Basic Instinct has something for everyone. Though failing to garner more than two minor Academy Award® nominations, Paul Verhoeven's over-the-top mystery received more column inches from critics and larger audiences than any combination of Best Film nominees. This should come as no surprise, considering that scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas provided for enough breasts and narrative non sequiturs to stagger the most disinterested viewer. In "unedited" form, Basic Instinct became the highest-grossing film in the entire European continent last year; and even with half a minute of blush-inducing athletics shaved off, the American version constituted enough of a scandal to ensure its box-office success.

The film's primary draw is, of course, sex. Instinct's implied contract with the audience is, you give me six bucks, and I'll make you start smoking again. But sex along does not a legitimate feature film make. Its payola is disguised under a crazy-quilt of social criticisms, all of them enormously suggestive, but none of them complete. You may think you're just getting an eyeful of flesh and an earful of f-words, but you're also leaving with plenty of cultural baggage that demands unpacking.

Critics have yet to agree on the message, overt and implicit, of Basic Instinct. Some say Verhoeven promotes misogyny by infusing every female character with homicidal impulses. Others praise him for posing Catherine Tramell as the new liberated woman who plays the games of man's world better than men themselves. Queer Nation and other gay-rights organizations castigate the film for a negative portrayal of homosexuals as murderous psychotics. Meanwhile, lesbian writers in the Village Voice herald Catherine, Roxy, and Lisa/Elizabeth as exciting and empowering characters. Plenty of outraged viewers decry the film's sexual intensity and inventiveness, whereas my French grammar professor in Paris last semester applauded it for being an "excellent mirror to the collective unconscious." The fact that opinion is so divided attests to the film's ambiguity of thematic intent, but the critics are all wrong in one aspect: they all think they know "who did it." A closer look at the narrative makes for a flow-chart nightmare, such that we can never know the agent behind the misandrist murders. Eszterhas has obviously forgotten that narrative ambiguity has no place in a murder mystery, for another promise of the genre is that we will ultimately be rewarded with answers. Such irresponsible filmmaking allows us to interpret the film's comments on the relationship between gender and power any way we see fit. And therein lies the film's moral danger.

A simple plot summary poses the tale as a triangle of lust, in which San Francisco detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) vacillates between the wiles of his police department's psychiatrist, Dr. Elizabeth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and those of his current case's prime suspect, the popular novelist Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone). Curran's hormonal dilemmas are framed by the murder of a retired rock singer, Johnny Boz, who was stabbed during sex thirty-one times with an ice pick. Tramell is suspicious on two grounds: she was Boz's last companion, and the murder echoes the plot of her last book, Love Hurts, about "a retired rock-and-roll star who gets murdered by his girlfriend" with the selfsame chilly instrument. The premise makes for an excellent good-guy versus bad-girl tale, but Eszterhas complicates things by shading Curran's own character. Curran is a recovering cocaine buff and alcoholic who is required to meet regularly with Dr. Garner after "accidentally" shooting several tourists while drugged-up on duty. His dark past makes him attractive fodder for Tramell's nexy project, entitled Shooter, about a detective who "falls for the wrong woman." Such an omen fails to convince Curran to keep his loins away from her, unfortunately, so we wait for him to be perforated.

Basic Instinct leaps from man's world into, so to speak, the lap of women. The film's predominantly male perspective is suggested by the continual presence of the ever-phallic Prudential building outside of Curran's apartment window. Verhoeven launches the plot from Curran's point of view, then spends the rest of the film subverting it. For this is not a story about Curran; though he may be the protagonist, he is not the hero. This film is about women, and specifically a new breed of women epitomized by Catherine Tramell, who is Instinct's truly triumphal character with whom we are meant to identify. Curran is not even remotely likeable; and gradually it becomes clear that Verhoeven intends for Curran to represent the worst element of male heterosexuality: complacency. Curran rests blindly secure in his belief in male dominance, unwilling to be threatened by a mere woman, whose importance to him fluctuates according to his need. It is not a sense of justice that gravitates Curran to Tramell - it is egotistical lust, the heedless physical need that so characterizes the male population. Tramell is fully aware of man's primum mobile, and this knowledge becomes her trump card over her victims.

Tramell is basically a female version of Curran: they both used drugs, screw around with ladies between the sheets for recreation, cheated on lie detectors, and (allegedly) killed people. Their unusual similarity is hinted at repeatedly within the dialogue, with lines like "Then she's as crazy as you are, Curran," or Catherine's assertion "You see? We're both innocent, Nick." Stone's portrayal essentially takes the baton from where Linda Hamilton in Terminator II, the eponymous vigilantes in Thelma and Louise, and the ever-empowered Madonna left off, masculinizing herself to the nth degree with no compromise of female beauty. She is richer than men (total assets of $100 million), smarter than men (magna cum laude double-major graduate of UC-Berkeley), stronger than men, more independent than men, less principled than men, drives better than men, and snags more beautiful women than men could hope to. But instead of using her power to rewrite the patriarchal rulebook that governs society, she plays by the book; instead of resisting exploitation, she beckons you to exploit her - then pay dearly for it. Indeed, Basic Instinct may deliver the most positive filmic message to women in years; whereas Thelma and Louise argues that those who resist men's rules forfeit their lives, Verhoeven offers a potentially more life-affirming (though morally questionable) alternative. Tramell's secret, and advice to her sisters, is to use the "male gaze" to her own advantage.

Man's relish for aesthetic visual nourishment has become an enduring tenet of social psychology, and the cinema's own voyeuristic nature arguably betrays its male-oriented foundations. Filmmakers themselves are often all too aware of this: Hitchcock's Rear Window is a feature-film-length commentary on man's belief that to capture someone with the eye is to establish power over them. This is also the governing impulse behind pornography, an activity which also dehumanizes its object in the service of selfish pleasure. Under this principle, all film has the potential to be pornographic. Verhoeven, cognizant of film's exploitative capabilities, thus shapes his film as an affront both to men and the film complex.

Tramell's manipulation of the "male gaze" subverts one of society's most basic societal power structures, the idea that it is men who do the watching, and women who are reduced to less-than-three-dimensional images. Even her female rivals and lovers entertain such a role reversal: Elizabeth Garner's apartment overlooks a ladies' dance class, and Roxy's taste for watching Catherine make love to other men completely flips our visual conventions. "She likes me to watch," Roxy argues, and later when Catherine takes apart a block of ice for her drink with her favorite weapon, she exposes Nick's potentially tragic flaw with a question: "You like watching me, don't you?" It is now women who run the show. When Nick secretly watches Catherine strip at her living room window, she turns the light off. Finally, Verhoeven's most brilliant comment on man's scopophilic downfall takes place in the film's very first scene: Johnny Boz and his soon-to-be-killer make love underneath his ceiling mirror, from which he undoubtedly enjoyed watching his own amorous adventures, and from which he now witnesses his own murder. (In the unedited version, Boz receives an ice pick in the eye, further punctuating Verhoeven's statement.)

I would be a fool to ignore Basic Instinct's classic contribution to film history, however: the notorious interrogation scene between Tramell and several detective remains one of the most gripping and scandalous moments of Hollywood's past decade - known as the "gratuitous beaver shot" that launched a thousand ships, as well as Sharon Stone's career. The scene becomes a metaphor for woman's place in the world, as she single-handedly matches wits with five men - and reduces them to Jello®. The event is essentially pornographic, with five men throwing their gaze on a beautiful woman and trying to dominate her. And Tramell knows it, of course. As she unnecessarily elaborates on her sexual practices, her inquisitors begin to sweat and lick their lips. "He [Johnny Boz] gave me a lot of pleasure," Tramell notes, taking man's place as the one who should receive the pleasure. When Assistant District Attorney John Correli asks if she ever engaged in sadomasochistic activities, Tramell refires, "Exactly what did you have in mind, Mr. Correli?" The room gets hotter, and the detectives run for the water cooler. And when Tramell finally delivers the coup de grace by uncrossing and re-crossing her legs sans undergarments, the pornographic role-reversal is complete: the guys may get a look, but it is she who benefited, as the men find themselves unable to continue the cross-examination. Tramell succeeds in passing through her accusers' fingers by playing to their basic instincts.

Thus Tramell figuratively invades the fraternity of police and takes up shop in the men's room. Verhoeven repeatedly illustrates Tramell's eschewal of conventional female behavior, down to her tossing her cigarettes into the ocean, spurning woman's longtime symbolic association with Mother Earth. One is unlikely to find her in search of an "MRS." Degree, for her lesbian liaison with Roxy marks her sexual liberation and independence from men. She is unrelenting in her aggressive autonomy. Tramell denies anyone the advantage even in conversation, for in every scene where Curran questions Trammel, she fires back with her own barrage of inquiries into his personal life, always maintaining a balance of information. Curran becomes defensive: "You seem to know a lot about me," he observes. "You know an awful lot about me," says Trammel. "I don't know anything that's not police business," he counters. "You know I don't wear any underwear, don't you Nick?" And she exposes along the way man's eternal double standard that sexually active men are "studs" whereas unvirginal women are "whores":

"How did you feel when Johnny Boz had died?"
"I felt like someone had read my book and was playing a game."
"But it didn't hurt."
"No."
"Because you didn't love him."
"That's right."
"Even though you were fucking him."
"You still get pleasure. Didn't you ever fuck anyone when you were married, Nick?"
"You didn't feel anything for him, you just had sex with him for your book?"
"I'm a writer. I use people for what I write. Let the world beware."
"That's pretty cold there, lady."

 

Hollywood's own double standards surface as well when, in a recent interview, Douglas acknowledged having refused to let his penis be filmed, while Stone's part, it would seem, required complete nudity.

What Basic Instinct lacks in coherency it makes up for in intensity, and this energy manifests itself in how it has elicited a wide range of reactions from audiences. In particular, there is a great amount of "whodunit?" side-taking among fans of the movie. The media has reported about a "Catherine Did It" Club on the West Coast formed by those who believed Tramell was culpable for the deaths of Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Robert Garner, Johnny Boz, Nilsen, and Curran's partner Gus. In New York City last spring, a gay disc jockey tried to hamper the film's success by declaring repeatedly that "the shrink did it," hoping to spoil the mystery. A poll of those with whom I have discussed the film ended up equally divided. Though the narrative potholes effectively discombobulate both sides' arguments, Eszterhas clearly intends for either Tramell or Garner to be pegged as the killer; the fact that they never appear together in a scene also suggests this dualistic narrative intent. To choose one or the other is to infuse the film with an entirely different set of messages, for the blonde Tramell and the brunette Garner generate a polarity between themselves in more than just their hair color. In essence, the two are textual as well as literal enemies, robbing narrative significance from each other. The film's inconsistencies allow for a myriad of interpretations, however, and dangerously transmit contradictory messages about female representation. Exploring both camps' position better illustrates Basic Instinct's paradoxical stance toward women.

If Elizabeth Garner did it:
Eszterhas himself offers us what he considers the only two options for the killer's identity, through the mouth of Dr. Lamont, professor of the "pathology of psychotic behavior" at Stanford. Either the writer of Love Hurts was the killer, or someone who read the book hopes to incriminate the writer, Lamont conjectures. If the latter is indeed the case, then, he says, "you're dealing with someone very dangerous…and very ill." Such an individual would be acting on a "deep-seated obsessional hatred" coupled with "an utter lack of respect for human life." The killer is essentially a "once-in-a-lifetime, top-of-the-line looney tune." Eszterhas is describing the inner workings of Dr. Garner, made obvious by the camera's lingering pause on her face after Curran asks, "What if it's someone who read the book?" Garner's "psychopathic obsessive behavior" manifests itself throughout her interaction with Curran: "When that girl mates, it's for life," observes Gus. Garner's strange attachment is clear when she physically attacks Curran in his apartment when he tries to end their relationship, and Curran counters her charges of Tramell's manipulation with "You're better at it than she is!" With Garner as the culprit, she becomes an effective association of lesbianism with homicidal psychosis. Queer Nation's charges of a homophobic script are vindicated through this reading, for Garner would hardly hold a "deep-seated obsessional hatred" for Tramell if she were sexually indifferent to her. (Case in point: we eventually discover that Garner and Tramell had a brief affair in college, ending when Tramell accused Garner of stalking her.) Eszterhas repeatedly hurls at us evidence that Garner was a sick crypto-lesbian cookie, with an apartment providing a view into a ladies' dance class to boot. Tramell, conversely, would be nothing more than a sexually liberated and overly-aggressive writer who is simply framed.

If Catherine Tramell did it:
Dr. Lamont would clinically explain Tramell's state as an obsession to act out her books "in ritualistic detail." Both Verhoeven and Stone say Tramell did it, whether or not the script supports such an interpretation. To leave it in Tramell's hands is certainly an attractive simplification. Here surfaces a central issue of the film: is she, though guilty, a model femme fatale or a misogynist and homophobic example of lethal and lunatic lesbianism? This question is answered by one's interpretation of the final scene: does Tramell, out of love, renounce her serial killing, or merely decide to kill Curran later? Nothing in the filmic text itself is of much use here. But in a recent interview, Stone states that she interpreted Tramell's character as if her final soliloquy were sincere: "I can't allow myself to care…everyone that I care about dies…I lose everybody." Ever since the death of her parents, then of her husband Danny Vasquez, Tramell has felt unable to love for fear of being hurt again, and thus she prematurely ends her relationships by murder, before fate gets to them first. Tramell illustrates her emotional protectiveness in her literary principles: "Somebody has to die…somebody always does." Stone's Tramell is thus an essentially broken character, hiding her weakness through murder. Her pen name of Catherine Woolf also alludes to that great but emotionally troubled writer of the modern age, Virginia Woolf. Such an interpretation does not necessarily cast Tramell in a homophobic light, but it certainly robs her of the strength of healthy emotional independence. Stone is therefore not projecting Tramell as an admirable female ideal, though many viewers would rather take her as such. But if Tramell were indeed lying at the end of the film, her autonomy is reaffirmed. The woman plays her heartless games effectively to the end, and Curran is dead meat.

The issues of homosexual representation, misogyny, and graphic sexual depiction are subordinate to the film's greater implications. This is a film about a new wave of women who know what men want and who intend to fulfill their own desires by way of this knowledge. Curran's anxiety and paranoia thus speak for all men who are growing progressively aware that they might have as much to fear from their girlfriends as women fear from their traditionally stronger boyfriends. (Physical strength means little if you don't see the ice pick in advance.) Despite Basic Instinct's empowering elements, however, Verhoeven allows for several sensationalistic excesses which are far from complimentary toward women. Careless imagery constantly threatens to overwhelm the picture, such as stereotypically dyke-ish lesbian characterizations and at least one thoroughly discomfiting instance of date rape. Such moments can only remind us of Hollywood's own basic instinct, that of pushing our shock thresholds in order to draw in revenue. Unfortunately, a film that sloppily dares to address the sensitive issues of gender and power, while aspiring to become a soft-porn classic, may do more harm than good. For, as Tramell herself comments, our own malleable souls can work in mysterious ways: "Funny how the subconscious works."

May 1993