’90s, the prospect of selling a night with your wife for a million dollars meant something more than just a particularly smutty Scruples question. It gave a particularly predatory angle to the Redford character.
• The sex hangups of the early ’90s were not to be underestimated. America was very easily scandalized by sex back then.
• Unsurprisingly, feminist groups were all over this movie. The power dynamics are fucked. That Moore’s character had zero agency in this dark bargain — we see her consulting with Harrelson’s character over whether they should take the money or not, but there’s no thought given to whether or not Moore would or could nix the deal — was an incredibly creepy setup, even back in 1993.
• American audiences have always and will likely always like to judge. Indecent Proposal was essentially one great big invitation to play Monday-morning quarterback to these people’s lives.

Unfortunately, there’s almost no chance at replicating the kind of scandalized reaction America had to the idea of a rich man purchasing a night with a poorer man’s wife. If the 50 Shades franchise taught us anything, it’s that you really have to up the ante on the kept-woman fantasy in order to play the game these days, and even in that case, the public gets pretty tepid by the second and third movies. But perhaps that’s only how it should be. Indecent Proposal  was deeply a movie of its time, and that’s where it should stay.

Where to stream Indecent Proposal