The Problematics: ‘Basic Instinct’ Is Too Ridiculous To Be Offensive

Back in the late 1980s, Sharon Stone was considered “one to watch” by a select cadre of genre-movie nuts. She made a particular impression in the picture Action Jackson, a not-sufficiently-appreciated cinematic cheeseball that tried to make a franchise action hero out of Apollo Creed originator Carl Weathers. (And you know what, it should have succeeded.) By 1990 she had been discovered by Paul Verhoeven, the provocative Dutch director who made a huge Hollywood impression with RoboCop; he cast Stone as the sweet-then-salty wife of Ah-nuld in Total Recall. This was the stage set for the picture that made her a star, 1992’s Basic Instinct.

It’s a movie almost everybody knows. At the time, it seemed to have set the standard (such as it was) for the big-budget erotic thriller. The tale of disgraced cop Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) drawn into the evil web of maybe-serial-icepick-murderer AND bestselling author Catherine Trammel (Stone), the movie startled critics and viewers with its copious nudity, bloody violence, frank sex talk, and a police interrogation scene featuring the most memorable private-parts flashing in mainstream cinema history. The movie also drew the ire of gay rights groups, many of which took umbrage at the movie’s implied connection of bisexuality with multiple murdering. 

Nearly 30 years after its release, watching it on Hulu, we can acknowledge that Basic Instinct, while certainly provisionally offensive in many requests, is not really problematic. (And after all, when we look back on all the cultural factors that made the progress of gay rights more difficult, this movie is not prominent among them. In any event, these days the picture is more apt to inspire gender and queer studies redolent dissertations rather than protests.) What it is, though, is ridiculous.

Where to begin? The murder plot full of holes? The incredibly laughable dialogue, including the declaration “She’s evil! She’s BRILLIANT!” and a bit about rugrats that inspires an immediate basic instinct to hide under the couch and is iterated three whole times? (It is said that Joe Eszterhas’ script sold for $3 million, and that he wrote it in thirteen days. I’d say it sounds like it was written in thirteen days, but Ben Hecht wrote a lot of GREAT scripts in two weeks; maybe that extra single day was crucial. No, I don’t think that’s it.) The boogity-boogity-boogity vibe that descends on the picture every time a character brings up a completely weird sexual practice like…um…light bondage? There’s so much. 

There’s a sense that the wide-eyed gaze with which the movie apprehends some sexual practices and/or orientations is just director Verhoeven taking the piss at American puritanism. Once murder suspect Catherine meets Nick, she begins to discombobulate him to the extent that she compels him to take up all the habits he gave up after having shot like maybe 200 innocent bystanders in a series of police actions. First it’s cigarettes, in a hilarious scene. 

Eventually Nick is so addled he has to take his police department therapist and ex-girlfriend Beth (poor Jeanne Triplehorn, who for some reason is obliged to wear the jacket from David Byrne’s Stop Making Sense Big Suit for like half the movie) by force and from behind. Yikes. There’s actually a potentially interesting psychological thread in the movie’s scenario, one which posits Nick and Catherine as siblings in aberrant behavior and guilt, but it’s buried under the posturing, most of which is borne of Eszterhas’ morbid preoccupation with the femme fatale convention. 

Michael Douglas’ Nick has contempt for everything. At the murder scene, after one of his superiors remarks that the murder victim was very civic-minded, Nick takes note of the mirror near the bed, piled high with what he calls “very civic-minded, very respectable cocaine.” Talk about the pot calling, etcetera. Is cocaine poisoning a thing? Because if it is, this movie has it bad. The character eventually comes to represent the impotence of the out-of-control mediocre male; in a sense this movie, like Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, can be seen as an examination of the Twilight Era of the White California Male.

There’s a song by the cabaret artist Dave Frishberg called “I Can’t Take You Nowhere” that lists among the reasons for the title situation as “you talk back to cops.” In Basic Instinct, Catherine and pretty much everyone who’s not a cop talks back to cops. In this movie’s brave new world, it’s just the thing that’s done. (This is also a feature of the Law and Order TV series that I’m frequently puzzled by.) “We weren’t dating, we were fucking,” Catherine says to Nick and his affable partner Gus, describing her relationship with the murdered rock dude Boz, the movie’s first victim. She then describes the last time she saw Boz. They went to a club, and she didn’t go home with him afterward. Hey, wait a minute: that sounds like a date. 

The movie is a juicy 128 minutes of this kind of nonsense, which extends into the production design. (The police interrogation room wherein Stone’s character rocks Wayne Knight’s world looks like a postmodern anechoic chamber.)  Nick signals his homophobia by calling Catherine’s girlfriend Roxy “Rocky,” before telling this smoky character that he considers Catherine “the fuck of the century.” I guess if you enjoy sex that, as depicted here, looks like an extremely outré Pilates class, the character may well have been. (This mode of intimacy is of course carried over to the staging of sex scenes in Showgirls, the 1995 Verhoeven/Eszterhas follow-up to Instinct, a film that garnered oodles of critical disapprobation in spite of being not a whit less ridiculous than their prior film.) What makes it watchable is in part Verhoeven’s direction, which is both tidy and fleet. Everything that has to be in a given frame is there, and the movie moves as sleekly as a panther. Which is good, because except for Stone, Leilani Sarelle as Roxy, and Dorothy Malone, every actor in the movie gives a performance that’s either neon-bright emotive or just plain bad. I’m afraid that Michael Douglas, an extremely creditable actor in the main, is kind of staggering in this respect. “She killed them Phil…it’s part of her game,” is just one of the many hoo-boy line readings he delivers here. 

If there are any readers 60 or older lingering over this consideration, they are probably still asking “Wait, Dorothy Malone?” Yes, Dorothy Malone, the sexy leading lady specializing in beguiling and sometimes troubled characters though the ’40s and ’50s, later a TV star on Peyton Place, appears in a small but crucial character role in this movie, which would be her last. She plays Hazel, one of Catherine’s real-life murderer pals. (She claims she befriends such folks as research for her novels.) During one of Nick’s “difficult” moments with Catherine, whom by this time he has decided he wants to have rugrats with, Hazel shoots the cop a look as if to say “You’re no Humphrey Bogart. Or Kirk Douglas for that matter.” (Malone shared a flask with Bogie in one of the best scenes in 1946’s The Big Sleep, and co-starred with Michael’s father in 1961’s The Last Sunset, an enjoyable film of rather less consequence.) The one Basic Instinct question to which I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer is: how did Dorothy Malone end up in this gonzo smorgasbord? Anybody?

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Basic Instinct