Sinful Sundays: Catherine Tramell and the Deadly Queer Women of "Basic Instinct"
Sharon Stone's icy bisexual queer is deadly with words, and and ice pick, and she's joined by a cadre of similarly perilous dames.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
Warning: Spoilers are ahead!
Few filmmakers have courted controversy as assiduously as Paul Verhoeven, but even so, the uproar over his neo-noir/erotic thriller Basic Instinct was something to behold. Many were outraged by the scene in which Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell flashes her vulva during an interrogation–a scene which has indelibly etched itself into the popular imagination–but it also earned the opprobrium of many in the queer community. The latter were disturbed by the film’s association of bisexuality with murderous female intent and and, given the anti-LGBTQ fervor that was very much a part of the cultural fabric at the time, one can well understand such dislike.
If you haven’t seen it, the film follows your expected ‘90s neo-noir plot arc. When a former rock star is murdered with an ice pick while having sex, suspicion falls on his lover, novelist Catherine Tramell. Michael Douglas’ Detective Nick Curran is soon on the case, but he falls deeper into Tramell’s wiles, his fascination with her born out of both fear and desire. At the same time, he also comes to believe something is not quite right with his on again/off again supposed “good girl” lover, Police Psychologist Dr. Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn).
Looking back on it, there is something deliciously subversive about Catherine. Like so many other queer villains who have graced both the large and the small screens, she commands the gaze as much as she is the object of it. Moreover, she manages to not only pursue her desires with abandon–having affairs with both men and women–she also manages to win in the end (if ending up with Michael Douglas’ Nick Curran can be considered winning).
Part of Catherine’s appeal certainly stems from Stone’s undeniable screen appeal. With her blonde hair and her cheekbones that are as sharp as the icepick that she wields with wild abandon, she’s the epitome of screen goddess bitch. Like so many of the other femmes fatales that have populated the noir imagination she is far more in control of the situation than the man who sets out to investigate her. There’s a fierce and cunning glint in her eye from the very first, when Nick arrives at her lovely seaside house and sees her on the deck wrapped in a sweater and (of course) smoking a cigarette. While anyone else might be intimidated by the police as they question her, she is utterly and ruthlessly in command. As one writer says, she’s almost smirking as she parodies their questions.
Catherine is also someone who enjoys indulging her desires, both because doing so brings her pleasure and because doing so gives her power over others. She seems to particularly enjoy taunting Nick with the presence of her lover, Roxy, who not only looks more than a little like Catherine but also has a murderous past. Indeed the film goes out of its way to highlight the extent to which death and desire (particularly same-sex desire) are wedded in Catherine, and she seems drawn again and again to women who have killed. She loves to flirt with danger and violence, and even her sex with Nick is more than a little aggressive, as she leaves wicked claw marks down his back. Queer desire, straight desire, violent desire…they’re all caught up and swirled together into a heady and toxic mélange.
Of course, Catherine isn’t the only dangerous queer woman moving through this world. There is, of course, Roxy, whose killer instincts and jealousy lead her to try to run Nick over with a car. And then there’s Dr. Beth Grant who is, arguably, even more dangerous than Catherine because on the surface she looks so traditionally feminine and “normal” (in noir terms she’s the good girl who exists in opposition to the femme fatale). And yet she, too, is a creature of lies and deceit, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest she is an obsessional killer. Like many other dangerous femmes in the history of Hollywood, Beth is sinister precisely because she isn’t legible as queer. It’s not even until the very end that we learn about the nature of her own lies and deception, and even then there are still many things that remain unexplained. Queer women, whether butch or femme or something in-between are terrifyingly and delectably unknowable.
Now it is important to note that the film itself seems to want us to buy into Nick’s perspective. Once again, star text is important here, since by this point Michael Douglas was indeed a very big Hollywood star, and he was particularly adept at playing men who are put-upon and tormented by women with bottomless desire (who could forget, for example, his beleaguered adulterer in Fatal Attraction?) For most of the film we are forced to stay with him as he pursues Catherine. At the same time, even by the ugly misogynist standards of the 1990s, Douglas’ Nick is a dick, even going so far as to rape his Beth after getting frustrated by his encounters with Catherine. It’s a horrifying scene, made all the worse by the fact that neither the film nor the characters seem to want to offer any further commentary on it.
From a 2024 standpoint all of this is quite egregious and disgusting behavior, if unsurprising. However, I don’t think it takes a backward looking approach to see the ways in which the film’s misogyny is often undercut by its own logic. Not only is Nick not a particularly good detective–there are a myriad of things wrong with getting involved with the subject of an investigation–but he’s also a sitting duck for Catherine’s predations. Most fatal of all, perhaps, is the fact that he’s just not that interesting, certainly not when compared to Catherine, who steals the show any time the two are on-screen together.
Then there’s the infamous final scene, when Nick and Catherine are in bed (again), and for a perilously few moments it seems likely that Catherine is going to reward his vision of their future together with a stabbing with an ice pick. It’s pure noir melodrama, filled with pregnant tension and a score that verges on absolute hysteria, as we’re left wondering whether she is going to go through with it or not. Ultimately Catherine decides against it–cuddling up to him once again–but the very last shot, however, shows an icepick laying dangerously beneath the bed. By this point we’ve seen just what a misogynist asshole Nick is, and I daresay there were many people in the audience–gay, bi, and otherwise–who would have cheered had Catherine finally given him the ultimate reward for his misogyny.
Is Basic Instinct a good film? I’m honestly not even sure at this point. It is very much a product of its time, exploiting the pervasive (and very sleazy) misogyny of the ‘90s and the decade’s obsession with neo-noir as a genre, with all of the excess and hysteria and hyperbole (and excess nudity) that such obsessions entail. There are some plot points that don’t really make a great deal of sense–are we supposed to believe that Beth was the real murderer the whole time? If so, then why does Catherine have the ice pick at the end?--but ultimately the film continues to entrance because of the powers of Catherine and her fellow queer women. As the icepick at the end reminds us, Catherine at least is far from tamed. Having survived when her fellow queers have been shuffled off the mortal stage, she is still there, waiting, ready to let her deadly libido out into the world again.