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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
In Stone, Verhoeven found an actress who seemed the veritable incarnation of his Temptress archetype; in Verhoeven, Stone found the director willing to expose and exploit the cruelest and most powerful side of her personality. I'm officially, here and now, begging Paul and Sharon to bury the hatchet and get back to work. These kinds of Sternberg-Dietrich relationships don't come along often, and let's face facts: Neither of you has been quite the same since.
But before Stone and "Basic Instinct" in 1992, there was Soutendijk and "The Fourth Man" in 1983. Verhoeven's last true Dutch film, "The Fourth Man" still has something of a cult following, and it's no wonder. It's a creepy psychosexual thriller suffused with a mood of dread, driven by a number of threatening dream sequences as powerful as anything in the director's work. Considered in tandem, "The Fourth Man" and "Basic Instinct" meld into a catalog of Verhoeven's obsessions. As two aspects of the same narrative of irresistible compulsion -- one, as it were, directed by Hitchcock and the other by Luis Buquel -- they form the brilliant and tormented centerpiece of his work.
In "The Fourth Man," Jeroen Krabbi (another Verhoeven alumnus who would go on to numerous Hollywood roles) plays Gerard, a visiting writer drawn in by a mysterious woman who lives at the beach and may be a multiple murderer. In Eszterhas' screenplay for "Basic Instinct," Catherine, the beautiful murder suspect who lives at the beach, is herself a writer who appropriates Detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) as the principal character in her next novel. Christine in "The Fourth Man" is also a creator and collector of sorts; in fact, she's a filmmaker. She meets Gerard while shooting him during a public appearance, and, as he later discovers, she has reels of film devoted to each of her three deceased husbands.
In the sexual texts of the two films, we can see a sort of object lesson in the difference between European and American cinema, and in the translations Verhoeven's obsessions required when crossing the Atlantic. Gerard is gay and on the run from a stale relationship in Amsterdam; although he enjoys sex with Christine, he's hoping to use her to seduce a studly construction worker who is also her lover. Needless to say, this wouldn't fly for Douglas and Hollywood, and the homoeroticism had to be displaced onto the female characters. In "Basic Instinct," Catherine is the voracious bisexual whose other lover is a woman.
Both of these secondary figures die in auto accidents: Catherine's Roxy kills herself while trying to kill Nick, and Christine's hunky laborer is gruesomely impaled just after admitting his interest in sex with Gerard. (Talk about symbolism!) To attribute these deaths to Verhoeven's alleged homophobia, while an understandable reaction, is to miss the point entirely. These other lovers die not because of their sexuality, or because of Catherine and Christine, but because of the men.
It's crucial to note that the question of whether Christine and Catherine are really murderers is not conclusively answered in either film. In "The Fourth Man," Gerard's conviction that Christine is a killer lands him in the loony bin. Yes, there is that final shot of the ice pick under Catherine's bed in "Basic Instinct," but it hardly removes the ambiguity. Just before that, and after we see Stone and Douglas in the final clinch, Verhoeven inserts a three-second blackout. What the hell does it mean? Is the last shot real or some kind of symbolic fantasy suggesting that violence, literal or metaphorical, is always under the bed?
Verhoeven's insistent ambivalence may be infuriating, but it is central to his art. We can never be certain whether the two women are genuine black widows or only brilliant flames into which men fly like moths, blank screens on which paranoid male fantasy is projected.
While "The Fourth Man" remains a singular European film of its time, "Basic Instinct," as I see it, has greater significance. It's a uniquely potent fable of America in the early '90s, and its hidden text -- the idea that Nick, rather than Catherine or Roxy or Beth, the police psychologist, is the real killer -- is the source of its power. Supposedly in recovery from his squalid past as a violence-prone cokehead and boozehound, Nick is actually sliding all too eagerly back into addiction and abuse. He ends up by killing Beth, who is unarmed and may be the only person in the film who really cares about him, without ever being sure she is the murderer. Nick's real addiction, and that of the class he stood for, was to power and money and dominion. (Killing homosexuals, if you like, was a perfectly apt metaphor for their activities.) With Douglas and his litany of persecuted-male roles as their avatar, angry white men in suits all across the country claimed to be the victims of a far-reaching Stalinist conspiracy, even as they stood at the cusp of a new era of greed that would make the Gordon Gekko '80s look innocent.
Of course, "Basic Instinct" is also a lush, seamlessly constructed thriller with two extraordinary stars at the peak of their powers. It's driven by De Bont's lustrous cinematography and its offhand references to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," along with Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated score, pulsing and throbbing as it rises in pitch and intensity. If audiences can't see past Verhoeven's lustrous surfaces, past his stylized, haute-hot images of sexuality and violence, to the deeper structures he half-consciously has in view, is that his fault or ours? Perhaps both.
Seduced and overwhelmed by ambivalence and moral ambiguity, and by sexual fears he has never fully articulated, Verhoeven has always stood apart from his audience, a nearly great artist who suspects that all art may be propaganda and all morality self-justification. "After what went on in the Second World War and we saw what people were capable of doing to one another," he has said, "people all over the world were forced to realize they were no better than the Germans and were capable of committing similar acts. . . . We must acknowledge these dark things because the sooner we admit our capacity for evil the less apt we are to destroy each other."
