Review of "Basic Instinct"

Was on of my all time fav. movies.......

TOO BAD that Basic Instinct 2 wasnt as good as the first one.

Even though Camille Paglia did a critic’s commentary for it.

Ah… the thing we heard about Basic Instinct. Gays were picketing it, preview audiences were swooning at it, and lo and behold…

My lesbotronic heart fell in love with it. So did my cinematic heart.

I have to confess, I’ve always found qualitative judgments problematic. Too queer, not feminist, not queer enough… and so when I find a text (whether it be a film or a book or a song) that makes someone somewhere stand up and try to appropriate it and disclaim it at the same time—well then I get interested. What I find in this article’s analysis of the film is that she fails to see that Catherine’s primary relationships are with women. Dysfunctional yes (and who says there isn’t “fun” in dysfunctional?) but with Beth, Roxy, and Hazel Dobkins, the primary emotion in Catherine’s interaction with all of them is tenderness. Which sets apart her relationship with Nick. And if we want to stretch it a bit, her only other acknowledged relationships with other men. “I liked fucking Johnny.” A more equivocal reaction from Catherine can be found in her answer to the death of her fiancée: “Boxing was fun till Manny died.”

She seems to experience genuine regret in that scene, but her deep relationships with women that go on to be established throughout the film seem to belie that moment. She protects Hazel and Roxie to the extent that she never exposes them in the way that she flaunts her relationships with men. And indeed her own sexual-ness. See the forementioned leg-crossing scene.

Believe me, I’m a fan of guilty pleasures. And I’ll be my first to wave my hand at some: Showgirls, Bring It On (which I do believe has more value than my mentioning it in this context grants it), Less Than Zero and (shamefully) Everything’s Relative.

None of those, I will argue brings queer sexual politics to bear as forthrightly and as seductively as Basic Instinct. 

I have to admit that I object to the checklist of "appropriate" queer behavior that some commentators want to make. How many dead lesbians does it cost to get us one repentant lesbian? Etc, etc.

 Texts need to be evaluated as empircal wholes-- or at least that's what my New Crictical loving advisors taught me so long ago. And while I learned to temper it with many things-- the understanding that the act of writing a text wasn't completed until it was read, and most importantly that my understandings and experiences as a reader *do* affect the texts I'm reading (because they are malleable things in interpretation)-- I know that I cannot change a text into something more appropriate (or more paletabale). Or in the language of this essay, "less problematic."

I guess, in the end, what I admire about Basic Instinct is that it *is* elegant in its presentation. It is also complex in its depiction of not just sexuality, but gender. Nick purports to be the ultimate alpha-male, but he is the one perpetually losing control. He is the alcoholic and drug addict who accidentally killed tourists while on a bender on the job. He thinks he has his psychiatrist under control, but he has  no idea that she was lovers with the female suspect he is investigating. At the end of the film he believes he is going to live happily ever after with Catherine and raise—or not—a bunch of rugrats. The best of all possible endings for him is that he dies tied to Catherine’s bed in the middle of an orgasm while her (new) girlfriend watches from the room above.

I admit, my desire for a sequel to Basic Instinct (and it cried out for one in a certain sense—the way Patricia Highsmith’s “Ripley” novels did)—involved Catherine tangling with the female (and yes queer) investigator into Nick’s mysterious death, but that’s not the way it happened. But the very fact that the possibility arises opens new potentials for thinking, new avenues of exploring old texts. I’m just disappointed that this article didn’t do more of that.

S.