Basic Instinct and the Erotic Thriller

Twenty-five years after the film noir cycle ended with Kiss Me
Deadly (1955) and Touch of Evil (1958), noir returned with a
vengeance in 1981 with Body Heat and a remake of The Postman
Always Rings Twice, which mark the resurgence of a new cycle of neonoirs
defined alike by their borrowings and their distance from the
earlier cycle. Retro genres, by definition, must offer something new to
distinguish themselves from their models, and the something in this
new cycle is sex. The self-alienation that had been noir’s keynote had
not necessarily been driven by sex – as Christopher Nolan demonstrated
in his neo-noir Memento (2000), whose backward scene-byscene
trajectory into the past cleverly dramatizes its avenging hero’s
loss of short-term memory – but sex is what the new cycle was selling.
The newly resurgent neo-noirs are driven by three developments in
the sociology of American sexuality: the sexual freedom made possible
by the widespread availability of contraception and abortion; the
replacement of the Hays Office’s 1930 Production Code by the Motion
Picture Association of America’s system of age-appropriate ratings,
beginning in 1969; and the dramatic political and social changes provoked
by the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. Just as issues
concerning women’s empowerment were coming to the fore for
the first time since the years immediately following the war, the film
industry was undergoing a revolution in its portrayal of sexual behavior.
No longer bound by the restrictions of the Production Code, filmmakers
were free to present sexual relationships more frankly. At the
same time, the discovery of the youth audience’s economic power,
with the success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde in the summer
of 1967, led to a movement away from a mass-marketing strategy,
which had dictated that virtually every film Hollywood released had
to be suitable for family audiences, to a niche-marketing strategy,
which allowed studios to target more specific audiences with different
releases, promoting some films as family fare and others as suitable
for adult audiences only.

The emergence of a full-blown neo-noir cycle was accelerated by
two further developments in the 1980s: the isolation of HIV, the virus
that causes AIDS, and the explosion in home video technology, which
led not only to a renascence of low-budget pornography but to the
proliferation of low-budget sex/suspense features starring such directto-
video stars as Shannen Doherty, Shannon Tweed, and Shannon
Whirry.1 These developments broadened the range of explicitly sexual
behavior presented on Hollywood screens, but at the same time encouraged
an ultimately censorious attitude toward that behavior in
much the way that Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical spectacles from The Ten
Commandments (1923) to The Sign of the Cross (1932) had done in the
generation before the code.

Although the new license in sexual frankness left its mark on many
genres, from the soap-opera anomie of Making Love (1982) to the explicit
period biography of Henry and June (1990), it found a particularly
hospitable genre in the newly resurgent crime film, whose built-in
moral categories allowed audiences to indulge forbidden sexual fantasies
without ever forgetting how likely they were to be punished. Because
the central figure of this new generation of crime films, the fatally
alluring, often naked body of the female star,2 points both toward
and away from its noir antecedents, the films are less accurately called
neo-noirs than erotic thrillers.

The indispensable importance of female nudity to the noir revival
is nowhere more clearly figured than in Body Heat. In its central situation,
writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s debut film is a loose reworking
of Double Indemnity. Both films concern an unremarkable hero,
Ned Racine (William Hurt, in the Fred MacMurray role) ensnared in a
conspiracy to kill the husband (Richard Crenna) of his lover (Kathleen
Turner) for love and money, and both turn on the adulterous wife’s
treachery toward both husband and lover. Although Body Heat is shot
in color, its desaturated monochrome visuals (overexposed in the
lunchtime scenes at a stifling diner, restricted to one color at a time
everywhere else) pay constant homage to film noir’s black-and-white
visual style, an homage frequently underlined by Turner’s timeless
outfits as Matty Walker and the anachronistic fedora she gives her
lawyer-lover Ned Racine as a gift.3
Sex is what marks Body Heat’s distance from Double Indemnity. It
is a difference registered at every point from Ned’s first meeting with
Matty, in which she challenges him to lick off the cherry ice she has
spilled on her dress. Unlike Wilder, who had cowritten and directed
one of the coldest films in Hollywood history, Kasdan chooses heat as
his leading metaphor for pent-up desire. As Ned’s cop friend Oscar
Grace (J. A. Preston) tells him, “When it gets hot, people try to kill
each other. . . . After a while people think the old rules are not in effect.
They start to break them, figuring nobody’ll care, because it’s emergency
time.” And Kasdan replaces Wilder’s and Chandler’s gaudy verbal
sparring with the X-rated needling of Oscar and Assistant District
Attorney Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson).

The main difference is of course in the sex scenes themselves. Unlike
Double Indemnity, whose representations of sex are limited to a
few fatal kisses, a possibly postcoital cigarette in Walter’s apartment,
a fetishized vocabulary of accessories like Phyllis’s anklet, and endless
repetitions of the endearment “baby,” Body Heat wastes no opportunity
for its attractive leads to make love on camera or just off. In
the film’s most startling echo of its progenitor’s imagery, Ned breaks
into Matty’s locked house by throwing a chair through a window and
climbing into what will become the prison of his own sexual desire as
he pushes up her skirt and lowers her to the floor. Later they will be
discovered naked in Matty’s bed, on the floor, and in a bathtub filled
with ice water. Like Bob Rafelson’s remake of The Postman Always
Rings Twice, Body Heat links the violence of its principals’ sexual encounters
to a general breakdown of social inhibitions. The atmosphere
of steamy sexual license is so pervasive that it seems perfectly
logical for Ned to encounter Matty twice outside her house ready
for action, greeting her the first time with a cheery, “Hey, lady, wanna
fuck?” and the second with an even more forthright invitation to
oral sex.

The authentic dangers that turn out to be involved in both these
encounters seem minor compared to the languorous pleasures of sex
to which Ned is invited as a participant and the audience as voyeurs.
Unlike Double Indemnity, whose narrative frame casts Walter’s every
action in a flashback that allows Walter, and encourages viewers, to
pass prospective judgment on his behavior, Body Heat contains no
such coercive frame.4 The film relies instead on the less coercive implications
of its imagery of uncontrolled, consuming fire and the intertextual
allusions of its plot, dialogue, and mise-en-scène. Instead of
knowing from the beginning that the hero is doomed, “the viewer,” as
Silver and Ward point out, “coexperiences [the hero’s] betrayal”5 [Fig.
32] by being encouraged to enjoy the sex scenes, which continue even
past the murder of Edmund Walker (Crenna), as titillating spectacles
that apparently bare all, even though they present the heroine far
more deceptively than anything in Wilder’s clinically dispassionate
film.6

The result is a deeply divided attitude toward sex, which is first presented
as more seductive than anything shown in the era of the Production
Code, then revealed as more treacherous. Ultimately, the hero’s
seduction is used in the service of a deeper masochism than that
of earlier noirs, since he is more clearly a victim of the femme fatale.
Double Indemnity may blame the corruption of its mediocre hero on
32. Body Heat: Coexperiencing the betrayal of Ned (William Hurt) by the
femme fatale, Matty (Kathleen Turner).
the femme fatale, but there is no doubt that by the time they shoot
each other, he has indeed become fatally corrupted. Body Heat, by
contrast, is constantly making excuses for Ned, the inoffensive dope
who is originally drawn to Matty by her come-on line, “You’re not too
smart, are you? I like that in a man.” Instead of planning their doubleindemnity
payoff together, Ned finds himself persistently doublecrossed
by the treacherous Matty.

Even when his trust in Matty disintegrates, however, Ned never
turns on her. He greets her admission that “I’m greedy, like you said.
. . . If you never trusted me again, you’d probably be smart” by resuming
their affair under his law-enforcement friends’ eyes, and tells Matty
in their final showdown, “Keep talking, Matty. Experience shows
that I can be convinced of anything.” Ned’s love never loses its essential
innocence, not even after he kills Edmund, since the film presents
the murder as a fight to the death between the slightly built killer and
a ruthless, alert victim packing a handgun. Afterward, Lowenstein concludes,
“That Edmund Walker was a really bad guy. The more I hear
about him, the gladder I am that he’s dead,” and frames Oscar’s bulldog
determination to arrest Edmund’s killer anyway by remarking that
Oscar is “the only person I know like that. Sometimes it’s a real pain
in the ass, even for him,” presenting Oscar’s quest for justice as more
deviant than Ned’s inoffensive murder of a really bad guy.
The strongest plea for Ned’s witless innocence, and therefore the
most damning condemnation of Matty’s guilt, has its basis in a remark
Edmund makes about the difference between two kinds of people: the
ruthless ones who are willing “to do what’s necessary – whatever’s
necessary” – and the spineless ones who aren’t. Ned admits to being
a spineless person himself. In the film’s final sequence, after Ned, now
in prison for the murder, has realized that Matty has escaped, he tells
Oscar, who dismisses the possibility of any such deep-laid plans:
“That was her special gift. She was relentless. Matty was the kind of
person who could do what was necessary – whatever was necessary.”
Hence Matty is cast alongside her murdered husband as one of the
ruthless predators who feed on innocent victims like Ned.
Erotic thrillers like Body Heat are even more determined than films
noirs to exculpate their male heroes at the expense of their femmes
fatales. The sexual politics of this asymmetry, noted as early as Rita
Hayworth’s song “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda (1946), may seem
anachronistic in the days after women’s liberation; but the fear of powerful
women, stirred by dramatic gains in women’s political and eco-
nomic power during the 1970s, is even deeper in erotic thrillers than
in the noirs of forty years earlier, given both sharper definition and
heightened moral ambivalence by the genre’s emphasis on sex.
Fatal Attraction (1987) indicates the complex ways viewers’ contradictory
attitudes toward sex are projected onto the femme fatale but
not her male counterpart. Glenn Close, who plays the femme fatale to
Michael Douglas’s philandering husband, had already starred in Jagged
Edge (1985), which managed to reverse the genders of Body Heat’s
criminal-lover story without sexually fetishizing either her or her costar,
Jeff Bridges, who plays murder suspect Jack Forrester. In one
sense, Jagged Edge presents a feminized view of the erotic thriller, focusing
on the treacherous psychological promise of romance rather
than the duplicitous visual spectacle of sex. In another, however, it
suggests that feminized erotic thrillers are simply a contradiction in
terms, since the fetishization that is the genre’s defining marker, irrelevant
as it is to the interests of female audiences, stipulates a target
audience of heterosexual males.7 No Hollywood hunk, it might seem,
can take the place of Kathleen Turner, since no slice of beefcake can
arouse the same response as a fetishized female.
Nor, it might seem, can Glenn Close, whose career has been founded
on playing strong women who refuse to be defined by men; but Fatal
Attraction shows how even Close, by virtue of her character’s very
determination to avoid being bound by male desire, can anchor an
erotic thriller. Despite its persistent echoes of the Puccini opera Madama
Butterfly, Fatal Attraction, which unfolds like a male nightmare of
adultery, more closely resembles Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window
(1944), which it echoes in somewhat the same way that Body Heat
does Double Indemnity: All four films concern men who are beguiled
into lethal relationships with femmes fatales, but the later film in each
pair allows the male lead to survive, albeit morally compromised, at
the price of utterly demonizing the female. When New York attorney
Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) – whose family, like Professor Wanley’s
in The Woman in the Window, is out of town on a visit – follows
a recent acquaintance, editor Alex Forrest (Close), back to her loft for
some scorching sex, he thinks he is enjoying a one-night stand. But
beginning the next morning, when she phones him at home and begs
him to come back to her, Alex keeps making demands on him, luring
him back to her loft, slitting her wrists when he insists on leaving, then
phoning him at work and at home to announce her pregnancy, pretending
an interest in buying his apartment that allows her to get his
new, unlisted phone number from his unsuspecting wife, Beth (Anne
Archer), throwing acid on his Volvo, and following him to his family’s
new suburban home to kill his daughter Ellen’s rabbit, take Ellen (Ellen
Hamilton Latzen) out of school to an amusement park, provoke the
frantic Beth into a near-fatal car crash, and finally attack Beth in her
bathroom. Dan apparently drowns Alex in the bathtub, and when she
rises from beneath the water, Beth shoots her dead.8

The film splits into two parts that accurately reflect the attraction/
repulsion to sex so characteristic of the genre. The first part, which
follows the story of screenwriter James Dearden’s 45-minute British
film Diversion (1979), introduces Dan to the joys of flirting, romantic
pursuit by an alluring woman and the uninhibited coupling he is evidently
barred from at home, despite Beth’s attractiveness and willingness,
by his family responsibilities. (In the film’s opening scene, all
three Gallaghers are shown in various states of undress, emphasizing
both Dan and Beth’s sexual desires and their sexual frustration.) But
this fantasy of fulfillment is only a prologue to the film’s second movement,
which multiplies the disastrous consequences of Dan’s adultery.
Alex’s tactics escalate from whimpering for Dan’s companionship and
providing a surrogate family for him to breaching his domestic sphere
and threatening his wife and daughter. At every stage, the film catalogs
all the ways Dan’s adultery is fetishized, not by the visual spectacle
of Alex’s body, but by his overinvestment in the one-night stand
that makes him vulnerable to Alex’s pleas and threats. It is not Alex’s
sexual allure that binds Dan to her, but the same passivity that led Dan
into the affair in the first place [Fig. 33]. Long after his initial attraction
to Alex is gone, Dan is held prisoner first by his inability to say no
when she asks him to spend the rest of the weekend with her, then by
his cowardly acceptance of her term “adults” to describe people who
can enjoy sex without commitment, then by his guilt about his participating
in the affair and her attempting suicide, then by his apprehension
lest she reveal the affair to his wife, and finally by his realization
that the family he is reluctant to abandon for her gives him much more
to lose than she does.

Alex’s power, in other words, stems not from her specularized body
(which the film, like Jagged Edge, treats with surprisingly chaste restraint)
but from Dan’s feelings about her and about the threats to his
sense of himself his affair with her represents. This power, however,
based as it is on male perceptions of the female rather than on the female
herself, is the very essence of fetishism. Soon after his initial cou-
pling with Alex on her kitchen sink, Dan’s associations with sex turn
overwhelmingly negative; yet that does not prevent them from operating
as fetishes – it merely makes them negative fetishes for which
he still, by virtue of the patriarchal values that made him susceptible
to Alex in the first place, must bear responsibility.

Fatal Attraction has been read as an anti-AIDS parable, a defense of
embattled family values (most audiences, no matter how sympathetic
they may have been to forlorn Alex, recoil from her when she directs
her vicious attentions from Dan to his innocent family), and an exorcism
of unregulated female sexuality.9 It is also, in its uneasy medley
of soft-focus sex and hell-hath-no-fury horror clichés, an unusually revealing
portrait of its target audience’s contradictory feelings about
the pleasures and dangers of sex, the difficulty of connecting them,
and the inevitability of attributing their contradictions to the fetishized
femme fatale. Jack Forrester in Jagged Edge needs to be unmasked
as a cunning, heartless manipulator who uses sex and the trappings
of sex to keep his hold on money and power, whereas Alex Forrest
needs to be exorcised, not simply unmasked, because her sexual allure
is real, not assumed, and because merely casting her out would
allow audiences to disavow all the male desires and activities that en-
33. Fatal Attraction: Another weak hero (Michael Douglas) trapped by his own
passivity between his inamorata (Glenn Close) and his wife (Anne Archer).
dowed her with power by fetishizing her in the first place. A cycle of
films determined to ratify beleaguered ideals of masculinity while acknowledging
that the power of female sexuality depends on these very
ideals, whether specular or psychological, must end by turning in redoubled
fury on the guilty heroine, producing a misogyny more intense
than anything in Double Indemnity. For if the matrix of postwar
noir is American anxiety over unbridled political power, focused and
inverted by the nightmare fantasy of the powerful woman, the matrix
of the erotic thriller is cultural anxiety over unbridled access to sex,
focused and inverted by the nightmare fantasy of the castrating liberated
woman figured in even more strikingly misogynistic terms than
the femme fatale of film noir because she represents a much broader
range of threats. Besides seeking the economic parity of women who
supported the wartime economy on the home front, these women demand
access to capital, control of their sexuality, an equal voice in
sexual politics, and a subversive access to patriarchal power or its female
equivalent. Hence a man like Dan Gallagher is profoundly shaken
when his one-night stand refuses his offer to finance an abortion and
demands a share of his domestic life because he is to grant her sexual
freedom only as far as it leaves his own unabridged. The heroines of
contemporary erotic thrillers, who claim traditionally male sources of
power as their own, provoke a male sexual panic that is truly global,
revealing itself in undifferentiated paranoid hysteria.

The ultimate male nightmare of the castrating heroine to date is Sharon
Stone’s Catherine Tramell, the seductive heroine of Paul Verhoeven’s
Basic Instinct. Virtually overnight since its opening in 1992, the
film has been recognized as a landmark even by commentators who
deplore its sexual explicitness, its sexual politics (it was picketed by
gay activists protesting its characterization of its amoral heroine as
bisexual), or its sexual manipulativeness. It succeeded in becoming
one of the top moneymakers of 1992, garnering Oscar nominations for
editing (by Frank J. Urioste) and music (by veteran Jerry Goldsmith)
and putting both its director and its female star on the map for good,
without ever establishing its respectability.

The gap between the film’s high profile and low respect has continued
to mark the later development of its director, cinematographer,
and screenwriter. Verhoeven, who had previously been best known in
America for the violent action films RoboCop (1987) and Total Recall
(1990), had already rehearsed for the project with the sexually explicit
historical drama Flesh + Blood (1985), his American debut, and The
Fourth Man (De Vierde man, 1979), an art-house thriller from his native
Holland that explored a gay writer’s obsession with an alluring widow
whose publicity stills showed her wielding a pair of scissors like a
butcher knife. Jan de Bont, who had shot all Verhoeven’s earlier films,
changed careers immediately after Basic Instinct to become the director
of such action spectacles as Speed (1994) and Twister (1996). But
the most dramatic gap between notoriety and respect is illustrated by
the later trajectory of Joe Eszterhas, who was paid three million dollars
for his screenplay – a coup that launched Eszterhas, who had earlier
written Jagged Edge, on a round of upscale exploitation films that
would include Sliver (1993), Showgirls (1995), and Jade (1995).
Most audiences, however, were less interested in the film’s production
credits than in the opulently displayed bodies of Stone and
Michael Douglas. Douglas, the actor-producer who had won an Oscar
for playing the take-charge Gordon Gekko in Wall Street in 1987, the
same year Fatal Attraction was released, confirmed his status as the
leading man who made sex look most unpleasant (a status that, first
suggested in Fatal Attraction, would turn into a joke with his starring
role as the executive sexually harassed by Demi Moore in the 1994
Disclosure). In Basic Instinct, however, he was sensationally out-acted,
or at least out-undraped, by Sharon Stone, previously best known for
her roles as the hero’s ostensible loving wife in Total Recall and the
sexually predatory journalist in Year of the Gun (1991) – a role that had
given the clearest hint of what she was capable of, and how she would
be typed beginning with Basic Instinct.

No film has ever succeeded in making sex look at once so alluring
and so glum. From its opening sequence, the film is a castration fantasy
that conducts a running critique of the titillation it is marketing.
It begins not with a confession like Walter Neff’s that turns the rest of
the story into a fatalistic flashback, nor with an ambivalent metaphor
like the fire burning uncontrolled outside Ned Racine’s window in Body
Heat, but with a nude scene showing a blonde woman, whose face is
obscured, tying her lover’s hands to a headboard, making passionate
love to him, and then stabbing him to death with an ice pick she
has hidden under the covers. Like innumerable earlier movie scenes
showing a crime being committed without revealing the culprit,10 it
plays on audiences’ attraction to scenes of sex and death while keeping
them uncertain how they are supposed to feel about the suspects
who may have been involved in these scenes.
This opening murder of retired rock star Johnny Boz (Bill Cable)
not only kicks off the film’s plot but frames its paranoia in visual and
thematic terms as well. The monochrome gold light in which de Bont
bathes this tableau of murderous rapture persists throughout the
film’s interior scenes, relieved only by the strategic use of blue sky and
water in the film’s exterior shots, the slate blues of the police interrogation
room walls and Douglas’s shirts, and the blue neon lights that
keep popping up in diners and nightclubs. Except for these blue notes
– which gradually recede along with the low horizon lines of the film’s
early exterior shots – the visual style is dominated by flesh tones.
The masking of the killer’s face in an opening scene, which gives
voyeuristic viewers otherwise complete access to her body, suggests
why fleshtones will be so important: because the human face, with
its promise of psychological depth, will be systematically displaced
throughout the film by the specularized body as a locus of identity.
Even the uncomfortably tight facial close-ups and two-shots with
which early dialogue scenes are studded do not reveal what the characters
are thinking or feeling; they merely suffuse the screen with
more flesh tones, reducing each face to flesh. Giving the killer’s breasts
and blonde hair more visual prominence than her concealed face does
not, of course, allow her to be easily recognized; instead, it equates
her with all women who can be so fetishized by a male gaze turned
paranoid.

The film’s opening scene, establishing both a voyeuristic interest in
sex and a grim tone from the beginning, provides an interpretive frame
for the action that is neither as coercive as the flashback structure
of Double Indemnity nor as open-ended as the symbolic frame of Body
Heat. In its radical ambivalence, charged with both voyeurism and admonition,
it encourages an attitude of doubt and dread toward every
sexual activity – a notion the film defines broadly enough to include
virtually all the behavior it puts on display – until the very last shot.
A second, equally ambiguous interpretive frame is provided by the
novels written by Catherine, the principal suspect in Boz’s murder, under
the pseudonym Catherine Woolf: The First Time, which fictionalized
the deaths of her parents years ago; Love Hurts, which predicted
the Boz murder in uncanny detail; and the one she is just beginning,
Shooter, which she intends as a portrait of Nick Curran (Douglas), the
lead detective investigating the murder. Catherine’s brazen openness
about the basis of her books in real experiences, and her insistence
that only someone who wanted to frame her would kill someone in a
manner she had outlined so precisely, make Nick uncertain just how
to interpret them, even when, incredibly, he allows his partner Gus
Moran (George Dzundza) to enter a building in which the manuscript
of Shooter has just predicted Gus will meet his death.
The film’s third interpretive frame is intertextual. Body Heat invoked
Double Indemnity and other noirs at so many points that only an audience
as naïve or besotted as Ned would have failed to recognize Matty’s
femme-fatale heritage. Basic Instinct is even more heavily indebted
to earlier films. The fear of a woman who kills the men with whom she
has sex echoes the central premise of Black Widow (1987), and the
casting of Douglas inevitably recalls his similar role in Fatal Attraction.
When Nick discovers that Catherine’s friend Hazel Dobkins (Dorothy
Malone) is an ex-convict who had killed her husband in 1956, alert
viewers will recognize the reference to the year Malone had given her
Oscar-winning performance as the nymphomaniac Marylee Hadley in
Written on the Wind – a reference that allows the film to echo its opening
reduction of the killer to a golden body by reducing Malone’s character
to the actress’s earlier performance as a man-hungry tramp. The
film’s most important echoes, though, are of Vertigo (1958), through
not only its exploration of gender but also its evocative music – particularly
the chromatic descending phrase introduced over the main
title, with its persistent denial of resolution in the tonic key – and its
San Francisco setting, especially when Nick, in a grotesquely soupedup
version of James Stewart’s dreamlike pursuit of Kim Novak’s Rolls-
Royce, weaves in and out of traffic on a sheer hillside expressway behind
Catherine’s death-defying Lamborghini. None of these references,
however, helps audiences decide how to react to the film’s frequent
presentations of sexual couplings by indicating whether Catherine is
innocent or guilty. The overgalvanized chase scenes show Nick, like
Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson, tailing a suspicious woman in the hopes
that her adventures will explain her behavior. Like Scottie, however,
Nick sees only a series of tableaux in which the mysterious heroine
reveals alternative versions of herself rather than the heart of her
personal mystery. Since both sequences are staged by their heroines,
neither voyeuristic pursuit can provide the psychological demystification
that is its pretext. Like the teasing opening murder, these sequences
simply create a climate of suspicion dispersed over every
female member of the cast.

The film’s suspicions focus on Catherine because of her frankly
predatory sexuality while linking her vampirish sexual habits to sub-
Basic Instinct and the Erotic Thriller 157
tler but equally sinister forms of possession. Nick is obviously taken
aback by Catherine’s wealth (she inherited an estate worth $110 million
when her parents died), her magna cum laude Berkeley degree
in psychology and literature (figured here as the credentials for worldclass
manipulation), her effortless mastery of self-presentation, her
amused detachment from the case, and her refusal to accept either of
the roles he would like to assign her: grieving lover or murder suspect.
More directly threatening is her announcement, “I use people for what
I write. Let the world beware,” and her subsequent disarming revelation
to Nick, “I’m using you for my detective in my book. You don’t
mind, do you?”

The film’s best-known set piece, in which Catherine sits with aplomb
and without underwear, her legs spread, as the sweating police interrogate
her, pits her charismatic sexuality against male institutions of
power whose interest in regulating it is outweighed by lubricity. Her
forthright refusal to put out her cigarette – “What’re you going to do,
charge me with smoking?” she taunts the cops who are interrogating
her – makes the male inquisitors in the no-smoking interrogation room
look like monkeys because, even as she invites the male gaze that
ought to disempower her by reducing her to an object, she turns the
tables on her accusers. She challenges their rules by refusing to follow
them – or by throwing them in their faces, by her mastery of their liedetector
test. She refuses to play the role of prey to Nick’s institutional
predator, calling him by his first name throughout the scene and taunting
him with personal remarks; and by courting the gaze of her interrogators
through the way she poses for them, she challenges their right
to question her at all by revealing their interest in her as ultimately
scopophilic. It is no wonder that even more than the three sex scenes
that structure the film’s narrative – the murder of Johnny Boz, the reenactment
of that murder by the episode halfway through in which
Catherine ties Nick’s hands to her bedpost but then does not kill him,
and the final scene that finds Nick and Catherine in bed once more –
Catherine’s brazen challenge to the legitimacy of the police interrogation
has become the film’s hallmark [Fig. 34].

Catherine, however, is only the most prominent of the film’s femmes
fatales. Her friend Hazel long ago had killed her family with a knife that
had been a wedding gift. Her lesbian live-in companion Roxy Hardy
(Leilani Sarelle) had killed her brothers with their father’s razor at the
age of sixteen. Even her apparent opposite, Nick’s lover, police psychiatrist
Dr. Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who ought to be cast as
the good girl, turns out to be implicated in the mystery as someone
who was briefly Catherine’s lover when they were students at Berkeley,
and who may have killed one of the old teachers she shared with
Catherine with an ice pick.

The dispersion of suspicion over a wide range of suspects is hardly
an innovation of Basic Instinct, since, as a defining trope of the mystery
story, it turns up in films as different as Laura (1944) and The Last
Basic Instinct and the Erotic Thriller 159
34. Basic Instinct: The frank sexuality of the heroine (Sharon Stone) challenges
the legitimacy of the police hero (Michael Douglas) in and out of bed.
of Sheila (1973). What makes Basic Instinct stand out from other whodunits
is the sexual tension aroused by the hero’s sleeping with two
of the suspects, either of whom could be planning to kill him. Not
even the reckless affair Det. Frank Keller (Al Pacino) conducts with
Helen (Ellen Barkin), the leading suspect in Sea of Love (1989) [Fig.
35], produces an equivalent sense of sexual paranoia; for even though
the film initially casts Beth in a therapeutic role as Nick’s counselor
and lover, makes her the widowed victim of violence (her husband
was shot to death five years ago), and shows her consistently offering
herself as subservient to Nick, evidence against her continues
to mount. She has changed both her name and her hair color since
her student days at Berkeley; she knew Catherine much better there
than she originally admitted; and according to Catherine, it was Beth
who obsessively imitated and stalked Catherine, not the other way
around. After Nick shoots Beth when he finds her on the scene of
Gus’s murder, the police discover a mountain of new evidence pointing
to her as the killer, and many viewers leave the theater believing
in her guilt.

Given the pall of suspicion the film goes out of its way to cast over
every female in the cast, why is Nick so attracted to them, especially
to Catherine, who makes no secret of the fact that she simply intends
to use him for her new book? The interrogation scene pointedly suggests
that when it comes to seductive women, men don’t think with
their brains; but even if Nick’s only attraction to Catherine were sexual,
the sex would not be half as good if her effrontery did not provide
him with a risk he clearly enjoys. Although Nick assures both Catherine
and Gus that his interest in her is professional, her unrelentingly
provocative behavior reveals a more insidious lure: his recognition of
Catherine as his more successful double. Even when he is nominally
assigned an adversarial role toward Catherine, as detective to her suspect,
he finds himself echoing her dialogue tags (most memorably,
“What’re you going to do, charge me with smoking?” when he sits in
the same chair to be questioned about the murder of his nemesis, Lt.
Marty Nilsen [Daniel von Bargen]) and adopting her habits, returning
to the smoking and drinking he had given up, cornering Beth over her
protests for a bout of rough sex that not only reveals his frustration
at Catherine’s aloofness but borrows her way of expressing it. When
Gus tells Nick that Catherine doesn’t have any friends who haven’t
killed anyone, he is rather tactlessly forgetting that this description
applies to Nick himself, who has shot four bystanders, two quite re-
cently, on the job. After initially considering Catherine an adversary
who provides a rationale for his professional identity, Nick is eventually
forced to see her as the untrammeled self he longs to be.
As she warns him, however, theirs is an unequal twinship [Fig. 36];
for if Catherine, in accord with her plans to feed on Nick as material
for her novel, increasingly succeeds in getting inside Nick’s head until
she knows him better than he knows himself, Nick never succeeds in
35. Sea of Love: Another compromised cop, another reckless affair. (Ellen
Barkin, Al Pacino)
getting inside her any way but physically. Early on, Nick recognizes
that he is overmatched, but he soon manages to forget this knowledge.
He is humiliatingly doubled with Catherine’s alternative lover,
Roxy, when he finds that she has watched what Nick, though not Catherine,
calls “the fuck of the century,” and has often watched Catherine
in bed with Catherine’s knowledge and consent. Although he caps a
second wild car chase, after almost being run over twice, by killing
Roxy, the car’s driver (believing she is Catherine), he had never succeeded
in rattling her into thinking he has taken her place in Catherine’s
affections, the way she obviously rattles him into suspecting that
Catherine has marginalized his male sexuality by staging their coupling
expressly for Roxy’s benefit – just as she had earlier danced with
him in Johnny Boz’s club in order to make Roxy jealous. If his affair
with Catherine is, as Nick believes, a race between his attempt to build
a case against her and her attempt to embalm him in her novel and
then move on, there can be no doubt who wins: She not only remakes
him in her own image, completes the book, and briskly dismisses him,
but succeeds so completely in turning his suspicions from her to Beth
that, after shooting Beth dead, he resumes his affair with Catherine.
Unlike the doomed lovers of Double Indemnity, then, Nick and Catherine
are not evenly matched partners; they more closely resemble
the female plotter and the male patsy of Body Heat. The film treats its
violent rondelet of sexual couplings as a game whose roles absorb its
participants so fully that they can never return to their former identities.
As Gus points out to Nick when he expresses his appetite for playing
along with Catherine, “Everybody she plays with dies.” By the end
of the story, Nick, practically alone of Catherine’s partners, has not
died; but he has paid for his relationship with Catherine with the loss
of his privacy (his troubled history is about to be revealed to the
world in the forthcoming Shooter), his peace of mind, his former lover
and therapist, his best friend, and his professional standing.
The film’s final scene aptly indicates what it means to gain Catherine
in this game of sex by pointedly failing to resolve the problems
Nick’s suicidally heedless infatuation with Catherine has raised. Nick
and Catherine are in bed in a scene staged as their final reenactment
of Johnny Boz’s murder. When they have finished making love, they
wonder what they’re going to do next as Nick invitingly presents his
back as a target; Catherine, after trailing her hand under the bed,
sweeps her arm up in passionate rather than murderous intent; and
the film fades from a shot of their exhausted faces to black. But in-
stead of presenting the closing credits, Verhoeven fades in after a few
long seconds on the identical shot, then tilts down further to show
Catherine’s hand dangling again under the bed, inches above an ice
pick she has presumably left there (although skeptical viewers are free
to think that Beth, who has been in Nick’s apartment often enough, left
it there instead). Catherine withdraws her hand without touching the
ice pick, suggesting over a second and final fade that she will not kill
Nick this time; maybe she never will. It is in that maybe that Basic Instinct
locates all hope for love, friendship, even satisfying sex. Having
survived the deaths of their closest friends and lovers, maybe Nick
and Catherine – he certainly a killer, she presumably one as well – will
live happily ever after. Maybe Nick has left behind the haunted loner
who killed four bystanders while working as a cop. Maybe Catherine
is not the killer he thought she was. Maybe.

Why are the rituals of courtship and romance systematically reduced
to the poisonous games these lovers play? The film presents
Catherine’s castrating power as a transgressive inversion of Nick’s institutional
power by showing her unfairly seizing advantages he assumed,
equally unfairly, were his by right. Yet Nick’s identity is so
bound up in his job that his initial self-confidence is really a confidence
in the legal system that has allowed him to use lethal force in
life-or-death situations, made his therapist-lover obligingly submissive
to him, and enlisted her official authority in forgiving or covering up
his fatal lapses in judgment. The femme fatale’s charismatic individual
power is nothing more than a backlash against the institutional power
of patriarchy, which would guarantee, whatever the heroine’s behavior,
an imbalance of power between men and women. In such an
unbalanced world, love is all but impossible, and sex at best a dangerous
game rife with possibilities for bullying, counterattack, and betrayal,
at worst an invitation to personal annihilation in the pursuit
of power needed to sustain even the most opportunistic relationship.
No wonder that R. Barton Palmer, whose reading of Catherine as guilty
of murder but largely sympathetic makes him perhaps the most optimistic
commentator on the film, concludes that it “ends by endorsing
a true love based on shared psychopathology.”11

Unlike films noirs, erotic thrillers, freed from the Production Code’s
demand that evil be punished, are often too deeply divided between
their critique of patriarchy and their complicit invitation to voyeurism
to resolve this dilemma by killing off the licentious heroine. Increas-
ingly, in the trajectory from Body Heat to Basic Instinct, they condemn
their patriarchal heroes without abating their execration of their
femmes fatales. Two recent films, however, suggest that even if love
between men and women may be impossible in a world that is patriarchal,
misogynistic, and voyeuristic, films need not simply reproduce
these values uncritically themselves.

John Dahl’s The Last Seduction (1994), first made for HBO, offers a
villain who is so resourceful in triumphing over her negligible male
adversaries that her criminality becomes heroic. After a spat in which
her face is slapped by her husband, Clay (Bill Pullman), a Manhattan
medical resident who has just scored $700,000 in a drug deal, hardcharging
sales-force supervisor Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino)
walks out on him with the money, apparently on the spur of the moment
and for no reason other than the slap, and goes to ground in tiny
Beston, outside Buffalo. Stopping for gas, Bridget ridicules the crude
come-on of insurance claims adjuster Mike Swale (Peter Berg), who
tells her, “I’m hung like a horse,” in reply to which she sits him down,
opens his fly, and gropes him in search of “Mr. Ed.” Eventually, however,
she allows him to buy her a drink and take her home as a “designated
fuck” whose companionship will keep her off Clay’s radar. In
an ingenious series of maneuvers, she manages to foil both of the detectives
Clay sends after her and inveigles the unwitting Mike into a
plot to murder him. When Mike balks at the last minute, she kills Clay
herself, pinning the crime on Mike, and rides off into the sunset rich
and free.

The film plays like Body Heat seen from the femme fatale’s point of
view. The only excuse it offers for Bridget’s behavior is the stupidity
and venality of her male adversaries. Even though Bridget is as duplicitous
and brutal as Matty Walker, the film suggests, she deserves to
beat the men she is playing because by adopting the stereotypically
male habits of sexual aggression, dirty talk, frank lack of romantic
commitment, and lust for power and money, she is getting revenge for
generations of patriarchal abuse of women. Bridget deliciously sends
up the romantic attitudinizing that is supposed to keep her responsive
to men, as when she responds to Mike’s complaint that she doesn’t
feel anything for him by saying, “You’re different from the others, Mike.
I feel that maybe I could love you. I don’t want that to happen. Really.
– Will that do?” No matter that Bridget does not consider herself a sister
to the women who paved the way for her role reversal, or that she
studiously snubs all the neighbors, women and men alike, who offer
her greetings on her first morning in Beston. Her right to revenge is
confirmed by her ruthlessness and wit and her victims’ weakness.
Clay, who is just as criminal without being just as clever, is Bridget’s
natural prey; but Mike, in the film’s most cunning gender reversal, is
an equally fitting victim. Although he talks constantly of his longing
for romantic commitment, the film never forgets that Mike, reeling
from the disastrous marriage that took him briefly to Buffalo before
tossing him back on Beston, sees Bridget mainly as a prop to his masculinity.
“How long does it take to grow a new set of balls?” he muses
to his drinking buddies as Bridget, whom he calls “a new set of balls,”
walks in. When Bridget begins at one point to tell him the truth about
herself, he stops her, insisting it’s just another lie, then tells her that
he needs her to restore his sense of himself: “You’ve been out there.
You came here, and you chose me. So I was right. I’m bigger than this
town.” Viewers are invited to revel in the irony of the romantic Mike’s
selection by someone who demonstrates how disastrously out of his
league he is when he leaves his despised small town for Buffalo (where
his bride, Trish, turns out to be a transvestite male played by the porn
actress Serena) or New York (where Bridget, by briefly playing the role
of the wife he hates, tricks him into releasing his rage just long enough
to ensure that he will take the fall for Clay’s murder). Male and female
viewers alike are invited to enjoy this castration fantasy as exhilarating
rather than disturbing because the male victims are so carefully
distinguished from the presumably less insecure audience.

The Last Seduction, like Basic Instinct, works not by redressing the
social inequalities between men and women but by inverting them, allowing
the femme fatale to earn her payday by usurping traditionally
male habits in order to play on the masculine insecurities of the hero.
Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Bound (1996) goes a step further by playing
to Nick Curran’s most paranoid fantasy, taking men out of the equation
altogether. By casting Gina Gershon in the role of the innocent
sucked into a dangerous conspiracy by an alluring woman with criminal
connections – a role traditionally played by men from Burt Lancaster
in The Killers (1946) to Don Johnson in Goodbye, Lover (1999)
– the film recasts in lesbian terms the anatomy of male–female power
games that dominate both films noirs and erotic thrillers. Once ex-con
rehabber Corky (Gershon) and her next-door neighbor Violet (Jennifer
Tilly) team up to fleece Violet’s lover Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) of two
million dollars in Mob money, the key question the film’s convoluted
plot keeps raising is whether the two conspirators can trust each oth-
er, or which one will betray the other one first. In a heterosexual noir
or erotic thriller the answer would be foreordained, since although
men can rage murderous through erotic thrillers like Crimes of Passion
(1984), Body Double (1984), Consenting Adults (1992), and Sliver,
men rarely betray the women with whom they conspire to break the
law. The role of double-crossing criminal conspirator is reserved for
women in such films as Out of the Past (1947), Criss Cross (1949), Body
of Evidence (1993), Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), and Palmetto (1998).12
This time, however, there is no way of telling which of the two females
will crack first.

As it turns out, neither does. Even though Violet seems at first to
harp on the cultural differences between them – “A truck. Of course,”
she says when she hears that Corky drives a 1962 Chevy pickup, and
later responds to Corky’s drink of choice, “Beer. Of course.” – the two
are bound together from the beginning, for better or worse, by their
similarities [Fig. 37]. Violet seduces Corky by admiring Corky’s tattoos
and inviting her to touch the tattoo on Violet’s own breast. Much later,
as Violet refuses to tell the suspicious Caesar the name of the person
she has telephoned after the money has disappeared, he identifies
Corky by the telephone he hears ringing next door. Caesar, maddened
as he is by Violet’s refusal to betray Corky, cannot know that the two
women have already passed up repeated opportunities to sell each
other out. Corky could have driven off with the briefcase that Violet
tipped her off would be full of cash; Violet could have stayed behind
and tipped Caesar off about Corky’s break-in instead of going to the
liquor store; Violet could have given Caesar Corky’s name earlier. The
two women not only flimflam Joe out of the money he is minding for
his higher-ups and so endanger his life, but also outrage his sense of
sexual propriety by forging a bond that is closer than his bond with
Violet.

Corky is an obvious butch whose idea of romance is picking up
women in gay bars, Violet a femme who has been living with the same
man for five years; Corky is a thief who is identified with physical labor,
Violet a passive–aggressive seducer who seems to have learned
her behavior from studying every erotic thriller since Body Heat. Despite
the differences in their status and habits, though, they are alike
under the leather jackets they wear so differently and inside their hyperaesthetically
stylized visual world, from the opening sequence –
a tour of a closet interior that comprises a delirious exercise in fetishism
– to the climactic shooting of the villain that becomes a study in
white. Less like the heterosexual lovers whose failures litter the noir
and neo-noir landscape than like the besieged family members of Fatal
Attraction, Corky and Violet are capable of forming a team whose members
can trust each other because they see themselves in each other
too completely ever to be fooled by superficial differences. The film’s
final exchange confirms this sense of teamwork while ruling it out for
heterosexual couples. As they drive off in Corky’s brand-new truck after
killing Joe and pocketing the money, Corky asks Violet, “You know
what the difference is between you and me, Violet?” “No,” replies Violet
dutifully. “Me neither,” says Corky.

The happy ending of Bound, like Bridget’s subversively enjoyable
rout of her male victims in The Last Seduction, suggests that insecure
men, not treacherous women, are the real villains in films noirs and
erotic thrillers. Unlike men, these films suggest, women do not oppress
or victimize people, justifying their power by perpetuating it in
patriarchal institutions, in order to reassure themselves about their
sexual identities. Women may be greedy and ruthless, but since these
traits are rarely gendered as female, the men they outwit are equally
immoral, simply more vulnerable because their access to institutional
power gives them more to lose, and because their masculinity makes
them more vulnerable both to the heroines who play on their insecurities
and to the audiences who are willing to sacrifice them as hostages
to the gender wars. Bound in particular suggests that the motivic
doubling of Walter and Phyllis in Double Indemnity as an image for Walter’s
own irreducible duality can be read in still another way: as a more
general representation of woman and man, doomed to failure as a couple
by social and cultural inequalities that can be mended only if they
exchange forgiveness and start over again. Lesbianism, Bound suggests,
is not deviant; heterosexuality is, because its couples are divided
by the very forces that unite them, from criminal conspiracies to
sexual difference. If the alleged attraction of psychosexual opposites
makes love go round (and round and round) for the repressed heroes
of film noir, the erotic thriller raises the stakes by dramatizing the
global paranoia men feel not only for the women on whom they depend
for the sex they crave, but for the possibility that women could
ever undermine cherished ideals of masculinity by showing how nightmarish
it would be if they ever acted as badly as men.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org