AUTHOR’S NOTE: This review makes frequent use of The Film Snob*s Dictionary. The footnotes below are just a small sample of definitions taken from this deliciously mean book. Buy it today and you’ll wonder how you ever watched a Sharon Stone movie without it. -SB
THE ORIGINAL Basic Instinct burst onto the scene just as Ai No Corrida1 and I Am Curious–Yellow2 had before it; full of sex and violence, the Sharon Stone thriller and its plot twists wowed audiences to the tune of $117 million. Now comes Basic Instinct 2, which has been roundly panned by critics and audiences alike. These plebes have clearly missed the point of this meditation on3 the relationship of perception, reality, and sexual violence.
Sharon Stone reprises the role of Catherine Tramell, the antiheroine4 who may or may not have been the killer in the original movie. This ambiguity carries over to the sequel; the audience is never sure exactly which side Tramell is playing. Did she intend to murder the attractive young soccer star in the opening sequence, or was his death an unfortunate accident? Was she ever truly interested in psychotherapy for herself, or did she just want to mess with a young up and coming psychoanalyst’s head?
Although the auteur5 behind Basic Instinct, Paul Verhoeven6, did not return for the sequel, it almost feels as though his replacement, Michael Caton-Jones, directed this film as an homage to the Dutch master. Like David Cronenberg7, Verhoeven is known for his films’ mind-bending plots: Did the “blue skies on Mars” ending of Total Recall really take place, or was it just a memory implant? Is Starship Troopers a schlocky science-fiction piece, or a serious commentary on Frank Capra’s quasi-fascistic “Why We Fight” films? Was Showgirls merely a big budget T & A fest, or is it a damning look at the dehumanizing effects of the Vegas sex industry? Caton-Jones brings the same ambiguity to Basic Instinct 2. Only the final murder takes place onscreen (the shooting of a police officer, which may or may not have been accidental), making it impossible for the audience to judge with any degree of certainty who the real killer is.
The mise-en-scène8 of Basic Instinct 2 is unrelentingly dark; dreary England is the perfect setting for clouded emotions and deviant desires and helps create the needed diegesis9. The film’s anamorphic aspect ratio10 really allows one to fully take in the sense of moral decadence. The only notable scene with sunshine comes toward the end of the film, when, after shooting a police officer, Dr. Michael Glass is allowed to stay in a sanitarium instead of being locked away in a prison for the rest of his life. The contrast created by his being kept in an open courtyard, surrounded by nature, as opposed to being locked in an urban jungle and surrounded by concrete, is striking. Having been liberated by the professional rules he had lived by for so long, though that liberation came at the expense of his sanity, he is more free than ever before.
Unfortunately for Stone, Caton-Jones, and everyone else involved with this film, America seems to be even more prudish than when the Hays Code11 ruled the land. As Verhoeven recently said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, “anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States . . . Look at the people at the top (of the government). We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values.”
Luckily for us, Ms. Stone is undeterred by the current political climate. According to Contact Music, she hopes to direct the next installment in Britain, and a script is already set. Hopefully Basic Instinct 3 will be received like The Godfather, Part II instead of a Godfather, Part III-like12 reception that this movie was treated to.
1 Ai No Corrida–“High toned Japanese skin flick from 1976. . . that dragged pornography from the grindhouse to the art house. . . . The film legitimized the Snob’s furtive desire for smut by allowing him to watch coitus out in the open under the guise of taking in a ‘study of desire.'”
2 I Am Curious–Yellow–“Ponderous, nudity filled 1967 Swedish film, directed by Vilgot Sjöman, that sparked a moralists-versus-libertines kerfluffle upon its American release in 1969.”
3 Meditation on–“Stock hack-crit phrase used to bestow an air of erudition and gravitas on both the critic and the film he is reviewing.”
4 Antihero–“Film-crit term, borrowed from comp-lit studies” about featured characters in movies that are “morally compromised.”
5 Auteur theory, the–“Immutable tenet of film theory that holds that the director, rather than the screenwriter, producer, or star, is the ‘author’ of a film.”
6 From “The Snob Cheat Sheet for Confusing Similarities”–“Paul Verhoeven is the Dutch director of such violent, mordantly humorous films as Robocop, Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers. Michael Verhoeven is the German director of the mordantly humorous true-story film The Nasty Girl.”
7 Cronenburg, David–“Cheerfully depraved Canadian horror auteur whose dystopian weird-out flicks Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983) enchanted Splatter Snobs immediately . . . but repulsed critics.”
8 Mise-en-scène–“Theorist-beloved term describing the collective elements of a scene, from sets, costumes, and lighting to the positioning of the characters; best uttered while gesticulating with a lit cigarette between index and middle fingers.”
9 Diegesis–“Unnecessarily opaque film-studies term for the world inhabited by a film’s characters.”
10 Aspect ratio–“The ratio between the width and height of the film frame . . . Though once known only within the filmmaking industry and among those who used to be called ‘AV nerds’ in high-school projectionist clubs, the term has become commonplace on DVD sleeves.”
11 Hays Code–“Implemented in 1934, at a time when early Hollywood’s moguls were taking flak for the moral bankruptcy of their product, the Hays Code forbade the making of any film that ‘will lower the moral standards of those who see it.'”
12 From “Ten Snob-Approved Sequels”–“6. The Godfather, Part II, 1974. But the less said about Part III, the better.”
Sonny Bunch is an assistant editor at The Weekly Standard.
