COLUMN: "Basic Instinks"

From Tim Farrell's "Speaking Strictly For Myself," Spring '92 I went because earlier that afternoon I dropped 500 bucks for a ticket to San Francisco and I figured, what better way to get psyched up for my big post-graduation move than to see some beautiful footage of the skyline, Golden Gate Bridge, Marin, Sausalito, crisp, cool blue skies and lush golden sunsets over the Pacific? I decided that instead of not going to see it, I would protest the movie by vowing never to spend a penny in the gay bar where they filmed the disco scene. I can't wait to live in San Francisco. Over one third of the city's population is gay, gays dominate city politics, they've got a domestic partners law, all sorts of anti-discrimination ordinances, nice weather, beautiful scenery; it's clean, safe and liberal. If you're gay and you want to live and work in a hassle-free, tolerant city, you can't beat wonderful Sodom-by-the-Bay. "Basic Instinct" was so-so. An extended version of a letter to Penthouse. There's this beautiful blonde babe who's a really fierce lay and she has this lesbian thing going on the side. She writes books about screwing men and then killing them, and the big mystery is whether or not she actually kills them in real life. There's some light S&M; involved -- she likes to tie her sexual partners to the bed with a white silk scarf -- but it's pretty mild compared to some of what really goes on in that town, so I'm sure most savvy Frisco residents yawned their way through it. I mean, there's Sharon Stone with her silk scarf, and then there's Baroness Freida, She-Dominatrix of Haight Street. Halfway through the movie I got bored, so I killed time looking for the scenes the gay community was protesting. Of course, there's the whole premise of having a bisexual killer; and then Sharon Stone's female lover tries to run down Michael Douglas with her Porsche after he calls her a man, so there's your killer lesbian. I don't know about straight audiences, but by the time she tries to run him down I had no sympathy for him. Calling a killer lesbian a man isn't a very smart thing to do. Then there was Michael Douglas. I don't think the gays were protesting him and -- aside from his run-in with the killer lesbian -- he doesn't seem all that homophobic in the movie. He gave a good performance -- not worth the $15 million he got for doing the film, but he did O.K. His appearance in "Wall Street" and "Fatal Attraction" plus the recent voice-overs he's been doing in those Infiniti J-30 commercials have earned him a certain white-male-yuppie-power-asshole image, which becomes especially tiring if you go to Penn and are already surrounded by pre-white-male-yuppie-power-assholes driving Infiniti J-30s. After a while, the movie actually was beginning to irritate me on a political level, but I stuck around because the audience was sort of a fun bunch: they were screaming and hollering about Sharon Stone and her icepick and whether or not she was the killer. I felt particularly sorry for Michael Douglas because the audience just didn't buy his sex symbol charade. At one point in the movie, he gets up out of bed and is shown naked with his back to the camera -- looking geriatric to say the least. The three women behind me hollered ruthlessly, "Cover it up!", "Airbrush that saggy butt!" and "Where's the body double?" I thought the heterosexuality in the movie was kind of interesting. I don't see heterosexuality, you know, played out all that often, so it was sort of fun to see how straight folks do it in the '90s. I confess total ignorance on the subject. I sometimes stare at late night L.A. dating shows, 1-900 number commercials, Smokey Joe's and South Street bars, wondering what it's like to be straight. I wondered how many straight women tie up their boyfriends like Susan Stone tied up Michael Douglas. I wondered how the female shrink in the movie felt about Michael Douglas slamming her up against a wall, ripping what looked like a pretty expensive shirt to shreds and then screwing her like an animal over a chair in the living room. I was watching the movie with two gay friends, and I whispered, "Did she enjoy that?" They were similarly puzzled, but one remarked, "Too bad about the shirt." Overcome suddenly with professional insight, the woman shrink exclaims, "You weren't making love to me just then!" That clued us in a bit. Then she tells him to leave, so we decided she really wasn't satisfied by the encounter. My friend pointed out, "She definitely didn't come." Of course, whenever there's sex, gay men are trained to think: condoms. There weren't any in "Basic Instinct," which aroused my curiosity. The April 1992 issue of Penthouse Magazine -- which I'll unscientifically cite here as a rough barometer of the straight swinger set -- contains a group sex scene featuring two men and one woman in a stable, entitled "Galloping Gonads." No condoms there, either. But in the "Forum" section of the same issue, two stories out of seven were semi-safe sex fantasies which specifically mentioned condoms. And, paradoxically, the issue also contained a fiction story by Robin Hardy entitled "Final Exit," about a gay man dying of AIDS. So I wondered: are straights being careful or what? (For the record, they ran a pictorial of two lesbians in the April issue as well: no icepicks, no condoms.) If I were Michael Douglas or the killer lesbian in "Basic Instinct," I would've been more frightened by Sharon Stone's bodily fluids than her icepick. Her character's sexual history is a part of the plot, and we learn that she had repeated intercourse with a famous boxer and a nightclub owner. Call me presumptuous, but famous athletes and nightclub owners aren't known for their monogamy. Add up all the herpes and AIDS statistics in California, and "Basic Instinct" becomes an epidemilogical mess. (But of course, if you want to be entertained by stories of HIV-infected homosexual psycho-killers, just read The Philadelphia Inquirer. It's been done to death.) So that was my trip to see "Basic Instinct." Do I protest the movie? Yeah, I suppose. Protesting probably generated more ticket sales, but it still did the trick of getting the world to think about Hollywood's vapid homophobia. I oppose "Basic Instinct" just as Italians oppose the way they're always portrayed as gangsters and Mafiosi. If Hollywood thinks it's going to sell, they'll make it anyway. One thing that surprised me is the fact that gay men helped this movie get off the ground. It wasn't covered in Philadelphia newspapers, but it was widely reported in California that they were heavily involved. Gay male bar owners tried to get the club scene filmed in their bars, the publisher of a major gay newspaper in San Francisco provided the place for the final shoot, and a closeted gay film mogul in Hollywood was largely responsible for getting the project off the ground. They deserve a few jeers for making the damn movie as well. Tim Farrell is a senior American Civilization and Religious Studies major from Boston, Massachusetts. "Speaking Strictly For Myself" appeared alternate Thursdays.

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