Basic Instinct at 30: a lurid throwback to when Hollywood still took risks

Thirty years ago, Basic Instinct was all anyone could talk about. Before our current age of Insta-controversies and aggregated showbiz news, it was widely known that screenwriter Joe Eszterhas had sold his screenplay for a record $3m and that demonstrators in San Francisco, including Eszterhas himself, had protested against the film’s association of lesbianism with violent psychosis. It was known that director Paul Verhoeven had battled the MPAA from an NC-17 rating to the hardest of R ratings in the states, and it took no time for buzz to circulate about the famed interrogation scene, where Catherine Trammell, the author and might-be murderess played by Sharon Stone, uncrosses her legs before a roomful of sweat-drenched men. (The odious trickery behind that shot, however, was still unknown.)

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It would not be accurate to think about an artist of Verhoeven’s stature as a troll, exactly, but he’s a button-pusher of the first order. While his films, including last year’s nunsploitation howler Benedetta, have an underlying seriousness to their provocations, he also enjoys poking the hornet’s nest, seizing every opportunity to razz the scolds. Basic Instinct is a lively, sexy and fitfully repugnant vulgarization of film noir, targeting American audiences with such surgical precision that its title refers as much to them as the pleasure-seeking lunatics on screen. Even though he was from Holland, Verhoeven understood better than anyone in Hollywood the puritanical response of sex and violence, how it could attract and repulse simultaneously. Like a chemist splashing around with acids and bases, he knew how to produce heat.

Still, Basic Instinct was a less sui generis phenomenon than a studio finding the right person for the job. The $3m spent on Eszterhas’s embarrassing but crudely effective screenplay was a small gamble on the hundreds of millions Fatal Attraction had made a few years earlier, also starring Michael Douglas as the aggrieved victim of his own desire. Verhoeven just did the formula one better: he had already given a knife to a Hitchcockian blonde in his great Dutch thriller The Fourth Man, and Basic Instinct allowed him to do it again in San Francisco, the home of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And he had a mandate to shock.

It takes no time for him to follow through. To the swells of Jerry Goldsmith’s score – a brilliant Harlequin-ization of something Hitchcock’s composer, Bernard Herrmann, might have done — Verhoeven starts with a suggestive dance of images around a blurry reflective surface before finally sharpening focus on a ceiling mirror above two wriggling bodies below. The woman on top, her blond hair obscuring her face, reaches first for a white silk scarf to tie her man’s wrists to the bedposts. Then she reaches for an ice pick and repeatedly, savagely stabs him in the face and chest. (How savage? Rob Bottin, the legendary effects and makeup artist of The Thing and Verhoeven’s Total Recall, went all out again here.) The victim is a retired rock star who never retired from sex and drugs. “He got off before he got off,” cracks an investigator on the scene, spouting one of Eszterhas’s million-dollar one-liners.

As Nick Curran, the ultimate cop-on-the-edge type, Douglas returned to the city that helped make his career with the TV policer The Streets of San Francisco, but his detective here follows his impulses as much as he does evidence – and more often than not, confuses the two. That makes him an ideal mark for Catherine, who presents such an open-and-shut case as the perpetrator that the obviousness of her guilt becomes her best defense. Not only is she the victim’s longtime sex partner, spotted leaving a club with him the night of the murder, but she wrote a novel about killing a rock star. Nick comes around to her line of thinking, in no small part because he’s drawn into pansexual orbit, despite her stated intent to write a new book abouta cop who’s slain after falling for the wrong woman.

Eszterhas’s script adds a couple of steamy alternatives to Catherine, like her jealous lesbian lover Roxy (Leilani Sarelle) and Nick’s ex-lover Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), a police psychologist shielding him from an internal affairs investigation. There’s also endless business about Catherine’s past, in which her billionaire parents and Berkeley psychology professor died under mysterious circumstances. In one of the film’s more quietly ridiculous scenes, Nick finds Catherine at home crying over the many, many, many people in her life who seem to die prematurely. She weeps about 10 feet away from an ice pick. She likes “rough edges” in her drinks.

One of Verhoeven’s strongest qualities as a film-maker is that he’s sophisticated without ever needing to be respectable, which allows for a film as unabashedly tawdry and “wrong” as Basic Instinct to plumb depths that mere exploitation never can. Verhoeven knows enough about cinema to realize that he can’t turn the clock back on noir, so his solution is to make the implicit explicit and allow the sexual and intellectual confidence of his femme fatale to devour the entire film. Though Stone was far down the list of actors offered the role – most flatly rejected it, given the requirements of the job – she makes any other choice seem unthinkable in retrospect. Vertigo is about a woman (and then, a second woman) who is held captive by a man’s obsession; Basic Instinct has the man held captive, and Catherine is the one pulling the strings, often accompanied by Stone’s half-sinister/half-seductive grin.

At the same time, it’s not revisionist thinking to recoil at certain moments in Basic Instinct, like Nick pushing past consensual boundaries with Beth or suggesting to Roxy that they talk “man to man”. And it’s just simple good taste to laugh at Eszterhas’s over-cranked writing, which Verhoeven does not tamp down here any more than he would later with Showgirls. But the fact is that nothing like Basic Instinct could come out of risk-averse Hollywood today, at least not on the scale that might propel it to the center of American culture. The thirst is still there, with precious little to slake it.