It’s Pretty Basic
(This post deals with the film Basic Instinct, along with other films and TV shows, and assumes the reader has a good famiiarity with the movie. Needless to say, there are many spoilers and some strong language.)
While I was over in Britain recently I picked up a copy of Basic Instinct in a charity shop. It was one of those cheap deals where you can have five for a pound or something. I was toying with adding this one to the others I’d decided to buy to make up the numbers. Did I really want it, though? I wasn’t going to bother. I’ve always thought of it as a derivative re-tread. I noticed it was the two-disk 10th Anniversary edition. Ho hum. With a director’s commentary. Yawn. And an additional audio commentary by Professor Camille Paglia... Wait a minute! I must have this!
I wanted to hear what Professor Camille Paglia had to say but that meant watching the film again. Oh well, what the heck. But then, of course, I started seeing things in it that I had not ever seen before, which is my curse, whenever I revisit old movies. There’s always something new in a classic, yadda, yadda, but this time I was not only reacting to the images on the screen but also to Professor Camille Paglia’s own audio commentary, so this is really about both. They cannot be separated for me now. She asks some of the most powerful questions about this film. They prompted me to pick up the ball and run with it.
“We see the woman on top in the dominant position,” says Professor Paglia of that opening sex scene. Now, I believe that’s often referred to as the ‘cowboy’ position, Prof. We’ll be seeing more cowboys later, too.
Nick and Gus arrive, walking past a display of African artworks, some of them definitely religious artefacts and probably not meant to be in someone’s home in America. Gus, who comes across almost like Nick’s comedy sidekick a lot of the time, had not heard of Johnny Boz before. I was hard-pressed to think of many other people who share the name ‘Boz’. What? Did he draw cartoons for Charles Dickens? Mind you, suppose we do something like the same for the name BOZ as was once done with HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and advance each initial one letter forwards in the alphabet. Thus H-A-L becomes I-B-M. Mind you, since Z is the last letter in the alphabet, there is nowhere to go advancing BOZ forwards. What about backwards? Well, then we get ANY. Ah. Mr Boz is Anyone, Mr Everyman - just a little bit more advanced. Or should we say, initiated?
Also, in this opening scene, we saw that Johnny was in bed with a blonde woman who looks very like Catherine Tramell. We saw that he was killed by that same woman while he was having sex with her. The policemen didn’t see this. In fact, nobody saw it... apart from us.
The policemen know there are semen stains on the sheets but they are able to detect these only with black light and filter-specs. This ought to be rather surprising. If the sex of victim and perpetrator were reversed, we would be on familiar police procedural territory. The presence of semen would tell them that sex with a man had been involved.
Here, however, how can they know straight away whether it’s Johnny Boz’s semen or someone else’s? Mr Boz may have had sex with person A earlier on and then been murdered by person B later. They cannot know if the sex act and the killing were simultaneous or even related to one another at all. Most crucially, they cannot know whether Boz’s sex partner was male or female. We know because we saw. They can’t know because they didn’t see, but they act as though they did. They do know... because we know.
As D. Klahr points out in ‘Beyond Piaget: a Perspective from Studies of Children’s Problem Solving’ (Refreshing Developmental Psychology: Beyond the Classic Studies edited by A. Slater and P. Quinn, London: Sage) “Young children don’t realize that what they know isn’t also known by everyone else, or that someone viewing a scene from a different perspective than their own will see a different relative location of objects in the scene.”
If I know something, thinks the small child, then you must know it too. Oh, and if you happen to have an alter-ego that was arrested in its child state, then that alter will also think like that. Remember, however, it’s not the policemen being infantilised here - it’s us. We are seduced into not noticing that they know something only because we saw it. We are not in the film. Yet, somehow, what we witness feeds back into the minds of the characters who are. I shall come back to this again later.
At 06'16", Captain Talcott spells it out for Nick:
“Listen Curran, I’m going to get a lot of heat on this. I don’t want any mistakes.”
Captain Talcott could almost have been cast to look and sound like an older version of Harry Callaghan from Dirty Harry, as though he had stayed on the force and joined the chief’s staff as his Enforcer. Johnny Boz is important to the top brass because he is a contributor to the ‘Mayor’s campaign’. Could this have been a political slaying... asks nobody. Yet why should it not be?
To me, the big question that ought to be asked here (but isn’t) is not “Why was Johnny Boz killed?” but “Why now?” If we are later led to believe that Beth was the woman in his bed, if it was indeed she who killed the improbably-named Mr Boz, then - why now?
Oh, it was for revenge, you say. It’s because Catherine Tramell was sleeping with him, and so Beth could make her look like the obvious suspect.
That is possible, of course, but I think, however, we may rather come to form the impression that Catherine sleeps with quite a lot of people actually and so another (and possibly better) opportunity to frame her in this way must surely have presented itself long ago. Why did Beth not take advantage of it?
Nick goes to visit Catherine but find she is not at home. They encounter Roxy instead.
At 09'15", Professor Paglia says: “The men’s last glimpse of Roxy here is beautifully composed. She stands there, half a work of art, like the sculptures to either side of the staircase and half a butch gunslinger.”
Roxy, when we first see her, is indeed standing between these two somewhat curious sculptures. They frame the bottom of the staircase and appear to depict two women, in a pastiche of an ancient Roman style. They are broken and cracked into sections at the neck, the waist and the thigh.
This seems to be quite deliberate. It is a part of the aesthetic of the pieces, as though a referencing how sculptures of the classical world are so often found today - in separate sections. Yet they hold together while split.
Could these be a metaphor, do you suppose? For a split personality, a multiple identity? A splitting that has been done quite purposefully by the ‘artist’? It may also point to a disconnect between the head and the different parts of the body. Or all of these things.
At various moments during this brief encounter, Roxy mimics the postures of these statues. When she stands between them, there are three very similar figures side by side, with a reflection in the mirror behind Roxy.
When Nick and Gus arrive at the beach house, we can see that Catherine has two identical cars. As Professor Paglia rightly notes, one is black and the other white. Their registration numbers are 2GQI123 (white) and 2GQI124 (black), so, presumably, they were both bought on the same day.
At 10'46", Professor Paglia says: “Catherine Tramell receives them [the policemen] with this eerie composure. She knows who they are, she expects them. Did Roxy call her or is she clairvoyant? There’s a kind of supernatural omniscience that Catherine projects in this scene.”
This is quite outstanding. I think Professor Paglia puts her finger on one of the most crucial elements in the film. I’d have loved for her to take this further. ‘Is she clairvoyant?’ That’s not just a question, it’s the question. Stay tuned.
At 11'45" Professor Paglia says: “Everything about her is both seductive, drawing in and yet pushing away. Though they try to keep a brave façade, the men are made very uneasy by the way Catherine is not normally female, that is she’s not nurturing, she doesn’t express sorrow, seems to be almost emotionless, she seems to be a kind of sexual aggressor or adventuress who extracts sexual pleasure from a man without being committed to him in any psychological way.”
Not expressing any sorrow would fail the Columbo test straight away. That’s how the lieutenant most often zeroes in on his perps and he’ll then proceed to worry away at them like a dog with a pull-toy. I would say it is not just the men in the film who are made uneasy at this point. It may be troubling for the audience too. The point that ‘seems to be almost emotionless’ is a key one, however. We’ll deal with that more deeply later.
Professor Paglia promises us early on that she would be talking about all the occult imagery in the film. Sadly this discussion never made it into the final edit of her commentary. All the same, it made me keep a weather-eye open for it. It is there all right. Oh, it’s there!
One of the first things to leap out at me was the coffee mug that Nick drinks from in police headquarters when he gets back. It is white and bears a seven-pointed star. Now, it turns out, to my astonishment, that this prime occult figure actually is the insignia of the real-life San Francisco Police. All the same, it is not for nothing then that this film is set in San Francisco. It gives them an excuse to use this and the seven-pointed star is a powerful symbol in the film and in various occult doctrines.
Aside from being associated with the SFPD, it is also the Alchemical and Masonic symbol for Vitriol, or sulphuric acid, the letters of which, in alchemical lore, stand for: “Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem” or an instruction to ‘rectify’ that which you find within the Earth in order to achieve the Philosopher’s Stone. “The Vitriol-Seven-pointed star is one of the most famous alchemical images of all,” writes Ulrich Arndt (in Weg der Lebensenergie: Der geheime Siebenstern, first published in the magazine Paracelsus, Septenber 2004, pages 11-15).
Margaret Weiss, answering a question on QUORA in 2015 about this figure provided another connection with San Francisco, linking it to the sphere of Venus in Kabbalistic tradition. She makes the point that one of the earliest uses of this symbol in modern times, aside from the San Francisco Police, was another group in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s. They called themselves “The Elf-Queen’s Daughters” who “believed themselves to be incarnated elven spirits in human form”. These they called the ‘Otherkin’.
Is Catherine “Otherkin”? Let us ponder this as we move on to the famous crossed-legs scene at 23 minutes into the running time.
Catherine is questioned in a very strange place. It is not an office, not a deposition suite, not an interrogation or interview room. It has no windows. It seems to be an underground bunker, although it is later revealed to be above ground. It has white brick walls, under-lit by blue lamps. We see numbers on the back wall: one to five. In the reverse-shot, we see the two-way mirror facing this wall. This is where a witness would be standing. This is a space designed exclusively for identity parade line-ups. Why should a potential witness be questioned in such a place?
Yet here, the identity parade is reversed. Against the numbered wall is one single person and she is facing five men. There would normally be five men against the wall behind her. The reversal makes the law-enforcement officers, symbolically, into the suspects.
At 24' 24" we see the complete reverse-shot and can tell, that there are indeed five possible ‘perps’ and that she is identifying them. She ‘identifies’ Nick. She already suspected him. After all, how can it be that she has a newspaper featuring him on her coffee table only hours after the killing of the rock star? She may be researching her new book but how could she be so sure she would meet him? Out of all the people in the police department, why should he come calling on her? Mere coincidence?
Her behaviour is, as Professor Paglia paints her, like Circe in Homer’s Odyssey. Yet she seems more like someone who has read the script. She acts as though her character knows what is coming next. Is she clairvoyant after all? She is so assured, so blasé, that one might almost imagine she had been to REKALL and had memory implants. Or that she was like one of the replicants in Blade Runner. Oh, now I’m just being fantastical, you think. As Eldon Tyrell might say: “Indulge me!”
Professor Paglia is quite correct to point out that, in the interview scene, Catherine is dressed just like Kim Novak in Vertigo. But why should that be? What’s the point? Well, there may not be one. It may just be because screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was phoning it in, doing a lazy cut-and-paste job on the earlier Al Pacino movie Sea of Love, which has a plot almost identical to Basic Instinct, by the way.
Season 2 Episode 5 of McMillan & Wife (‘No Hearts, No Flowers’, 1973) surely has to be the main contender for the true source for the Basic Instinct plot, though. The similarities are shockingly close. The woman psychiatrist/profiler, played by Sheree North, bears a striking resemblance to Sharon Stone. She, like Beth (supposedly) in Basic Instinct, was fixing the blame onto her patients because she wanted Commissioner McMillan for herself. The idea that the psychiatrist in Basic Instinct sets up Catherine to take the fall for her crimes, which were engineered to try and get Nick (her ex-lover) back for herself. The psychiatrist in McMillan & Wife even has press cuttings about Mac exactly as Sharon Stone does of Douglas in Basic Instinct. Of course, Basic Instinct is also very closely based on Sea of Love, but this TV episode is an even closer match, plus it also provides another reason for Basic Instinct’s San Francisco setting.
All the same, however much of a ready-made the story may or may not be, Verhoeven is smarter than to throw in Hitchcock references to no purpose. Sharon Stone appeared opposite Arnold Schwartzenegger in Verhoeven’s Total Recall. This, like Blade Runner, was an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’). Sharon Stone played Quaid’s fake wife. In Vertigo, Kim Novak played Elster’s fake wife. If the comparison isn’t just coincidental, is it telling us that Catherine, too, is a fake? A replica?
‘They assume it’s Catherine Tramell but it isn’t,’ says Professor Paglia in her commentary as the policemen meet Roxy. ‘It’s her double, her lover...’ Roxy is the double of Catherine. Another replica (the first being the woman in the opening sequence of course). How many more are there? And where is the original?
For memory implantation, which is science-fiction, read mind control, which probably isn’t. MKUltra-used to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Not so much now... Drawing loosely on Brad Schreiber's book Revolution’s End (2016, Skyhorse/Simon & Schuster) which details this ill-fated project, I am tempted to wonder whether Basic Instinct could contain allusions to the kind of mental control mechanisms that sex-traffickers might employ to keep sex-slaves in line.
Professor Paglia’s next comment is very revealing:
“Catherine sits almost like a zombie,” she says, referring to the lie-detector scene. “Either she’s telling the truth, or she’s a sociopath, she’s inhuman and is able to conquer her own physiological responses.”
Like the blush response, perhaps? The replicants can do that. They are inhuman. Would Catherine pass the Voigt-Kampf Test? Could we be seeing here the switching of alter-egos to other personalities, seeing them able to dissociate and become someone other? I would propose that this is the first appearance of the ‘neutral’ alter, Catherine’s ‘rest-state’ personality.
In a very real way, Blade Runner is about this too and it is about our present-day now, the world of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, of Harvey Weinstein. The replicants are “more human than human”, as Tyrell describes them. They are under the control of the Off-World Colonies, but those who break their control and escape, they must be destroyed... or they will give the game away. The game is what goes on in these colonies, which they don’t want people on Earth to find out. “They don’t advertise for killers in the newspapers...” You bet they don’t. There are dirty secrets out there in space. The replicants may have apparently adult bodies but they are only four years old. In short, it’s Heaven for paedophiles up there. Detective Bryant describes the replicant Pris as “a basic pleasure model” and think how often Catherine Tramell uses the word “pleasure”. Think how the title of the film includes the word “Basic”! The name Tramell, written down, even resembles Tyrrell slightly and in Dick’s original novel, the android Pris was an exact duplicate of the robot corporation founder’s daughter.
“Catherine seems to know the roads, their serpentine pattern...” says Professor Paglia in describing the scene where Nick drives after Catherine, which, as she very rightly points out, is a pastiche of the car-chase in Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief (and also of the out-of-control car race in Family Plot). “It’s part of her command of nature...” Maybe. Or, again, it’s as though she can see what’s coming next and Nick, very clearly, can’t.
Professor Paglia says (at 42'44") “...and [Nick] is transfixed by the sight of her [Catherine] undressing. We too look at this misty, rosy window almost as if it’s a movie screen up on the wall.” Or we might more simply realise that this is a pastiche of Hitchcock’s Rear Window... another film in which there was a fake wife!
Catherine knows about Hazel Dobkins, knows what she did and knows where to find her. She is not a police officer, was not alive when Hazel’s killings took place and, unlike Nick, has no access to computer technology that could reveal this information to her in this pre-internet era. Yet Nick didn’t know who Hazel was, had never heard of her before, which, for a professional policeman, is a little odd. Odder still, his younger comedy-sidekick Gus, who knew nothing of the dead ’60’s rock star Johnny Boz (as he was before his time) does remember Hazel, which he couldn’t possibly do as her crimes were in the 1950s.
Hazel said she did not know why she killed her family. Could she have been an alter-ego or alternative personality at the time? Or under mind control? An assassin who was inadvertently triggered? Or required to make a sacrifice? Is she part of the same “cell” as Catherine. Is that how they know one another?
When Nick says to Gus that there was “something” between him and Catherine while at the same time telling him that he does not know what it is between them, there is “something”. In the context of that moment, is it his growing obsession with her? Or is it something that was in her mind long before the point where the film’s story begins? Is that “something” a shared history of mind-control? Are they both sleepers in an Eyes Wide Shut style cult, waiting for the “go” code? Catherine is triggered already and knows the “script” her “cell” is to be following. Nick is part of it too, has been for years, but does not know it. He is yet to be activated. I’m waxing speculative here but I think I can come back on this a bit harder later on.
When looking up the information about Hazel Dobkins, Nick drinks from a black mug with a gold seven-pointed star on it. Previously all the mugs had been white. Yes, Professor, there is a theme of black and white but it’s not just good and evil. It’s the black and white checkerboard squares of the Masonic Lodge. It’s the Black Lodge and the White Lodge of (the earlier) Twin Peaks. That, too, was about copies, duplicates and replicas. That was also about child sex-trafficking and the ritual killing of children by their parents. Funnily enough. A much more primal theme than you think.
It's Just a Puzzle Box
When Beth appears at Nick’s apartment after this encounter with Gus, she still has her key. It has a key-ring in the shape of the cartoon child, Bart Simpson. Do we need it spelled out more overtly? The child is the key. All of this dates back to childhood. Nick, Beth and Catherine have been prepared and pre-programmed. He presses the key into her hand on the word ‘obligation’, the Bart Simpson dangling in full view.
‘I didn’t think he’d show them [her notes about Nick] to anyone else,’ says Beth.
In other words to Catherine but how does Beth know that this is what is on Nick’s mind? The subtitles at this point read ‘...sell them to anyone else’ picking up the earlier confrontation at the police station but we have seen no proof that this is how Catherine obtained all this information about Nick and at 55'17" Nick has to admit this himself. There is still an ambiguity. What if she had known all along? By the way, what motivates Beth’s decision to turn up at Nick’s place? It becomes a discussion about the notes but was that her intention?
Nick’s television is playing a re-run of a 1970s sit-com called The Jeffersons but what follows it is the film Hellraiser, featuring the scene in which the abusive uncle becomes a monster. The director’s commentary suggests that the film represents “Nick’s bad dream” but I cannot believe these clips were just stuck in at random. They both point to family conflict and to fears about childhood and ageing.
In the Hellraiser clip, the uncle-monster is trying to devour the daughter, so we have another instance of parents killing (or trying to kill) their kin but let’s just stop to think about Hellraiser a bit more in this context. It is a film in which a mother is forced to prostitute herself by her undead brother-in-law and ex-lover to provide men as blood-sacrifices so that he can rise from the grave, Dracula-style. In a nice extra twist, the house in question is his childhood home. In other words, that which is brought into the house for sex is killed and that which should be buried is coming back from Hell in a demonic, daughter-devouring form. Hmm. So, that’s Nick’s dream. About a childhood home where murder and forced prostitution take place. Straight after we’ve seen the figure of a little boy who is the key to the door. Hmm. Just random coincidence, then, eh?
Then we have the killing of the police investigator and Nick is questioned in the same room that Catherine was in earlier, again with five men facing him in an identity-parade reversal. Professor Paglia rightly notes that “...When Nick becomes a suspect after the murder of Lieutenant Nilsen, we find him sitting in the same chair, in the same room, subject to the same interrogation as Catherine was earlier. It’s very eerie. As if she has somehow been his precursor, he has become her proxy and they have merged in some odd way. When Nick makes the same witticism about smoking that Catherine did, we seem to hear her voice coming out of his mouth.”
Exactly. Again, it is as though she knows that is going to happen, as if she has read the script. But what if it’s not that he has somehow become her or that she has somehow prefigured him but that both of them have reverted to the same alter when placed in the same situation? Professor Paglia is 100% right to say this is eerie and odd. Oh, yes it is! As I read it, Nick and Catherine are both dissociating and both switching to the same alternative personality because they have both been conditioned - in childhood - so to do!
Remember, this room is intended for identity parades. Everything that goes on in it is about identity. It is where multiple people appear but only one will be recognised at a time. However, this parade-room is reversed, so that instead of multiple people standing against the wall, there is one single person sitting... By implication, then, following the logic of the reversal, should we not expect this one single person to be possessed of multiple identities!
I said I could come back on this a bit harder later on. How’s my driving?
Take Your Pick
Professor Paglia’s comments about the implausibility of Nick (or Catherine for that matter) having either block ice in their homes or an ice-pick are spot-on, of course. They do indeed lead us back to the 1940s but, very specifically, to Orrin Quest and the gangster Steelgrave, the ice-pick killers in Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, in which the eponymous little sister’s brother wields a neat neck-piercing ice-pick or three. She has a sister too, who is a movie-star and has a dark-haired double (!), a fake-Mexican actress, who turns out to have been behind a number of the murders, or to have ordered them, at least. This parallels Catherine and Beth, in a way, here.
Catherine’s first novel, the one she gifts to Nick, is quite interesting. Of course, she explains that it’s about a boy who kills his parents by, in some unexplained manner, by organising a plane crash. This sounds very like a sex-role reversal of the famous horror-comic story ‘The Orphan’ (which originally appeared in Haunt of Fear 1 in 1954 from EC Comics, USA). In ‘The Orphan’, publisher Bill Gaines’ “O. Henry ending” was that it was the little girl Lucy who really killed her father and contrived the circumstances for her mother’s execution for his murder. Catherine’s novel seems to duplicate this plot, albeit with a flying accident and the killer being a boy instead of a girl.
Her novel is called The First Time. It has the image of a small boy sitting on a tombstone. What a curious title for such a story, though, wouldn’t you say? Don’t we normally associate the phrase ‘The First Time’ with a person’s first sexual experience? So why should there be a little boy on the cover? Why indeed?
It was at this point that, with the benefit of all the revelations that have come out in the present century about the secret codes and cyphers that Hollywood- and Washington-based paedophiles employ that I thought to myself “All we need now is for someone to come along with a pizza.” And, blow me down, there’s comedy-sidekick Gus coming up the stairs straight after Catherine leaves. And what is that he’s carrying, boys and girls? Why, it’s a pizza! We don’t see them eat it, though. It’s just there as a McGuffin, in this case a symbol for those in the know. Shorthand.
‘Everybody she plays with dies,’ says comedy-sidekick Gus.
‘I know what that’s like,’ Nick replies.
What an extraordinary thing to say. Does he mean that he knows what it is like to have everybody he plays with die? Hardly. This does not appear to have happened to him. He killed two tourists by accident but he was not in any way ‘playing’ with them first. He ‘played’ with Beth and she is still living. The only other thing he could be saying here is that he knows what it is like to die.
Catherine later tells Nick he is dead and it should not be ruled out that, taking another Philip K. Dick theme, this may all be an afterlife reverie, much as in the 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder. This, incidentally, connects to Basic Instinct quite closely, in that its director, Adrian Lyne, also directed Flashdance (Joe Eszterhas script) and Fatal Attraction (starring Michael Douglas). Of course, Total Recall also leaves us at the end not knowing whether Quaid is really on Mars or whether he is in a death-state coma, suffering a brain embolism in the REKALL offices.
It might almost be argued that Fatal Attraction is another variation on the theme of ‘The Orphan’, at least with its original ending, in which the Glenn Close character commits suicide but leaves a trail of false clues which accuse the Michael Douglas character of her murder and for which he is duly convicted. Although, unlike Lucy, any satisfaction she may have found in finally destroying the family that made her life miserable has to lie beyond the grave!
All the same, it is hard to find any very solid evidence for Nick’s demise. He seems very clearly alive. If he’s dead, so is everybody else... Ah, hold that thought, we may return to it.
Anyway, for now, how can this be? If it does not refer to physical death, this leaves only the death of the spirit, of the inner self or of the identity. It would need some pretty serious trauma to achieve any of those. I think we are intended to assume Nick has indeed suffered just such soul-destroying trauma, and the shooting wasn’t it.
One-Eyed Jacks
‘When Nick goes to meet Catherine at the night club he is making a descent into the underworld,’ says Professor Paglia as the next scene opens. Yet the club is a pastiche, neon-lit ‘church’, complete with vaulted arches and stained-glass ‘windows’ that look out onto nothing. The bar-tenders are wearing priestly ‘dog-collars’.
The music is a lot more uptempo than in the ‘church’ scene in Eyes Wide Shut but other than that, it may well serve much the same purpose. If this is an orgiastic ritual, though, like that one, it is a very formal one. Nick is ‘wearing a simple sweater without a shirt’ says Professor Paglia and he is, although he seems out of place looking so casual. A lot of the other dancers are in suits. It seems almost as though they’ve all just come straight from the office and their dancing reflects this idea. It doesn’t come across as very passionate. It’s like a school disco, or like film-extras jigging about, which is, of course, exactly what it is, but should it look like that? The night-club in The Hunger it ain’t. Sleazy it most certainly is not. ‘The Underworld’? It’s all smiles, smart suits and happy faces boogying around. It doesn’t seem quite right somehow.
The track, listed at the end of the film, is ‘Rave the Rhythm’ by Channel X, which was a popular Belgian number from the previous summer, released in 1991. There is something very odd, though. It is as if the dancers are reacting to something else altogether. If you switch the sound off and just watch them, you’d think that what they were hearing was ‘Disco Inferno’ by The Trammps. They are not dressed for Techno, they are not moving to Techno. It’s as though they were at Studio 54, fifteen years earlier and, as an astute commenter on Discogs put it (ian_s), Michael Douglas wanders in looking twenty-five years older than anyone else there. If it is deliberate (and we have to assume it is because they’ve sourced a very credible and contemporary club track) then it is meant to look fake. This is a store-front. There is something else going on and this is the cover for it. Remember the Eyes Wide Shut ritual? Keep thinking...
Did you notice the dance floor? You probably didn’t because of the number of people prancing about on it but once Nick opens the ‘church’ door to the room marked ‘MEN’, we can see what’s really going on. There they are: those good ol’ Masonic chequerboard black and white square tiles. Line ’em up! This is not a dance, folks. This is a Lodge meeting for initiates. That’s why the whole place is made up to look like a church and that’s why the happy-clappers are not taking the music seriously. That’s not why they are there. Notice in passing, also, the strange cadence between the names of the late proprietor of the club, Johnny Boz, and those of the two pillars that feature in a Masonic lodge: Jachin and Boaz.
‘Inside every kind of lesbianism and drug-taking is going on,’ says Professor Paglia.
I don’t know how many kinds of lesbianism there are but there seem to be as many men as women in this room. Once again, they are all very soberly dressed. No-one is really acting in a particularly sexual way. It does not matter that there are men and women in the room marked “MEN” because in the Lodge there are only men and thus all who are in the Lodge, by merit of being in the Lodge, are “MEN”.
Drug-taking? Maybe there’s some of that but what we mostly see them using is tobacco. Everybody is either smoking a cigarette or passing a cigarette to someone else, as though these were something illicit but they’re not. They’re all ready-rolled, machine-made, filter-tipped. So transgressive, eh?
The one thing that might be a more unusual substance is being doled out by the man in Catherine’s cubical. He seems to be dripping it from a tiny, tiny glass bottle and she seems to be sniffing it, like it was perfume. What is it? We can only guess. Maybe it is perfume? Or maybe it’s one of the drugs used in mind-control experiments?
When Catherine first enters the room, it is true we do see two women half-kissing, very briefly, so there’s your lesbianism, perhaps. There is a man at the back who might be taking some kind of drug, but once Nick comes in, they are suddenly nowhere to be seen. The man with the red cape has vanished as well. Instead, we see a girl in a black cap which has an orange ‘Flower-Power’ motif on it, which seems a little anachronistic but it serves another purpose. Look closer. The flower has seven petals. Or is it a star with seven points?! Passing behind Nick is a man in a similar cap. On his jacket is the exact same seven-pointed flower/star but this time it is green. We cut from them directly to a girl in a chequerboard-pattern dress. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
The dominant colour that obtains in the ‘club’, however, is blue. This is a Blue Lodge, or Master Mason’s Lodge. As an article in the Freemasonry journal The Builder pointed out in July 1919, “Blue is the supreme color of Masonry... and no Mason, whatever his degree, questions the Master Mason’s ownership of blue...”
The one thing that strikes me as possibly significant in the ensuing sexual encounter is Nick’s comment the morning after to Catherine that Roxy, who was watching, may have seen something she had not seen before. If that thing was Catherine’s impregnation, then that would put us directly in accord with the ritual sequence in Eyes Wide Shut, which, as critic Sean McCann claimed in his discussion with William Ramsey in March 2022, is the true purpose of the orgy scene following the ritual in the latter film. ‘Next time I’ll use a rubber,’ Nick says to Gus later on, which, I suggest, is very, very telling in this context.
By the way, it is Gus who uses the word ‘rugrats’ here for the children he doesn’t believe Nick and Catherine could raise and this reference is repeated later. Rugrats, of course, was a popular TV cartoon series from 1991 about babies with very advanced vocabulary. The link here is that this show was also by the co-creator of The Simpsons, Hungarian-born animator Gabor Csupo, thus it links directly to the Bart Simpson keyring and also to Basic Instinct screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, also Hungarian.
Professor Paglia suggests that the symbolism of the Wild West line-dancing bar where Nick finds Gus the next night (and which I would whole-heartedly agree is most improbable in 1990s San Francisco) is about ‘frontier manhood’. To me it just says that, while Catherine was the ‘fuck of the century’, Gus is the fuckwit of the previous century. In stark contrast to the ‘club’ Nick and Catherine attended, the place Gus chooses to hang out is outwardly not Masonic. It comes from an era of wood-plank houses, shotgun shacks and log cabins, not cut stone. In fact, we can see the interior is all wood and wood-panel. Take a closer look, though. See those cowboy hats on the dancers’ heads in the long-shot? They form a familiar pattern: white, black, white, black... There’s no escaping it. Professor Paglia tells us that the bar is called ‘The Stetson’. What? Not ‘Bob’s Country Bunker’? Although this is not referred to in the script and the neon sign outside is not remotely legible as they leave.
By the way, the late-night cowboy theme is intriguingly foregrounded right at the beginning of the film when the camera passes down a crowded corridor at the police headquarters. There we see a man dressed exactly like the Jon Voight character in Midnight Cowboy, and I mean exactly like. It can be no coincidence. Midnight Cowboy, as I am sure we all remember, is a film about a young and naive boy who comes to New York and soon gets sucked into a sleazy world of prostitution and vice. Hmmm...
As a small aside, the barman accosts Nick for the tab on his way out. Gus has forgotten to pay. Him too drunk! For as much as is made of Nick’s alcohol problem, Gus has managed to guzzle his way through $32 worth of booze all on his own, which, in 1992, was no insignificant amount. If Nick is supposed to be drinking to dull the pain of his traumas, what’s Gus’s excuse? Same as the Midnight Cowboy’s?
During the car chase we see road signs of flashing, pointing arrows that mimic the lights in the ‘club’. Afterwards, following Roxy/Rocky’s death, Nick faces another psychological evaluation. He is asked about his childhood. His angry and combative reaction clearly touches at something dangerous to him. It is somewhat reminiscent of Holden’s interview with Leon in Blade Runner (“Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind, about your mother...”)
This makes a nice prelude to Nick’s next house-call on Catherine. At 01:28'27", Professor Paglia says ‘Catherine is weepy, almost child-like. She needs consolation.’ This is another alter making its appearance, I would say: the child self. Professor Paglia describes her in the chair when Nick arrives ‘as if she is prematurely aged, like a vampire who has given up the fight.’ To me, though, the way she is presented to the camera is much, much more reminiscent of Mrs Bates in her rocking chair in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. We’ve been dogging Hitch’s tail all through, haven’t we? We’ve had lots of Vertigo so isn’t it time for a bit of Psycho now? It is. As the late Barry Norman might have said: ‘And why not?’
Catherine, Mrs Bates and a vampire all have the same thing in common, don’t they. They are as the dead. Nick says he knows what it is like to be dead. This hints to us that Catherine does too. She, just like Mrs Bates, has another, one who pretends to be her, dresses up as her, a duplicate, a fake - the one who really does the killing.
‘We seal juvenile records until they are deceased,’ the Cloverdale policewoman tells Nick when he looks through the photographs of Roxy’s slaying of her brothers. ‘That’s why you couldn’t find any on your computer.’ If that is the case, so that Nick and his colleagues had no idea that Roxy had any criminal record, how could Catherine know? Any more than she could know about Hazel Dobkins. Yet, somehow, she did. ‘Sometimes when I do my research I get involved with them,’ she tells Nick later. Except that no amount of research could have led her to Roxy. There has to be something else. Like them being in the same mind-control “cell”?
‘What was the motive?’ Nick asks.
‘She said she didn’t know herself, just did it on impulse.’
Hazel Dobkins also did not know why she killed her children. She, too, just did it. As though another personality had taken over for a time, perhaps?
Eerily, Hazel seems to know Nick, or ‘Shooter’ as she calls him. It’s very subtle and fleeting but there seems to be a familiarity, a recognition on her side, although he does not know her. Or not consciously at any rate.
Now there’s basically an intermission while we ‘enjoy’ an air-guitar solo from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas as he, to all intents and purposes, rehashes a plot device from his earlier film Jagged Edge. The person we have pretty much concluded must be the real killer is uncovered and openly accused. It’s all over! It’s all over! But no, there are twenty minutes of the running time still to go. Oh! So the accused has to stall, deny everything and so then we think that person must be a red herring and the murderer is someone else... until the ‘twist’ reveals it isn’t and we realise we were right earlier on after all.
Thus the film as a thriller does become a lot shakier at this point, what with trying to shoehorn in a lot of plot-work in a short time.
Mind you, the plus is that this provides Professor Paglia an opportunity to riff off a whole mythological criticism lecture on the theme of “What is Woman?” while all these pointless McGuffins are being shuffled around on stage. Professor Paglia does not think that the biblical texts offer her a wide enough palette for describing femmes fatales like Catherine and draws upon the stories of Lilith, the alternative first woman but I do wonder... May she have forgotten that there were Three Faces of Eve?
Magnum Force
Why is the sheriff of Salinas washing his own car? There’s no-one of a lower rank to do it for him? Why does the camera focus on the (six-pointed) Monterey police force badge on the door, almost obscured by filth? Why, the sheriff's car is not just grimy, it’s caked in mud! It looks as though it’s been driven through a river bed. My, my. That sheriff. He sure is a dirty cop! Could the metaphor be any more blatant?
I don’t think this is just a random bit of actor’s ‘stage business’ to make the scene more interesting to the viewer than a pair of talking heads. There’s a police-car, smothered in dirt and the sheriff is hosing it down. A symbol of coming clean perhaps? It may well also be a symbol that his department is ‘dirty’, i.e. corrupt. We would be well not to take what he says too seriously. Nick fails to heed the warning however.
He did not take any more notice of the symbolism immediately after the famous interrogation scene with Catherine in the hot seat. As they all leave, the first thing we see is a yellow cone for a wet floor and a man mopping up. Oh, there are many ways to read this, I am sure. It is a symbolic echo of how ‘wet’ Catherine is, of how wet the pervy policemen’s pants are now and how wet both male and female members of the audience are going to make themselves and their floors too later on. I have no doubt that’s all intended. But the most insistent and overt interpretation cries out to us: “This department is dirty!”
Nick sees Catherine‘s book being printed out and Professor Paglia says it’s ‘mechanically printed’ which is quite true. The lines of text are appearing as the dot-matrix head runs across the page. There is a little more to it than that, though. What is missing here is that we, the audience, are being shown the actual script of the film that we are watching while we are watching it! This is what we see on screen:
car. Shooter raced into the
pounded the button for the
ly up the staircase, his brea
s. His partner's dead body la
elevator, legs sticking out.
Of course, we don’t see the whole lines. These are from the centre of the page, where the close-up is focusing. Yet there is no mistaking it. These are the exact events from a scene from near the end of the film. Nick will be in Gus’s car and see (or think he sees) something on the fourth floor. He will race for the door, pound on the button for the lift, to no avail so he will run up the staircase, get very out of breath in the process, the find his partner, comedy-sidekick Gus, not quite dead yet but very nearly, lying on the floor of the lift, his legs sticking out... This is precisely what will happen later. It’s a scene we haven’t got to yet.
This is very curious, to say the least. The only other film that I can think of in which this occurs is Spaceballs. At one point, Lord Dark-Helmet gets hold of a VHS copy of the Mel Brooks’ film Spaceballs, the very film he himself is in, and he fast-forwards it to see what will happen to him next. That’s absurd, of course, but how is it different to this?
The other comparison would be John Carpenter’s (slightly later film) In the Mouth of Madness, where the horror novels predict where ‘real-life’ characters will be and what they will be doing. There may be no separation between ‘life’ and ‘fiction’ here, they may be one influencing the other or on the other hand the ‘real-life’ characters may be in the book and becoming aware that they are indeed characters in a book. We can’t tell. But what appears on the screen here, in Basic Instinct is, in every detail, precisely what happens later in the film. It is an exact description of what occurs. Aside from the fact that it is in the past tense instead of the present, it actually is the script of Basic Instinct, right in front of our eyes.
I bet you thought my references to Philip K. Dick earlier on were too fantastical. How wild do they look they now? This shifts Basic Instinct into a very different realm, one that we would normally associate only with writers like Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, in Philip K Dick’s 1972 novel A Maze of Death, colonists on a planetoid discover a book which contains an account of everything that has happened to them. It is, effectively, A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick and they, the characters in the very same novel, can read it and realise that they can skip ahead further and find out what will happen to them later. They are becoming aware that they are themselves fictional characters, or wondering if this is what they may be, like the figures in In the Mouth of Madness.
At this point, Basic Instinct offers Nick this very revelation but he does not grasp it. Catherine tells him he is dead. Does she mean, not that he has died, but that he was never really alive to begin with? That he is a character in a film? Could Catherine already have this consciousness of herself as a fictional creation? She really has read the script! Or has she?
One of the newspaper cuttings that Nick sees at Beth’s apartment has, on the back, the word ‘PREDICTION’. That’s Catherine’s thing, isn’t it? Predicting what is going to happen next.
We are back to shifting personalities again. Catherine has three clear alters. The primary is the one we see first at the beach-house. This is the dispassionate persona, what Professor Paglia called her ‘sociopath’ side. This is the alter that has open hostility towards Nick. Hazel often seems to be is around when this alter is in the driving seat. Then there is the sex maniac alter and finally, the tearful, vulnerable child alter. There is a fourth, in a way. As we have seen, this is what Professor Paglia called the ‘zombie’ personality and which I would contend is the neutral self, the dissociated, hypnotised and hypnotisable brain.
The way I see it, Catherine, like Hazel, is a product of a kind of MKUltra-style ‘conditioning’. Hazel is her handler. Recruited in prison, she keeps an eye on the latest generation of undercover agents, of sleeper agents, with their multiple alters, their different buttons that, when pressed, can launch them from sex to assassination. In his book, Brad Schreiber details the activities of MKUltra’s sister programme, MKSearch, in the 1970s. This conducted “prison behavior modification” and recruited and processed informants from among prison inmates. Was Hazel one of these?
Catherine knows what’s coming next because the higher ups have it all planned out and they’ve told her, or rather, they’ve told one of her sleeping alters. To be awoken when needed. And when they are no longer needed, if there might be a danger that they could talk to someone about their strange experiences, well then... a Blade Runner will need to come and ‘retire’ them. And I think that’s just what’s happening at the end.
The killing of Gus looks just like the shower scene in Psycho but it is also strongly reminiscent of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now - in which there was a very strong clairvoyance sub-plot. However, the placing of the cape and the wig on the staircase is ludicrous for two reasons. Firstly, Nick came up the stairs so why did he not see them there? If we argue that Beth put them there while he was in the lift tending to Gus, how exactly would she be able to have gone from there, then duck round the corner and appear from the other side of the stairwell without his having noticed her? It is impossible for her to be in these two places at once.
For another thing, Nick’s police colleagues find the cape and wig and take this to be confirmation that Beth was indeed the killer. Yet the only person in the film who saw the killer wearing this cape and wig was Gus and he is dead. No-one else, aside from us, has any idea what the killer looked like. Again, as in the killing in the opening sequence, we saw it, the police didn’t and yet they act as though they had.
The killer might put on a rain-cape to stay clean of blood while stabbing, but why bother with the wig if only one person will ever see her/him and that is the victim? Didn’t Nick see them? We think Nick saw someone on the fourth floor moving about and we assume that is what prompted him to leap out of the car and chase into the building. However, we see the front of the block from his perspective. We can analyse those frames of footage as long as we like - there is no-one there.
So what do we imagine? That Catherine has planned all of this and did it herself? It’s beyond all belief. She would have to have superhuman powers to have predicted everything and rushed around organising everything and writing a book at the same time. It’s a tall order. Even if she were possessed of Bill and Ted’s time machine, she would still forget to wind her watch at some point. It is, however, very much more possible that someone else has done it, that someone has put all of these things in place to make us believe that what we see has happened is because of Catherine. We are encouraged to think that this someone was Beth, but again, the same problem obtains there too. This is too much for any one person to achieve. This has to be the work of a back-stage team. Team MK?
This, astonishing though it may be, is, however, not the most peculiar nor the most paranormal element in the film. That comes at the very, very end. Nick and Catherine are in bed. They are embracing. Then the scene fades to black. For a moment it is almost as though it’s as if the director is fading out so that we don’t see the sex scene and that would be a typical trope in so many films and TV shows but it’s utterly ridiculous here because we’ve already seen so many explicit sex scenes. They’re going to get all coy about this one all of a sudden? Maybe it’s a fade-out ending for the film itself? But then, all our expectations are dumbfounded. The film fades back in again. Nick and Catherine are in exactly the same positions they were in before the fade out! Then the camera pans down under the bed to the ice pick lurking there.
What is the blackout for? What does it do? Is it an alternative ending? In a way, yes. There can really be only one interpretation. This is the moment that marks the shift in consciousness. This is the dissociation of personality, the movement from one alter to another and it’s been pressed on us. We are seeing the future when we are being shown that transition from one mindstate to the next. Now it has been presented to us. By the end, we’re actually able to see it.
“See if you can guess, whodunnit!!”
We are left at the end, as we are with a lot of the old Ellery Queen mysteries, the ones where you had to match wits with Queen and guess the killer. There would always be one giveaway piece of evidence that would nail the bad guy but... But there was a problem. The formula of The Ellery Queen Mysteries - and one that is meticulously imitated by its modern TV re-incarnation, Castle - is that there would always be two red herrings, whose behaviour was mighty suspicious but which would turn out to have nothing to do with the crime. Very well, but once we have our man, how do we work backwards to explain away the actions of the red herrings?
The answer is always that we can’t but it somehow doesn’t matter because we’ve got the real baddie! We just have to accept that the red herrings’ actions don’t count but the fact remains that, in many cases, we cannot rewind the plot to make sense of anything that they did.
Can we do that here? Can we reverse the reels and run everybody’s actions backwards and see if they match the outcome at the end? Not in so many words, but perhaps we don’t need to.
“Well, I think I know what happened now. Do you? ...Do you know who the killer is now?!”
Well, Ellery, I think I just might. At least in part. It’s speculation, of course, but most of what we see could fit a straightforward police corruption plot. Nick’s shooting of two innocent tourists was an accident but it brought Internal Affairs into the department to investigate him. Nilsen and Beth are on the case there. We can imagine this might annoy a lot of officers who are on the take. The longer those two spend looking into Nick, the more additional corruption they are likely to find. The department’s objective then would be to dispose of both Internal Affairs investigators and make sure no more of them come to call.
Thus Boz is killed by a hired assassin, hired by the police department and paid for by the Mayor’s rival candidate. The department (and their affiliated jurisdictions, like Monterey) feed Nick the information they want him to have, that makes him suspect Beth. The department kills Nilsen, Beth is set up to be the killer, Nick ‘solves’ the case, he’s the hero. Internal Affairs are shamed in that it was one of their people who was behind the killings and the department is left in peace to dredge up more money from San Francisco’s bottomless pit of corruption.
As I say, that fits. It answers all the ‘real-world’ plot questions. In this sense, Catherine is incidental to the whole thing. The only problem with this ‘explanation’ is that there isn’t a shred of real evidence to support it. In a lesser movie, however, this would be the final denouement.
In the last reel, Nick would realise he had been tricked. He would round on his superior, Captain Talcott, thumping his fist on the desk. He would accuse them all of setting him up to clear the decks for their dirty business. And then a corrupt lieutenant would sidle up, take him aside and say something to the effect of: “Forget it, Nick. It’s Chinatown.” We would close on Nick receiving his medal of congratulation from the new Mayor with Catherine at his side... at the Mayor’s side, that is.
Basic Instinct is not that kind of movie. There is no clear and obvious resolution as there might be with, say, an earlier Michael Douglas police corruption thriller like Star Chamber, itself a kind of variation on Dirty Harry II. Everything is left ambiguous, unclear, nebulous. We can go home with the ‘Beth-dunnit’ plot we’ve been handed (straight from McMillan & Wife and Sea of Love, as I mentioned) or we can dig deeper. How far down do the fakery and responsibilities go?
Let’s see. The one killing (or, rather, failed killing) where there is no mystery, where we know for certain whodunnit, is Roxy’s attempt to kill Nick in Catherine’s car. Nick must recognise the registration number and know it to be hers and at this point he must think it is she who is trying to run him over. In a way, the car is not just a weapon for Roxy to use to destroy Nick but a disguise. She’s pretending to be Catherine. She is behind the wheel of her car/body, and what more direct metaphor would you like for an alter-ego seizing control?
Yet, who is the disguise for? There’s no-one else around. Comedy-sidekick Gus has drunk-driven away. There’s no-one else on the street. Nick is the only audience for this switcheroo. Roxy’s intention is to kill Nick, so what’s the point of fooling him first?
The disguise is for us. In exactly the same way that the opening sequence is for us, not for the characters in the film. What do you think? If that’s not Catherine, Boz is going to be fooled it is her by a blonde wig? Even on drugs, he wouldn’t be that far gone. The wig at the end, with the cape, is also for us, to connect it back to that same opening scene... which nobody saw except us.
We are a party to all these events. So much of the behaviour of the perpetrators is for our benefit alone. That is what Catherine’s apparent clairvoyance is there for. She’s reminding us all the way through. It’s a movie. There’s a script. I’ve read it. She even shows it to us. We’re in on the game. Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we are characters in this film. You want to know whodunnit, Ellery? We did!
Who fuels the occult and abusive Hollywood secret culture of drugged and brainwashed young girls (and boys) for jaded old executives and faded stars like Johnny Boz... or his real life equivalents, Harvey Weinstein and his ilk? Who pumps the money into the system to sustain it? Why, you do Mr and Mrs American Film-Goer! You do! You shell out to buy a ticket every date-night. You’re complicit! You’re in this film because you make it happen. Let’s take that ridiculous wig off and see who the real killer was! Zoiks, it’s you! And you’d have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids! That is the real message of Basic Instinct. Go tell it to the Marines.
In short, I have come to think Basic Instinct was trying to reveal a lot of the same secret goings-on that Eyes Wide Shut was to do seven years later but it had to be a great deal more covert about it. Stanley Kubrick had enough studio clout that he could get away with being blatant and not be stopped. Had Basic Instinct not been so ambiguous, it would certainly have been neutered back down to a simple, patriarchy-positive tale like Fatal Attraction.
While I was over in Britain recently I picked up a copy of Basic Instinct in a charity shop. It was one of those cheap deals where you can have five for a pound or something. I was toying with adding this one to the others I’d decided to buy to make up the numbers. Did I really want it, though? I wasn’t going to bother. I’ve always thought of it as a derivative re-tread. I noticed it was the two-disk 10th Anniversary edition. Ho hum. With a director’s commentary. Yawn. And an additional audio commentary by Professor Camille Paglia... Wait a minute! I must have this!
I wanted to hear what Professor Camille Paglia had to say but that meant watching the film again. Oh well, what the heck. But then, of course, I started seeing things in it that I had not ever seen before, which is my curse, whenever I revisit old movies. There’s always something new in a classic, yadda, yadda, but this time I was not only reacting to the images on the screen but also to Professor Camille Paglia’s own audio commentary, so this is really about both. They cannot be separated for me now. She asks some of the most powerful questions about this film. They prompted me to pick up the ball and run with it.
“We see the woman on top in the dominant position,” says Professor Paglia of that opening sex scene. Now, I believe that’s often referred to as the ‘cowboy’ position, Prof. We’ll be seeing more cowboys later, too.
Nick and Gus arrive, walking past a display of African artworks, some of them definitely religious artefacts and probably not meant to be in someone’s home in America. Gus, who comes across almost like Nick’s comedy sidekick a lot of the time, had not heard of Johnny Boz before. I was hard-pressed to think of many other people who share the name ‘Boz’. What? Did he draw cartoons for Charles Dickens? Mind you, suppose we do something like the same for the name BOZ as was once done with HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and advance each initial one letter forwards in the alphabet. Thus H-A-L becomes I-B-M. Mind you, since Z is the last letter in the alphabet, there is nowhere to go advancing BOZ forwards. What about backwards? Well, then we get ANY. Ah. Mr Boz is Anyone, Mr Everyman - just a little bit more advanced. Or should we say, initiated?
Also, in this opening scene, we saw that Johnny was in bed with a blonde woman who looks very like Catherine Tramell. We saw that he was killed by that same woman while he was having sex with her. The policemen didn’t see this. In fact, nobody saw it... apart from us.
The policemen know there are semen stains on the sheets but they are able to detect these only with black light and filter-specs. This ought to be rather surprising. If the sex of victim and perpetrator were reversed, we would be on familiar police procedural territory. The presence of semen would tell them that sex with a man had been involved.
Here, however, how can they know straight away whether it’s Johnny Boz’s semen or someone else’s? Mr Boz may have had sex with person A earlier on and then been murdered by person B later. They cannot know if the sex act and the killing were simultaneous or even related to one another at all. Most crucially, they cannot know whether Boz’s sex partner was male or female. We know because we saw. They can’t know because they didn’t see, but they act as though they did. They do know... because we know.
As D. Klahr points out in ‘Beyond Piaget: a Perspective from Studies of Children’s Problem Solving’ (Refreshing Developmental Psychology: Beyond the Classic Studies edited by A. Slater and P. Quinn, London: Sage) “Young children don’t realize that what they know isn’t also known by everyone else, or that someone viewing a scene from a different perspective than their own will see a different relative location of objects in the scene.”
If I know something, thinks the small child, then you must know it too. Oh, and if you happen to have an alter-ego that was arrested in its child state, then that alter will also think like that. Remember, however, it’s not the policemen being infantilised here - it’s us. We are seduced into not noticing that they know something only because we saw it. We are not in the film. Yet, somehow, what we witness feeds back into the minds of the characters who are. I shall come back to this again later.
At 06'16", Captain Talcott spells it out for Nick:
“Listen Curran, I’m going to get a lot of heat on this. I don’t want any mistakes.”
Captain Talcott could almost have been cast to look and sound like an older version of Harry Callaghan from Dirty Harry, as though he had stayed on the force and joined the chief’s staff as his Enforcer. Johnny Boz is important to the top brass because he is a contributor to the ‘Mayor’s campaign’. Could this have been a political slaying... asks nobody. Yet why should it not be?
To me, the big question that ought to be asked here (but isn’t) is not “Why was Johnny Boz killed?” but “Why now?” If we are later led to believe that Beth was the woman in his bed, if it was indeed she who killed the improbably-named Mr Boz, then - why now?
Oh, it was for revenge, you say. It’s because Catherine Tramell was sleeping with him, and so Beth could make her look like the obvious suspect.
That is possible, of course, but I think, however, we may rather come to form the impression that Catherine sleeps with quite a lot of people actually and so another (and possibly better) opportunity to frame her in this way must surely have presented itself long ago. Why did Beth not take advantage of it?
Nick goes to visit Catherine but find she is not at home. They encounter Roxy instead.
At 09'15", Professor Paglia says: “The men’s last glimpse of Roxy here is beautifully composed. She stands there, half a work of art, like the sculptures to either side of the staircase and half a butch gunslinger.”
Roxy, when we first see her, is indeed standing between these two somewhat curious sculptures. They frame the bottom of the staircase and appear to depict two women, in a pastiche of an ancient Roman style. They are broken and cracked into sections at the neck, the waist and the thigh.
This seems to be quite deliberate. It is a part of the aesthetic of the pieces, as though a referencing how sculptures of the classical world are so often found today - in separate sections. Yet they hold together while split.
Could these be a metaphor, do you suppose? For a split personality, a multiple identity? A splitting that has been done quite purposefully by the ‘artist’? It may also point to a disconnect between the head and the different parts of the body. Or all of these things.
At various moments during this brief encounter, Roxy mimics the postures of these statues. When she stands between them, there are three very similar figures side by side, with a reflection in the mirror behind Roxy.
When Nick and Gus arrive at the beach house, we can see that Catherine has two identical cars. As Professor Paglia rightly notes, one is black and the other white. Their registration numbers are 2GQI123 (white) and 2GQI124 (black), so, presumably, they were both bought on the same day.
At 10'46", Professor Paglia says: “Catherine Tramell receives them [the policemen] with this eerie composure. She knows who they are, she expects them. Did Roxy call her or is she clairvoyant? There’s a kind of supernatural omniscience that Catherine projects in this scene.”
This is quite outstanding. I think Professor Paglia puts her finger on one of the most crucial elements in the film. I’d have loved for her to take this further. ‘Is she clairvoyant?’ That’s not just a question, it’s the question. Stay tuned.
At 11'45" Professor Paglia says: “Everything about her is both seductive, drawing in and yet pushing away. Though they try to keep a brave façade, the men are made very uneasy by the way Catherine is not normally female, that is she’s not nurturing, she doesn’t express sorrow, seems to be almost emotionless, she seems to be a kind of sexual aggressor or adventuress who extracts sexual pleasure from a man without being committed to him in any psychological way.”
Not expressing any sorrow would fail the Columbo test straight away. That’s how the lieutenant most often zeroes in on his perps and he’ll then proceed to worry away at them like a dog with a pull-toy. I would say it is not just the men in the film who are made uneasy at this point. It may be troubling for the audience too. The point that ‘seems to be almost emotionless’ is a key one, however. We’ll deal with that more deeply later.
Professor Paglia promises us early on that she would be talking about all the occult imagery in the film. Sadly this discussion never made it into the final edit of her commentary. All the same, it made me keep a weather-eye open for it. It is there all right. Oh, it’s there!
One of the first things to leap out at me was the coffee mug that Nick drinks from in police headquarters when he gets back. It is white and bears a seven-pointed star. Now, it turns out, to my astonishment, that this prime occult figure actually is the insignia of the real-life San Francisco Police. All the same, it is not for nothing then that this film is set in San Francisco. It gives them an excuse to use this and the seven-pointed star is a powerful symbol in the film and in various occult doctrines.
Aside from being associated with the SFPD, it is also the Alchemical and Masonic symbol for Vitriol, or sulphuric acid, the letters of which, in alchemical lore, stand for: “Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem” or an instruction to ‘rectify’ that which you find within the Earth in order to achieve the Philosopher’s Stone. “The Vitriol-Seven-pointed star is one of the most famous alchemical images of all,” writes Ulrich Arndt (in Weg der Lebensenergie: Der geheime Siebenstern, first published in the magazine Paracelsus, Septenber 2004, pages 11-15).
Margaret Weiss, answering a question on QUORA in 2015 about this figure provided another connection with San Francisco, linking it to the sphere of Venus in Kabbalistic tradition. She makes the point that one of the earliest uses of this symbol in modern times, aside from the San Francisco Police, was another group in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s. They called themselves “The Elf-Queen’s Daughters” who “believed themselves to be incarnated elven spirits in human form”. These they called the ‘Otherkin’.
Is Catherine “Otherkin”? Let us ponder this as we move on to the famous crossed-legs scene at 23 minutes into the running time.
Catherine is questioned in a very strange place. It is not an office, not a deposition suite, not an interrogation or interview room. It has no windows. It seems to be an underground bunker, although it is later revealed to be above ground. It has white brick walls, under-lit by blue lamps. We see numbers on the back wall: one to five. In the reverse-shot, we see the two-way mirror facing this wall. This is where a witness would be standing. This is a space designed exclusively for identity parade line-ups. Why should a potential witness be questioned in such a place?
Yet here, the identity parade is reversed. Against the numbered wall is one single person and she is facing five men. There would normally be five men against the wall behind her. The reversal makes the law-enforcement officers, symbolically, into the suspects.
At 24' 24" we see the complete reverse-shot and can tell, that there are indeed five possible ‘perps’ and that she is identifying them. She ‘identifies’ Nick. She already suspected him. After all, how can it be that she has a newspaper featuring him on her coffee table only hours after the killing of the rock star? She may be researching her new book but how could she be so sure she would meet him? Out of all the people in the police department, why should he come calling on her? Mere coincidence?
Her behaviour is, as Professor Paglia paints her, like Circe in Homer’s Odyssey. Yet she seems more like someone who has read the script. She acts as though her character knows what is coming next. Is she clairvoyant after all? She is so assured, so blasé, that one might almost imagine she had been to REKALL and had memory implants. Or that she was like one of the replicants in Blade Runner. Oh, now I’m just being fantastical, you think. As Eldon Tyrell might say: “Indulge me!”
Professor Paglia is quite correct to point out that, in the interview scene, Catherine is dressed just like Kim Novak in Vertigo. But why should that be? What’s the point? Well, there may not be one. It may just be because screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was phoning it in, doing a lazy cut-and-paste job on the earlier Al Pacino movie Sea of Love, which has a plot almost identical to Basic Instinct, by the way.
Season 2 Episode 5 of McMillan & Wife (‘No Hearts, No Flowers’, 1973) surely has to be the main contender for the true source for the Basic Instinct plot, though. The similarities are shockingly close. The woman psychiatrist/profiler, played by Sheree North, bears a striking resemblance to Sharon Stone. She, like Beth (supposedly) in Basic Instinct, was fixing the blame onto her patients because she wanted Commissioner McMillan for herself. The idea that the psychiatrist in Basic Instinct sets up Catherine to take the fall for her crimes, which were engineered to try and get Nick (her ex-lover) back for herself. The psychiatrist in McMillan & Wife even has press cuttings about Mac exactly as Sharon Stone does of Douglas in Basic Instinct. Of course, Basic Instinct is also very closely based on Sea of Love, but this TV episode is an even closer match, plus it also provides another reason for Basic Instinct’s San Francisco setting.
All the same, however much of a ready-made the story may or may not be, Verhoeven is smarter than to throw in Hitchcock references to no purpose. Sharon Stone appeared opposite Arnold Schwartzenegger in Verhoeven’s Total Recall. This, like Blade Runner, was an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’). Sharon Stone played Quaid’s fake wife. In Vertigo, Kim Novak played Elster’s fake wife. If the comparison isn’t just coincidental, is it telling us that Catherine, too, is a fake? A replica?
‘They assume it’s Catherine Tramell but it isn’t,’ says Professor Paglia in her commentary as the policemen meet Roxy. ‘It’s her double, her lover...’ Roxy is the double of Catherine. Another replica (the first being the woman in the opening sequence of course). How many more are there? And where is the original?
For memory implantation, which is science-fiction, read mind control, which probably isn’t. MKUltra-used to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Not so much now... Drawing loosely on Brad Schreiber's book Revolution’s End (2016, Skyhorse/Simon & Schuster) which details this ill-fated project, I am tempted to wonder whether Basic Instinct could contain allusions to the kind of mental control mechanisms that sex-traffickers might employ to keep sex-slaves in line.
Professor Paglia’s next comment is very revealing:
“Catherine sits almost like a zombie,” she says, referring to the lie-detector scene. “Either she’s telling the truth, or she’s a sociopath, she’s inhuman and is able to conquer her own physiological responses.”
Like the blush response, perhaps? The replicants can do that. They are inhuman. Would Catherine pass the Voigt-Kampf Test? Could we be seeing here the switching of alter-egos to other personalities, seeing them able to dissociate and become someone other? I would propose that this is the first appearance of the ‘neutral’ alter, Catherine’s ‘rest-state’ personality.
In a very real way, Blade Runner is about this too and it is about our present-day now, the world of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, of Harvey Weinstein. The replicants are “more human than human”, as Tyrell describes them. They are under the control of the Off-World Colonies, but those who break their control and escape, they must be destroyed... or they will give the game away. The game is what goes on in these colonies, which they don’t want people on Earth to find out. “They don’t advertise for killers in the newspapers...” You bet they don’t. There are dirty secrets out there in space. The replicants may have apparently adult bodies but they are only four years old. In short, it’s Heaven for paedophiles up there. Detective Bryant describes the replicant Pris as “a basic pleasure model” and think how often Catherine Tramell uses the word “pleasure”. Think how the title of the film includes the word “Basic”! The name Tramell, written down, even resembles Tyrrell slightly and in Dick’s original novel, the android Pris was an exact duplicate of the robot corporation founder’s daughter.
“Catherine seems to know the roads, their serpentine pattern...” says Professor Paglia in describing the scene where Nick drives after Catherine, which, as she very rightly points out, is a pastiche of the car-chase in Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief (and also of the out-of-control car race in Family Plot). “It’s part of her command of nature...” Maybe. Or, again, it’s as though she can see what’s coming next and Nick, very clearly, can’t.
Professor Paglia says (at 42'44") “...and [Nick] is transfixed by the sight of her [Catherine] undressing. We too look at this misty, rosy window almost as if it’s a movie screen up on the wall.” Or we might more simply realise that this is a pastiche of Hitchcock’s Rear Window... another film in which there was a fake wife!
Catherine knows about Hazel Dobkins, knows what she did and knows where to find her. She is not a police officer, was not alive when Hazel’s killings took place and, unlike Nick, has no access to computer technology that could reveal this information to her in this pre-internet era. Yet Nick didn’t know who Hazel was, had never heard of her before, which, for a professional policeman, is a little odd. Odder still, his younger comedy-sidekick Gus, who knew nothing of the dead ’60’s rock star Johnny Boz (as he was before his time) does remember Hazel, which he couldn’t possibly do as her crimes were in the 1950s.
Hazel said she did not know why she killed her family. Could she have been an alter-ego or alternative personality at the time? Or under mind control? An assassin who was inadvertently triggered? Or required to make a sacrifice? Is she part of the same “cell” as Catherine. Is that how they know one another?
When Nick says to Gus that there was “something” between him and Catherine while at the same time telling him that he does not know what it is between them, there is “something”. In the context of that moment, is it his growing obsession with her? Or is it something that was in her mind long before the point where the film’s story begins? Is that “something” a shared history of mind-control? Are they both sleepers in an Eyes Wide Shut style cult, waiting for the “go” code? Catherine is triggered already and knows the “script” her “cell” is to be following. Nick is part of it too, has been for years, but does not know it. He is yet to be activated. I’m waxing speculative here but I think I can come back on this a bit harder later on.
When looking up the information about Hazel Dobkins, Nick drinks from a black mug with a gold seven-pointed star on it. Previously all the mugs had been white. Yes, Professor, there is a theme of black and white but it’s not just good and evil. It’s the black and white checkerboard squares of the Masonic Lodge. It’s the Black Lodge and the White Lodge of (the earlier) Twin Peaks. That, too, was about copies, duplicates and replicas. That was also about child sex-trafficking and the ritual killing of children by their parents. Funnily enough. A much more primal theme than you think.
It's Just a Puzzle Box
When Beth appears at Nick’s apartment after this encounter with Gus, she still has her key. It has a key-ring in the shape of the cartoon child, Bart Simpson. Do we need it spelled out more overtly? The child is the key. All of this dates back to childhood. Nick, Beth and Catherine have been prepared and pre-programmed. He presses the key into her hand on the word ‘obligation’, the Bart Simpson dangling in full view.
‘I didn’t think he’d show them [her notes about Nick] to anyone else,’ says Beth.
In other words to Catherine but how does Beth know that this is what is on Nick’s mind? The subtitles at this point read ‘...sell them to anyone else’ picking up the earlier confrontation at the police station but we have seen no proof that this is how Catherine obtained all this information about Nick and at 55'17" Nick has to admit this himself. There is still an ambiguity. What if she had known all along? By the way, what motivates Beth’s decision to turn up at Nick’s place? It becomes a discussion about the notes but was that her intention?
Nick’s television is playing a re-run of a 1970s sit-com called The Jeffersons but what follows it is the film Hellraiser, featuring the scene in which the abusive uncle becomes a monster. The director’s commentary suggests that the film represents “Nick’s bad dream” but I cannot believe these clips were just stuck in at random. They both point to family conflict and to fears about childhood and ageing.
In the Hellraiser clip, the uncle-monster is trying to devour the daughter, so we have another instance of parents killing (or trying to kill) their kin but let’s just stop to think about Hellraiser a bit more in this context. It is a film in which a mother is forced to prostitute herself by her undead brother-in-law and ex-lover to provide men as blood-sacrifices so that he can rise from the grave, Dracula-style. In a nice extra twist, the house in question is his childhood home. In other words, that which is brought into the house for sex is killed and that which should be buried is coming back from Hell in a demonic, daughter-devouring form. Hmm. So, that’s Nick’s dream. About a childhood home where murder and forced prostitution take place. Straight after we’ve seen the figure of a little boy who is the key to the door. Hmm. Just random coincidence, then, eh?
Then we have the killing of the police investigator and Nick is questioned in the same room that Catherine was in earlier, again with five men facing him in an identity-parade reversal. Professor Paglia rightly notes that “...When Nick becomes a suspect after the murder of Lieutenant Nilsen, we find him sitting in the same chair, in the same room, subject to the same interrogation as Catherine was earlier. It’s very eerie. As if she has somehow been his precursor, he has become her proxy and they have merged in some odd way. When Nick makes the same witticism about smoking that Catherine did, we seem to hear her voice coming out of his mouth.”
Exactly. Again, it is as though she knows that is going to happen, as if she has read the script. But what if it’s not that he has somehow become her or that she has somehow prefigured him but that both of them have reverted to the same alter when placed in the same situation? Professor Paglia is 100% right to say this is eerie and odd. Oh, yes it is! As I read it, Nick and Catherine are both dissociating and both switching to the same alternative personality because they have both been conditioned - in childhood - so to do!
Remember, this room is intended for identity parades. Everything that goes on in it is about identity. It is where multiple people appear but only one will be recognised at a time. However, this parade-room is reversed, so that instead of multiple people standing against the wall, there is one single person sitting... By implication, then, following the logic of the reversal, should we not expect this one single person to be possessed of multiple identities!
I said I could come back on this a bit harder later on. How’s my driving?
Take Your Pick
Professor Paglia’s comments about the implausibility of Nick (or Catherine for that matter) having either block ice in their homes or an ice-pick are spot-on, of course. They do indeed lead us back to the 1940s but, very specifically, to Orrin Quest and the gangster Steelgrave, the ice-pick killers in Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, in which the eponymous little sister’s brother wields a neat neck-piercing ice-pick or three. She has a sister too, who is a movie-star and has a dark-haired double (!), a fake-Mexican actress, who turns out to have been behind a number of the murders, or to have ordered them, at least. This parallels Catherine and Beth, in a way, here.
Catherine’s first novel, the one she gifts to Nick, is quite interesting. Of course, she explains that it’s about a boy who kills his parents by, in some unexplained manner, by organising a plane crash. This sounds very like a sex-role reversal of the famous horror-comic story ‘The Orphan’ (which originally appeared in Haunt of Fear 1 in 1954 from EC Comics, USA). In ‘The Orphan’, publisher Bill Gaines’ “O. Henry ending” was that it was the little girl Lucy who really killed her father and contrived the circumstances for her mother’s execution for his murder. Catherine’s novel seems to duplicate this plot, albeit with a flying accident and the killer being a boy instead of a girl.
Her novel is called The First Time. It has the image of a small boy sitting on a tombstone. What a curious title for such a story, though, wouldn’t you say? Don’t we normally associate the phrase ‘The First Time’ with a person’s first sexual experience? So why should there be a little boy on the cover? Why indeed?
It was at this point that, with the benefit of all the revelations that have come out in the present century about the secret codes and cyphers that Hollywood- and Washington-based paedophiles employ that I thought to myself “All we need now is for someone to come along with a pizza.” And, blow me down, there’s comedy-sidekick Gus coming up the stairs straight after Catherine leaves. And what is that he’s carrying, boys and girls? Why, it’s a pizza! We don’t see them eat it, though. It’s just there as a McGuffin, in this case a symbol for those in the know. Shorthand.
‘Everybody she plays with dies,’ says comedy-sidekick Gus.
‘I know what that’s like,’ Nick replies.
What an extraordinary thing to say. Does he mean that he knows what it is like to have everybody he plays with die? Hardly. This does not appear to have happened to him. He killed two tourists by accident but he was not in any way ‘playing’ with them first. He ‘played’ with Beth and she is still living. The only other thing he could be saying here is that he knows what it is like to die.
Catherine later tells Nick he is dead and it should not be ruled out that, taking another Philip K. Dick theme, this may all be an afterlife reverie, much as in the 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder. This, incidentally, connects to Basic Instinct quite closely, in that its director, Adrian Lyne, also directed Flashdance (Joe Eszterhas script) and Fatal Attraction (starring Michael Douglas). Of course, Total Recall also leaves us at the end not knowing whether Quaid is really on Mars or whether he is in a death-state coma, suffering a brain embolism in the REKALL offices.
It might almost be argued that Fatal Attraction is another variation on the theme of ‘The Orphan’, at least with its original ending, in which the Glenn Close character commits suicide but leaves a trail of false clues which accuse the Michael Douglas character of her murder and for which he is duly convicted. Although, unlike Lucy, any satisfaction she may have found in finally destroying the family that made her life miserable has to lie beyond the grave!
All the same, it is hard to find any very solid evidence for Nick’s demise. He seems very clearly alive. If he’s dead, so is everybody else... Ah, hold that thought, we may return to it.
Anyway, for now, how can this be? If it does not refer to physical death, this leaves only the death of the spirit, of the inner self or of the identity. It would need some pretty serious trauma to achieve any of those. I think we are intended to assume Nick has indeed suffered just such soul-destroying trauma, and the shooting wasn’t it.
One-Eyed Jacks
‘When Nick goes to meet Catherine at the night club he is making a descent into the underworld,’ says Professor Paglia as the next scene opens. Yet the club is a pastiche, neon-lit ‘church’, complete with vaulted arches and stained-glass ‘windows’ that look out onto nothing. The bar-tenders are wearing priestly ‘dog-collars’.
The music is a lot more uptempo than in the ‘church’ scene in Eyes Wide Shut but other than that, it may well serve much the same purpose. If this is an orgiastic ritual, though, like that one, it is a very formal one. Nick is ‘wearing a simple sweater without a shirt’ says Professor Paglia and he is, although he seems out of place looking so casual. A lot of the other dancers are in suits. It seems almost as though they’ve all just come straight from the office and their dancing reflects this idea. It doesn’t come across as very passionate. It’s like a school disco, or like film-extras jigging about, which is, of course, exactly what it is, but should it look like that? The night-club in The Hunger it ain’t. Sleazy it most certainly is not. ‘The Underworld’? It’s all smiles, smart suits and happy faces boogying around. It doesn’t seem quite right somehow.
The track, listed at the end of the film, is ‘Rave the Rhythm’ by Channel X, which was a popular Belgian number from the previous summer, released in 1991. There is something very odd, though. It is as if the dancers are reacting to something else altogether. If you switch the sound off and just watch them, you’d think that what they were hearing was ‘Disco Inferno’ by The Trammps. They are not dressed for Techno, they are not moving to Techno. It’s as though they were at Studio 54, fifteen years earlier and, as an astute commenter on Discogs put it (ian_s), Michael Douglas wanders in looking twenty-five years older than anyone else there. If it is deliberate (and we have to assume it is because they’ve sourced a very credible and contemporary club track) then it is meant to look fake. This is a store-front. There is something else going on and this is the cover for it. Remember the Eyes Wide Shut ritual? Keep thinking...
Did you notice the dance floor? You probably didn’t because of the number of people prancing about on it but once Nick opens the ‘church’ door to the room marked ‘MEN’, we can see what’s really going on. There they are: those good ol’ Masonic chequerboard black and white square tiles. Line ’em up! This is not a dance, folks. This is a Lodge meeting for initiates. That’s why the whole place is made up to look like a church and that’s why the happy-clappers are not taking the music seriously. That’s not why they are there. Notice in passing, also, the strange cadence between the names of the late proprietor of the club, Johnny Boz, and those of the two pillars that feature in a Masonic lodge: Jachin and Boaz.
‘Inside every kind of lesbianism and drug-taking is going on,’ says Professor Paglia.
I don’t know how many kinds of lesbianism there are but there seem to be as many men as women in this room. Once again, they are all very soberly dressed. No-one is really acting in a particularly sexual way. It does not matter that there are men and women in the room marked “MEN” because in the Lodge there are only men and thus all who are in the Lodge, by merit of being in the Lodge, are “MEN”.
Drug-taking? Maybe there’s some of that but what we mostly see them using is tobacco. Everybody is either smoking a cigarette or passing a cigarette to someone else, as though these were something illicit but they’re not. They’re all ready-rolled, machine-made, filter-tipped. So transgressive, eh?
The one thing that might be a more unusual substance is being doled out by the man in Catherine’s cubical. He seems to be dripping it from a tiny, tiny glass bottle and she seems to be sniffing it, like it was perfume. What is it? We can only guess. Maybe it is perfume? Or maybe it’s one of the drugs used in mind-control experiments?
When Catherine first enters the room, it is true we do see two women half-kissing, very briefly, so there’s your lesbianism, perhaps. There is a man at the back who might be taking some kind of drug, but once Nick comes in, they are suddenly nowhere to be seen. The man with the red cape has vanished as well. Instead, we see a girl in a black cap which has an orange ‘Flower-Power’ motif on it, which seems a little anachronistic but it serves another purpose. Look closer. The flower has seven petals. Or is it a star with seven points?! Passing behind Nick is a man in a similar cap. On his jacket is the exact same seven-pointed flower/star but this time it is green. We cut from them directly to a girl in a chequerboard-pattern dress. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
The dominant colour that obtains in the ‘club’, however, is blue. This is a Blue Lodge, or Master Mason’s Lodge. As an article in the Freemasonry journal The Builder pointed out in July 1919, “Blue is the supreme color of Masonry... and no Mason, whatever his degree, questions the Master Mason’s ownership of blue...”
The one thing that strikes me as possibly significant in the ensuing sexual encounter is Nick’s comment the morning after to Catherine that Roxy, who was watching, may have seen something she had not seen before. If that thing was Catherine’s impregnation, then that would put us directly in accord with the ritual sequence in Eyes Wide Shut, which, as critic Sean McCann claimed in his discussion with William Ramsey in March 2022, is the true purpose of the orgy scene following the ritual in the latter film. ‘Next time I’ll use a rubber,’ Nick says to Gus later on, which, I suggest, is very, very telling in this context.
By the way, it is Gus who uses the word ‘rugrats’ here for the children he doesn’t believe Nick and Catherine could raise and this reference is repeated later. Rugrats, of course, was a popular TV cartoon series from 1991 about babies with very advanced vocabulary. The link here is that this show was also by the co-creator of The Simpsons, Hungarian-born animator Gabor Csupo, thus it links directly to the Bart Simpson keyring and also to Basic Instinct screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, also Hungarian.
Professor Paglia suggests that the symbolism of the Wild West line-dancing bar where Nick finds Gus the next night (and which I would whole-heartedly agree is most improbable in 1990s San Francisco) is about ‘frontier manhood’. To me it just says that, while Catherine was the ‘fuck of the century’, Gus is the fuckwit of the previous century. In stark contrast to the ‘club’ Nick and Catherine attended, the place Gus chooses to hang out is outwardly not Masonic. It comes from an era of wood-plank houses, shotgun shacks and log cabins, not cut stone. In fact, we can see the interior is all wood and wood-panel. Take a closer look, though. See those cowboy hats on the dancers’ heads in the long-shot? They form a familiar pattern: white, black, white, black... There’s no escaping it. Professor Paglia tells us that the bar is called ‘The Stetson’. What? Not ‘Bob’s Country Bunker’? Although this is not referred to in the script and the neon sign outside is not remotely legible as they leave.
By the way, the late-night cowboy theme is intriguingly foregrounded right at the beginning of the film when the camera passes down a crowded corridor at the police headquarters. There we see a man dressed exactly like the Jon Voight character in Midnight Cowboy, and I mean exactly like. It can be no coincidence. Midnight Cowboy, as I am sure we all remember, is a film about a young and naive boy who comes to New York and soon gets sucked into a sleazy world of prostitution and vice. Hmmm...
As a small aside, the barman accosts Nick for the tab on his way out. Gus has forgotten to pay. Him too drunk! For as much as is made of Nick’s alcohol problem, Gus has managed to guzzle his way through $32 worth of booze all on his own, which, in 1992, was no insignificant amount. If Nick is supposed to be drinking to dull the pain of his traumas, what’s Gus’s excuse? Same as the Midnight Cowboy’s?
During the car chase we see road signs of flashing, pointing arrows that mimic the lights in the ‘club’. Afterwards, following Roxy/Rocky’s death, Nick faces another psychological evaluation. He is asked about his childhood. His angry and combative reaction clearly touches at something dangerous to him. It is somewhat reminiscent of Holden’s interview with Leon in Blade Runner (“Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind, about your mother...”)
This makes a nice prelude to Nick’s next house-call on Catherine. At 01:28'27", Professor Paglia says ‘Catherine is weepy, almost child-like. She needs consolation.’ This is another alter making its appearance, I would say: the child self. Professor Paglia describes her in the chair when Nick arrives ‘as if she is prematurely aged, like a vampire who has given up the fight.’ To me, though, the way she is presented to the camera is much, much more reminiscent of Mrs Bates in her rocking chair in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. We’ve been dogging Hitch’s tail all through, haven’t we? We’ve had lots of Vertigo so isn’t it time for a bit of Psycho now? It is. As the late Barry Norman might have said: ‘And why not?’
Catherine, Mrs Bates and a vampire all have the same thing in common, don’t they. They are as the dead. Nick says he knows what it is like to be dead. This hints to us that Catherine does too. She, just like Mrs Bates, has another, one who pretends to be her, dresses up as her, a duplicate, a fake - the one who really does the killing.
‘We seal juvenile records until they are deceased,’ the Cloverdale policewoman tells Nick when he looks through the photographs of Roxy’s slaying of her brothers. ‘That’s why you couldn’t find any on your computer.’ If that is the case, so that Nick and his colleagues had no idea that Roxy had any criminal record, how could Catherine know? Any more than she could know about Hazel Dobkins. Yet, somehow, she did. ‘Sometimes when I do my research I get involved with them,’ she tells Nick later. Except that no amount of research could have led her to Roxy. There has to be something else. Like them being in the same mind-control “cell”?
‘What was the motive?’ Nick asks.
‘She said she didn’t know herself, just did it on impulse.’
Hazel Dobkins also did not know why she killed her children. She, too, just did it. As though another personality had taken over for a time, perhaps?
Eerily, Hazel seems to know Nick, or ‘Shooter’ as she calls him. It’s very subtle and fleeting but there seems to be a familiarity, a recognition on her side, although he does not know her. Or not consciously at any rate.
Now there’s basically an intermission while we ‘enjoy’ an air-guitar solo from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas as he, to all intents and purposes, rehashes a plot device from his earlier film Jagged Edge. The person we have pretty much concluded must be the real killer is uncovered and openly accused. It’s all over! It’s all over! But no, there are twenty minutes of the running time still to go. Oh! So the accused has to stall, deny everything and so then we think that person must be a red herring and the murderer is someone else... until the ‘twist’ reveals it isn’t and we realise we were right earlier on after all.
Thus the film as a thriller does become a lot shakier at this point, what with trying to shoehorn in a lot of plot-work in a short time.
Mind you, the plus is that this provides Professor Paglia an opportunity to riff off a whole mythological criticism lecture on the theme of “What is Woman?” while all these pointless McGuffins are being shuffled around on stage. Professor Paglia does not think that the biblical texts offer her a wide enough palette for describing femmes fatales like Catherine and draws upon the stories of Lilith, the alternative first woman but I do wonder... May she have forgotten that there were Three Faces of Eve?
Magnum Force
Why is the sheriff of Salinas washing his own car? There’s no-one of a lower rank to do it for him? Why does the camera focus on the (six-pointed) Monterey police force badge on the door, almost obscured by filth? Why, the sheriff's car is not just grimy, it’s caked in mud! It looks as though it’s been driven through a river bed. My, my. That sheriff. He sure is a dirty cop! Could the metaphor be any more blatant?
I don’t think this is just a random bit of actor’s ‘stage business’ to make the scene more interesting to the viewer than a pair of talking heads. There’s a police-car, smothered in dirt and the sheriff is hosing it down. A symbol of coming clean perhaps? It may well also be a symbol that his department is ‘dirty’, i.e. corrupt. We would be well not to take what he says too seriously. Nick fails to heed the warning however.
He did not take any more notice of the symbolism immediately after the famous interrogation scene with Catherine in the hot seat. As they all leave, the first thing we see is a yellow cone for a wet floor and a man mopping up. Oh, there are many ways to read this, I am sure. It is a symbolic echo of how ‘wet’ Catherine is, of how wet the pervy policemen’s pants are now and how wet both male and female members of the audience are going to make themselves and their floors too later on. I have no doubt that’s all intended. But the most insistent and overt interpretation cries out to us: “This department is dirty!”
Nick sees Catherine‘s book being printed out and Professor Paglia says it’s ‘mechanically printed’ which is quite true. The lines of text are appearing as the dot-matrix head runs across the page. There is a little more to it than that, though. What is missing here is that we, the audience, are being shown the actual script of the film that we are watching while we are watching it! This is what we see on screen:
car. Shooter raced into the
pounded the button for the
ly up the staircase, his brea
s. His partner's dead body la
elevator, legs sticking out.
Of course, we don’t see the whole lines. These are from the centre of the page, where the close-up is focusing. Yet there is no mistaking it. These are the exact events from a scene from near the end of the film. Nick will be in Gus’s car and see (or think he sees) something on the fourth floor. He will race for the door, pound on the button for the lift, to no avail so he will run up the staircase, get very out of breath in the process, the find his partner, comedy-sidekick Gus, not quite dead yet but very nearly, lying on the floor of the lift, his legs sticking out... This is precisely what will happen later. It’s a scene we haven’t got to yet.
This is very curious, to say the least. The only other film that I can think of in which this occurs is Spaceballs. At one point, Lord Dark-Helmet gets hold of a VHS copy of the Mel Brooks’ film Spaceballs, the very film he himself is in, and he fast-forwards it to see what will happen to him next. That’s absurd, of course, but how is it different to this?
The other comparison would be John Carpenter’s (slightly later film) In the Mouth of Madness, where the horror novels predict where ‘real-life’ characters will be and what they will be doing. There may be no separation between ‘life’ and ‘fiction’ here, they may be one influencing the other or on the other hand the ‘real-life’ characters may be in the book and becoming aware that they are indeed characters in a book. We can’t tell. But what appears on the screen here, in Basic Instinct is, in every detail, precisely what happens later in the film. It is an exact description of what occurs. Aside from the fact that it is in the past tense instead of the present, it actually is the script of Basic Instinct, right in front of our eyes.
I bet you thought my references to Philip K. Dick earlier on were too fantastical. How wild do they look they now? This shifts Basic Instinct into a very different realm, one that we would normally associate only with writers like Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, in Philip K Dick’s 1972 novel A Maze of Death, colonists on a planetoid discover a book which contains an account of everything that has happened to them. It is, effectively, A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick and they, the characters in the very same novel, can read it and realise that they can skip ahead further and find out what will happen to them later. They are becoming aware that they are themselves fictional characters, or wondering if this is what they may be, like the figures in In the Mouth of Madness.
At this point, Basic Instinct offers Nick this very revelation but he does not grasp it. Catherine tells him he is dead. Does she mean, not that he has died, but that he was never really alive to begin with? That he is a character in a film? Could Catherine already have this consciousness of herself as a fictional creation? She really has read the script! Or has she?
One of the newspaper cuttings that Nick sees at Beth’s apartment has, on the back, the word ‘PREDICTION’. That’s Catherine’s thing, isn’t it? Predicting what is going to happen next.
We are back to shifting personalities again. Catherine has three clear alters. The primary is the one we see first at the beach-house. This is the dispassionate persona, what Professor Paglia called her ‘sociopath’ side. This is the alter that has open hostility towards Nick. Hazel often seems to be is around when this alter is in the driving seat. Then there is the sex maniac alter and finally, the tearful, vulnerable child alter. There is a fourth, in a way. As we have seen, this is what Professor Paglia called the ‘zombie’ personality and which I would contend is the neutral self, the dissociated, hypnotised and hypnotisable brain.
The way I see it, Catherine, like Hazel, is a product of a kind of MKUltra-style ‘conditioning’. Hazel is her handler. Recruited in prison, she keeps an eye on the latest generation of undercover agents, of sleeper agents, with their multiple alters, their different buttons that, when pressed, can launch them from sex to assassination. In his book, Brad Schreiber details the activities of MKUltra’s sister programme, MKSearch, in the 1970s. This conducted “prison behavior modification” and recruited and processed informants from among prison inmates. Was Hazel one of these?
Catherine knows what’s coming next because the higher ups have it all planned out and they’ve told her, or rather, they’ve told one of her sleeping alters. To be awoken when needed. And when they are no longer needed, if there might be a danger that they could talk to someone about their strange experiences, well then... a Blade Runner will need to come and ‘retire’ them. And I think that’s just what’s happening at the end.
The killing of Gus looks just like the shower scene in Psycho but it is also strongly reminiscent of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now - in which there was a very strong clairvoyance sub-plot. However, the placing of the cape and the wig on the staircase is ludicrous for two reasons. Firstly, Nick came up the stairs so why did he not see them there? If we argue that Beth put them there while he was in the lift tending to Gus, how exactly would she be able to have gone from there, then duck round the corner and appear from the other side of the stairwell without his having noticed her? It is impossible for her to be in these two places at once.
For another thing, Nick’s police colleagues find the cape and wig and take this to be confirmation that Beth was indeed the killer. Yet the only person in the film who saw the killer wearing this cape and wig was Gus and he is dead. No-one else, aside from us, has any idea what the killer looked like. Again, as in the killing in the opening sequence, we saw it, the police didn’t and yet they act as though they had.
The killer might put on a rain-cape to stay clean of blood while stabbing, but why bother with the wig if only one person will ever see her/him and that is the victim? Didn’t Nick see them? We think Nick saw someone on the fourth floor moving about and we assume that is what prompted him to leap out of the car and chase into the building. However, we see the front of the block from his perspective. We can analyse those frames of footage as long as we like - there is no-one there.
So what do we imagine? That Catherine has planned all of this and did it herself? It’s beyond all belief. She would have to have superhuman powers to have predicted everything and rushed around organising everything and writing a book at the same time. It’s a tall order. Even if she were possessed of Bill and Ted’s time machine, she would still forget to wind her watch at some point. It is, however, very much more possible that someone else has done it, that someone has put all of these things in place to make us believe that what we see has happened is because of Catherine. We are encouraged to think that this someone was Beth, but again, the same problem obtains there too. This is too much for any one person to achieve. This has to be the work of a back-stage team. Team MK?
This, astonishing though it may be, is, however, not the most peculiar nor the most paranormal element in the film. That comes at the very, very end. Nick and Catherine are in bed. They are embracing. Then the scene fades to black. For a moment it is almost as though it’s as if the director is fading out so that we don’t see the sex scene and that would be a typical trope in so many films and TV shows but it’s utterly ridiculous here because we’ve already seen so many explicit sex scenes. They’re going to get all coy about this one all of a sudden? Maybe it’s a fade-out ending for the film itself? But then, all our expectations are dumbfounded. The film fades back in again. Nick and Catherine are in exactly the same positions they were in before the fade out! Then the camera pans down under the bed to the ice pick lurking there.
What is the blackout for? What does it do? Is it an alternative ending? In a way, yes. There can really be only one interpretation. This is the moment that marks the shift in consciousness. This is the dissociation of personality, the movement from one alter to another and it’s been pressed on us. We are seeing the future when we are being shown that transition from one mindstate to the next. Now it has been presented to us. By the end, we’re actually able to see it.
“See if you can guess, whodunnit!!”
We are left at the end, as we are with a lot of the old Ellery Queen mysteries, the ones where you had to match wits with Queen and guess the killer. There would always be one giveaway piece of evidence that would nail the bad guy but... But there was a problem. The formula of The Ellery Queen Mysteries - and one that is meticulously imitated by its modern TV re-incarnation, Castle - is that there would always be two red herrings, whose behaviour was mighty suspicious but which would turn out to have nothing to do with the crime. Very well, but once we have our man, how do we work backwards to explain away the actions of the red herrings?
The answer is always that we can’t but it somehow doesn’t matter because we’ve got the real baddie! We just have to accept that the red herrings’ actions don’t count but the fact remains that, in many cases, we cannot rewind the plot to make sense of anything that they did.
Can we do that here? Can we reverse the reels and run everybody’s actions backwards and see if they match the outcome at the end? Not in so many words, but perhaps we don’t need to.
“Well, I think I know what happened now. Do you? ...Do you know who the killer is now?!”
Well, Ellery, I think I just might. At least in part. It’s speculation, of course, but most of what we see could fit a straightforward police corruption plot. Nick’s shooting of two innocent tourists was an accident but it brought Internal Affairs into the department to investigate him. Nilsen and Beth are on the case there. We can imagine this might annoy a lot of officers who are on the take. The longer those two spend looking into Nick, the more additional corruption they are likely to find. The department’s objective then would be to dispose of both Internal Affairs investigators and make sure no more of them come to call.
Thus Boz is killed by a hired assassin, hired by the police department and paid for by the Mayor’s rival candidate. The department (and their affiliated jurisdictions, like Monterey) feed Nick the information they want him to have, that makes him suspect Beth. The department kills Nilsen, Beth is set up to be the killer, Nick ‘solves’ the case, he’s the hero. Internal Affairs are shamed in that it was one of their people who was behind the killings and the department is left in peace to dredge up more money from San Francisco’s bottomless pit of corruption.
As I say, that fits. It answers all the ‘real-world’ plot questions. In this sense, Catherine is incidental to the whole thing. The only problem with this ‘explanation’ is that there isn’t a shred of real evidence to support it. In a lesser movie, however, this would be the final denouement.
In the last reel, Nick would realise he had been tricked. He would round on his superior, Captain Talcott, thumping his fist on the desk. He would accuse them all of setting him up to clear the decks for their dirty business. And then a corrupt lieutenant would sidle up, take him aside and say something to the effect of: “Forget it, Nick. It’s Chinatown.” We would close on Nick receiving his medal of congratulation from the new Mayor with Catherine at his side... at the Mayor’s side, that is.
Basic Instinct is not that kind of movie. There is no clear and obvious resolution as there might be with, say, an earlier Michael Douglas police corruption thriller like Star Chamber, itself a kind of variation on Dirty Harry II. Everything is left ambiguous, unclear, nebulous. We can go home with the ‘Beth-dunnit’ plot we’ve been handed (straight from McMillan & Wife and Sea of Love, as I mentioned) or we can dig deeper. How far down do the fakery and responsibilities go?
Let’s see. The one killing (or, rather, failed killing) where there is no mystery, where we know for certain whodunnit, is Roxy’s attempt to kill Nick in Catherine’s car. Nick must recognise the registration number and know it to be hers and at this point he must think it is she who is trying to run him over. In a way, the car is not just a weapon for Roxy to use to destroy Nick but a disguise. She’s pretending to be Catherine. She is behind the wheel of her car/body, and what more direct metaphor would you like for an alter-ego seizing control?
Yet, who is the disguise for? There’s no-one else around. Comedy-sidekick Gus has drunk-driven away. There’s no-one else on the street. Nick is the only audience for this switcheroo. Roxy’s intention is to kill Nick, so what’s the point of fooling him first?
The disguise is for us. In exactly the same way that the opening sequence is for us, not for the characters in the film. What do you think? If that’s not Catherine, Boz is going to be fooled it is her by a blonde wig? Even on drugs, he wouldn’t be that far gone. The wig at the end, with the cape, is also for us, to connect it back to that same opening scene... which nobody saw except us.
We are a party to all these events. So much of the behaviour of the perpetrators is for our benefit alone. That is what Catherine’s apparent clairvoyance is there for. She’s reminding us all the way through. It’s a movie. There’s a script. I’ve read it. She even shows it to us. We’re in on the game. Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we are characters in this film. You want to know whodunnit, Ellery? We did!
Who fuels the occult and abusive Hollywood secret culture of drugged and brainwashed young girls (and boys) for jaded old executives and faded stars like Johnny Boz... or his real life equivalents, Harvey Weinstein and his ilk? Who pumps the money into the system to sustain it? Why, you do Mr and Mrs American Film-Goer! You do! You shell out to buy a ticket every date-night. You’re complicit! You’re in this film because you make it happen. Let’s take that ridiculous wig off and see who the real killer was! Zoiks, it’s you! And you’d have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids! That is the real message of Basic Instinct. Go tell it to the Marines.
In short, I have come to think Basic Instinct was trying to reveal a lot of the same secret goings-on that Eyes Wide Shut was to do seven years later but it had to be a great deal more covert about it. Stanley Kubrick had enough studio clout that he could get away with being blatant and not be stopped. Had Basic Instinct not been so ambiguous, it would certainly have been neutered back down to a simple, patriarchy-positive tale like Fatal Attraction.