Sleeping With The Enemy (1991) Really Begs the Question: “What Is It With Men?”

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by Melissa Reagan, a lovely Texas cinephile that I met through The Deucecast Movie Show, which somehow has listeners in Texas. Melissa is also an executive chef, which I find to be really impressive, and you’ll be even more impressed if you listen to her great new podcast, The Food For Thoughtcast, which helped me understand that I know nothing about cooking. It also made me very hungry, but in a good way. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

Note: It’s kinda hard to discuss the men in this film without discussing their actions, so this is a spoiler-filled issue. I also firmly believe that this film would not be ruined in the slightest by spoilers, which are all things that you could guess based on the premise. But you’ve been warned!

To put it in the simplest possible terms, Sleeping With the Enemy is the story of a woman. But today I’m here to talk about the men in this film. (Happy Women’s History Month!)

In the film, Julia Roberts plays Laura, a woman who fakes her own death to escape her marriage to an abusive husband, after which she changes her name to Sara. Sara Waters, in fact, because—you guessed it—she faked her death by pretending to drown.* Laura’s/Sara’s voiceover monologue tells us a lot about her situation, because that’s what screenwriters do when they don’t know how to show something.

But there’s one line from Laura/Sara that does more heavy lifting than anything else in the film: “What is it with men?” What indeed! It’s a question that can only be solved by taking a closer look at the three central male figures in the film, all of whom are bad in different ways.

The foremost man of the film is the one who is most bad. Martin, Laura’s husband (not Sara’s!), is initially revealed as subtly controlling and manipulative, but that veneer quickly falls. He becomes physically and sexually violent with Laura, and we learn that he has threatened to find her and kill her if she ever tries to leave him. Very bad things all around.

As the film goes on, Martin becomes cartoonishly bad. He’s the fictionalized kind of psychopath who becomes so fixated on getting his wife back that he’s willing to kill hapless bystanders along the way. He’s very bad at thinking ahead, which makes him very bad at being a criminal. But given that the film is (or tries to be) a cautionary tale about how many evil acts men can get away with in plain sight, it kinda makes sense.

So yes, Martin is the worst of the men. But reader, I’m here to tell you that the good men in this story are kinda also bad men.

When Laura becomes Sara, she moves from Massachusetts to Iowa. This is primarily because her aging mother is in a nursing home nearby, but it’s also because Iowa is the place where you go when you don’t want to be found.** Almost immediately, Sara (not Laura!) meets a new man named Ben, a drama professor at the local college. After having one brief conversation with him, he is hopelessly in love with her, because she is Julia Roberts in the early 90s.

The film wants us to like and root for Ben, I think. But I do not like Ben. One could certainly argue that he “means well,” but he is far too aggressive in his pursuit—especially once he learns that “Sara” is a fake name and that she’s attempting to escape her traumatic past. It’s pretty clear that Sara needs to take things slow (for her physical safety as well as her emotional wellbeing), but he has no interest in taking things slow.*** In fact, Ben pressuring Sara to open up is the catalyst for her all-important question: “What is it with men!?”

Even when Ben does a “good thing,” it feels dubious. The best example comes just before the climax of the film. He’s just spent an evening with Sara and they’ve agreed to see each other the next day, but as soon as he leaves just before the strike of midnight, she realizes that Martin has tracked her down and he’s in her house. Luckily for her, Ben’s an absolute knucklehead who won’t leave her be: He knocks on her door at 12:05 and says “It’s tomorrow, I couldn’t wait.” (Men, please do not do this.) And when he tries to fight Martin and save the day, he gets knocked out pretty easily and doesn’t wake up until Sara has already saved herself. How convenient.

But there’s a third man in this film, folks. He’s the one you might’ve forgotten about. His name is John, and he’s the one who helps Laura fake her death by inviting Laura and Martin to go sailing when there’s going to be a storm. (We don’t actually see John and Laura plotting this scheme together, but it becomes evident when Martin is caught off guard due to the unexpected storm.) Laura disappears overboard, Martin is devastated, and we never hear from John again.

We need more information on John. Why was he doing all of this? Why did he allow Laura to go through this elaborate scheme during a storm when she could’ve actually drowned? Seems very irresponsible to me. And that’s not even factoring in that Martin might want to kill him if he ever found out. If John wanted to do the right thing, he should’ve notified the authorities, or even hired a detective to acquire proof of Martin’s abuse.

Reader, I’ve waited until the end of the piece to admit that I lied to you. There is actually a fourth man in this film.**** And he’s the only good one.

When Martin learns that Laura has fallen in love with a drama teacher in Iowa, he threatens the first drama teacher he can find—only to discover that he’s threatening the wrong guy. This drama teacher is a gay man who is definitely not harboring Martin’s wife. Martin swiftly apologizes. (Just kidding, he threatens to kill him if he squeals.)

But anyway, the inclusion of this fourth man—and having a gay man be the only good man in the film—makes Sleeping With The Enemy one of the most progressive films of its time. (Just kidding, it’s definitely not.)

*The symbolism in this film is quite on-the-nose, but there’s so much of it that I have to respect it. The character names (“Waters” falls in love with a “Woodard”), the use of food, the variations of Julia’s hair, the love interest being a drama teacher. Melissa could probably write an entire piece about the food symbolism, frankly.

**Dust On The VCR subscriber Nathan Johnston is actually a resident of Cedar Falls, Iowa, where most of this film is set. As he notes in his Letterboxd review, though, they did not do a very good job of making it look like Iowa. (Most of the Iowa scenes were shot in South Carolina.)

***Sara deserves a share of the blame here as well. The timeline of the film is not explicit, but we can surmise that it’s only been a couple months since Sara’s very dramatic escape from an abusive relationship. Please take some time to heal, ma’am! This drama teacher ain’t worth it!

****My editor John asked me if any of the male actors in the film are noteworthy enough to mention. The answer is no, they’re not, but also I wanted to leave their names out on purpose. This is what feminism in action looks like, folks.