Like the subject of last month’s post, The Horse Whisperer, Basic Instinct plays on male fantasies about women’s genitalia and castration, but with a very different approach.
Basic Instinct is a film that has interested and perplexed both psychoanalytic discussants and film critics. It was a Thursday night feature at the fall meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association a few years ago, and has been discussed by analysts elsewhere. In one of the better psychoanalytic discussions of the film, Arlene Richards (1998) stressed the film’s portrayal of woman and her genitals as a dangerous Medusa, threatening to destroy men with her sexuality. She wrote that “Basic Instinct is a movie that promulgates a hateful message with such artful means that it provoked me to hate myself for loving it.” (p. 270) Leonard Maltin (1995) refers to it as a “sex thriller” because of its tendency to slip back and forth between detective story/film noir and soft-core pornography. (p. 90) The loss of boundaries between the two is clearly intentional. Nevertheless, I would like to try to peel apart the film’s two stories, one a detective thriller and the other a particular form of sexual fantasy.
The detective story, quite conventionally, begins with a murder. A former rock star, Johnny Boz, is found murdered in his bed, naked, his hands tied by a silk scarf to the railing of the headboard, deep stab wounds in his neck and upper chest, with copious blood and a bloody ice pick, the murder weapon. The audience has witnessed the murder, in which a very sexy, athletic looking blonde woman has stabbed him during intercourse at the point of mutual orgasm. The male detectives examining the body make nervous jokes, clearly defending against their horror and ours. Finding that he had ejaculated, one detective jokes, “He got off before he got offed.”
That detective is Gus Moran, the burly, somewhat older partner of the film’s central male protagonist, Nick Curran. Nick is a tough, good-looking plainclothes detective who could have come out of the pages of Dashiell, Hammet or Ross McDonald. He is an alcoholic who falls off the wagon early in the film. He is impulsive and unorthodox. We learn early that he has been on some sort of probation with assigned visits to a police psychologist, Beth Garner, with whom he has also been having an affair. We eventually find out that he had gotten into trouble shooting and killing a tourist in the pursuit of a criminal. For this, and other incidents, he has been given the not so affectionate nickname, “Shooter.”
The prime suspect for the murder is the murdered man’s girlfriend, Catherine Tramell, a particularly seductive blonde who has written a series of murder thrillers, including one that matches the murder of Johnny Boz. In fact, she uses that as her “alibi.” “I would have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a killing and then kill him in the way described in my book.” She implies that someone is setting her up.
Gradually, we discover along with Nick that that someone is the psychologist, Beth. Catherine feeds Nick little leads that he tracks down to find out that Beth and Catherine had known each other, gone to college together. Catherine says that Beth stalked her and copied her. Beth accuses Catherine of the same. The audience is moved back and forth along with Nick between Catherine and Beth as the plot twists. Only Nick’s partner, Gus, is steadfast in his belief that Catherine is the murderer. At one point, he tells Nick, “She’s got that magna cum laude pussy on her that done fried up your brain.”
Gus is the true throwback to the film noir detectives of the thirties and forties. He can find a beautiful woman attractive, but he does not allow his perceptions and his mind to be seduced. At the end of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade hands the woman over to the police, not because he does not love her, but because she killed his partner. The code of honor demands it. Nick and Gus have a closer bond than Sam Spade had with his partner, but Nick is a more modern hero, susceptible to his own sexual desire. Ultimately, Catherine will kill his partner, but Nick wants to be seduced by the woman who gives him “the fuck of the century,” and the male part of the audience, equally seduced, is not sure what it wants.
Gus follows a lead that he hopes will get him to the truth about Catherine and Beth. He steps out of an elevator and is stabbed to death by a hooded assailant in a scene that Catherine had already written into her newest book. Nick finds Gus’s body and then finds Beth there. She says that she came, like Gus, in response to a phone call. Thinking that Beth has a gun in her pocket, Nick shoots her, only to find that she was holding the keys to his apartment in her pocket. Nevertheless, evidence on the scene and in Beth’s apartment point to her as the murderer. In the final scene, Nick is in bed with Catherine who has an ice pick hidden under the bed.
Richards points out that the film depicts sexual women and their genitals as extremely dangerous to men in their seductiveness. She sees as the film’s underlying image the Medusa, a mythical embodiment of the vulva, a sharp toothed face surrounded by snakes that gives a frightening rendition of man’s view of the woman’s external genitalia. This is best demonstrated in what is probably the film’s most famous scene. Catherine is brought in by the police and the DA’s office for interrogation. Confronted with a group of men, Catherine is in complete control. She is both seductive and defiant. When she lights up a cigarette and is reminded that smoking is not allowed in the building, she remarks, “What are you going to do, charge me with smoking?” making them and their rules appear impotent and childish. What made the scene so famous is that when Catherine momentarily uncrosses her legs, she exposes her bare vulva. As she recrosses her legs, she rubs them together erotically. The men stare, hypnotized by their own arousal. Judging from the enormous publicity this fleeting image evoked, it was not only the policemen in the interrogation room who were captivated by this opportunity to see the actress Sharon Stone’s bare genitals.
As Richards emphasizes, the powerful sexual woman is a threat to men. We see it in the nervous jokes the male detectives make at the original crime scene. We see it in Catherine’s lesbian lovers, all of whom have at one time committed vicious murders. We feel it in the film’s opening scene.
With the opening credits, we see rhythmic bodily movement through a prism-like lens. As the scene opens, we are watching a man and woman making passionate love. She is on top, gyrating violently, her long blonde hair falling on him with each forward rock of her body. She ties his hands to the bedpost with a silk scarf. As they approach their climaxes, she reaches under the covers of the bed, pulls out an icepick and with her last thrust forward stabs him repeatedly in the neck. He screams in excitement and then horror as the blood begins to spout from his neck.
Watching this scene in a public theater, members of the audience are easily caught up in a conflictful tension. They have just settled in, seen the coming attractions, been told about the popcorn stand and suddenly they are voyeurs, watching this highly erotic scene. Each caught in an individual idiosyncratic reaction, most will be struggling between arousal and the discomfort it causes in a public setting. There will be tension around guilt and shame, maybe even disgust as the sex becomes kinky. One thing they cannot be is neutral. Even before the murder, the viewer is likely to be involved in the allure and danger of sexual arousal. The sudden bloody attack confirms the worst fears.
The tension and trauma of this scene is reinforced for us when we exhale in the following scene while an all male cast of detectives and medical technicians examine the body. The contrast imprints on us the idea that sexuality is dangerous, that men are safer in their own world. We see it again when the macho detectives first come across Catherine Tramell at her beach house. She is cool and calm, keeping Nick and Gus off balance with her sexual directness—”I wasn’t dating him. I was fucking him.” This is not the sensitive or prissy lady of the thirties or forties. When Gus threatens to take her downtown, she dares them to arrest her. Her control of the men is, of course, reinforced in the later interrogation scene at the police station. She holds a room full of men at bay, controlling them with her sexuality and mocking directness.
In several ways, the film both depicts and arouses male castration anxiety. It does so by bringing together sexual arousal and murder, by showing Catherine controlling and discomfiting the supposedly masculine men and by flaunting her homosexuality. We sense castration anxiety in the nickname with which Catherine teases Nick, “Shooter.” It says that he is impulsive, quick to shoot. This impulsiveness and quickness to action is reminiscent of two conditions that we ordinarily associate with castration anxiety and fear of entering the vagina, enuresis (bedwetting) and premature ejaculation. In each, there is an implied lack of control. My own association to the word, “shooter,” is to another epithet used as a put-down, “pisher.” Very clearly, when she calls him a “shooter,” Catherine is telling Nick that she considers him a little boy who cannot control his emotions, violence or sexuality. Finally, we know that one of the sources of men’s fear of women’s genitals is the absence of a penis. By flaunting her genitals, Catherine subtly reminds the men of their fear of castration.
Castration anxiety is often defended against with fetishistic fantasies, and this film provides the viewer with just such a fantasy. That fantasy is explicit in the film’s scenes of intercourse, but the tone for it is set in a series of doublings, a breaking down of characters’ identities so that they may be experienced on a fantasy level as interchangeable.
The theme of mistaken identity begins early, when Nick and Gus go to Catherine Tramell’s home and mistake her live-in lover, Roxy, for Catherine. Later, Nick will confuse Roxy for Catherine when he becomes involved with her in a high-speed chase that ends in Roxy’s death. The next crossing of identities comes between Catherine and Nick. Some time after Catherine’s famous interrogation scene, Nick is interrogated in the same room by virtually the same group of men. He has become a suspect in the murder of an internal affairs investigator. Imitating Catherine, he defiantly lights up a cigarette and repeats Catherine’s line, “What are you going to do, charge me with smoking?”
The doubling of Catherine and Beth is essential to the plot. They are ultimately confused by most of the film’s characters and much of the audience as the plot twists around their identities in pursuit of the murderer. I have even found that there are some viewers who leave the film thinking that Beth is the murderer rather than Catherine. But from a psychoanalytic standpoint, the doubling of Catherine and Beth is even more interesting in terms of their relationships with Nick. In that relationship they play opposite, complementary roles. Beth is as masochistic with Nick as Catherine is sadistic and controlling. They make a sado-masochistic pair in their relationships with Nick. Beth is in love with Nick, desperate to win him back while he is verbally and physically abusive to her, beating, raping, and ultimately murdering her. After the rape, Beth accuses Nick of having been aroused by Catherine. Teased and controlled by Catherine, he takes out his rage on Beth.
In their sexual encounters, all three characters, Nick, Beth and Catherine, begin to blur their identities, playing interchangeable roles. Shortly after seeing Catherine’s performance in the police station and experiencing her seductiveness while driving her back to her house, Nick rapes Beth in her apartment, pinioning her arms violently against the wall, then tearing off her clothes, exposing her pubic hair in one “editor’s cut” of the film, and finally entering her from behind.
This scene is partially repeated when Nick ends up in bed with Catherine. While they are making love, he gets on top of her and pinions her arms down, exhibiting some of the same sadistic sexuality that we saw with Beth. But her hands come free and she rakes her nails into his back, causing him to stop and scream. Suddenly, she rolls him onto his back and straddles him. She pushes his right arm down to the bed, then his left. He appears to try to resist, but is seemingly overpowered. She tells him “ssh” as if to calm him down and alleviate his fears about being dominated. She then ties his wrists to the headboard and makes love to him, recreating the film’s opening scene, falling forward on him as they reach orgasm, but without the ice pick. The tables have been turned. Nick begins to enact his sadistic sexuality with Catherine as he had with Beth, but the roles are reversed. He ends up taking the submissive, feminine role.
This scene depicts a masochistic male fantasy in which roles are reversed and a powerful, beautiful woman overpowers and rapes the man. The momentary struggle in which Nick appears to try to resist having his arms pinioned reinforces the fantasy. It reminds us of what he did to Beth. Now, he experiences the “female role.” Beth, Nick and Catherine have become interchangeable in a sado-masochistic orgy. It is this sex, in which Nick gets to play the role of both the active and passive partner, the male and female role in conventional thought, that he later calls “the fuck of the century.”
Nick wakes up during the night after this scene to go to the bathroom. He stands naked by the sink when Catherine’s lover, Roxy, enters to announce that she has watched and to warn him to stay away from Catherine. Nick calls her “Rocky” and talks to her as if “man to man.” This scene, too, reinforces the blurring of gender identity. As the film develops, Catherine taunts Nick with her homosexual lovers as if to remind him that his biological masculinity gives him no special place in her sexual life.
In “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud (1924) describes the typical male masochistic fantasy of being beaten, bound or humiliated as putting the man “in a characteristically female situation; they signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.” Loewenstein (1957), among others, points out that this means the woman partner stands for a man and this serves to deny the absence of a penis in women and to deny the danger of castration. The interchangeable male and female roles deny the difference—for the man the implied castration—and the sexualizing of the female role turns the castration fear into a pleasure.
The masochistic fantasy has also been described as a means of seducing the aggressor. By taking a willing submissive role, Nick gets Catherine to participate in a forbidden sexual act. We see this in the core masochistic fantasy, in which Nick is pinned down, then tied up and made love to by Catherine. This mimics the more dangerous opening scene in which the sexual play turns truly violent. This seduction of the aggressor is emphasized in the final scene. After a replay of their sadomasochistic sex, Nick and Catherine talk in bed. She asks him what they do now, and he answers in words given to him by his now dead partner, Gus, “We fuck like minks. We raise rug rats. We live happily ever after.” She answers, “I hate rug rats,” reaching under the bed where she has hidden an ice pick. When he says, “Forget the rug rats,” she foregoes the weapon and all is fine for the moment.
The film presents us with a frightening image of women, an image that I believe incorporates a particularly male fantasy of women. The interest generated by Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs in the interrogation scene highlights that fantasy. The female genitals have the medusa-like power to freeze men in their tracks, turn them to stone (I think that pun is unintended). But men fear the vagina not only as a potential sharp-toothed mouth that will bite off the penis. It is also frightening because it does not have a penis. It provides both the evidence and the means for castration. When the male detectives stare between Catherine’s legs we can presume that they are eagerly trying to get a look at the tempting sexual prize, but that they also unconsciously see the dangerous medusa and the absence of a penis. By blurring the boundaries between male and female and by offering a fantasy of male submission and role reversal, the film attempts to quiet the medusa’s hunger and to deny the possibility of castration.
Freud, S. (1924) The economic problem of masochism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: HogarthPress and The Institute of Psychoanalysis. vol. 19:155-172.
Loewenstein, R. (1957) A contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of masochism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 5: 197-234.
Maltin, Leonard (2008) Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide 2008 Edition. New York: Plume.
Richards, A. (1998) Woman as Medusa in Basic Instinct. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 18:269-280.
Previously published in Stein H. (2000) Castration anxiety and feminine masochism in Basic Instinct. PANY Bulletin 38:2 and in Double Feature: Finding Our Unconscious Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein (ebooks, 2002)