BASIC INSTINCT
No stars (Worthless) Directed by Paul Verhoeven Written by Joe Eszterhas With Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Denis Arndt, Leilani Sarelle, and Dorothy Malone.
- Your relation to oppressed minorities. For your villains, pick an oppressed group that “ordinary” viewers know very little about, and portray them in a way that confirms their worst fears; this isn’t hard because previous serial-killer thrillers have already established firm guidelines for such stereotyping. Lesbians are a safe bet because they’re even less empowered than gay men to fight back, and most straight viewers will know even less about them–yet lesbian stereotypes will still tap into unconscious fears about “dangerous sex” associated with AIDS, herpes, and so on. Of course, if gay groups do fight back, this can be considered free publicity; it’ll pique the interest of straight viewers and encourage homophobes to buy tickets. (You might even want to hire some people to picket your movie, as I’m told the publicity people on Cruising did.)
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- The right ambience: art, glitz, and combinations of the two. When you’re upgrading trash to art, something even more transcendental than profit is involved: art-movie ambience. Jonathan Demme made The Silence of the Lambs Oscar-ready and exemplary to many New York feminists by elevating pulp notions of evil, innocence, violence, fear, and courage to such a plane that they elicited awe, piety, and reverence. It hardly matters whether Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter or Foster’s Clarice Starling functions as the key role model, because on the movie’s terms either is inoperative without the other; the sacrament is what passes between them, and the patriarchal FBI is their church. Technically, of course, Lecter is a maximum-security prisoner who eats people and Starling is a trainee out to catch a transsexual woman skinner, but emotionally speaking he’s a priest bestowing grace and she’s a devotee.
Nick and Gus proceed to the plush home of the victim’s wealthy girlfriend, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), and the first thing Gus says is, “They got his and her Picassos.” When Nick expresses wonder that his friend can identify a Picasso, Gus explains by pointing to the signature: “It says so right here.” He adds, “Hers is bigger.” (Of course Gus is a simpleton who has to have certain things explained to him; he stands in for the groundlings in the audience–or those who missed something when they went out for popcorn.) This kind of scene alerts the audience to the fact that high art and money and drugs and powerful women and dangerous perversions are coextensive and mutually enhancing–definitely associated, in ways that fear can only imagine (“Hers is bigger”). Clearly fear of feminism also plays a role in all this, and a close look at the handling of similar elements in Fatal Attraction would be helpful.
More on characters:
- Your motives–not the characters’–are the only ones that count. Why does Catherine write and publish grisly murder novels that predict real-life murders? Why does she write novels at all? Why is she so interested in abnormal psychology? And why does Nick become involved with her, even after she makes him fall off the wagon, taunts him with cigarettes until he resumes smoking, and even cracks an ugly joke about his wife’s suicide? The answer to all these questions is simple: the movie wants them to. And the movie wants them to in order to render a few scenes–scenes involving fucking and/or ice-picking–more effective.
You don’t need to answer such questions–they can’t be said to matter in the long run anyway. Consider: there are only four female characters of any importance in this movie, and all four are eventually revealed to be blond lesbian or bisexual psychos who kill without any known motive. Basic Instinct is therefore an open text with limited options: viewers can select their own killer or killers, and because all four women prove to be interchangeable, it makes no difference whom they pick. Democracy in action, you might say.
Since Basic Instinct amply demonstrates that depicting lesbian or bisexual women as psycho serial killers is vastly more profitable than depicting them as ordinary human beings, and since this is a society that clearly values profit–not the profit of consumers but the profit of investors–over accuracy, one might well wonder what’s so special or different about this movie. Stone’s twat; lesbian or bisexual psychos with killer ice picks; shots of Michael Douglas gritting his teeth very hard, smoking habitually after sex, and slamming people against walls: as John Waters might put it, what else is entertainment all about? Let’s wait for the sequel and spin-offs and find out.
