Basic Instinct
I've been trying to find a way to write about this film for a while, but the recent conversation on
TÁR has motivated me to try, since I think
Basic Instinct is a film where Verhoeven accomplishes the impossible: Successfully navigating a path to sustainably engage with a character's subjectivity and also keep it restrained to the perfect degree; effectively translated through extrapolating the surrogate from character to audience member to general psychology to society and culture to abstract themes on internal and social confrontations with immaterial material, whether a film, delusion, projected desire... you name it.
I used to shrug this movie off, but over the years I've grown to love it for both very simple and very complex reasons, which are inevitably intertwined by Verhoeven’s own dual focus. Yes, he’s taking Joe Eszterhas’ unironic script and making lemonade by lampooning it, but he’s doing so with calculated precision, and masterfully balancing concurrent audacious overflow and restraint. Verhoeven chops this up and shoots it like a Hitchcock or De Palma suspense film- it’s beautiful, involving, economical without an ounce of fat, and genuinely entertaining on a pure formal level. He’s also initiating satire, but careful, tougher satire than the cheap shots at low hanging fruit a lesser filmmaker would settle for. Verhoeven is satirizing society, gender roles, power dynamics, the artificialities of movies and the artificiality of the personas we don from watching movies, but he’s also validating these as at least
somewhat (but not
too much) worth exploring instead of snubbing our noses at them. And this is because he understands that the audience, and our relationship to movies, is part of this process. Verhoeven isn’t playing a joke on us, but engaging the audience on an adult level around schlock, repurposing it as an exercise to be both superficially entertained by -in blatant transparency of the plot’s vacuous nature- and challenged into critical thinking and feeling, around the infinite potentials to approach this kind of material with dignifying encouragement. He succeeds in part through employing a narrative (divorced from ‘plot’) that doubles as a mature scavenger hunt for us to unlock gems in every domain of cinema’s possibilities.
Verhoeven somehow finds a comfortable distance by which to acknowledge the western male's mental obsessions and physical compulsions, and also peripherally balk at the psychology and behavior. But he goes several steps further, first by metaphysically refuting the practice of earnestly allotting time and energy to such meritless endeavors of investigating Douglas' Nick's psyche (for artist, audience member, and all voyeuristic/vicarious participants), and then by reflexively making that part of the text; as Nick fruitlessly, pointlessly, yet pathetically and fatalistically embarks on his own 'investigation' of the murder case and Stone's Catherine's involvement. These are occasionally seen as the same thing by Nick, but more often than not they are kept ironically separate (forced apart by Nick' own competing impulses and that of Verhoeven's stratified targets), when we all know they are one in the same. Nick also proceeds towards these goals in both half-assed and full-measured methods, split between the sincerity of his job, morality around murder, etc. and the id impulses of his sex drive, addictions, conceit. This feels like the most successful cinematic adaptation of Nabokov's style in approaching the solipsism in
Lolita, indulging in simultaneous sincere participation and ironic critique.
Though it's this all-encompassing engagement Verhoeven omnisciently commits to every shred of his material that makes it work. If Nick represents both us as audiences and Verhoeven himself as a filmmaker, what does that say? Is the pathetic and deterministic nature of Nick allowed to be broadly pitied along with deserving dark laughter? Don't we all feel split, and aren't we all to some degree powerless to actualize the perfect logical sobriety we secretly yearn for- to essentially be God (as Verhoeven comes as close as anyone has in his vast scope of attention with this film), impeded by all the same handicaps Nick has, at least generally speaking? Don't we all have narcissistic parts inherently binding us to a narrow scope of vision, just like him? Isn't life ironic, and is it possible that the silly movie-fake murders in Eszterhas' screenplay are actually of less worth than the sex drives that usurp Nick' focus and dominate the narrative, since they command our attention more than any actual mystery or bare-minimum care about plot? I think Verhoeven is pretty clearly but cheekily (and ardently but leisurely) asking these questions, and leaning into the latter as truth, which itself tangles up the meta-commentary by further validating Nick' stupid choices within the context of a dumb movie but also real life, which is pretty dumb too, with a bunch of Nicks/us walking around.
It's noteworthy that I adore this film, but tune Nick out almost the entire time, despite his role as a faux-surrogate. Whenever he's on screen, I'm almost always giving more of my attention away to the scenery, or the sleek camera movement, or Verhoeven's mastery over the form, or the characters he's playing off of. Douglas' Nick is a critical aid in granting a lot of the elasticity necessary for Verhoeven to achieve his unthinkable equilibrium in examination, but not in the function one expects. He is, quite simply, the worst in every way; the worst character, the worst performance (by Douglas and bordering on any actor ever), and the comically-worst representation of the prototypical western man's worst qualities - which, thankfully, doesn't discount the utility embedded in stereotypes, and only emphasizes the reading that he's not worth fleshing out or allotting investment in on any level of equality. Nick's vehicle is uninteresting, brutish, weak, overconfident, impulsive, and vapid. By making him the main character, Verhoeven has a ripe opportunity to pull off this impossible task of model engagement: Nick is so repelling that he subverts the accessibility of himself as a surrogate. We follow him around, but never identify with him emotionally. He's not aware he has any emotions, or doesn't properly show them when they do seem to come verbally; they're either buried deep, nonexistent, or, in a vacuum, but it hardly matters- for a delusional man this undignified, digging for what nobody wants to find is a waste of time and energy for all. However, we
can identify with what he represents for us cerebrally, if we wish. We can meet him on his appropriate level of reductiveness for pathologizing, that can in turn reveal a lot about sweeping trends in humanity, and our relationship to vicarious consumption in private spaces, safely facilitating a process of realising our worst qualities without becoming fully sober to them.
Catherine, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the femme fatale through an unimaginative male gaze, and a pleasure to watch regardless of her thin characterization. Verhoeven knows this, and makes her alluring while never once trying to sincerely endorse a reading that she's either innocent or actually interesting beyond a cookie-cutter acidic doll. And yet, we as the audience don't mind being wooed by her blunt sexually-charged one-liners and actions that fulfill both dominant and submissive fantasies for men. She's an incarnation of Nick's (and all he represents, including parts of us deep down) absurdly-impossible and unwanted-in-real-life Dream Woman: mysterious, flirtatious, independent, sexually adventurous, and elusive- always game for being chased, but still showing up on his doorstep when he craves her presence for just a taste of a tease. Her existence sparks the extremism of Nick's dual impulses, just as she represents dualities: compelling and alienating, solicitous and cold, exciting and frightening, dominant and submissive, inhibited and disinhibited, independent and dependent (both predictably and unpredictably around sex), intelligently intuitive and habitually drawn to seemingly irresistible urges... She's superficially fun, but her character is trash and welcomes trashy activity beneath the veneer of austere luxury, much like Verhoeven's strategic execution of his ethos. In real life, she wouldn't be fun or particularly stimulating in most areas that she is here, and this mirage is a key to unlocking the point of the movie.
She's highly intelligent, apparently, and also may have superpowers to conjure behavior into being, but the physicality of her desire drives the compulsive behavior that causes her to need to use her intellect. That comes second, along with the drive to write. She's first and foremost an insatiable predator, but in exploiting the femme fatale and inverting it into bald-faced satire, Catherine Tramell is a mirror held up to western men, dissolving their worth and posturing at wider, abstract repudiation for the value in virtue itself. This is distinct from nihilism, since there's plenty of meaning to be found in the gorgeous construction of this film, and in the philosophical deconstruction of the specific moral channels of meaning we flock towards; though in consideration of morality (something this film ensures we do wonder about), it retains recontextualized value. We're more interested in the sexy, flashy, cinematic digestibility of the movie, to the point where we can forsake the plot and our main character in favor of the schematic flourishes. A humanist film, this is not- but it's one that invites a wealth of engagement with the crevices of human psychology without patronizing the audience.
So thematically, this is at once a deeper exploration of our human drives, and an evisceration of the absurd ones that create and sustain myopia and facilitate narcissistic harm onto others, while also cautiously respecting the unavoidable intrinsic nature of them. That's a simplified summary, but intentionally written as three parts, with the second flowing back into the first for a significant reason. If it was just a "Yeah x.. BUT
Y!" the film would fail, but instead Verhoeven imbues a layered fluidity between an approach that genuinely encompasses interest and dedication to craft and themes, with camp that mocks our psychologies through the characters and narrative devices, and then
back to the fervency in devotion to the concoction that makes it all work: which could be, and is among many things, a fully-absorbed exhibition of the conflicting influences and wills in anthropology and life itself. Verhoeven doesn't offer a solution, a way out, or a didactic response... he just lays it bare: like an optical illusion that can be consumed as pulp extravaganza or good-movie making or thematic profundity or absurdist psycho-existential wry, dry comedy.
Verhoeven essentially creates a fourth dimension to play around in and make his sandbox, and it’s a blast to do that for two hours. I can’t think of another film that does what this one does-
Showgirls is fine, but it’s only ever operating on the superficial side of this film’s strengths. In
Basic Instinct, the subtext and text intermingle and occasionally conflate, without the auteur ever losing sight of which is which, resulting in the kind of confident and earned smoothness that's wildly impractical, but also a wholly novel strand of aesthetically poetic satisfaction you didn't even know you wanted until you figured out it can exist. In its gradual percolation, the rewards are infectious and expand every sense we use to ingest the content of the medium, toward consummating the sublime (in a way Nick will never achieve with his ridiculously extreme and hollow acts with Catherine, delusional as he may be; and that Catherine impermanently attains through ridiculously extreme and hollow acts of id impulses despite her superhuman intellectual skills; another of the many meta in-jokes this film provides for the taking). In Verhoeven's lucid process of locating, manipulating, and exercising this smoothness, he achieves Art that is reflexive on every level of the cinematic experience. Films like this make me thirst for more like it, and in coming up empty, I only appreciate the rich singularly more.