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Basic Instinct? Basic ideology!

Basic Instinct, the chart topping film in Britain and the USA, is about sex and violence. Nothing unusual about that. But it is also the latest in a string of big-budget Hollywood releases which are ramming home a reactionary message for the 1990s. The permissive society of the 1960s and 1970s has, it is suggested, gone too far. A new culture of female independence, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality and hostility to the established model of family is undermining the very fabric of society; that is the message of Basic Instinct.

The treatment of women’s sexuality in film is an important indicator of attitudes in society as a whole. Of course mainstream cinema, as with all other media, closely follows the prevailing ideology in society—the ideology of the ruling class. Women in film are largely portrayed as vulnerable, weak, dependent on men both sexually and socially. But from the 1960s onwards more liberal attitudes began to make an appearance.

By the mid to late-1980s the pattern was changing in line with the moral backlash under Reagan. In Fatal Attraction, a well adjusted male yuppie has casual sex with Glenn Close. Her sexual obsessiveness is rapidly transformed into a murderous assault on the hero and his idyllic young family. She makes it abundantly clear that he will not be allowed to have his fun in a one-night stand and then walk away without taking the consequences. In a clear metaphor for the threat posed by HIV, Close’s character became the virus, endangering and undermining her victim’s career, relationship, security.

Promiscuity equals breakdown of family equals death was the message. The film may have been a crude attack on sexually liberated attitudes, but it was no less effective for it.

Michael Douglas, the hero of Fatal Attraction, returns as the main character in Basic Instinct. He is again confronted by a female killer with an interest in extra-marital sex.

A series of coital murders are graphically displayed, although the sex and violence are only rarely gratuitous given that they make up the very theme of the film. Douglas himself gets his kit off as the menopausal killer cop assigned the job of tracking down the murderess. Prime suspect is Sharon Stone, a rich writer/top psychology graduate who lives in a fantastically opulent apartment and is in league with a sinister older murderess who exerts a strange power over her.

The film is notable for its treatment of female bisexuality. When I saw it, the first embrace between Sharon Stone and her lesbian lover brought groans of disgust from around the packed cinema—but the voices were all female. The men in the audience were silent, settling down to watch a scene designed for their titillation rather than as a positive representation of sex between women.

In the USA lesbian and gay organisations have picketed the film, wrongly seeking to impose censorship because of the manner in which lesbianism is portrayed. But opposition to censorship should not prevent socialists from recognising the virulently anti-homosexual prejudices that the film peddles.

When Michael Douglas addressed Stone’s jealous lesbian partner “man to man”, the Streatham Odeon exploded into cheers and laughter. Lesbians in the audience must have been sickened and terrified at this public abuse.

All this follows hot on the heels of Silence of the Lambs, in which the deeply sick serial killer is . . . a gay male transvestite. No matter how many Hollywood directors solemnly swear that their villains “just happen” to be gay, the message is clear. Whilst all statistics indicate that a tiny minority of sexual attacks and murders are carried out by gay men, and still fewer by lesbians, the most powerful film industry in the world is persistently suggesting the opposite, linking homosexuality to criminal violence and mental illness.

Basic Instinct attempts an ambiguous ending. As the closing credits go up, you may still be wondering which of the film’s four female bisexual promiscuous maniacs was the criminal. If you’re sensible, you may not care.

But at the level of ideology, the film is unambiguous. Women’s independence, free choice of sexual partners, sex for pleasure instead of procreation, women’s control over their own bodies: all of these signs of human progress become threatening, criminal and perverse rather than liberatory and enlightening.

Overall, the film is an attempt to convince its mass audience that the spiritual malaise of US society is related not to economic decline, to abundance in the midst of poverty, to formal equality alongside sexual oppression and violence. Instead it attributes it to the liberation of lesbians, gays and women.

The film certainly gives us images of “strong” women. But it is a strength that warps and destroys, not liberates. You don’t have to be a prude, support censorship or pretend not to have enjoyed Basic Instinct to recognise it as a thoroughly reactionary film.

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