| Devin Bee |
Basic Instinct plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, December 7th, through Tuesday, December 9th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
There’s a great gag in the show 30 Rock where we view the world through the eyes of Kenneth, the eternally cheerful and naïve NBC page played by Jack McBrayer. What Kenneth sees is not a world of flesh-and-blood creatures, but one populated entirely by muppets—bouncing about, communicating through beguiling musical numbers. So childlike and Pollyannaish is Kenneth’s outlook that he lives in an alternate reality of constant delight.
I’ve always loved this joke and what it suggests about perception, that people can inhabit the same physical space but exist in drastically different realities. I often think of Kenneth when I encounter a worldview bafflingly distant from anything I recognize as true. What must this person see when they look at the world? I’ve been compelled to ask this question with concerning frequency in recent years, as, for a distressingly large number of people, consensus reality is replaced by algorithmically curated alternatives.
And so lately I find myself drawn to movies that suggest potential answers, that appear to take place in the crackpot realities of some of humanity’s most warped minds. If satire is to have any bite, if we are to glean anything about its subject, this is how it must be: delivered not from a winking, self-satisfied distance, but from deep within the muck.
And this brings me to Basic Instinct.
Basic Instinct takes place in a world that reflects male hysteria. By this, I don’t just mean that its male protagonist, Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), is a hysteric (though he most certainly is). I mean that the reality of the film itself manifests the fears, anxieties, resentments, desires, and fantasies that animate the worldview of the manosphere, and that every toxic, self-serving delusion its redpilled denizens believe, no matter how absurd, is presented as 100% true.
In this world, the economic, social, and political gains won through feminist movements have unleashed the chaotic and destructive potential latent in all women. Free from the bounds of male authority, and without the clearly defined mission of motherhood within the nuclear family, female libertines are running rampant. A woman annihilates her entire family using a knife that was a wedding gift. A teenager slaughters her two brothers with her father’s razor. A woman guns down her husband to run off with another woman. If you don’t need men or a family anymore, why not just kill them?
Or you could use them for sex until you grow tired of them, and then kill them. This is the way of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), the devilish woman at the center of Basic Instinct.
Catherine embodies nearly every anxiety about feminist excess. The heiress to a significant fortune, she lives in style and luxury: lavish homes, high-end sports cars, designer clothes. What’s more, as a novelist, she’s self-employed and creatively fulfilled. She’s brilliant, having double-majored at Berkeley in psychology and literature (trained in the dark arts of lies and manipulation!) and graduated magna cum laude. She’s hot and she knows it, finding ways to expose her naked body to eager onlookers. She fucks both men and women with no emotional attachment, and talks openly about her sexual exploits and drug use. She prioritizes her own pleasure and has no empathy for others: people are either tools for her enjoyment or fodder for her writing. She’s unmarried and hates children. She is the furthest thing imaginable from a tradwife.
She’s also a serial killer who targets men. Police detective Nick Curran becomes suspicious of her when investigating the murder of Johnny Boz (Bill Cable), Catherine’s boyfriend and a former rock star. Johnny’s found dead in his home, hands bound to the headboard of his bed, having been stabbed to death with an icepick during sex. It turns out he’s not the only man close to Catherine who’s been murdered in this fashion, which just so happens to be how the victim in Catherine’s most recent novel is killed. There’s also the fact that her parents died in a mysterious boating accident, leaving her millions of dollars and inspiring the plot of one of her earlier novels.
The way Catherine is killing men is significant. By binding their hands and taking a position on top during sex, she’s asserting dominance. And there’s really no ignoring the phallic nature of the weapon. Not only is Catherine in a position of power, she’s also penetrating these men when she kills them, over and over and over again. It’s a particularly brutal form of emasculation.
Further, the threat of violence and even death from sexual partners is something all too familiar to women. Yet straight men likely never even consider the possibility. Catherine, in flipping this dynamic, functions as a figure of male projection: the most extreme manifestation of sexual violence is actually the work of a woman. This serves as a spectacularly grisly counterpoint to the far more plausible incident where consensual sex turns ugly, and Nick rapes his on-again, off-again girlfriend Beth (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Nick’s sexual violence is quickly smoothed over by Beth’s speedy forgiveness, as well as the fact that she’s later revealed to be an unhinged bisexual (likely) murderess in her own right.
The threat of being killed mid-coitus is also a potent metaphor for the fear of humiliation during sex. For many men, the thought of sexual embarrassment—the inability to perform well, the inability to achieve or maintain an erection, that one’s dick or body might somehow be laughable—in the presence of a sexually confident woman like Catherine is a scenario akin to death. Johnny Boz’s corpse represents the psychic wreckage of such a possibility: covered in blood, puncture wounds, and semen, his limp dick and balls exposed for everyone to see.
Performance issues abound in Nick’s life. He has a trigger-happy history, being responsible for four police shootings in five years, most notoriously killing two tourists while coked out of his mind. And what is firing off one’s gun too quickly but a deadly form of premature ejaculation? What are Nick’s reckless cocaine and booze habits but inadequate male discipline? What’s more, these failures of male performance are subject to public scrutiny. His wife couldn’t handle it and killed herself. Internal affairs are still riding his ass. He’s mandated to participate in counseling, where he must confess his failings to another desirable woman: Beth is the police psychologist assessing Nick, and we could venture a guess that Nick started having sex with her to take control of the relationship. But that sense of control is short-lived because someone leaks Nick’s psych file to Catherine, and she uses the information therein to rattle and manipulate him. Pointedly, when Nick tries to demonstrate that he’s unshaken by her efforts, using an icepick in front of Catherine, the attempt is feckless. Catherine takes over and makes quick work of the frozen mass.
But the redpilled psyche contains multitudes. It is, ultimately, an incoherent space. The fear and anxiety coexist with irrationally elevated confidence. And so a world that reflects male hysteria must contain both parts of this contradiction. In Basic Instinct, the confidence presents itself whenever Nick flexes his masculinity and seems to bend the world to his will. We see this in how every male psychiatrist comes off as a neutered buffoon, and how Nick doms two of them by ranting about how much he jerked off as a kid and then storming out of the room. More incredibly, while seemingly outclassed in every way by Beth and Catherine, and being considerably older than both of them (the lighting and angle of many shots accentuate the lines on his face), his dick game is apparently so exquisite that he essentially cures them of bisexuality, makes them fall in love with him, and sends Roxy, formerly a willing voyeur, into a jealous rage. The latter foolishly challenges him to mortal-combat-via-car, and Nick, as a man, harnesses his inherently superior driving ability to send her crashing to her death.
But sometimes the worldview animating the film’s reality short circuits, and Nick is neither an avatar of male anxiety nor male fantasy. In these moments, something like the truth is revealed. He adopts one of Catherine’s mannerisms or repeats one of her lines. He tries his hand at exhibitionism, wearing an unfortunate, ill-fitting sweater with a preposterously deep V-neck, and—in a recreation of the kind of shot seen in countless films, that of the sexy actress finally removing her top to reveal her breasts—later removes it in front of Catherine to expose his bare chest.
I imagine that, in these moments, he is happiest. Because Nick doesn’t really want to bust Catherine for murder, and he doesn’t just want to fuck her. What he really wants is to be Catherine. He knows that women like Catherine are fabulous. He knows that the men who populate this world—the world imagined through male hysteria—are devoid of interesting ideas, style, a sense of humor. He knows that they lack the ability to derive any real pleasure from life. How could Catherine not get bored of them? So bored that killing them seems like the only suitable option? It’s funny, but it’s also tragic. As Nick’s partner Gus (George Dzundza) accurately observes: that magna cum laude pussy done fried up Nick’s brain.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon