By 
Basic Instinct (1992) is king of the “I Can Fix Her” genre.
“Sure, she’s a diabolical genius manipulative psychopath who ice picks men to death while making lust to them. On the other hand, she’s an 11 worth $100 million.”
Put like that, men everywhere nod in agreement that it makes sense to endure a certain number of keyed cars, deranged text messages and meltdowns for the greater good. $100 million net worth puts a personal foosball table into play, after all.
Alas, crazy is a hole that can never be filled with chocolates and cucking.
Basic Instinct
The entertainment industry took a seismic shift as the 1980s petered out and the 1990s got into full swing. Tetris, the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo blew the video game industry up from a hobby to a lifestyle. Smells Like Teen Spirit changed the course of music forever. Plus, we got a four-bagger of movies that influenced cinema to this day:
Batman 1989, Seven, Scream and Basic Instinct. In the long run, Scream probably proved the most virus-like. Its self-awareness spread into every genre. Yet, Basic Instinct proved a big deal, too. Body Heat walked so Basic Instinct could run and run it did.
Who knows how many Basic Instinct clones happened…and still happen. Many folks got into the erotic thriller game, including big names like Madonna (Body of Evidence) and Bruce Willis’s willy (Color of Night). Meanwhile, Basic Instinct clones packed the straight-to-VHS market until the VHS format went the way of the dodo bird. Throw in the made-for-cable movies, and it was all Basic Instinct all the time through the 1990s.
How does the film hold up today? Let’s sit it down in the interrogation room and examine its motives. Avert your eyes when it crosses its legs…
Killer Basic Instinct
Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up: music and effects. When it comes to giants of musical scores in that era, two names come up: John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. For my money, I prefer Goldsmith. I simply enjoy his quirkiness to Williams’s more traditionally robust sound.
Goldsmith does not disappoint with his work on Basic Instinct. The slurred notes the theme is built on feel like a line stretched to breaking between the romantic and dangerous portions of the score. All the music together creates a haunting, spooky elegance that contrasts nicely to the sleaziness onscreen. It almost makes it classy. Almost.
Likewise, when it comes to makeup effects, you had two giants of the era: Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. That’s a toss up to which I prefer. I lean slightly toward Bottin. Like the choice between Williams and Goldsmith, it is based on quirkiness. Baker was a lot cleaner and precise in his work. Bottin was more punk.
Bottin doesn’t have to go as elaborate as he did on things like The Thing and Robocop with Basic Instinct. He only had to make the ice pick deaths look gnarly. He succeeded. They are quick, brutal and bloody. The opening death in the unedited version of Basic Instinct shows more of Bottin’s work than the theatrical version, even if it is quick cuts. The man loved to build dummies and do nasty things to them.
In Basic Instinct, Bottin built what looks like a full dummy for a shot of an ice pick to the face that lasts a fraction of a second. What a madman. He likely worked months, probably living on Snickers and Coke for a split-second shot. And it is glorious.
Basic Mother’s Instinct
Basic Instinct served as the end of Verhoeven’s three-film run that positioned him to be the Hollywood director for violent lunacy. Then Showgirls happened…
Nevertheless, Verhoeven is mostly effective with Basic Instinct. It’s a much more restrained film for him visually and thematically. One could say it is his attempt to be Hitchcock, but Verhoeven is no Hitchcock. He is about as opposite of Hitchcock as one can get maybe get.
Verhoeven’s ability to ape Hitchcock is having Sharon Stone dress up like Kim Novak from Vertigo. That is about all he can bring to the table. Filmmakers who try to imitate Hitchcock need to spice the dish up with something else. For example, Zemeckis on What Lies Beneath. He combined Hitchcock with an EC Horror Comic, and that works well.
At least one can tell Verhoeven genuinely tried. How much he succeeded is probably tied to his secret weapon. Basic Instinct is a Jan De Bont shot film. I love me some Dean Cundey, but De Bont is the most badass cinematographer of that era when it came to slickness.
De Bont’s work on Die Hard alone makes him a legend. People who weren’t there don’t understand how hard Die Hard hit in 1988. Part of that seismic impact was how De Bont lensed it. Die Hard looked like nothing that had come before it.
Basic Needs Instinct
We recently looked at an early Michael Douglas film, which is what led to doing a rewatch of Basic Instinct. Little needs to be said of Douglas from the 1980s and 1990s. He had a great run that ran the gamut of genres, plus his production work.
Douglas is his usual solid self in Basic Instinct. Upon examination, Shooter is a great, three-dimensional character. He might be the protagonist, but he is no hero. If you sit down and take the character apart, he has fairly severe mental issues: addiction, violence, a possible death wish, plus a possible killing streak.
Basic Instinct has a solid core of supporting performers, as well. Wayne Knight, Daniel von Bargan, Stephen Tobolowsky and Mitch Pileggipop in for little roles. George Dzundza gets the best lines and probably had the most fun on the film as Douglas’s partner.
“Well, she got that magna cum laude $#%$& on her that done fried up your brain!”
Basic Instinct was Jeanne Tripplehorn’s film debut as Douglas’s girlfriend, who he may or may not be using to mitigate his problems with Internal Affairs (boy, Internal Affairs really showed up in a lot of cop films back in the day). She is fine, but she is trapped in a place of confused ambiguity and likely was pulled in multiple directions that prevented even work. We will look more at that later.
Despite the success of Basic Instinct, Tripplehorn didn’t have a huge career. Basic Instinct got her into The Firm, Reality Bites and Waterworld, and that was it for big movies.
Back to the Basic Instinct
Ultimately, Basic Instinct is Sharon Stone’s movie. She grabs the camera by the neck and makes it do her bidding. Verhoeven wanted her after working with her on Total Recall, and it was clear from that film that Stone had superstar potential.
Not many people saw it that way, however. Debra Winger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Geena Davis, Kathleen Turner, Kelly Lynch, Ellen Barkin and Mariel Hemingway were all looked at before Stone. Furthermore, Douglas did not want to work with her. He wanted an A-lister because he wanted another big name sharing the risk with him.
Ultimately, Stone won the part, however, but she was only paid $500,000 against Douglas’s $14 million. In the end, one can’t really imagine anyone else in the role, though.
Stone moves effortlessly between sultry, dangerous, manipulative, smart, sweet and scary. Whatever the script requires, she is game. She probably should have gotten an Oscar nod. The nominees for that year were Emma Thompson (Howards End), Catherine Deneuve (Indochine), Mary McDonnell (Passion Fish), Michelle Pfeiffer (Love Field) and Susan Sarandon (Lorenzo’s Oil).
It is easy to see that no one is talking about those movies or performances anymore…
Despite all of this, Stone did not really capitalize on Basic Instinct either. She got typed, big-time, after the film. At least we got The Quick and the Dead, though. I also have an alternate version of Jurassic Park in my head that starred Kevin Costner and Sharon Stone, plus Sean Connery in the Hammond role.
Speaking of Hitchcock, I wonder what he would have thought of Stone. She has that icy blond quality he might like, but maybe it is too icy. Stone probably wouldn’t have put up with many Hitchcock shenanigans. She probably would have smacked. him. For what it is worth, Stone also has a reported IQ of 154, so maybe she would have genuinely Catherine Tramell’ed good old Hitch. A 150+ IQ is in the one percent.
Advanced Instinct
And here is where we get to the crux of the matter: the script. Joe Eszterhas wrote it. Eszterhas is an interesting character. He was born in a Hungarian village and somehow ended up the screenplay writer in Hollywood for a time.
Eszterhas is a bit of a maverick and once had a great quote that lives in my head.
“If you want to send a message, use Western Union…”
Eszterhas had no problem understanding that there was nothing wrong with a movie that sought to be nothing more than entertaining. After Flashdance and Jagged Edge (and an uncredited rewrite on Blue Thunder), Eszterhas got a bidding war going for Basic Instinct.
Carolco finally bought the screenplay for $3 million. It went through a process before filming. Verhoeven wanted more lesbian sex. Gary Goldman came on and rewrote the script four times. Eventually, everyone realized the rewrites were stupid and went back to the original version.
Eszterhas wrote the original script in 13 days. And, honestly, it kind of shows. The story level is where things become hinky for Basic Instinct. It starts out fine, but in the third act it splinters. The story leaves Stone and Tripplehorn behind as Douglas runs back and forth speaking to random characters who pop into the movie to tell him things that the movie never showed that are somehow supposed to matter. Greatly.
The “Oberman/Hoberman” thing is a good example of this kind silliness.
This is what causes the cracks to show in Tripplehorn and Stone’s performance here and there. They get sidetracked, and no one seems to know exactly what to do with them. They get reduced to the acting equivalent of humming to look busy.
Yet, all of this is still somewhat forgivable. One imagines Basic Instinct being the result of the sum total of everything Eszterhas learned about Hollywood. One pictures him by his pool, emptying vodka bottles and chuckling while he twitches the puppet strings, and his agent dangles the concept before production companies. He seemed to know it didn’t have to be good. It just had to push the right buttons.
Basic Results Instinct
Basic Instinct proved lucrative at the box office, but it was not without controversy. One naturally assumes it was the sex and violence that provoked this. That was part of it, yes, but a larger part was protests held by homosexual groups. They didn’t like homosexuals portrayed as violent deviants.
Man, Hollywood really course corrected on that one, didn’t they?
Homosexual groups even went so far as to rush the stage during Sharon Stone’s appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Nevertheless, Basic Instinct survived. We still talk about it to this day. It has undergone various analysis and is purported to be a feminist film. Yada, yada, yada, but Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tremell is not so different from other femme fatales that have come before. For example, Barbara Stanwych in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage in Detour. Meanwhile, Verhoeven found influence in The Fourth Man.
The ending also stuck with people, where the camera pans down to the ice pick under the bed after Douglas and Stone resolve to “#$%@ like minx and live happily ever after.”
Sans “rugrats,” of course…
That qualified as a twist, but it’s not really much of a twist. It all seems pretty clear in retrospect, although I once saw and interview where Verhoeven said even he wasn’t sure what the ice pick meant, beyond “something Freudian.”
For me, the twist of Basic Instinct is how it tackled the “I Can Fix Her” delusion. All I could say when this viewing of Basic Instinct ended was…
“Oh wow! He actually DID fix her!”
I also found it funny how my reactions to things changed over the years. At one point, Douglas gets his back scratched by Stone. He then flips over, and all I could think was, “Dude, you’re getting blood all over the bedding. I hope you are ready to act quickly with cold water and hydrogen peroxide.” At this stage in life, my basic instincts are to simply keep things clean…
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