Paul Verhoeven's American Quartet

I peaked in the 1990s. Just as everything in the 20th century happened in the 1970s, everything happened for me in the 1990s.

The 1990s was America's decade and came at the end of the American Century -- but more symbolically, at the end of its rival Russia's "communist" counter-narrative, a program that played out in Eastern Europe, parts of Africa, South-East Asia and an island in the Caribbean. 

If I was asked what filmmaker captured America best in the 1990s, who would I say? Robert Altman? I love Altman, but not on this topic. Martin Scorsese? No. Kubrick? No. The filmmaker who made the most important "American" films of the 1990s is Paul Verhoeven. I would even go so far as to call Robocop (1987), Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997) the "American Trilogy" for all these films have to tell us about American domestic policy, late-capitalism and foreign policy, respectively.

The one Hollywood film of Verhoeven's I had never seen until last night is Basic Instinct (1992). Why it took so long is beyond me. Part of it could be Michael Douglas, an actor I don't enjoy looking at (wasn't Bill Pullman available?). But then, I enjoy looking at Sharon Stone, so the question of talent is a wash. Maybe it has to do with how certain images and scenes from the film have come to stand in for the whole film -- in a way that makes me feel like I've seen the film and don't need to see it again, in long-form. But now that I've seen it ...

Basic Instinct has its place in my American Trilogy (American Quartet now) for what it tells us about gender relations, albeit white, middle-class heterosexual gender relations, or the last days of strictly white, middle-class heterosexual gender relations. Could the film be re-made today with BIPOC leads? Basically, but that's beside the point.

Pictured up top is less a grab from a scene than a grab from a view of monitors that show Sharon Stone's character passing a lie detector test. The "scene" comes immediately following the film's infamous interrogation scene, where it is the interrogators who are made to feel uncomfortable, not the murderer's Sharon Stone. Of the five male interrogators, Douglas's character registers lowest on the General Acute Response Continuum of Intimidated-Aroused (GARCIA), while lead interrogator Wayne Knight's character (Knight is best-known for playing Newman on Seinfeld) is, necessarily, a preposterous exaggeration. Taken together, that is America in the 1990s.