Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Is the director of "Total Recall" and "Hollow Man" a pornographer, a homophobe and a misogynist -- or a misunderstood genius who's been defeated by his own contrary nature?
Aug 1, 2000 | "People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep." -- Paul Verhoeven, 1987
When word got back to me that one of the critics at Salon, whose identity I shall protect, had expressed disbelief that I was writing a Brilliant Careers piece on Paul Verhoeven -- "You're kidding, right?" -- I could hardly be surprised. Most American filmgoers, if they know Verhoeven's name at all, regard him as a director of empty, sensationalistic spectacles, who has been pilloried by right-wing moralists as a pornographer and by left-wing moralists as a homophobe and misogynist. Meanwhile, to a far smaller cadre of cineastes, Verhoeven is a once-interesting European director who sold his soul to make megabucks Hollywood trash.
It's true that the story of Verhoeven's life as a filmmaker might best be considered under some rubric more complicated than "brilliant," but as far as I know, Salon has no plans to launch a column called Ambiguous Careers. So here we are, and my mission is to convince you that Paul Verhoeven is indeed a genius, albeit one partly defeated by -- take your pick -- history, circumstances, public indifference or his own contrary nature.
Is he concerned with sex and a sleek, candy-coated visual style? You bet. Does he choose disreputable genres: the erotic thriller, the soapy melodrama, the sci-fi spectacular? Clearly. Does he make trash? Sometimes he absolutely embraces it. But what intoxicating, satisfying, downright weird trash! I'll take Verhoeven at his best over all your Ridley Scotts and Tim Burtons and Terry Gilliams and whatever other piss-elegant upscale Hollywood artistes you can name. Next to his obsessive reiterations they're kids in the backyard with Dad's video camera and last year's Halloween costumes.
Verhoeven's career has a peculiar coherence that isn't easy to grasp; in order to understand his American films you need to see his European films, and vice versa. His body of work is unquestionably uneven, but I would argue that "Starship Troopers," "Basic Instinct" and, to a lesser extent, "RoboCop," are among the most interesting Hollywood films of the last 20 years. They are ambiguous and troubled works, not quite complete and widely misunderstood; they share an ironic/melodramatic narrative mode that is, for better or worse, distinctively Verhoeven's own.
After the relative commercial failures of "Starship Troopers" in 1997 and "Showgirls" in 1995 (failure in Hollywood is always a question of perception rather than absolute numbers), Verhoeven may be running out of rope, which makes a reassessment of his career especially timely. He has always been a slow and methodical craftsman despite his hack reputation, and "Hollow Man," his invisible-man thriller starring Kevin Bacon, which opens this week, is his first film in three years. If it fails to connect with mass audiences, Verhoeven may have difficulty refuting the perception that, at 62, he's an aging director of overpriced genre pictures who has nowhere to go but down.
For that tender minority who believes Verhoeven is an important director, "Hollow Man" will seem like a disappointingly conventional film. It's recognizably his work, both because of the dazzling special effects and because it's a fable about an arrogant man, wounded in love, who is symbolically emasculated (by literally disappearing) and becomes a jealous, paranoid monster. But without a powerful and complicated woman for Bacon's mad scientist to bounce off -- Elisabeth Shue's character is a cheerful Girl Scout type -- Verhoeven never seems viscerally engaged with the film. There are a couple of creepy signature moments, as when the invisible Bacon stalks a naked woman who thinks she's alone in her apartment, but for the most part "Hollow Man" is standard (and wretchedly scripted) Hollywood action-adventure.
Verhoeven foresaw his current problematic fate in a characteristically frank interview with Bob Strauss of the Boston Globe in 1997, before the release of "Troopers": "When your movies work, it gives you more power. . . . The moment you start to make failures one after the other, you're much more at the mercy of what people want you to do." In Verhoeven's world, films and filmmaking are always power games, played against a shadowy adversary (whether it's his Hollywood employers, the audience or both) he seems to desire as much as fear.
The key concept in understanding Verhoeven's work and career, I think, is ambivalence. He is ambivalent about sex, about men and women, about violence, about Hollywood. Although it's probably fair to call Verhoeven a leftist (yes, really), he understands the philosophical and aesthetic appeal of fascism. He loves the overwrought narrative style of thrillers and melodramas, but doesn't entirely trust its manipulative power. He wants to attract a mass audience and then feel superior to it. He's like the conjurer who tells you how the trick works, then makes you believe in magic anyway. For a filmmaker in his position in the marketplace, he thinks too damn much.
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