Thirty years ago, Basic Instinct was all anyone could talk about. Before our current age of Insta-controversies and aggregated showbiz news, it was widely known that screenwriter Joe Eszterhas had sold his screenplay for a record $3m and that demonstrators in San Francisco, including Eszterhas himself, had protested against the film’s association of lesbianism with violent psychosis. It was known that director Paul Verhoeven had battled the MPAA from an NC-17 rating to the hardest of R ratings in the states, and it took no time for buzz to circulate about the famed interrogation scene, where Catherine Trammell, the author and might-be murderess played by Sharon Stone, uncrosses her legs before a roomful of sweat-drenched men. (The odious trickery behind that shot, however, was still unknown.)
It would not be accurate to think about an artist of Verhoeven’s stature as a troll, exactly, but he’s a button-pusher of the first order. While his films, including last year’s nunsploitation howler Benedetta, have an underlying seriousness to their provocations, he also enjoys poking the hornet’s nest, seizing every opportunity to razz the scolds. Basic Instinct is a lively, sexy and fitfully repugnant vulgarization of film noir, targeting American audiences with such surgical precision that its title refers as much to them as the pleasure-seeking lunatics on screen. Even though he was from Holland, Verhoeven understood better than anyone in Hollywood the puritanical response of sex and violence, how it could attract and repulse simultaneously. Like a chemist splashing around with acids and bases, he knew how to produce heat.
