_Basic Instinct_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs On one level, Paul Verhoeven's _Basic Instinct_ delivers to (worst) expectations: it's bloody, homophobic, gynophobic, and massively masculinist. For all its shrewdly edited vehicular chases and stylishly lit sex scenes, however, it is also carelessly plotted and clearly aimed to provoke visceral reactions. The superhype surrounding the film is enough to warrant some investigation. But the superschlock the film itself dishes out taps into specific cultural anxieties which are worth attending to. The semi-twisted and generally predictable narrative follows San Francisco Detective Nick (Michael Douglas, back on the streets) as he tracks an ice pick killer: a very bloody sex and death scene (woman on top) opens the film. Damaged in the way that most movie cops are these days (he's killed someone in the recent past, maybe or maybe not by accident), Nick gets involved with the primary suspect, the victim's last sexual partner, Catherine (Sharon Stone). Unsurprisingly in this film's mightily cynical milieu, everyone in the department know that Nick is also sleeping with the department shrink, Beth (Jeanne Tripplehorn) who has been assigned to treat him. His late night drinking binges (he watches "The Jeffersons," featuring only black folks in the movie) are punctuated by his daily adventures with his adorable-in-that-macho-asshole-way partner, Gus (George Dzundza). This is a sick-fuck movie in multiple senses. (And in this regard it is hardly original.) What has lesbigay protesters upset is that the villains are lesbian and bisexual women--and these are the only women in the movie. Some organizations (including GLAAD and Queer Nation) have opted not to censor the film per se, but to reveal - loudly - the ending. The studio and distributor have not exactly dissuaded this tactic. And I admit, it's somehow freeing to write about a movie whose hype-package includes this kind of spoiler (no need to tiptoe around crucial plot points). As a strategy to discourage viewers from paying to see the movie, though, the announcement that "Catherine did it" is not exactly news: check out the spooky-blue poster that features Stone with her fingernail-claws dug into Douglas' vulnerable back. What the producers and promoters seem to think is that audiences are less interested in seeing whodunit than in seeing how it's done. To this end, the big-splash pitch for this movie focuses on its lurid bodily fluids fest, and the danger of "contact imminent" performance is part of that package. This performance depends on what Catherine, a novelist, calls "suspension of disbelief." And the film takes this as a subject. Catherine's books, though, are about power in a most aggressive way: they narrate various murders (of her parents, her rock'n'roll musician lover) and provide alibis for all of them (according to Dead Meat Gus, she's a "magna cum laude pussy"). This device also allows her to write the movie as it happens. This brings up two issues obscured by the protests against the movie's multiple phobias and narrative abuse of its three lesbian/bisexual women characters. (For instance, the fact that Beth may or may not be sleeping with Catherine only indicates the former's compulsive stupidity, and hardly indicts the latter.) First, the movie itself considers the same question of narrative authority raised some time ago, when screenwriter Joe Eszterhas attempted to change his own script after lesbigay groups began protesting its scurrilous treatment of queer characters. Since his name is on the film and he is presumably receiving payments, Eszterhas is surely not off the blame hook, but does it matter? He's circulating well-known and widely accepted images, for one thing. And for another, in fact, Catherine is the most sympathetic character in the movie. She's scary, but she's also intriguingly intelligent (especially evident as she is surrounded by idiot men). Which brings up the second issue: the film offers an extremely ugly male protagonist. Nick is a hyper-reprise of too many flawed heroes. A dissolute jerk of a cop, he's smug yet tremulous about a Past Incident (he shot two tourists while popped out on coke). After meeting Catherine, he is apparently so shaken by her that he is moved to recover his masculinist dominance by date-raping Beth two scenes later. Walking macho stereotype Nick believes his sex is the best sex: that he competes with Catherine's lesbian lover Roxy (Leilani Sarelle) reinforces Cro-Magnon notions about sexuality and gender. It should come as no surprise that he resorts to alarm and stereotyping when he runs into Roxy after a particularly elaborate sexual workout with Catherine. "Let me ask you something Rock, man to man," he smirks, falling back on the old myth that this lesbian both hates and wants to be men. The movie encourages this attitude by making Roxy increasingly psychotic (she drives her car over a cliff in a rage). But it also reveals the smug self-blindness that such an attitude necessitates in the "hero," Nick. Nick's pathology may be less available to some audience members than the women's (he is played by Douglas, after all), yet it's also undeniable that he is conspicuously heinous. Moreover, he is also made up by Catherine, and acts out her shifting versions of events. And since we never know what she wants, the ambiguity of the ending indicts the movie, its conventions, its blindness, its sexualized hysteria. As an over-the-top paean to the sex as violence mode of moviemaking, _Basic Instinct_ does offer an internal critique by its very excessiveness. Increasingly irrelevant, Nick models his performance on Catherine's but only looks dumb. As the movie becomes more ambiguous, he is ridiculed and all of his readings are undermined, until he is (perhaps like his audience), seduced into being just thankful it's over (or maybe not). Troubling and senseless in its assumptions, the movie eventually collapses in on itself. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer studies project at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.