'Female gaze', 'Male gaze', Misogyny, Homesexuality...

Basic Instinct… Paul In "unedited" form, Basic Instinct became the highest-grossing film in the entire European continent; and even with half a minute of blush-inducing athletics shaved off, the American version constituted enough of a scandal to ensure its box-office success.

The film's primary draw is, of course, sex. Instinct's implied contract with the audience is, you give me six bucks, and I'll make you start smoking again. But sex along does not a legitimate feature film make. Its payola is disguised under a crazy-quilt of social criticisms, all of them enormously suggestive, but none of them complete. You may think you're just getting an eyeful of flesh and an earful of f-words, but you're also leaving with plenty of cultural baggage that demands unpacking.

Some say Verhoeven promotes misogyny by infusing every female character with homicidal impulses. Others praise him for posing Catherine Tramell as the new liberated woman who plays the games of man's world better than men themselves. Queer Nation and other gay-rights organizations castigate the film for a negative portrayal of homosexuals as murderous psychotics. Meanwhile, lesbian writers in the Village Voice herald Catherine, Roxy, and Lisa/Elizabeth as exciting and empowering characters. Plenty of outraged viewers decry the film's sexual intensity and inventiveness, whereas my French grammar professor in Paris last semester applauded it for being an "excellent mirror to the collective unconscious." A closer look at the narrative makes for a flow-chart nightmare, such that we can never know the agent behind the misandrist murders. Eszterhas has obviously forgotten that narrative ambiguity has no place in a murder mystery, for another promise of the genre is that we will ultimately be rewarded with answers. Such irresponsible filmmaking allows us to interpret the film's comments on the relationship between gender and power any way we see fit. And therein lies the film's moral danger.

A simple plot summary poses the tale as a triangle of lust, in which San Francisco detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) vacillates between the wiles of his police department's psychiatrist, Dr. Elizabeth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and those of his current case's prime suspect, the popular novelist Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone). Curran's hormonal dilemmas are framed by the murder of a retired rock singer, Johnny Boz, who was stabbed during sex thirty-one times with an ice pick. Tramell is suspicious on two grounds: she was Boz's last companion, and the murder echoes the plot of her last book, Love Hurts, about "a retired rock-and-roll star who gets murdered by his girlfriend" with the selfsame chilly instrument. The premise makes for an excellent good-guy versus bad-girl tale, but Eszterhas complicates things by shading Curran's own character. Curran is a recovering cocaine buff and alcoholic who is required to meet regularly with Dr. Garner after "accidentally" shooting several tourists while drugged-up on duty. His dark past makes him attractive fodder for Tramell's nexy project, entitled Shooter, about a detective who "falls for the wrong woman." Such an omen fails to convince Curran to keep his loins away from her, unfortunately, so we wait for him to be perforated.

Basic Instinct leaps from man's world into, so to speak, the lap of women. The film's predominantly male perspective is suggested by the continual presence of the ever-phallic Prudential building outside of Curran's apartment window. Verhoeven launches the plot from Curran's point of view, then spends the rest of the film subverting it. For this is not a story about Curran; though he may be the protagonist, he is not the hero. This film is about women, and specifically a new breed of women epitomized by Catherine Tramell, who is Instinct's truly triumphal character with whom we are meant to identify. Curran is not even remotely likeable; and gradually it becomes clear that Verhoeven intends for Curran to represent the worst element of male heterosexuality: complacency. Curran rests blindly secure in his belief in male dominance, unwilling to be threatened by a mere woman, whose importance to him fluctuates according to his need. It is not a sense of justice that gravitates Curran to Tramell - it is egotistical lust, the heedless physical need that so characterizes the male population. Tramell is fully aware of man's primum mobile, and this knowledge becomes her trump card over her victims.

Tramell's manipulation of the "male gaze" subverts one of society's most basic societal power structures, the idea that it is men who do the watching, and women who are reduced to less-than-three-dimensional images. Even her female rivals and lovers entertain such a role reversal: Elizabeth Garner's apartment overlooks a ladies' dance class, and Roxy's taste for watching Catherine make love to other men completely flips our visual conventions. "She likes me to watch," Roxy argues, and later when Catherine takes apart a block of ice for her drink with her favorite weapon, she exposes Nick's potentially tragic flaw with a question: "You like watching me, don't you?" It is now women who run the show. When Nick secretly watches Catherine strip at her living room window, she turns the light off. Finally, Verhoeven's most brilliant comment on man's scopophilic downfall takes place in the film's very first scene: Johnny Boz and his soon-to-be-killer make love underneath his ceiling mirror, from which he undoubtedly enjoyed watching his own amorous adventures, and from which he now witnesses his own murder. (In the unedited version, Boz receives an ice pick in the eye, further punctuating Verhoeven's statement.)

I would be a fool to ignore Basic Instinct's classic contribution to film history, however: the notorious interrogation scene between Tramell and several detective remains one of the most gripping and scandalous moments of Hollywood's past decade - known as the "gratuitous beaver shot" that launched a thousand ships, as well as Sharon Stone's career. The scene becomes a metaphor for woman's place in the world, as she single-handedly matches wits with five men - and reduces them to Jello®. The event is essentially pornographic, with five men throwing their gaze on a beautiful woman and trying to dominate her. And Tramell knows it, of course. As she unnecessarily elaborates on her sexual practices, her inquisitors begin to sweat and lick their lips. "He [Johnny Boz] gave me a lot of pleasure," Tramell notes, taking man's place as the one who should receive the pleasure. When Assistant District Attorney John Correli asks if she ever engaged in sadomasochistic activities, Tramell refires, "Exactly what did you have in mind, Mr. Correli?" The room gets hotter, and the detectives run for the water cooler. And when Tramell finally delivers the coup de grace by uncrossing and re-crossing her legs sans undergarments, the pornographic role-reversal is complete: the guys may get a look, but it is she who benefited, as the men find themselves unable to continue the cross-examination. Tramell succeeds in passing through her accusers' fingers by playing to their basic instincts.

Tramell denies anyone the advantage even in conversation, for in every scene where Curran questions Trammel, she fires back with her own barrage of inquiries into his personal life, always maintaining a balance of information. Curran becomes defensive: "You seem to know a lot about me," he observes. "You know an awful lot about me," says Trammel. "I don't know anything that's not police business," he counters. "You know I don't wear any underwear, don't you Nick?" And she exposes along the way man's eternal double standard that sexually active men are "studs" whereas unvirginal women are "whores":

What Basic Instinct has offered was wide range of reactions from audiences. In particular, there is a great amount of "whodunit?" side-taking among fans of the movie. Though the narrative potholes effectively discombobulate both sides' arguments, Eszterhas clearly intends for either Tramell or Garner to be pegged as the killer; the fact that they never appear together in a scene also suggests this dualistic narrative intent. The film's inconsistencies allow for a myriad of interpretations, however, and dangerously transmit contradictory messages about female representation. Exploring both camps' position better illustrates Basic Instinct's paradoxical stance toward women.

To leave it in Tramell's hands is certainly an attractive simplification. Here surfaces a central issue of the film: is she, though guilty, a model femme fatale or a misogynist and homophobic example of lethal and lunatic lesbianism? This question is answered by one's interpretation of the final scene: does Tramell, out of love, renounce her serial killing, or merely decide to kill Curran later?

The issues of homosexual representation, misogyny, and graphic sexual depiction are subordinate to the film's greater implications. This is a film about a new wave of women who know what men want and who intend to fulfill their own desires by way of this knowledge. Curran's anxiety and paranoia thus speak for all men who are growing progressively aware that they might have as much to fear from their girlfriends as women fear from their traditionally stronger boyfriends. Despite Basic Instinct's empowering elements, however, Verhoeven allows for several sensationalistic excesses which are far from complimentary toward women. Careless imagery constantly threatens to overwhelm the picture, such as stereotypically dyke-ish lesbian characterizations and at least one thoroughly discomfiting instance of date rape.