Wretched Excess
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Wretched Excess 'Basic Instinct 2* raises Hollywood to new depths. BY JOHN PODHORETZ The colossal failure of the sequel to the mammoth 1992 hit Basic Instinct is primarily due to the new movie's...
...And while Sharon Stone tries to be as shockingly exhibitionistic in the sequel as she was in the original, she is defeated not only by her advancing age (48) but also by changes in the culture since 1992...
...it was a marketing ploy for a motion picture, a way of getting men into the movie theater...
...No, they're doing it for the same reason Sharon Stone did it: Because they want to be immortalized, and they can't figure out any other way to achieve it...
...To help America get over its bourgeois hang-ups...
...To express the power of female sexuality...
...Sharon Stone got paid to show her all...
...And if that weren't enough, they were also opening society's eyes, liberating the masses from the shackles of bourgeois morality...
...At the time, Basic Instinct seemed to herald the dawn of a new age of explicit Hollywood moviemaking...
...Motion pictures had to have something Americans could not get from watching television, and after years of technological gimmickry like 3-D and Cinerama and VistaVision and Smell-O-Vision and God knows what else, Hollywood grabbed onto sex and violence as though they were life rafts...
...Basic Instinct 2 is beneath discussion except for the change it heralds in moviegoing tastes and, if it's not stretching it too much, American society as a whole since the release of the original film 14 years ago...
...The stars of The Real World do it for free...
...Now, however, her salacious conduct has lost its power to shock...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ The colossal failure of the sequel to the mammoth 1992 hit Basic Instinct is primarily due to the new movie's colossal wretchedness...
...Going nude wasn't a badge of artistic honor for an actress...
...In 2006, every 20-year-old cast member on MTV's The Real World conducts herself like a miniCatherine—sharing a lesbian peck in a hot tub one minute, and pulling off her shirt in a bar the next (her nudity obscured by optical camera effects...
...It was all nonsense, of course...
...Between 1969 and 1982, five Best Picture winners featured nude scenes, while four winners for Best Actress and two Supporting Actress winners appeared unclothed (and at least a dozen female nominees did so as well...
...Her character, Catherine Tramell, did things no mainstream audience had ever quite seen before...
...Are they doing it to serve a director's artistic vision...
...But in fact it proved to be the last moment at which it was still possible for mainstream Hollywood to release a film that had the capacity to shock and titillate with its graphic sexuality...
...At one moment, Basic Instinct is the ultimate male fantasy about a completely uninhibited woman, while at the next it's the ultimate male nightmare about a woman so cold she would kill you as soon as look at you...
...You can see worse on reality television...
...On occasion, big-studio Hollywood would still present a self-consciously "erotic" crowd-pleaser—offering lurid hints of sadomasochism in 9 1/2 Weeks or rape fantasies in Thief of Hearts...
...Only once, really, did a genuinely filthy mainstream Hollywood picture strike it big, and that was the original Basic Instinct—a brilliantly-made thriller in which a bisexual woman goes around San Francisco killing men with an ice pick...
...But the appetite of the moviegoing public for such fare was growing ever more limited, even as such films would score record ratings on cable, fly off videostore shelves, and create a new model for several hundred new Xeroxes...
...And aren't these the sorts of questions that might make one wonder whether God will soon be provoked enough to void his covenant with Abraham, and bring about the second Great Flood...
...These movies were basically Xeroxed, dozens if not hundreds of times, to fill the insatiable need of cable channels and video stores for salacious material...
...But it's still among the worst motion pictures you will probably never see...
...The sexual revolution came at a propitious moment for Hollywood, just as the old studio system was melting down...
...And just as cable and the VCR brought an end to the sordid porno theaters that cast a pall over every neighborhood unlucky to have one, so did they allow the soft-core audience to use these cinematic sexual aids in the privacy of their own homes...
...Who's better...
...Like a seducer who talks a woman into bed by promising he will still respect her in the morning, Hollywood was offering every possible inducement to desperate actresses to bare it all...
...a major Hollywood studio to pay her 14 cents to headline a film...
...And after the widespread introduction of cable television and VCRs into American households in the late 1970s and early '80s, movie theaters lost their monopoly on cinematic nudity...
...Nudity increasingly became the province of B movies: horror pictures in which naked women were paraded and then killed in gruesome ways, and teen sex comedies in which the successful conquest of a conveniently unclad beauty was the unironic reward for aggressively obnoxious behavior...
...And what do these shining examples of American maidenhood want...
...It exists merely to pay exorbitant and undeserved fees to its producers and its over-the-hill star, Sharon Stone, who evidently collected $14 million at a time when she couldn't get John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S movie critic...
...Basic Instinct became a sensation because it rides its mixed messages all the way to a daringly unrealized conclusion that leaves us in perpetual doubt as to who the real killer is...
...That playful trickery is entirely absent from this endless and lethargic sequel...
...By doing so, Hollywood was saying with its prizes, actresses were conforming to the highest standards of their art...
...It's lascivious and Puritanical in equal measure, a movie that says sex will probably kill you and, what's more, you'll deserve it...
...Of course, the era of high-toned nudity didn't last very long, as female stars began to wise up and realize they were being had...
...But man, what a way to go...
...Jonathan Yardley once said of a book he disliked that it was "so bad that it adds whole new universes of meaning to 'bad.'" Basic Instinct 2 doesn't quite sink to those infinite depths, in part because it makes no effort whatsoever to be good, or even minimally interesting...
...Hollywood threw nominations at films featuring nudity and actresses willing to shed their tops...
...Who's worse...
Vol. 11 • April 2006 • No. 29
