Basic Instinct

While Basic Instinct (1992) received much of its attention to a certain leg-crossing scene and a lowbrow but quality-in-its-meta-ness Joe Eszterhas screenplay, it is Verhoeven’s touch that makes so much of this film’s noirish material flow with ease. Certainly this is partially due to the fact that the story is basically a re-baked The 4th Man, with the lesbian elements filling in for the “troublesome” androgyny elements. However, whereas the former film aspired to contemplation with its Bergmanesque juxtapositions of the cross/spider, existential images that continually haunted the protagonist, Basic Instinct celebrates its crassness, wallowing in its psychological depravity and utilizing the noir treatment in a shorthand form that extends the themes of denial and refutation.

By now the story doesn’t need much summarizing, since the noir elements reveal much of the desperation and fatalism that will follow: Det. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), doubted by the police squad because of an accidental shooting that killed an innocent, investigates a string of murders that a literate and sexually promiscuous author, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), has endless ties to, and he gradually becomes so taken by her that he denies all the obvious signs of her guilt. The subjective psychosis of Nick’s character, also famously, best finds its externalization in a scene where he and his on-again-off-again shrink (Jeanne Tripplehorn) engage in what can only be described as non-consensual sex, existing as nothing but rape/violation. Thus, we realize that Nick is no mere innocent in the transgressions that follow, but rather that this rape has consequences and any desire to cover up those consequences is a part of Nick’s unconscious. So, in accordance with noir tradition, only the innocent (the shrink, Nick’s partner) are at risk, as the amoral (Nick, Catherine) have nothing to lose.

The film is slickly shot, but that same slickness acts as part of Verhoeven’s mise en scene, offering a vacuum, a blankness to the compositions that is in accordance to his lead’s interiority. So this film isn’t even about moral ambiguity, but about how the vacuous Nick unconsciously believes that washing away all ties to innocence will cure him of his own moral blankness. It is the appropriately blunt masterwork of Verhoeven’s engagement with Hollywood.

Basic Instinct: 9.5/10