The Red Metaherring

Seeing any of this on the screen, explicated or not, still makes me feel morally icky, and it doesn’t say anything good about Hollywood’s general treatment of women.

But in criticizing Basic Instinct, it’s a good idea not to lose sight of just whose views are being represented here, and consider whether representation the same as holding the views you represent. On this topic, most critics of the arts respond with a loud and resonant NO: you don’t hear people going around complaining about those bigoted Nazi directors who made Sound of Music because the bad guys are Nazis.

Representation is only part of the picture. And there’s nothing wrong with a movie where everyone’s a bad guy, as long as its narrative works.

So Verhoeven may have a point when he argues it shouldn’t be an issue that his killer(s) happen to be lesbians/promiscuous/bi-curious. In a way it’s insulting, because once we viewers make a big deal about it, we’re essentially buying into the whole screwy mind set of the fictional world and implying that non-majority expressions of sexuality are a catalyst for multiple forms of crazy.

We don’t go on and on about how tons of serial killers depicted in movies have brown hair and, as any research writer will tell you, correlation is not cause.

(Somewhat relevant here is the fact that treating correlation as cause is a major source of bias in scientific research, and often undermines what would be otherwise very sound analyses.)

So maybe, as Verhoeven vehemently argues, it’s us Americans, liberal or not, that are making a thing about it. And maybe – though he doesn’t say this, to my knowledge – what he’s doing is depicting vice and evil not only on the part of his characters, but on the part of Hollywood and the Joe the Plumber consumers of Hollywood’s output.

And the Killer Is . . .

As a feminist, I have no mixed feelings about Basic Instinct whatsoever: it’s awful and promotes awful thoughts about women and sexuality, at least among those already misguided enough to think them. But as an avid moviegoer and consumer of creative work of all brow heights, I’m pretty conflicted.

I rely, with few qualms, on other subcategories within Verhoeven’s oeuvre to scratch that “I need to see faux brain matter up close” itch, and those viewings demonstrated pretty clearly that he has a knack for over-the-top, heavy-handed, and somehow completely self-aware movies where lots of things, and also sometimes people, blow up. Even the sexualized thriller/melodramas that have been the other 40 percent of his work raise some pretty interesting questions about characters’ motivations and the relationship between coherent motivations and motivating narratives.

Starship Troopers, my favorite Verhoeven movie by far and the one with the most vehement of positive reviews (though there are many negative ones, as well), covers both of these categories nicely, in that lots of human brains get sucked out by a “brain bug” that looks almost exactly like a vagina. If you don’t believe/agree with me, consider: in one commentary track on Starship Troopers, a special effects guy remarks that Verhoeven would often muse about whether it should look more like a vagina or a rectum, and the crew thereafter took to referring to the brain bug’s mouth as a “poo-gina”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhwPI3Jgglg

For all its schlockiness, Starship Troopers is also a marvelous and nuanced critique of fascism, war, and what it means to be a “survivor” of some colossal awfulness – experiences that Verhoeven knows first-hand as a survivor of WWII. Hardly the work of a ham-fisted, pulp-obsessed jerk, and yet also somehow exactly the work of such a person. The best short explanation of this I’ve come up with after all this meandering is that his are reproductions too accurate to be taken at face value.

[Note – we’ve got some Overthink on Starship Troopers coming up tomorrow!]

Do I think that Verhoeven has some serious issues with ladyparts? Absolutely. Would I let myself be seen with him at a gay pride parade? Absolutely not. But with Basic Instinct and much of his other work, he demonstrates a unique knack both for really entertaining with his entertainment, and also for presenting his audience with caricatures of the more subtle offenses – whether violence, discrimination, human obsession and vice, or all of the above – that Hollywood has been breathlessly (breathily?) serving up for the price of a movie ticket since the silver screen got its name.

[Is this a fair analysis of Basic Instinct? Sound off in the comments!]