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Basic Instinct
Retrospectives
- February 2003
USA, 1992. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written
by Joe Eszterhas. Photographed by Jan De Bont. Edited by Frank J. Urioste.
Music by Jerry Goldsmith. Released by Carolco and Studio Canal. 128
minutes.
Starring Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, Jeanne
Tripplehorn, George Dzundza, Leilani Sarelle, Chelcie Ross, Dorothy Malone,
Wayne Knight, Daniel von Bargen, Stephen Tobolowsky.
"Basic Instinct" opened in the United States on March
20, 1992 -- which means, believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, that the
sucker is almost eleven years old. Could we be ready to stop sniggering about
it and admit to its status as a modern classic?
I was in primary school when the movie came out,
but its reception is hard to forget. It was legendary from day one -- or
beforehand, for those who remember the ripples created around Hollywood when
Joe Eszterhas's screenplay started a bidding war, and was eventually snapped
up by that gutsy little production company Carolco for $3million. On the
playground, it was a vicarious thrill to hear about classmates who had come
upon pirate copies of the film. And occasionally you would overhear conversations
from parents who had dared to go and see it, which they admitted to each
other with blushed grins and breathless little whispers.
On one level, the movie is trash. Its plot is about
a San Fransisco detective trying to find a woman who kills men in bed with
an ice pick, just to see if she can get away with it. It has dialogue that
uses bad language to interrupt rhythm rather than create it. It has grotesque
explosions of violence -- an eyeball is pounded from a bloody head in the
first five minutes. The sex scenes pushed the boundaries of what Hollywood
could conceive of getting away with, and not in the tender artsy way. On
the other hand, "Basic Instinct" was absorbing enough to get us all talking,
and as far as I can see, we haven't stopped. The blocking and lighting of
the entire interrogation scene is as famous as that shot in it where you-know-who
uncrosses her legs to show you-know-what. The material's way of mixing sex
and violence did, albeit for the worse, have enough impact to steal the thunder
of "Fatal Attraction" and reinvent the concept of the mainstream erotic thriller.
And I doubt that another movie will ever become as closely associated with
ice picks.
Michael Douglas plays the cop as a macho hothead
recovering from drink and coke problems, and an internal affairs investigation
that correctly jumped on his back after the shooting of two tourists. We
meet him as he gets to the murder scene of a retired rock star, and then
goes to interview the singer's girlfriend. She's a writer named Catherine
Tramell, played by Sharon Stone in the performance that people always talk
about. We first see her from behind, mysteriously smoking a cigarette against
the shore, and then she turns, with the sunlight resting playfully along
the side of her face. She is so boldly relaxed and in control, in such a
sexual way, that two things are instantly clear: The detective is unshakably
attracted to her, and also convinced she is the killer.
Everyone who has seen the movie, and many of those
who haven't, know that the story develops into a game between Douglas and
Stone -- an intense sexual chess match, driven by pursuit and suspicion.
Either Stone is the killer, and is so brazen because she has a brilliant
plan to get herself out of being caught, or the murders are being committed
by Dr. Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), a police shrink who has both treated
and been involved in a love affair with Douglas. Both of the women are skilled
at psychology, can access the hero's secret files, want him as a sexual plaything
and have incriminating secrets someone is leading him to discover. One of
the women is an evil manipulator, but is it the one who acts like she's trying
to save the cop or the one who openly winks that she could be
guilty?
When "Basic Instinct" was first released, some
complained that the movie was toying with us dishonestly, and that since
either one of these women could be the killer, the content was empty of true
character. When certain gay and lesbian activists decided to picket the film's
release, one group named itself in a way that gave away the answer, as a
way of destroying the film's worth. And in one of the major reviews, Roger
Ebert wrote, "The ending is so arbitrary that it hardly matters. This is
not a movie where the outcome depends upon the personality or behaviour of
the characters. It's just a wind-up machine to jerk us
around."
Ah, come on. The whole point is how we really
know all along who the killer is, as does Douglas, and yet we and he nonetheless
manage to get strung along by her deceptions. In the brilliant reveal of
the last shot, we're sitting there going, "I knew it, dammit, I knew it!"
And maybe we did, but for a moment there, she had us. (I'm assuming you've
seen the movie, and am going to freely discuss the identity of the bad
girl.)
By the end, when Douglas and Stone have decided
to be together, we can sense he knows she's the killer, and something about
the alternative explanation just doesn't add up. But he has realised that
he cannot beat his nemesis, and although she has by this time murdered two
of his beloved, he must give in to evil. She holds him in her grip, and that's
that. All through the movie, the dialogue between the two dances around her
implied threats to kill him, as well as her offers of sex, incorporated with
references to the fact that she might be the killer and taunts about his
own weakness for homicidal impulse. She teases, tempts and commands him.
He stands unphased, and insists he will be strong enough to take her down.
She keeps changing the subject with a crafty grin, refusing to let him know
whether he's a true threat, and that is her way of using his ego to her
advantage.
I was going to quote from the movie to illustrate
the rapport between the two leads, but finding the few right lines is difficult.
Undercurrents reveal themselves and reference each other over the course
of fairly lengthy exchanges, and so much depends on the way Stone and Douglas
linger on pauses before answering each other's questions, face off with their
eyes and body language, or toy with props (the scenes in which they cut up
blocks of ice, or offer each other cigarettes, are especially
suggestive).
Stone broke right into stardom with "Basic Instinct",
where she is devious, enigmatic and intensely fascinating in the way she
hides things through dialogue that seems beguilingly frank and penetrating.
Her character cuts through men while seeming to invite them; she masters
every type of attraction, from flirty challenge to aggressive dominance to
tenderness, and the more it seems believable, the stranger and more powerfully
deceptive it actually is. Stone creates one of the classic femme fatales
by running impossible circles around others, gauging natures to weave outcomes
of situations to her advantage, and making all this convincing through its
ease, confidence and ironic humour.
The Douglas performance is less acclaimed, maybe
because it shows an actor usually marketed as cool and strong to be pathetically
at the mercy of Stone, and led around by his trousers despite all efforts.
But it's not Douglas that's a pitiful and deluded middle-aged tough guy (behave,
ye gigglers), it's his character. In being able to play someone who so obviously
thinks he knows the score and still remains something of a typical male buffoon,
Douglas is courageous. He plays Nick Curran as a man who knows how he comes
across, thinks this will provide a poker face for his smarts, and ends up
no match for the villain.
The chemistry of the leads is enough to savour,
but it is accentuated by the film noir essence of the production. The photography
shows California as magnetic and sun-drenched, and also slinks around to
suggest mystery, borrowing angles from Hitchcock and moving around light
sources to match the moody rhythms of the dialogue. The score, by Jerry
Goldsmith, uses strange, coiling string sounds to hang over the movie, sometimes
creeps up on them with low piano rumblings and builds to a final moment where
the full orchestra pounds out the sounds of violence and revelation with
the kind of showmanship that knocks you back, then makes you
grin.
It was hardly mentioned, in the press of the time,
just how skilfully "Basic Instinct" was made. Everyone was too busy with
the sex scenes, how they walked the line between ridiculous aggression and
irresistible interest, and how they provoked the Motion Picture Association
of America to cut out almost a minute of material that was left in release
prints all over the rest of the world. But the film received Oscar nominations
for music and editing, and most reviews of the recent video re-release gave
far more love to the technical precision than attention to the controversy.
On the DVD commentary, director Paul Verhoeven and cinematographer Jan DeBont
do not make shallow comments -- they're interested in reminiscing about how
they pulled off effects with shapes, colours, textures, subtleties of rhythm
and their influences.
Is "Basic Instinct" a gauche film? Sure. Does
that stop it from being a masterpiece in a certain Hollywood tradition? Nah.
What people forget about film noir is that it wasn't always a respectable
genre, and those smoky old crime dramas played in fleapits before guys like
Humphrey Bogart got involved. Even then, they were enjoyed for grit and
sordidness as much as tempo and style. "Basic Instinct" fools us just like
Catherine fools Nick -- it seems obvious to work out and stand back from,
but it winds seductively, and by the end, the intrigue has sucked us
in.
The stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, rest his soul,
used to have a bit about "Basic Instinct". He said, "Don't get sucked in
by the phoney hype surrounding this movie. Quick capsule review: 'Piece a
shit!' That's all it was, is a piece of shit. Anyway, after I saw it about
eight times..."
And that's it. It's the kind of movie everyone
is talking about at work the day after it's been on TV. Someone brings it
up with a smile: "You watch 'Basic Instinct' last night?" And everyone kinda
smiles, and laughs, and yes, everyone did end up watching it. And then someone
admits: "It's really good, actually, isn't it?"
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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