 Starring: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Year Of Release: 1992
Plot: An ex-rock star is murdered while in the throes of passion and the evidence points towards his girlfriend, Catherine Trammell, because she wrote a book where the same thing happened. Detective Nick Curran starts investigating and gets sucked into Catherine’s manipulative web of sex and power, and begins to wonder whether the author did kill her lover, or if it was someone else. |
Watching movies, it’s difficult to escape the idea that men fear female sexuality. They may want to have sex with the female of the species, but the idea of women being sexual beings in their own right is something cinema hasn’t managed to come to terms with in over a century.
You’d have hoped that by 1992 and Basic Instinct we might have got past it, but the film still treads the well-worn path of suggesting that women who are fully aware of their sexuality are dangerous, probably violent and generally bad news. In the film, Catherine Trammell spends much of her time using sex to weave her web, whether it’s uncrossing her legs while not wearing any panties, titillating Michael Douglas with some lesbian action, or generally treating men like puppets because of her unabashed love of doing the nasty. Whether she’s killed anyone or not is ultimately irrelevant, it’s the fact that she uses sex to take control that makes her the villain of the film.
She’s basically the extreme of a type of woman who’s been around throughout cinema history. Many early silent movies were about women falling into prostitution, and while some of these movies were sympathetic to their plight, they all pretty much suggested that once a woman has had sex with anyone except a husband she’s devoted to, she’s spoiled goods. By the teens and 20s we had the vamp, who would invariably flutter her eyelashes and seduce a man, and from the moment he was he was under her spell (and the men were often portrayed as is they had literally lost all free will), their fate was sealed.
People like Theda Bara, Pola Negri and Myrna Loy specialised in playing these sorts of women. While these early sexual predators normally corrupted and ruined men because they were like a walking female libido who couldn’t help but seduce anything with a penis, by the 40s and 50s they’d become even more dangerous. This was the era of the film noir femme fatale, who were generally women who knew and understood their sexuality and used it get what they wanted. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity uses the possibility of sex to get Fred MacMurray to murder her husband, or there’s Rita Hayworth in Gilda, who sexually manipulates her husband and his best friend, so she can live the high life while cavorting with any man who passes.
It’s a stereotype that’s lived on through the likes of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction and Nicole Kidman in To Die For. However one of the most interesting things about nearly all these films is that while the men are corrupted and end up doing things they shouldn’t, it’s always the woman who gets blames, whether it’s actually their fault or not. For example in Basic Instinct, at one point Michael Douglas virtually rapes Jeanne Tripplehorn, but the film suggests it’s not his fault, it’s Sharon Stone’s, because she unleashed a beast from within Douglas.
From its Bernard Hermann influenced score to its psychological manipulations, Basic Instinct desperately wants to be a Hitchcock movie, but the master director tended have a slightly different way of looking at women. While he wasn’t averse to using femme fatales, much of the time in Hitchcock films the problem sexually independent women have isn’t that they’re inherently evil, but that men want to crush it out of them.
While Hitchcock’s women often get punished for their sexuality, it’s not as clear cut as with most femme fatales, as rather than corrupting men, it’s the male’s obsessive wish to control women and deny that they have an independent sexuality and existence, which ends up being the major issue. Men in Hitchcock movies tend to be attracted to sexual women, but then they can’t handle it when it turns out they’re not in complete control. Whether it’s Marion Crane getting murdered because she inspires sexual thoughts in Norman Bates, or James Stewart trying to mould Kim Novak into his perfect, helpless love in Vertigo, many of Hitchcock’s movies revolve around men who view women as either virgins or whores, and who cannot find a way to reconcile the two when it turns out that women are a bit of both and far more than besides. The end result is that it normally destroys them both.
In fact it’s Vertigo that Basic Instinct is most closely modelled on, right down the San Francisco setting, although it’s not actually as psychologically fascinating as Hitchcock’s film.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about most of these films is that while they suggest a sexually aware woman is a potentially dangerous thing, what they actually reveal is a male fear of female sexuality. Nearly all these movies were written and directed by men, and when you look at what happens in the films, you realise it’s largely about a male fear of being emasculated by women. They invariably present a situation where a man starts out as a master of his own universe, but the moment he comes up against a sexual woman, he loses his ability to function rationally and is corrupted. In the mindset of these movies, where women only exist in relation to how they affect men, a woman controlling a man is the ultimate emasculation, and so as a result, any women who would do that must be evil (at least in that framework).
Director Paul Verhoeven has said that he sees Basic Instinct as pretty much a feminist film, because it’s about a sexually forthright, independent woman who knows how to get what she wants. If you look at what we actually know out about Catherine Trammell objectively, he’s right. (Spoilers ahead) Although much is hinted at and suggested, we never actually discover whether she has ever killed anyone, so while she’s definitely manipulative and likes to play games, we don’t actually see her do anything genuinely bad, and she’s certainly empowered enough to be able to constantly turn things to her advantage. She is essentially taking the men on at their own game and winning.
However the problem with Verhoeven’s assessment is that while he’s right on one level, the fact is the whole movie is told through the eyes of the film’s male character, and in their eyes, Catherine is pretty much the personification of evil – a woman who can control a man and stop him being master of his own destiny (the fact the film starts with a woman killing a man during sex, pretty much lays out its thesis that any woman who uses their sexual power is dangerous, and could destroy a man). Objectively Catherine may be an empowered woman, but that’s not the view you get when you see her through the film’s masculine viewpoint. In fact with most of Catherine friends having killed men simply because they snapped and decided to let out their rage, it suggests that empowered, sexual women are all verging on the psychotic.
The film only views women in terms of the way they affect men. For example, in the film Trammell is bisexual and has a girlfriend, but this is only important because of the titillating effect it has on Michael Douglas’ character. When Douglas comes up against Catherine’s girlfriend, who is a lesbian, the way he deals with it is to completely deny her status as a woman, and treat her like a man. It’s not only offensive because it suggest lesbians aren’t real women, but basically suggests an attitude that women are only there for men, so a lesbian who isn’t sleeping with women for the pleasure of a man is essentially pointless and should be treated with contempt.
The idea that the only importance women have is in the effect they have on men is common throughout cinema history. However while it’s sexist, it does reveal some striking aspects of the male psyche, and the fear men have of female sexuality. The femme fatale becomes the embodiment of a fear of being emasculated and losing control. The main difference with Basic Instinct, and the reason Verhoeven can champion its feminist leanings, is that while sexually aware women normally come to a sticky end, Catherine Trammell doesn’t. She manipulates and plays games and ultimately gets what she wants, although the end of the film suggests both that this may make her the most dangerous type of woman of all, but also that with a man’s influence, there’s possibility she can be tamed, which isn’t exactly the most empowering of messages for women.
Basic Instinct may take things to extremes, but it reveals the fear of women that creeps through in quite a few films, and also shows that objectifying the female of the species is far from dead. Perhaps one day men will come to understand female sexuality and not to fear it, but until then I suspect the femme fatale will keep rearing her manipulative head in cinema.
TIM ISAAC
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