An allegedly smart cookie like Sharon Stone should have known better.
As with so many memorable film femme fatales, Basic Instinct’s resident man-eater Catherine Tramell is a man-made creature. She conducts herself like men supposedly wish they could. She drives fast cars. She makes a lot of money. She parties hard. She nails hot blondes. Hell, she screws whomever she wants whenever she likes. She’s also the demon spawn of Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven’s fevered brains. Sharon Stone may have given her life (at least in the first movie), but it was men who first created Catherine. Yet, wouldn’t you know, it’s a group effort to bring her down.
I remember when Basic Instinct first appeared in 1992. I believe I even went on opening day because I wanted to know why Eszterhas had been paid an obscene amount of money for the script. I’m still waiting for an answer. But seriously, I also remember the overwrought grad school film studies papers inspired by that film’s version of Catherine, and Stone’s transformation from the target of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s divorce proceedings in Total Recall to post-feminist sexual icon. Ooooo, she acts just like a man and gets away with it. Isn’t that cool? I suppose. But it was way cooler when Linda Fiorentino did it in The Last Seduction. Regardless, all of the pre-release hoo-ha about star Michael Douglas showing the camera his flat, naked derriere quieted down once the viewing public got a load of Stone’s full frontal glory in the infamous police interrogation scene. She uncrossed her legs and showed those guys what real balls looked like. Thus, a star was born.
Why anyone thought a sequel to Basic Instinct was a good idea, though, is beyond me. Apparently, it was also beyond Eszterhas, Verhoeven, and Douglas, because they are nowhere to be seen even remotely near the hairball that is Basic Instinct Part Deux. Alas, we don’t even find out if Catherine ever did get sick of Nick’s nattering about making rugrats, and stick him with her signature ice pick. I mean, really, if you’re going to vomit up a sequel, at least let us know what happened to the first guy who tried to beat Catherine at her own game. Nope. All we learn is that she turned that episode in her life into a novel called “Shooter.” Jeez, since she’s so brilliant, couldn’t she have come up with a better title? Like, maybe, “Basic Instinct”? But no. No, no, no. She throws slander suit caution to the winds and calls it “Shooter.” Then again, she is a risk addict.
It wasn’t just sheer boredom that got me thinking about Nick during Basic Instinct 2, either. It was more the fact that everyone involved in the sequel seemed to have forgotten how important Douglas was to the first one. Douglas made Basic Instinct in the midst of his late ‘80s-early ‘90s beset manhood phase, when he could draw a male audience to watch him confront all sorts of cultural indignities (ex-wives, nutty mistresses, immigrants, Demi Moore). He wasn’t too young or too old, too pretty or too ugly, too smart or too dumb, too strong or too weak: he was, supposedly, Every Man. And who was Catherine Tramell? Every Man’s dream and nightmare. Richer, stronger, sexier, and, horrors upon horrors, smarter. She’s the type of she-male who would never need the likes of Douglas’s police detective Nick Curran, so of course Nick would like to think that he could keep her home and knock her up. No wonder she kept an ice pick under the bed. But even more important for keeping the on screen balance of power enticing for all members of the audience, Douglas matched Stone as far as star potency. She may have become one, but he already was one. When Stone wasn’t on screen going commando, Douglas was still around to keep things entertaining. And if Douglas could fall in love with Stone’s Catherine, then couldn’t every man?
There’s no such love in Basic Instinct 2. Now Catherine is just a nightmare, and Stone’s male co-star David Morrissey is, to put it politely, no Michael Douglas. Instead of Every Man, Morrissey’s Dr. Michael Glass is an academic, upper class British twit who is clearly dead meat as soon as Stone’s ossified Catherine lays her gimlet eyes upon him. He’s also such an anemic presence that the movie simply seems to give up during the long stretches that Catherine is absent from the screen while Dr. Glass and David Thewlis’s pissed off detective Washburn try to figure things out (if Thewlis’s electric sociopath Johnny from Naked had been matching wits and perversions with Catherine, that would have been a movie). Setting Catherine loose on the Brits in London must have seemed like a good idea at one point to screenwriters Henry Bean and Leora Barish (oh, how far Barish has fallen from the days when she wrote Desperately Seeking Susan), but in practice, it just turns Catherine into a trash-talking Terminator.
Yes, there’s still plenty of lip from Catherine about fucking, coming, and masturbating, but she and Glass don’t actually do a lot of it. And I can’t really imagine anyone getting as much of a charge from Stone’s “hey, look, I’m a naked older woman!” moments as they did from Basic Instinct’s raunchy bits (for reasons, incidentally, that have nothing to do with age). This absence of sex and passion means that, for all the bad dialogue about Glass’s erotic obsession with Catherine, the real threat posed by Catherine is her brain. I know, her brain was threatening in the first film as well—that’s why we find out about her graduating magna cum laude etc. etc. This time, though, Catherine isn’t just the subject of a police investigation: she’s a subject of psychoanalysis. Dr. Glass will truly uncover the deep inner workings of her mind. That’s his training. He’ll even publish academic papers on her, dammit. But if Dr. Glass accepts Catherine as his patient, will he be able to out-think her during their sessions and beyond? Will he be able to keep his own libido in check? Oh, please. Granted, director Michael Caton-Jones makes no bones about equating Catherine and Glass’s mind games with penis games. Dr. Glass’s office is in the glass and steel building officially named 30 St Mary Axe, also known as the Swiss Re building or the Gherkin. Yep, gherkin. As in pickle. As in big shiny pointy pickle. To paraphrase Dr. Freud (who makes a cameo appearance), sometimes a building isn’t just a building. Then again, subtlety left the building—so to speak—with Dr. Glass’s name. Catherine’s going to shatter that pickle.
Nevertheless, even the film’s tagline alerts us to the true nature of Catherine’s monstrosity: “Everything interesting begins in the mind.” Indeed. Catherine is now detestable because she can turn men into blithering, drooling idiots without flashing her cooter. She’s vile because she makes even ostensibly intelligent men look stupid. She out-thinks the psychoanalyst Glass and the wily detective Washburn (although why she cares or bothers remains a deep, deep mystery), luring them to their doom by knowing how they will respond to her written words. She can trick famous psychoanalyst Gerst into thinking she’s harmless. Even more insidious, she can bamboozle Charlotte Rampling’s Dr. Gardosh into taking her side against Gardosh’s close friend and colleague Glass.
This last point is a rather sad confirmation of how much the film has it out for smart women—besides simply being a movie that insults everyone’s intelligence regardless of gender. It isn’t only that Rampling is saddled with the most moronic bit of “intellectual” dialogue in years (“She just up and left? How Lacanian”—it’s just so…wrong). It’s also that she is made to look like perhaps the biggest stooge of all. She knows why Glass is susceptible to Catherine, and she knows about Catherine’s pathology. Yet, somehow, she doesn’t get it. She actually trusts Catherine, apparently because they both smoke cigarettes. Great. Smart women are either psychotic killers or emotional cretins. Well, at least all the fellas left standing in Catherine’s world can take solace in the fact that brainiac Gardosh didn’t see her coming, either.
Because of course Catherine lives to write another novel. Of course she defeats the psychoanalyst. Nick couldn’t have her body, and Glass can’t have her brain. Maybe that’s the fantasy Basic Instinct 2 wants to offer to the first film’s Michael Douglas-Every Man audience: no man can have her, regardless of wealth, class, or education. And the untouchable woman is in fact a castrating bitch instead of a cool blonde ideal. Sure, all of these ideas were at play in the first Basic Instinct, but I don’t know, somehow it seemed like everyone involved with that picture was having a bit of dirty amusement in taking those ideas to the trashy limit. You could almost hear everyone snickering at the over the top clichés, including star-to-be Stone. Now, the clichés are the same, but nobody’s having a good time (least of all the audience). As one of Dr. Glass’s colleagues might say, Catherine has made the transition from phallic woman to monstrous feminine. She’s pure, unadulterated evil. Fine. Now that that’s cleared up, maybe Hollywood and Stone can put Catherine to rest. As the box office numbers suggest, the rest of us already have.
(For an overview of Sharon Stone's up-and-down career, click here.)
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
