Song - She's Always A Woman (Billy Joel)
Movie: Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992)
In 1993 George Sluizer directed The Vanishing, a remake of his own 1988 Dutch movie Spoorloos. Such projects tend to be derivative anyway (I haven't seen The Vanishing, but its awful reviews make a lot of sense), but at its best, Basic Instinct already feels like the greatest possible Hollywood remake of Spoorloos. The two don't share the same plot, but are about the same obsession. Both films are about men who are trying to understand the exact nature of a mysterious death/disappearance, where the main question is much less who did it, but how they did it. As a result both men are willing to knowingly put themselves in the exact same life-threatening position as the victim was in before the fatal blow. Now, in Spoorloos that leads Gene Bervoets to one of the most horrifiyngly nightmarish situations imaginable, while in Basic Instinct it leads Michael Douglas to "the fuck of the century." I don't know how conscious Paul Verhoeven was of the connections between the two films, but Spoorloos is based on a famous Dutch book written by Tim Krabbe, the brother of Jeroen Krabbe (who's had multiple major roles in Verhoeven's Dutch films, and is probably the most recognisable Dutch actor outside of Rutger Hauer).
It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that Basic Instinct ends with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in bed, with the camera panning to show an ice pick underneath it. The film opens with a blonde woman killing her sexual partner in bed with an ice pick, and although her quick movements and concealing hair make it hard to identify her, once we get a few good looks of Sharon Stone, it becomes fairly evident that she is the killer. As a result Basic Instinct is least succesfull when it pretends to be a investigative thriller. It produces a lot of repetitive scenes that logically always lead to the same conclusion, while we are asked to believe that they potentially don't. Equally frustrating is Verhoeven's need to always be signifying. A cigar is not just a cigar and a blonde woman is not just a blonde woman, but also a reference to film history (especially to Hitchcock), and more importantly a symbol of how American society is supposedly much darker and perverse than we notice on the surface. This would be more effective if Verhoeven was capable of integrating his symbolism much more organically within his story, but many of his choices keep stopping the film in his tracks. That's much less a problem here though than in Turkish Delight, Elle and espcially Starship Troopers (it's amazing that people still misinterpret that movie, but that doesn't make it good. I think it is the most boringly obvious satire I've seen).
Still, most of his films are good, smart and entertaining, and Basic Instinct is much more interesting and provocative than even its reputation suggests. Yeah, there is not a moment when Sharon Stone is on screen, when she isn't doing something sexily, and her chemistry with Michael Douglas is great. It's a film that fully earns the right to call itself an 'erotic' thriller, but Verhoeven connects the eroticism directly to danger and death. Douglas' atrraction to Stone is not in spite of her murderous criminality, but heightened by it. The most sexy and erotic scenes in the film are also the ones which are the most violent, or have the most potential for violence (The 'fuck of the century' described my Douglas is shot and cut to explicitly resemble the opening scene) All of this is highlighted in the interrogation scene, where, even before Stone's famous crossover, the cops in the room are fully helpless, They are not just attracted to her beauty, but to the way she combines that with her viciousness and her complete disregard for laws and rules. That gives more than just a sexual connotation to Michael Douglas' obsession and also puts the ice pick at the end of the film in a different context. What if we are not supposed to see that as a clue to solving the mystery of the murder, but as a clue to why Douglas despite his better judgement still chooses to be with Stone?
