[Hey, Overthinkers – enjoy this Verhoeverthinking It Week guest post from Diana Barnes-Brown]
When I started the initial Overthinking for my Paul Verhoeven Week Basic Instinct Guest Post, the thought process was more or less as follows:
Michael Douglas + crazy bi chick + Paul Verhoeven = Hollywood hates women! Let the crucifixions begin!
But lots of things are happening in Basic Instinct, and only one of them is misogyny – so why essentialize? Keep reading for a brief rundown of the more interesting plot points, some feminist issues as a jumping off place for (what I hope is) more subtle criticism, and of course the obligatory reference to vagina bugs/Starship Troopers.
Ocean’s 69
The problem with analyzing Basic Instinct from a strictly feminist perspective is this: look closely at the treatment and behavior of any female character in this movie and poof! You have an open and shut case (that’s detective lingo) of vagina phobia and the predictable accompanying feminist and/or queer theory issues of gender identity, patriarchal narratives, and misrepresentation of the oppressed and/or minority group in question.
These concepts are pretty much the conceptual Rat Pack of feminist and queer theory, and while I happen to agree with the irrefutable math demonstrated in the intro, fleshing out that argument alone in a discussion of this movie would have resulted in nothing more than a feminist Mad Lib. Maybe okay if this were Underthinkingit.com (or a first-year Women’s Studies class at Dartmouth), but not really sufficient here.
And, after having seen other Verhoeven movies, it’s clear that while he has, or maybe just depicts, some extremely screwy ideas about women, he does so in a pretty smart, savvy way that indicates more progressive views than I was initially willing to credit to him.
Basic Instinct, WTF?! (Part 1)
Spoiler alert! A brief and in no way biased summary of key plot points is probably helpful here.
Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), a troubled cop with a troubled past, investigates the case of a former rocker recently found doing his best impression of a colander while tied to a bed frame with a white scarf. Blood’s everywhere, a bloody ice pick is found at the scene, and homeboy is extremely not-alive.
It’s discovered that Catherine Trammel (Sharon Stone), a blonde (this is important!) crime novelist, was the last person seen with him. The cops go to her house, whereupon it becomes clear that:
- she likes to say almost as many cuss words as the cops,
- she doesn’t much care that Mr. ex-rocker bit it, and
- she is all up in Nick’s junk. ALL up in it.
Nick skims Catherine’s book, which is about a woman who stabs her lover to death with an ice pick while having sex with him after tying him to a bed with a white scarf. The cops bring her in for questioning; Nick, Dennis “nice dinosaur” Nedry, and a bunch of other cops interrogate her in sorta rave-y lighting; she denies everything and also shows them her bare ladyparts, inspiring a great deal of occasional music and also almost winning the move a then-dreaded NC-17 rating, despite being nearly indistinguishable (at normal playback speeds, anyway) from nude-tone granny panties due to hair color and lighting issues.
Nick starts an affair with Catherine, even though he thinks she may kinda want to kill him and/or people in general. They have hot sex during which she ties him to the bed with a white scarf and he’s all, “I might get killed but whatevs, for I am detective dangerslut!”
Basic Instinct WTF?! (Part 2)
Later, Nick bumps into police psychologist/sex puppet Dr. Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), goes with the brunette (this is important!) back to her apartment and then date rapes her in a very clear-cut “she said no and I held her down anyway” sorta way, followed by a cuddle session. Because no means yes.
Also! Beth’s ex-husband was murdered, Catherine knows things about Nick that only the police department knows, and Catherine’s lesbian lover Roxy has jealousy issues, which seem mostly to be an excuse for Verhoeven to show hetero porn-informed lesbian nightclubbing, for Nick to call Roxy “Rocky” and ask her to have a “man-to-man” conversation with him, and for Beth to take sitz baths until she’s ready to be sexually assaulted again. Because no means yes.
Later, Roxy tries to kill Nick in Catherine’s car and winds up dead, because that’s one of two ways to deal with lesbians in film before the mid-90s. The other one is Ben Affleck.
Basic Instinct, WTF?! (Part 3)
Confusion builds, Catherine wears austere clothing and also really short dresses, and it’s discovered that Beth had an affair with Catherine in college, where they were both – oh snap! – psych majors. Get it? Like with psychology, which is totally the study of mind games and people who kill people and other stuff? Where people get smart about how mind games work and maybe even learn how to be better mind game players themselves? Raising all sorts of meta-narrative concerns about whether non-geniuses can write criminal geniuses successfully?
Beth, due to being a shrink, also has access to some confidential information about Nick’s mental status, which he realizes she may have given to Catherine. When confronted, each women claims the other was obsessed with her. It also turns out that a professor was murdered with an ice pick while the two attended college.
Nick’s partner Gus is lured to a building and killed in a manner described in Catherine’s new manuscript, but then Nick finds Beth in the stairwell and shoots her. An investigation uncovers a blonde wig and other evidence that ties her to the killings, and it’s assumed that Beth is the sole murderer.
In the final scene, Nick is in bed with Catherine, having steamy reformed bisexual sex, and then the camera pans down to show an ice pick under the bed.
Double snap. More occasional music. Roll credits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA57gysJSt4
Paul Verhoeven, WTF?!
According to Verhoeven in various interviews and Blonde Poison: the Making of Basic Instinct, he set out to make a true modern noir film because he wanted to pay homage to Vertigo and other classics of American noir cinema, and he has no feelings of homophobia or misogyny. In particular, Verhoeven vehemently denies any homophobia, explaining that since people are open about sexuality of all kinds in the Netherlands (his birth country) there is no way he could have meant it that way.4 I believe that he believes this, and I also think it’s partly true.
But let’s just get it out there that being open about sex does not mean that you are even remotely okay with women, vaginas, lesbians, or any of the Venn diagrams that could be made involving these three nouns.
What’s more interesting to me in this discussion is that whether or not Verhoeven is okay with women, their body parts, and their sex lives, one reason Hollywood ate up Basic Instinct (and it grossed $352,700,000 in theaters worldwide) was that it played on cultural fears of the time so deftly. Fears of homosexuality becoming part of the main stream, of sexually confident women and the “mistakes” they “make” men make, and of certain darker impulses – male or female – towards fantasies that involve domination or outright violence towards women.
While the ending isn’t completely conclusive, it’s pretty clear that Catherine and Beth both have a thing for killing the men one or both of them slept with. And making both the main suspect and the red herring really twisted, batty women who seem to have no motive except being really twisted and batty is a great choice, because now when Nick does violent and dominant things to these women, it’s not because he’s a hateful misogynist homophobe, silly-head! It’s because he’s a vigilante cop trying to bring Justice into the picture in his own offbeat way.
It’s also suggested throughout the movie that Nick likes to self-medicate with really freaky and dangerous behavior to mitigate the psychological fallout of a past coke addiction, a possible sex addiction, and maybe some alcoholism. Basically, the guy is a mess, so what’s a little date rape between cop and co-worker, or a steamy, crime-replicating romp with the main suspect? Arguably the whole point is that he’s a mess, and for his character to be convincing he has to be written in ways that are unattractive as well as intriguing.
Americans and Sex, WTF?!
And then there’s this whole issue of, how do you say, Americanosity?
You know how they fatten Geese to make foie gras? By shoving funnels down their throats and force-feeding them until their livers become fatty. Basic Instinct fattens its audiences in the same way, by force-feeding the basic ingredients of these significant cultural anxieties to create a rich, or perhaps just richly fraught, end product. Like foie gras (yeah, I’m really into this simile, so we’re going to see it through here), that product is something both decadent and kind of repulsive. And pretty sadistic all around.
But I’m not at all convinced that was Verhoeven’s goal, or that his alternate cultural context even makes it possible for this to mean what it would if it had been the product of a born-and-raised American. Verhoeven self-identifies as a European, sex-positive movie fanatic, and while I’ve covered the fact that sex-positive and sexually healthy are not necessarily synonymous, a nod must be given to the idea of non-translatable cultural concerns.
Sure, creating a movie where lesbians and bi-curious women go around killing men, this killing is linked both temporally and conceptually to their having slept with said men, and men are just awful in their treatment of women, reflects some really twisted values and ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality.
The American Idea of Sexuality (Part 1)
But so, too, were/are Americans’ ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality. Let’s review for a second: In the United States in 1992, Ellen would not come out for another five years, HIV/AIDS was still largely considered a “gay thing” and a deadly rather than chronic illness in the industrialized world, and women in visible leadership positions were required by organizational policy to wear skirts and heels, shave their legs and armpits, and generally had their bodies micromanaged in the workplace in ways that were never required of men (hell, in some finance offices this is still the case). This was less than 20 years ago.
The American Idea of Sexuality (Part 2)
Like it or not, the Hollywood film industry survives because it makes money from mainstream American moviegoers. And no mainstream American moviegoers at that time would shell out to see a non-straight protagonist who wasn’t at once wholly consumed by his/her sexual orientation and hyper-sexualized in straight-friendly ways. It just wasn’t gonna happen.
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!]