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It was hard to defend Basic Instinct as an "important" film back when it first came out, in (gasp!) 1992, and it's equally hard to defend it as being that now. Part of that comes out of a strictly Doyleist perspective: the film was conceived and executed by dudes, specifically Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven, so its unabashed portrayal of an omnivoracious, almost perversely independent, hypersexual woman as a narcissistic sociopath who murders for fun/plot twists would, on the surface, seem to be a simple case of Men Are Scared Women Will Laugh At Them gone wild (with extra vagina dentata thrown in on top). But I'll point out that one of the pleasures of Verhoeven's American work has always been its inherent commitment to satire, so maybe taking Basic Instinct "seriously" as a neo-noir thriller with harsh things to say about the state of modern American sexuality is at least as ridiculous a position as trying to take RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Trooper "seriously" as science fiction. (Or Showgirls "seriously" as an hard-hitting expose of how inseparable Las Vegas's glamour industry is from its seedy sex-work underbelly, even though--as my friend Adam Nayman points out, in Showgirls: It Doesn't Suck--it actually does pretty well at getting jsut that same dichotomy across, leaving critics wondering why a film which purports to be all about sex is so distinctly and intentionally UNsexy.)
I first became aware of Basic Instinct while attending a filmmaking workshop in Ottawa earlier in the same year it came out, during which my screenwriting instructor--Paul Donovan, the co-creator of Lexx--threw us all a copy of the script and said: "This is the most amazing pile of Hollywood tripe I've seen in years, and it's gonna make a billion dollars." He wasn't wrong. Essentially, Basic Instinct flipped the script by taking the sexual subtext of most film noir and crapping it all out on top, for everybody to see; kind of an amazing thing to do in Puritan-founded America, especially at the height of the NC-17 era. When I think about Basic Instinct, I always think about Kat Dennings's observation that you can show anything violent you like onscreen and still get a PG-13, but the minute you show a woman having an orgasm and enjoying it, all bets are off--you're getting an R at the absolutely least. Verhoeven and Eszterhas play into this completely with their depiction of Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone), whose every climax is like a weapon, a strike against the patriarchal framework attempting to constrain her.
Very simply, Basic Instinct begins when homicide detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is called to the house of former rock star Johnny Boz, who's been tied to his bed with white silk scarves and stabbed to death with an icepick. The investigation very quickly points Curran and his partner Gus Moran (George Dzundza, who gets to say the amazing line that makes up this entry's title) towards Trammell, a novelist who writes lurid thrillers linking sex with violence, not so much for money--she's been independently wealthy since the "accidental" deaths of her parents, back when she was barely twenty--as for fun. Catherine, it ensues, is one of those Hollywood writers who can't actually make anything up; her books are all thinly-veiled autobiography, always based on stuff she's experienced personally, or the personal experiences of somebody she's "researched"/fucked/fucked over, plundered for creative fodder and then dropped like a hot rock.
Nick asks Catherine to come in for an interview, launching the film's single most-referenced sequence, in which she puts an all-white, high- and low-cut ensemble that quickly reveals she wears no undergarments. As she contorts herself into a weird, predatory seated position and keeps crossing and uncrossing her legs to flash her Magna cum Laude pussy like a punctuation mark ("So you were seeing Johnny..." "Fucking him. I liked fucking him. He was a good fuck." [FLASH!]), both she and Nick start to treat the interview like it's foreplay, because it is. Being evil and omnipotent, Catherine's already learned all about Nick: she knows about his longstanding alcoholism/coke addiction; knows people call him "Shooter" because he's been investigated by IA for possibly just executing criminals he judged guilty but impossible to prosecute, drop-piecing them after the fact; knows he's a risk-taker who's addicted to danger, and managed to skate on his psychiatric evaluation by starting up an edge-of-non-con rough sex affair with his evaluator, Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He's no angel, so the idea of fucking the Devil and then possibly arresting her for murder is a big lure.
Other things which quickly spill out about Catherine include the fact that she's bisexual at the very least, and that she's consistently attracted to people who either already are killers or can be potentially turned into killers. She has a crazily jealous live-in girlfriend, Roxanne Hardy (Leilani Sarelle), who was convicted of murder as a juvenile and has a sealed record Nick easily penetrates (ha ha), and her best friend in the area is an older lady who served time for murdering her husband. She also likes attending semi-public orgies in a club with same-sex washrooms and inciting her partners to try and kill her, or each other. This latter quality eventually ends up "forcing" Roxy to wreck her car trying to crash it into Nick's, and also leads to Nick's realization that Catherine once went to university/had a Gay 'Til Grad fling with Dr Beth, who claims she was fixated on her in a stalkerish fashion. Catherine says the same, except the other way 'round, but is she setting Beth up? Uh...well, probably, going by the film's final frame.
Throughout, there's this recurrent question of whether of not Catherine's outsized libido can ever be "tamed," thus taming/redeeming Nick's own issues, as well as whether or not she's more sinned against than sinning. It is that she's a serial killer, or just that she attracts serial killers who then kill the people she's most likely to want them to? How much of her behaviour is deliberated and how much of it is a cornucopia of obsessive-compulsive behaviours? Eszterhas wants it all ways, which figures; he's not exactly an unrestrained dude himself, and his intention here seems to be to push the general femme fatale image to its limits, figurative balls against the equally figurative wall(s of Catherine's uncontainable vajayjay). One way or the other, however, it's a fascinatingly weird mixture: prurient, epic, totally whackadoodle. And it kept Sharon Stone, actually a fairly good actress, stuck in a very rigid groove up until the time she finally decided to let herself fall out of "standard" Hollywood mode and reinvent herself as a character actress
Before that happened, however, we got one more kick at the can: Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction (dir. Michael Caton-Jones), which I recently bought and watched because hey ho, it co-stars David Morrissey, poor bastard. (This was literally his first intro to Hollywood, and the reception he got almost made him quit acting; I like to think his wife maybe pointed out to him that he'd done his level best to treat it as though he was doing a "real" film, and that the good part about being called an onscreen nonentity is that maybe people won't recognize you when they see you again in a different context.) The film was stuck in development hell until 2006, and a lot of the build-up chose to focus on whether or not Stone was "sexy enough" to play Catherine anymore, to the extent that her supposedly lopsided breasts were later nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Screen Couple. She looks fine to me, but then again, I might have been distracted by Morrissey's ass.
The plot goes thusly: Catherine's left San Francisco, probably after Nick Curran's offscreen death, though they don't really go into that (pity! Did she icepick him, or what?), and has somehow fetched up in London, where she's under investigation for having crashed a car into the Thames while engaging in mutual masturbation at 100 miles per hour with a football star who wasn't able to get out fast enough not to drown, mainly because he'd been shot so full of blah-blah drug he could barely move. In order to get a bail hearing, she has to undergo a psychiatric evaluation with Dr Michael Glass (Morrissey), who she immediately starts working on. He seems like an upright, ambitious guy, but his life's a bit of a shambles: fixated on a case that went south (George Cheslav, local drug dealer who he passed with flying colours who then went on to kill his girlfriend with a brick), his ex-wife (Indira Varma) left him for the Freddie Lounds-ish journo (Hugh Dancy) who wants to puncture hs career with an article about Cheslav, and he's also engaged in a weird working relationship with the cop who wants to best Catherine (David Thewlis). Then Catherine starts writing a book about him, and everything falls even further to shit.
By the end of the film, we're left with two possibilities, one of which I like a lot more than the other: that Catherine walked into her initial assessment, took one look at Michael and went "ooh hey, another sociopath! Let me offer myself as a literal get-out-of-jail-free card to this tall hunk, and show him how he can kill all the people who annoy him and get away with it." All the subsequent murders can then be credited to Dr Glass, with Catherine simply along for the ride, murmuring advice in his ear while riding him like a big, huge Liverpudlian horse. I like that better than the implication of Wikipedia's summary, which is that she made an innocent man into a murderer and then leaves him sectioned and sedated, "stymied by frustration and rage"; that's certainly not how Morrissey seems to be playing it, anyways. More like: "yeah okay, you got me, think I'll make an amazing recovery and come join you for a murder-tour of the continent soon." "Get well, baby, I miss you," is her last line to him, so...take that as you may.
The sex isn't quite as epic, sadly, though there are rumours that there was an extended orgy, a threesome scene (who, who and who? The mind boggles) and a non-con scene that might have not been so non- which got snipped in the final cut. I'm also annoyed by the fact that Catherine doesn't overtly come on to any chicks in this, even though Thewlis tells Morrissey at one point that she and his ex have become "girlie friends," and just the spectacle of Stone standing next to Charlotte Rampling (as Dr Glass's mentor Milena Gardosh) is enough to send a spark to one's nethers. Still, it does make for some cute images, ie: if Michael really did stage the scene in which Hugh Dancy is found "accidentally" auto-erotically asphyxiated to death (later feeding into Catherine suddenly slipping a belt 'round HIS neck while they're having sex), then did it happen like it did in the flashback, or was it more something that went on during some freaky bout of hate-sex with breathplay? And does this open up the series for a potential Basic Instinct 3, revolving around the ambitious young female psychiatrist who'll be called upon to evaluate Dr Glass's amazing recovery?
Yeah, they really don't make 'em like this anymore...not on the big screen, anyways. Not in Hollywood. Basic Instinct: the Series, anyone?
I first became aware of Basic Instinct while attending a filmmaking workshop in Ottawa earlier in the same year it came out, during which my screenwriting instructor--Paul Donovan, the co-creator of Lexx--threw us all a copy of the script and said: "This is the most amazing pile of Hollywood tripe I've seen in years, and it's gonna make a billion dollars." He wasn't wrong. Essentially, Basic Instinct flipped the script by taking the sexual subtext of most film noir and crapping it all out on top, for everybody to see; kind of an amazing thing to do in Puritan-founded America, especially at the height of the NC-17 era. When I think about Basic Instinct, I always think about Kat Dennings's observation that you can show anything violent you like onscreen and still get a PG-13, but the minute you show a woman having an orgasm and enjoying it, all bets are off--you're getting an R at the absolutely least. Verhoeven and Eszterhas play into this completely with their depiction of Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone), whose every climax is like a weapon, a strike against the patriarchal framework attempting to constrain her.
Very simply, Basic Instinct begins when homicide detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is called to the house of former rock star Johnny Boz, who's been tied to his bed with white silk scarves and stabbed to death with an icepick. The investigation very quickly points Curran and his partner Gus Moran (George Dzundza, who gets to say the amazing line that makes up this entry's title) towards Trammell, a novelist who writes lurid thrillers linking sex with violence, not so much for money--she's been independently wealthy since the "accidental" deaths of her parents, back when she was barely twenty--as for fun. Catherine, it ensues, is one of those Hollywood writers who can't actually make anything up; her books are all thinly-veiled autobiography, always based on stuff she's experienced personally, or the personal experiences of somebody she's "researched"/fucked/fucked over, plundered for creative fodder and then dropped like a hot rock.
Nick asks Catherine to come in for an interview, launching the film's single most-referenced sequence, in which she puts an all-white, high- and low-cut ensemble that quickly reveals she wears no undergarments. As she contorts herself into a weird, predatory seated position and keeps crossing and uncrossing her legs to flash her Magna cum Laude pussy like a punctuation mark ("So you were seeing Johnny..." "Fucking him. I liked fucking him. He was a good fuck." [FLASH!]), both she and Nick start to treat the interview like it's foreplay, because it is. Being evil and omnipotent, Catherine's already learned all about Nick: she knows about his longstanding alcoholism/coke addiction; knows people call him "Shooter" because he's been investigated by IA for possibly just executing criminals he judged guilty but impossible to prosecute, drop-piecing them after the fact; knows he's a risk-taker who's addicted to danger, and managed to skate on his psychiatric evaluation by starting up an edge-of-non-con rough sex affair with his evaluator, Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He's no angel, so the idea of fucking the Devil and then possibly arresting her for murder is a big lure.
Other things which quickly spill out about Catherine include the fact that she's bisexual at the very least, and that she's consistently attracted to people who either already are killers or can be potentially turned into killers. She has a crazily jealous live-in girlfriend, Roxanne Hardy (Leilani Sarelle), who was convicted of murder as a juvenile and has a sealed record Nick easily penetrates (ha ha), and her best friend in the area is an older lady who served time for murdering her husband. She also likes attending semi-public orgies in a club with same-sex washrooms and inciting her partners to try and kill her, or each other. This latter quality eventually ends up "forcing" Roxy to wreck her car trying to crash it into Nick's, and also leads to Nick's realization that Catherine once went to university/had a Gay 'Til Grad fling with Dr Beth, who claims she was fixated on her in a stalkerish fashion. Catherine says the same, except the other way 'round, but is she setting Beth up? Uh...well, probably, going by the film's final frame.
Throughout, there's this recurrent question of whether of not Catherine's outsized libido can ever be "tamed," thus taming/redeeming Nick's own issues, as well as whether or not she's more sinned against than sinning. It is that she's a serial killer, or just that she attracts serial killers who then kill the people she's most likely to want them to? How much of her behaviour is deliberated and how much of it is a cornucopia of obsessive-compulsive behaviours? Eszterhas wants it all ways, which figures; he's not exactly an unrestrained dude himself, and his intention here seems to be to push the general femme fatale image to its limits, figurative balls against the equally figurative wall(s of Catherine's uncontainable vajayjay). One way or the other, however, it's a fascinatingly weird mixture: prurient, epic, totally whackadoodle. And it kept Sharon Stone, actually a fairly good actress, stuck in a very rigid groove up until the time she finally decided to let herself fall out of "standard" Hollywood mode and reinvent herself as a character actress
Before that happened, however, we got one more kick at the can: Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction (dir. Michael Caton-Jones), which I recently bought and watched because hey ho, it co-stars David Morrissey, poor bastard. (This was literally his first intro to Hollywood, and the reception he got almost made him quit acting; I like to think his wife maybe pointed out to him that he'd done his level best to treat it as though he was doing a "real" film, and that the good part about being called an onscreen nonentity is that maybe people won't recognize you when they see you again in a different context.) The film was stuck in development hell until 2006, and a lot of the build-up chose to focus on whether or not Stone was "sexy enough" to play Catherine anymore, to the extent that her supposedly lopsided breasts were later nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Screen Couple. She looks fine to me, but then again, I might have been distracted by Morrissey's ass.
The plot goes thusly: Catherine's left San Francisco, probably after Nick Curran's offscreen death, though they don't really go into that (pity! Did she icepick him, or what?), and has somehow fetched up in London, where she's under investigation for having crashed a car into the Thames while engaging in mutual masturbation at 100 miles per hour with a football star who wasn't able to get out fast enough not to drown, mainly because he'd been shot so full of blah-blah drug he could barely move. In order to get a bail hearing, she has to undergo a psychiatric evaluation with Dr Michael Glass (Morrissey), who she immediately starts working on. He seems like an upright, ambitious guy, but his life's a bit of a shambles: fixated on a case that went south (George Cheslav, local drug dealer who he passed with flying colours who then went on to kill his girlfriend with a brick), his ex-wife (Indira Varma) left him for the Freddie Lounds-ish journo (Hugh Dancy) who wants to puncture hs career with an article about Cheslav, and he's also engaged in a weird working relationship with the cop who wants to best Catherine (David Thewlis). Then Catherine starts writing a book about him, and everything falls even further to shit.
By the end of the film, we're left with two possibilities, one of which I like a lot more than the other: that Catherine walked into her initial assessment, took one look at Michael and went "ooh hey, another sociopath! Let me offer myself as a literal get-out-of-jail-free card to this tall hunk, and show him how he can kill all the people who annoy him and get away with it." All the subsequent murders can then be credited to Dr Glass, with Catherine simply along for the ride, murmuring advice in his ear while riding him like a big, huge Liverpudlian horse. I like that better than the implication of Wikipedia's summary, which is that she made an innocent man into a murderer and then leaves him sectioned and sedated, "stymied by frustration and rage"; that's certainly not how Morrissey seems to be playing it, anyways. More like: "yeah okay, you got me, think I'll make an amazing recovery and come join you for a murder-tour of the continent soon." "Get well, baby, I miss you," is her last line to him, so...take that as you may.
The sex isn't quite as epic, sadly, though there are rumours that there was an extended orgy, a threesome scene (who, who and who? The mind boggles) and a non-con scene that might have not been so non- which got snipped in the final cut. I'm also annoyed by the fact that Catherine doesn't overtly come on to any chicks in this, even though Thewlis tells Morrissey at one point that she and his ex have become "girlie friends," and just the spectacle of Stone standing next to Charlotte Rampling (as Dr Glass's mentor Milena Gardosh) is enough to send a spark to one's nethers. Still, it does make for some cute images, ie: if Michael really did stage the scene in which Hugh Dancy is found "accidentally" auto-erotically asphyxiated to death (later feeding into Catherine suddenly slipping a belt 'round HIS neck while they're having sex), then did it happen like it did in the flashback, or was it more something that went on during some freaky bout of hate-sex with breathplay? And does this open up the series for a potential Basic Instinct 3, revolving around the ambitious young female psychiatrist who'll be called upon to evaluate Dr Glass's amazing recovery?
Yeah, they really don't make 'em like this anymore...not on the big screen, anyways. Not in Hollywood. Basic Instinct: the Series, anyone?
