<i>(Spoilers for the Paul Verhoeven movies Basic Instinct and Total Recall, thou gh these movies are

so well known that it is expected the reader is familiar wit h both, and no attempt is made to summarize them.)</i> This post might be thought the second in an ongoing series of attempts to deal w ith what might be generically and euphemistically referred to as "writer's block ". The first, <a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/tommy-wisea us-the-room-my-funny-valentine/">"The Room: My Funny Valentine"</a> was in turn halted by the same affliction; a substantial second part of this post going off on an entirely different tangent on bad movies remains unfinished. This post att empts to deal with the problem by writing about a bad movie I would usually have no inclination to write about, or frankly watch, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/t itle/tt0103772/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt"><i>Basic Instinct</i></a>. I am cheerfully tabula rasa as to what others have said about this film, avoidin g the curse mentioned by many, though my memory focuses on Huysmans' <a href="ht tps://archive.org/details/reboursh00huys"><i>A Rebours</i></a>, where one's read ing limits one into reiterating, or making awkward and failed attempts to avoid, what others have already said. I have chosen it as a remedy for my ills, but no t entirely haphazardly; it has the ideal qualities for a movie about which one w ishes to write. I have just spoken of it as a bad movie, and this is almost enti rely the fault of the screenplay, maybe one of the worst ever produced for this kind of very expensive production. If one can imagine a crazed billionaire fundi ng an erotic thriller with the stipulation that all the dialogue had to come fro m comments on youtube, it might produce a similar creature<a name="bkfrftnote1"> </a><a href="#ftnote1">¹</a>. You might look at the movie as an examp le of the lunatic movement of money, entirely unmoored from common sense, this t ime deciding to make a movie out of a disturbed child's english homework - thoug h of course somehow this bet paid off, with the movie a huge financial success. The gap between the script and the high quality of the production, the masterful cinematography and design, are what compel analysis. The emptiness of the scree nplay becomes opacity. There is seemingly nothing to the characters, nothing to their relations with each other, but the richness (the word is not chosen arbitr arily) of the images compels one to believe there <i>must</i> be something withi n. The movie is like a cryptic device, seemingly useless but beautifully ornamen ted, found in a pharoah's tomb. Someone so powerful must have had some reason fo r owning this antique, but what? So, I describe what I think is the most obvious perspective of seeing the film, and though I think this perspective is entirely natural and without awkwardness, it may very well be one entirely without intent of the movie's makers. I also t hink I am describing the most obvious way of seeing the film, and as a tender vi rgin ignorant the film's commentary, I think I may well be saying things that ha ve been said many, many times before<a name="bkfrftnote2"></a><a href="#ftnote2" >²</a>. <i>Basic Instinct</i> can only be seen, and only makes sense, as a movie about m ovie watching and the fantasies they inspire in the audience, and the way they d ifferently affect men and women. It might be seen as a companion piece of the Pa ul Verhoven film right before it, <i>Total Recall</i>. That movie was about a ma n having a fantasy made real, but it's also about the vicariousness involved in movie watching and how those fantasies are not without malevolence. The characte r Doug Quaid may well experience the fantasy of an escape from his life by playi ng the role of a secret agent, but we in the audience are given an equal escape too, the role of Arnold Schwarzenegger playing this very part. The film itself g ives a discreet nod to this in one of the few moments when we break from Quaid's perspective and are with another Rekall client and her potential fantasy: the s creen showing what awaits her features a massive bodybuilder form suggesting not hing less than our own hero. Our desires, however, are not entirely noble: the f antasy of Doug Quaid involves brutal killing, his use of a body as a human shiel

d, and shooting his wife with a machine gun. We eventually learn what underlies this cruelty: Quaid is actually a double agent, part of the malevolent and ruthl ess government which he serves, so deep undercover that his secret mission is un known even to him. That our role playing involves cruel acts more appropriate to a villain than a hero suggests that the fantasy does not involve being a hero a t all, but to play, briefly, at evil. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/xIVSTe4.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/D0ZbLky.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/NGtskkx.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> After an opening dream sequence, <i>Recall</i> begins in the bed of Quaid and hi s wife. <i>Basic Instinct</i> opens in a bed as well, one which we first see ent irely in reflection in the ceiling mirror; the movie is not about sex in real li fe, but images of sex. The plot which follows, all red herrings aside, is ridicu lously simple: a mystery writer named Catherine Tramell is suspected of the open ing murder, and becomes the target of an investigation led by Nick Curran. Trame ll writes books which seem to foretell killings, whether that of her parents or Johnny Boz, the rock star killed in the opening. Detective Nick Curran becomes i ncreasingly obsessed with Tramell, suspecting her of a slew of murders, includin g that of her parents, but we're unsure if his investigation is a cover for his own infatuation or the other way around. Eventually, we learn that Curran's form er girlfriend, a police psychiatrist named Elizabeth Garner is also obsessed wit h Tramell, and has been ever since they went to school together. The movie's ope n ending reveals that Garner is the one behind the killings, intended to frame a nd destroy the object of her ardor, Tramell, yet somehow when the movie closes w ith Curran and Tramell in bed, there is an icepick on the floor which Tramell te ntatively reaches for, but then, for the moment, leaves aside. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/soK1t1b.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> The movie, like <i>Recall</i>, often has the ambiguous quality of a dream; there are scenes that seemingly cannot be real, from which we expect the characters t o awake, but they never do, suggesting the entire movie is a dream life. Curran is a veteran cop, but when he tails Tramell by car, he is so close and so obviou s that he immediately gives himself away. Curran goes to a nightclub shabbily un derdressed and easily the oldest person there, yet no one seems to notice or giv e any dismissive stares; the club itself feels like a vision of what an older ma n might imagine such a club would be like. On the way to her interrogation, Tram ell is asked a series of questions in the car about writing books, and her answe rs here are first given as a reflection in the rearview mirror, a reflected imag e like that which opens the movie: <blockquote>GUS It must really be something making stuff up all the time. TRAMELL Yeah, it teaches you to lie. GUS How's that? TRAMELL You make up believable stuff. It's called suspension of disbelief.</blockquote>

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/3VQQ0Sf.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> The dream-like sequences we see, of Curran tailing Tramell in a manner more obvi ously than any cop would ever do, or Curran unnoticed in a nightclub, destroy th e movie's own suspension of disbelief. What we see cannot be real, it must be Cu rran's dream. Tramell, the center of this dream, seems to have an uncanny insight into Curran. We later learn she may have had access to an internal police report on him, but her knowledge appears to precede this, as if she knew him intimately before the movie began. Though <i>Basic Instinct</i> gives no evidence that Curran knew he r before, there appears such a close connection between them that he is frequent ly asked if he did. Curran is both the movie's protagonist and a character in on e of Tramell's fictions, which uncannily predicts exactly how Curran's partner i s killed. That Curran's character dies in the book implies that he'll die soon a s well, though perhaps only after the film ends. In her books and elsewhere, Tra mell appears to have precognition; she is like a goddess or demon from outside t he dream, summoned into it, who knows perfectly how it works and what will take place, but without any power over the consequences<a name="bkfrftnote3"></a><a h ref="#ftnote3">³</a>. "I don't make any rules, Nick," she says during the famous interrogation scene. "I go with the flow." She stares out at the cam era during a lie detector exam, all-seeing, knowing that eyes are always on her< a name="bkfrftnote4"></a><a href="#ftnote4">⁴</a>. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/Z7Wo8v6.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/J4j2t1Z.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/cfccAVX.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/L3y69pc.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/B0t0fiD.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/H8IsAMi.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <i>Basic Instinct</i> is a mystery set in San Francisco, and it feels like a pla y on that other mystery set in San Francisco, <i>Vertigo</i>. There are, of cour se, the overhead shots of winding staircases, and there is the cop haunted by th e mistakes of the past, this time two tourists killed when Curran worked as an u ndercover agent in a drug sting. The swooning strings suggest the scores of Bern ard Herrmann and Tramell's house is on the coast of the ocean in which <i>Vertig o</i>'s heroine tries to drown. The detective of <i>Vertigo</i> is obsessed with a mysterious woman while a neglected love stands by. Here, the neglected woman is equally obsessed, and it is not the object of obsession who is remade into th e ideal, but this obsessed woman who remakes herself into an image of the femme fatale<a name="bkfrftnote5"></a><a href="#ftnote5">⁵</a>. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/RK06v4w.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/9D56j22.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct

" /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/C6efd2b.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/wYQeEsM.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/0zRTUvN.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> I have said that the movie's opening implies that the film is entirely about our obsession with images themselves, and it is only in this relation that the movi e makes any kind of sense to me. Tramell is the iconic movie character and its a ssociated celebrity, and <i>Basic Instinct</i> might be a metaphor for the fanta sies we have about such things and the influence of such fantasies on our own li ves. Tramell is set apart early on from the other characters, a woman with a mas sive house outside of the city, the bounty of the extraordinary wealth she inher ited when her parents died. She is supposedly a figure of malice, yet she is the only character who over and over again wears white, the traditional symbol of p urity. This, to my mind, does not represent purity at all. Tramell is the centra l light whose rays fall on all the others. The other characters almost always we ar suits, in drab colors, that blend in with the blah interiors of the police st ation. Gardner is as gorgeous as Tramell, but she's stuck in dull browns. Almost all the characters work for the police department, doing what's considered diff icult, necessary work, while it's the multimillionaire maybe serial killer heire ss who embodies the ideal of freedom and wealth so often celebrated in movies. T his, I think, nakedly and without apology does what so many movies do, celebrati ng a material ideal achieved through corruption and death, the corrupt means an afterthought: this is not a movie driven by its moral lessons, this is a movie a bout wanting the multimillion dollar mansion of a murderess<a name="bkfrftnote6" ></a><a href="#ftnote6">⁶</a>. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/DWbsTwy.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/STPDVDq.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/PKXbZKh.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/33zjDJ1.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/heUM6B9.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> I don't think the references to <i>Vertigo</i> are there to simply place this mo vie in the tradition of Hitchcock thrillers, but because they are at the heart o f Nick Curran's fantasies, and the relation of movie fantasy to reality. Curran is a man who I assume, based on the age of Michael Douglas at the time, to be in his late forties or early fifties. The icy blondes of Hitchcock movies are the erotic fantasies of his youth, and in this dream, this icy blonde is given porno graphic life, and Curran finds himself in a fantasy which unsettlingly shares so me of the qualities of <i>Vertigo</i>. The icy blonde of his fantasy has remaine d eternally a thirty year old, while he has aged into an old man. As said, when he meets her in the club, he is very obviously and uncomfortably the oldest man in the room. Whatever their absurdities, he does not wish these fantasies to be questioned or examined. The objects of these fantasies, Catherine Tramell and El

izabeth Gardner, are also his opponents, and, not coincidentally, they both have a background in psychiatry. Their expertise lies in examining the desires of ot hers. Curran resists anything like such questioning, explicitly so during a psyc hiatric examination. "When you recollect your childhood...are your recollections pleasing to you?," he's asked. "Number one: I don't remember how often I jerked off, but it was a lot. Number two: I wasn't pissed off at my dad...even when I was old enough to know what he and mom did in the bedroom. Number three: I don't look in the toilet before I flush." Curran doesn't want to look at the shit in the bowl, and he doesn't want to look at the shit in his head. I think the idea of a fantasy preserved in memory, an erotic image made static i s crucial to my perspective on this movie, yet I struggle to covey it as precise ly as possible. The iciness of the Hitchcock blonde is not simply that of temper ament, but a flower frozen in ice, <i>Vertigo</i>'s Carlotta Valdes is <i>Vertig o</i>'s Madeleine is <i>Vertigo</i>'s Judy is <i>Basic Instinct</i>'s Catherine Tramell; the beauty is eternal because there is something in the beauty that is already dead. As said, I attempt to describe something that is crucial, but I fa il; I think, however, Norman Mailer comes closes to conveying it in his essay, < a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3590858/Thesinister-art-of-film.html">"The sinister art of film"</a>: <blockquote>Think of a favourite uncle who is gone. Does the apparatus of the mi nd which flashes his picture before us act in another fashion if we ask for a fl ash of Humphrey Bogart next? Perhaps it does not. Film seems part of the mechani sm of memory, or at the least, a most peculiar annex to memory. For in film we r emember events as if they had taken place and we were there. But we were not. Th e psyche has taken into itself a whole country of fantasy and made it psychologi cally real, made it a part of memory. We are obviously dealing with a phenomenon whose roots are less defined than the power and glory of king and church. Yes, movies are more mysterious than theatr e; even a clue to the undefinable attraction of the movie star is that he remain s a point of light in that measureless dark of memory where other scenes have gi ven up their light. He has obviously become a centre of meaning to millions, pos sessed of more meaning than the actor next to him who may be actually more attra ctive, more interesting - definition of the phenomenon frays as we try to touch it. But has the heart of the discussion been sounded? Does it suggest that movie stars partake of the mysterious psychic properties of film more than other acto rs? That something in them lends itself to the need of memory for images of the past one can refer to when the mind has need to comprehend something new before it? We have to be careful. It is perhaps not so simple as that. The movie star may a lso suggest obsession, that negative condition of memory, that painful place to which we return over and over because a fundamental question is still unresolved : Something happened to us years ago which was important, yet we hardly know if an angel kissed us then or a witch, whether we were brave or timid. We return to the ambiguity with pain. The obsession hurts because we cannot resolve it and s o are losing confidence in our ability to estimate the present. Obsession is a wasteful fix. Memory, when it can be free of obsession, is a stor ehouse to offer up essences of the past capable of digesting most of the problem s of the present; memory is even the libido of the ego, sweetening harsh demands of the will when memory is, yes, good. But the movie star seems to serve some d ouble function: The star feeds memory and obsession - one need only think back t o one's feelings about Marilyn Monroe! The movie star is welcoming but mysteriou s, unavailable yet intimate, the movie star is the embodiment of a love which co uld leave us abject, yet we believe we are the only soul the movie star can love .</blockquote>

Catherine Tramell is an image preserved in stasis, a kind of eternal blonde, and there is a kind of stasis, if not entropy, in the movie overall; when fantasy b egins, real life stops. There are no children or families in the film, none of t he police seem to have any relatives. Hazel Dobkins was convicted of killing her family, Tramell's girlfriend, Rocky, was convicted of killing her younger broth ers, and Tramell is suspected of killing her parents. <i>Basic Instinct</i> sugg ests that underlying a movie that is ostensibly about a flawed hero of the commu nity, a representative of the state, a policeman, is a worship of a Nietzschean ideal unencumbered by christianity, fellowship, or community, an all powerful go ddess among men, the wealthy and isolated Catherine Tramell; the women of the mo vie express the other side of this: they destroy the foundation of community, th e family, not by namby pamby cultural warfare, but through actual murder. Despit e themselves, Curran and his partner, Gus, are drawn to Catherine Tramell, this corrupt ideal. The movie deliberately establishes that the fantasies of Curran a nd Gus are not those of a corrupt coastal elite, but that of average flyover cou ntry Joe Q. America, the movie taking pains to make this clear: one of the longe st discussions between Curran and his partner, Gus, takes place in a honkytonk b ar, with Gus sporting a cowboy hat and bolo. His partner warns his friend of wha t might happen through his involvement with Tramell, but he's also deeply enviou s of his friend's entanglement. "You think I'm getting any? Sure, I can get laid by blue haired women!" he complains. "I don't like them!" <img src="http://i.imgur.com/ov5tKNb.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> Curran covets this woman as a man might covet a movie star ideal, but she is obs essed over as well by Liz Gardner, who wishes to be her but hates her as well. W ithout doubt or qualifier, I find Gardner to easily be the most interesting char acter of the movie<a name="bkfrftnote7"></a><a href="#ftnote7">⁷</a>. This has nothing to do with the writing, and entirely because of the actress. J ust as Tramell's presence flows exclusively from Sharon Stone, the fascination o f Gardner is wholely due to Jeanne Tripplehorn. There is no erotic charge to any of the couplings in the movie; the only one which one imagines carrying any suc h electricity is between two characters who never share the screen: Gardner and Tramell. Gardner is stuck in a world of ugly, older men - the only exception is detective Andrews (Bruce A. Young) who may or may not be considered invisible in this context. Douglas is lit sympathetically in other movies, but here his face is made to look either like melting clay or a cave fish. His character is a cha rmless sleaze who treats Gardner abysmally. In their only sex scene, he forcibly bends her over and sodomizes her. Every conversation, every moment they have to gether is, as they always say, about his drama, not hers. Gardner's house has pa intings on the wall, books, antiques, ornaments, suggesting substance as well as a hunger for new things, places unknown, whereas Curran's has nothing. Curran i s given no rivals for her affections, she is given no hint of a better choice. Gardner is the only female character among the police, and her position is a sub servient one. Curran acts like she's dirt, and in her psychiatric analyses she i s always accompanied by older men who take the lead in the analysis - Dr. Lamott (Stephen Tobolowsky) in one, Dr. McElwaine (James Rebhorn) and Dr. Myron (Willi am Duff-Griffin) in the other. Where Curran soon comes to idolize Tramell in his sexual obsession, Gardner hates the world she's stuck in and idolizes her in a different way: she becomes the femme fatale Tramell is supposed to be, killing o ff a series of men. She wishes to be like Tramell, and yet she hates her as well , the way a woman might hate a beautiful actress or model whose looks she is con stantly unfavorably compared to. Her killings are born out of frustration with C urran ignoring her, in favor of loving this ideal: her dying words to Curran are "I loved you." The irony, of course, is that Gardner has all the qualities that Tramell has. Gardner's body is gorgeous and her lips are sensuous. The movie pl ausibly tells us that Gardner is the killer in the opening scene, and that the b eautiful sexual dervish we see there is Gardner. "She's evil! She's brilliant!"

Gardner warns Curran about Tramell, and she's actually warning him about herself . Everything that draws Curran to Tramell should draw Curran to Gardner, but he is trapped within the confines of his own fantasy; we are told that he is not dr awn to Gardner out of any erotic attraction, but pity. "Sometimes I think he sta rted banging her just to get Internal Affairs off him," says one cop to Gus, who replies "He ain't that way. He's got a heart." Gardner is a police psychiatrist , she knows exactly what a police officer with a drawn gun will do when she pull s her hand out of her pocket, and so she does exactly that: she is sick of this world, and so she forces her escape<a name="bkfrftnote8"></a><a href="#ftnote8"> ⁸</a>. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/tlDoKZ0.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/PR5Bb1t.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/9PwjVgS.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/LHKAukD.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/bzCSbE4.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/0vhZCnb.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/fdEcdPh.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/OCrKT2f.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/VAjZ2t5.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/jtUZi2j.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/1xaXjAL.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/SedxVW0.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/sdoK1NT.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> That Curran's own illusion will end is inevitable as well. He wishes for the fan tasy to persist eternally, yet for it to unroll as well as if it were real life. Curran and Tramell discuss how the novel about his character will end: <blockquote>CURRAN The detective falls for the wrong girl. But he doesn't die. TRAMELL So what happens to him?

CURRAN They fuck like minks, raise rug rats...and live happily ever after. TRAMELL It won't sell. CURRAN Why not? TRAMELL Somebody has to die.</blockquote> He persists with trying to hold onto this conflciting vision, my life will be an erotic thriller but with a family as well, up till the very last scene. "I lose everybody," says Tramell, because she knows this dream must end. Shortly after meeting Tramell, Curran takes up smoking again, and these dreams are like cigare ttes in movies, a stylish pose, which one affects without giving any thought to the aftereffects, but are ultimately a habit you end or they destroy you. After they have sex, Tramell asks, "What do we do now?" and Curran somehow tries to at tach a normal life to this erotic fantasy. "Fuck like minks...raise rug rats and live happily ever after." Tramell, however, is a creature only of erotic fantas y, and she knows that children are antithetical to this: "I hate rug rats." Curr an wants so badly what he has to persist that he abandons it immediately without negotiation, "Fuck like minks, forget the rug rats...and live happily ever afte r." But Tramell knows that erotic fantasy is destroyed not just by children, but that fantasies themselves are self-destructing. Dreams are inherently ephemeral , inherently transient: the dreamer has to wake up. Inevitably, without logic or reason, somehow Tramell is the murderer as well, and sooner than later, Nick Cu rran will die. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/LRrNDuR.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/4g5ujql.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <i>(Edits for aesthetic reasons and clarity were made on November 27th, 2013; ap ologies are made for the poor readability of this piece on its initial posting, the day before. A still from Total Recall of Quaid using a body as a human shiel d that I decided was just too explicitly graphic was removed on November 27th as well. I originally misremembered the name of Huysmans' book and gave it a title which was an incoherent combination of various french sounds. That was also cor rected on the 27th. On November 29th, the text involving Noman Mailer and the ob sessive images of cinema were added, as was footnote #3, where Verhoeven describ es Catherine Tramell as demonic. The actress Jeanne Tripplehorn was briefly rena med Jeannette in this post; on the 29th, she was given back her rightful name. F ootnote #4 on Catherine Tramell and Madonna's Sex, and footnote #8 on who the tr ue killer is, were added on the 29th as well. Footnote #1, the example of the st erling writing of the movie, was added on the 30th. Footnote #6, quoting the pas sage from The Wolf of Wall Street, was added on the December 1st.)</i> <font size="3"><b>FOOTNOTES</b></font> <a name="ftnote1"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote1">¹</a> The most egregious example of the terrible terrible <i>terrible</i> writing in the movie is the fi rst encounter with Tramell: <blockquote>CURRAN Good afternoon. I'm Detective Curran. This is Detective Moran. We're with the Sa n Francisco Police...

TRAMELL I know who you are. So, how did he die? GUS He was murdered. TRAMELL Obviously. How was he murdered? CURRAN With an ice pick. How long were you dating him? TRAMELL I wasn't dating him. I was fucking him. GUS What are you, a pro? TRAMELL No, I'm an amateur.</blockquote> My dismissal of Eszterhas's writing is almost as artless and witless as the obje ct of dismissal; thankfully, those looking for an artful and skewering blade can find one in Joe Queenan's review of Eszterhas's advice book <i>The Devil s Guide to Hollywood</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Queena n.t.html">"Basic Instinct"</a>. <a name="ftnote2"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote2">²</a> After writing this post and making a few aesthetic edits, I found that innumerable people had look ed into the connections between this movie and <i>Vertigo</i>, though not quite taking the approach I have here, where Catherine Tramell is an erotic fantasy fo rmed from the memories of Hitchcock's icy blondes. Among those who do insightful work into the connections between the two movies are Molly Lambert in <a href=" http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/2/26/in-which-im-a-writer-i-use-people-for-w hat-i-write.html">"The Fuck of the Century"</a>; a comparison between the looks of Novak and Stone is <a href="http://monroesmile.blogspot.ca/2013/01/vertigo-vs -basic-instinct.html">"Vertigo vs Basic Instinct"</a> by nom de guerre TheClaud; and there are a few references to <i>Vertigo</i> in a detailed discussion of th e costumes of <i>Instinct</i>, <a href="http://clothesonfilm.com/basic-instinctsharon-stone-devil-white-dress/10397/">"Basic Instinct: Sharon Stone, Devil in a White Dress"</a> by Christopher Laverty. <a name="ftnote3"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote3">³</a> The idea that Cath erine is clairvoyant to a supernatural degree, implying a demonic figure, not si mply an evil character but one whose powers are those of an eternal, all-powerfu l being, is made as well by director Verhoeven in the documentary that was part of the film's DVD reissue in 2001, <i>Blonde Poison</i>. It can currently be fou nd on youtube, in three parts: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHUJ1Fg9W 4w">part one</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdffJlNiUiA">two</a>, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UsYrQ3waj0">three</a>. These commen ts occur in part one, from 5:28 to 6:10: <blockquote>GARY GOLDMAN (script consultant) She's beautiful, she's feminine, and yet she's also completely and totally mascu line. She's a superheroine in a way, say, that Sherlock Holmes and these charact ers are superhuman in their cleverness. PAUL VERHOEVEN That was extremely contrived, but worked <i>very</i> well. And that I thought, o

kay, how can I make that true to myself? I say, okay, "she's the devil." That ba sically makes her supernatural in some way, she could forsee with more insight t han anyone else...to be so clairvoyant, to be so, let's say, clever in planning. And it works.</blockquote> I am grateful to Spencer Everhart for making me aware of this documentary, in hi s post, <a href="http://www.theseventhart.org/main/blonde-poison-the-making-of-b asic-instinct-2001-documentary-verhoeven/">"Blonde Poison: The Making Of Basic In stinct "</a>, from the blog <a href="http://www.theseventhart.org"><i>The Seventh Art</i></a>. <a name="ftnote4"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote4">⁴</a> The lines that so very aptly describe Tramell are very appropriately found from a book by a woman who shares many of Tramell's qualities, and may well have been the model for the maybe murderess, and that would be <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Madonna/d p/8440631170/"><i>Sex</i></a> by Madonna. <i>Basic Instinct</i> makes everything gleaming, the entire movie bright with light and money in a way that signals an extinct era, with the audience that might have once fantasized about having a f raction of Tramell's wealth is now fighting for its life;<i>Sex</i> made the mis take of going for a raw zine like aesthetic, to make it look like the kind of ch eap porno mags that people used to find discarded in the woods - the kind of art ifact that exists now only in memories, like in this great piece by David Sedari s on <i>This American Life</i>, <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-a rchives/episode/137/transcript">"The book that changed your life"</a>. Madonna n eedn't have bothered. We no longer bought our porno in paper bags. We were all o utlaws now. The lines are from the beginning of the book: <blockquote>I'll be your sorceress, your heart's magician. I'm not a witch. I'm a love technician. I'll be your guiding light in your darkest hour. I'm gonna change your life. I'm like a poison flower.</blockquote> My reaction to most of the writing in the movie can be found from a fragment in the same book: "Some people know how to talk and some don't." <a name="ftnote5"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote5">⁵</a> Verhoeven discusse s the influence of Hitchcock's <i>Vertigo</i> in the short documentary mentioned in the previous footnote. From 6:58-7:40: <blockquote>PAUL VERHOEVEN I was really delighted, especially when I started to realize, how wonderful, and how beautiful, a city San Francisco was. And, of course, realizing at the same that I was shooting in the city of <i>Vertigo</i>. And <i>Vertigo</i> being one of my, with <i>North by Northwest</i>, probably my most favorite Hitchcock movie s, that I studied forever, that I still study...I knew <i>Vertigo</i> by heart. So, a lot of things that Hitchcock had done in <i>Vertigo</i> you will see back in <i>Basic Instinct</i> clearly. All changed a little bit, you know. I didn't g o back to the movie to check it out, you know, what I remembered of <i>Vertigo</ i>, I applied, you know. And if Hitchcock took the Golden Gate Bridge, I would t ake the next bridge.</blockquote> The intriguing point that Hitchcock would have liked to have made as explicit a

movie as <i>Basic Instinct</i> is raised by Verhoven early on in the documentary . From 0:13-0:19 of part one: <blockquote>PAUL VERHOEVEN Hitchcock would have loved to do, I think, a movie that has the explicitness tha t <i>Basic Instinct</i> has.</blockquote> We know this claim to have some basis in fact. Hitchcock worked for a long perio d of time on a movie about a male serial killer set in America, to be titled <i> Frenzy</i> - though it was to be a very different movie than the <a href="http:/ /www.imdb.com/title/tt0068611/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><i>Frenzy</i></a> that was event ually made about a serial killer which was shot in England. Patrick McGilligan's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchcock-Life-Darkness-Light/dp/00609882 74/"><i>Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light</i></a> provides some ide a of its plot, and makes clear that it would have featured explicit sex and nudi ty: <blockquote> Frenzy evolved into an American manifesto even offering a passing glimps e of the President of the United States himself. At the same time it was going t o be a very personal Hitchcock film, a triumphant reprise of his signature theme s. Hitchcock envisioned the mother of the killer as a professional actress, play ing with the idea of the mother giving a Broadway performance, while suspecting her son of horrible deeds. (The police are slow to suspect the real killer, of c ourse, although at one point a traffic cop pulls him over.) At the end of Frenzy, the mother would agree to help the police trap her son a kind of apologetic revers al of <i>Psycho</i>. The Frenzy murders would all be triggered by proximity to water, which had been a source of danger in other Hitchcock films. The first victim (a UN employee) woul d be slain in broad daylight near a waterfall in a secluded patch of woods outsi de New York City; the second, an art student, would be wooed to a shipyard and v iciously murdered amid abandoned World War II freighters. The Mothball Fleet seque nce would be a nail-biting cinematic crescendo, a Hitchcockian tour de force.</b lockquote> <blockquote>Hitchcock wrote the waterfall murder as a bucolic love scene that en ds up as the shocking annihilation of an innocent. He planned ample nudity featu ring both women and men ( an insistence on sex and nudity, Truffaut later pointed o ut), and a vignette where the killer s mother interrupts him masturbating in his b edroom.</blockquote> <blockquote> The first scene, [Dan Auiler, writer of the <a href="http://www.amazon .com/Hitchcocks-Notebooks-Authorized-Illustrated-Hitchcook/dp/0380977834/"><i>Hi tchcock Notebooks</i></a>] reports, is of the young model getting up from bed in her New York apartment. She s nude as she rises in the scene lit only by natural lig ht and walks to the bathroom. The camera remains fixed as it does a full 360-degre e pan of the apartment starting with her rise from the bed and following her aroun d to her entry into the bathroom. The second scene is at the artist s studio, where the young killer meets the nude m odel. There are several dollies and elaborate pans of the artists (including the young man intended as the killer) at work. </blockquote> <blockquote>It was the greatest film Hitchcock never made.</blockquote> <a name="ftnote6"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote6">⁶</a> Some passages whic h I came across by happenstance in recent reading which best convey this intertw ining of hidden desire, the sexual and the materialistic, is in Jordan Belfort's memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Wall-Street-Movie-Tie-/dp/0345549333 /"><i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i></a>, where he gives a speech which gets at the urge, the fear, that pushes on his team of stock salesmen (also known as the St rattonites because the name of Belfort's firm is Stratton Oakmont). It imagines material desire as something so urgent that one could think it justification for

murder, which makes it an appropriate tangent for a movie where the murderess i s the secret hero. Another detail that makes this speech apt for a post on <i>Ba sic Instinct</i> is that Belfort's memoir takes place around the time of the mov ie's release: <blockquote>"Listen to me, everyone: There's no nobility in poverty. I've been r ich and I've been poor, and I choose rich every time. At least as a rich man, wh en I have to face my problems, I can show up in the back of a strech limousine, wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and a twenty-thousand-dollar gold watch! And, believe me, arriving in style makes your problems a helluva lot easier to deal with." I shrugged my shoulders for effect. "Anyway, if anyone here thinks I'm crazy or you don't feel exactly like I do, <i>then get the fuck out of this room right no w</i>! That's right - get the fuck out of my boardroom and go get a job at McDon ald's flipping burgers, because that's where you belong! And if McDonald's isn't hiring, there's always Burger King! "But before you actually depart this room full of winners, I want you to take a good look at the person sitting next to you, because one day in the not-so-dista nt future, you'll be sitting at a red light in your beat-up old Pinto, and the p erson sitting next to you is gonna pull up in his brand-new Porsche, with his go rgeous young wife sitting next to him. And who'll be sitting next to you? Some u gly beast, no doubt, with three days of razor stubble - wearing a sleeveless muu muu or a housedress - and you'll probably be on your way home from the Price Clu b with a hatchback full of discount groceries!" Just then I locked eyes with a young Strattonite who looked literally panic-stri cken. Hammering my point home, I said, "What? You think I'm lying to you? Well, guess what? It only gets worse. See, if you want to grow old with dignity - if y ou want to grow old and maintain your self-respect - then you better get rich no w. The days of working for a large Fortune Five Hundred company and retiring wit h a pension are ancient fucking history! And if you think Social Security is gon na be your safety net, then think again. At the current rate of inflation it'll be just enough to pay for your diapers after they stick you in some rancid nursi ng home, where a three-hundred-pound Jamaican woman with a beard and mustache wi ll feed you soup through a straw and then bitch-slap you when she's in a bad moo d. "So listen to me, and listen good: Is your current problem that you're behind on your credit-card bills? Good - then pick up the fucking phone and start dialing . "Or is your landlord threatening to dispossess you? Is that what your problem is ? Good - then pick up the fucking phone and start dialing. "Or is it your girlfriend? Does she want to leave you because she thinks you're a loser? Good - then pick up the fucking phone and start dialing! "I want you to deal with all your problems by becoming rich! I want you to attac k your problems head-on! I want you to go out and start spending money right now . I want you to leverage yourself. I want you to back yourself into a corner. Gi ve yourself no choice but to succeed. Let the consequences of failure become so dire and so unthinkable that you'll have no choice but to do whatever it takes t o succeed."</blockquote> <a name="ftnote7"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote7">⁷</a> Whether coincident ally or not, one finds the names of the three principals line up with ancient ru lers. Catherine and Elizabeth are the namesakes of famous queens, one infamous f or her sexual appetites (how well founded the rumors are I can't be bothered to

look up right now) and one for her tactical brilliance, respectively and appropr iately. Nick takes after Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, notorious for his weakness and his pliability in the hands of his stronger wife. <a name="ftnote8"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote8">⁸</a> That I believe Eli zabeth to be the one behind all the murders is not the majority view. The docume ntary "Blonde Poison" gives the views of the movie's editor Frank Urioste, the c omposer Jerry Goldsmith, the movie's script doctor Gary Goldman, and Verhoeven o n the subject, with the director making himself very clear that he considers Tra mell to almost certainly be the true killer. The movie's screenwriter, Joe Eszte rhas, does not appear in "Blonde Poison", for what I assume is his usual reason, some feud with someone or other. From 4:32-5:03 in part two: <blockquote>GOLDMAN Everyone has their opinion about the end. GOLDSMITH To this day, I'm not even certain that she was really the killer. URIOSTE I still don't even know if she's the murderer. GOLDMAN The last movement, the movement in bed with the icepick, is the final revelation . And the way that it's done, in Hitchcockian fashion, by simply focusing on it, is the language of cinema telling you this is the answer to the story. It was q uite an argument, and quite the fight, to keep it that way, but I think it's act ually the best possible ending.</blockquote> From 6:42-6:56 in part one: <blockquote>VERHOEVEN Of course, Jeanne Tripplehorn is guilty too, in some way. For a long time, there is the suspicion that she is the killer in it, and at the end, the police think she is, but we know better...probably.</blockquote> The activists who protested the movie's depiction of a bisexual woman did so by trying to spike the box office through giving away the movie's ending, which the y considered not an ambiguous qualifier, but the movie's final revelation. I hav e not brought up the issue in this piece, because outside the contemporary conte xt cited by the group - yet another movie with a queer villain - I don't think t here's anything here that registers with Elizabeth or Catherine as queer stereot ypes. There is nothing in Roxy that makes her stereotypically butch. At no point do they connect gayness with physical ugliness. If I see this movie as one abou t the different ways a man and a woman relate to an image, a role, a celebrity, that fuels erotic fantasy, it is not to make excuses for the film, but because t his is, for me, the most natural and obvious way to see the movie. From "Blonde Poison", 1:45-2:28 the activist Annette Gaudino, along with Verhoev en's dissent: <blockquote>GAUDINO Throughout the entire protests, we had been labeled as censors. We had been told that we were trying to censor this film, that we were trying to stop expression . And we thought about that, and we realized, what better way to sort of turn th at around, than to name our group "Catherine Did It!". Catherine, of course, is the killer in the film. By giving away the ending of the film, we were challenin g Hollywood to see which is more important to you, is our freedom of expression

any less valuable than the freedom of expression of the filmmakers? You can know that Rosebud is a sleigh and still think <i>Citizen Kane</i> is a great film. I f giving away the ending of this movie takes away its value, that's really not o ur fault. </blockquote> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/KrWcLUA.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/7TMGFHn.jpg" title="Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct " /> <blockquote> VERHOEVEN I felt that they were all absolutely wrong, and that the movie proved them wrong . </blockquote> <i>(Images from Basic Instinct and Total Recall copyright Carolco Pictures; imag es from Vertigo copyright Paramount Pictures.)</i>