Indecent Proposal (1993) Made Me Feel Sympathy For a Gross Billionaire

Hello, reader. Jeremy here. I am excited and honored that my comrade Mary Catherine McAnnally Scott wrote an unprecedented third guest piece for Dust On The VCR this month! This puts her in rare company; I believe my editor John is the only other guest writer to gift us with a threepeat. And if I may say so myself, I think it’s her best work yet (although you should obviously read what she wrote about George Of The Jungle and Galaxy Quest). This is a real treat for me because I can also say things like “Oh, did you see Mary Catherine’s latest piece for Garden & Gun?” And just like that, this newsletter instantly has more clout than usual. Take it away, Mary Catherine!

I’ll tell y’all the truth: This was not the movie I intended to write about.

When Jeremy and I were talking about my next guest piece, I pitched him All The President’s Men, a movie I love because I’m an investigative journalism junkie.¹ But then I listened to a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Rewatchables, and they covered Indecent Proposal, a wild-sounding movie I’d never seen. Naturally, I had to watch it.

So I pivoted to a very different Robert Redford movie (which is really more a Demi Moore movie). Above all things, though, it is profoundly an Adrian Lyne movie, because of his trademark theme of White People Being Agonized About Sex Stuff, and also his trademark detail of featuring his female lead wearing white cotton bikini cut briefs at some point.²

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: This movie is terrible. It has enough over-acting to make your teeth ache.³ But in my recently copyrighted Good/Bad Matrix©, it falls firmly in the “Bad/Good” category; that is, it is a film critics snarled at that is somehow deliciously rewatchable because of how bad it is.⁴ Some might call it a guilty pleasure, yet I remain, yours truly, guilt-free.

The real thing I came here to talk about is how Lyne got me to feel sorry for a billionaire. 

Even if you’ve never seen the film, you probably know the premise because it’s been seared into pop culture. Hot young David and Diana (Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore) go broke, but they’re thrown a lifeline wrapped in a complicated question: Would you let your partner sleep with a really hot rich guy (in this case, Robert Redford) for a million dollars? (Spoiler alert: They go for it, and it presents, you know, some problems.)

Written for any other actor, John Gage (Redford) is an out-and-out slimeball. Taken at face value, the idea of a billionaire feeling entitled to rent someone’s wife for the night is pretty gross. But when we hear “billionaire” in 2023, our collective mind conjures the mononymous Elon or Bezos—those skeevy little goofballs with smelly ethics and storm basement levels of sex appeal—and that is not what Redford is bringing to this role.

Yes, he’s problematic, but he’s also…winning. Warm. Smart. He wouldn’t film a sex scene for this movie, which provided an interesting creative opportunity for Lyne: The audience, like David, is left to imagine John and Diana’s night together. And as every good horror director has taught us, our imaginations are always more vivid than reality, and Redford’s crucial last line before the cutaway (“Nothing will happen tonight that you don’t choose”) kinda cements him as a non-creep.

It doesn’t help things that David is a baby-back bitch.⁵ He’s all in on this big idea, but then he regrets it, then he punishes Diana for it. At one point, he gets paranoid and throws a full bottle of wine against their refrigerator (wasteful!), smashing it to pieces. He also pathologically leaves his dirty sneakers on the kitchen table. (Nah, I’m good.)

Sure, John does meet Diana in a casino boutique and immediately offers to buy her an expensive cocktail dress, justifying his gift by saying “I’ve enjoyed watching you—you’ve earned it,” which is decidedly gross. And he kind of…steals their house at one point? But, like, he’s lonely! And he’s just trying to find love. So he…buys love…okay listen, I hear how this sounds, but watch the movie and tell me you’re not kind of rooting for this guy. In his most heroic act, he sees that Diana still loves David and, through a thinly veiled attempt at driving her away, releases her back to her pouty little husband who bought her a zoo animal.⁶

Lyne is always interested in exploring the duality of human nature mixed with a dollop of soft-core sex, and I could give a TED Talk on all the ways this shows up in his movies. His main characters are always complicated—never binary, always somewhere along the spectrum of “decent family man/woman” and “narcissistic sociopath.” I watched this at the same time as a girlfriend of mine, and she and I have exchanged many voice notes debating whether or not John Gage is a sleaze.

This, I think, is exactly what Lyne wants from his audiences: nuanced reactions, complex debates, and the quiet recognition of the very traits we despise in his characters within ourselves. They’re gritty, they’re camp, they’re sometimes kind of naughty, and they’re always conversation-provoking. Stars! They’re just like us.

Indecent Proposal is now streaming on Paramount+ and Hoopla, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. No matter how dark the content. Like, Spotlight is one of my most rewatched movies. (…Am I okay?)

2. Confirming this detail led me to Google some really weird stuff—“diane lane unfaithful white underwear”—that has certainly placed me on some horrible federal list somewhere. There goes my TSA Precheck.

3. For example, the scene where Demi Moore’s marriage is crumbling and she sobs but still has the presence of mind to tear at her clothes, reveal her cleavage, and tousle her iconic hair in a technique I think Lee Stasberg called “sexy crying.”

4. The quadrants of the Good/Bad Matrix are: Good/Good (critically praised and objectively good, like The Sopranos), Bad/Good (critically panned but deliciously good, like The Real Housewives), Good/Bad (critically praised but not worth it, like The Big Bang Theory) and Bad/Bad (critically panned and objectively bad, like Blonde).

5. Jeremy here. Mary Catherine insisted that I leave this part in, which I was perfectly fine with. I just need to know if we’re hyphenating this term. It feels like it should have a hyphen?

6. I’m not going to explain this. You have to watch the movie now.