Beaver Shots, Bunny Boilers, and Bad HR: Revisiting Michael Douglas' Sex Trilogy

Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and Disclosure all reveal some ugly truths about male insecurity in the late '80s and early '90s.

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Something funny happened to Michael Douglas back in the late '80s—he became the cinematic epitome of male insecurity in America. For a seven year stretch, from 1987 and 1994, Douglas starred in three enormously successful movies: Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and Disclosure, a set he's referred to as his Sex Trilogy. Together they offer a peek into the subconscious of the heterosexual white American man, a kind of dossier you might label "Things Men Worried About Re: Women in the Late '80s-Early '90s."

Behind the frazzled figure of Douglas in each movie lurks a dangerously crazy woman who threatens to destroy our man's life as he knows it. Glenn Close, Sharon Stone, and Demi Moore take turns tormenting Douglas, but they aren't the only problems. Each film is like a slice of exposed brain tissue, and the synapses are all raw and inflamed because of powerful women, confusing sexuality, people of color, real estate to covet, and promotions thwarted—just to name a few.

To Douglas' credit, he emerged from this murky period to do things like hunt lions in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), and, more recently, breathe life into an unforgettable depiction of Liberace in Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra (2013). However, that doesn't alter the content of the Sex Trilogy. Opening the dossier in 2014, as Complex deputy editor Ross Scarano and contributing writer La Donna Pietra did, gives way to some ugly and edifying findings. It also makes you wonder where the sex in American movies has gone. Time for a deep dive.

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Fatal Attraction (1987)

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After director Adrian Lyne finished tinkering with the end of Fatal Attraction, Paramount unleashed it on feminists and potential philanderers on September 18, 1987. The film's portrayal of a family man's (Michael Douglas) weekend indiscretion with the walking embodiment of borderline personality disorder (Glenn Close) scared the bejeepers out of viewers to the tune of $320M worldwide. Along the way, it scored six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won the enmity of rabbit owners everywhere.

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Ross: R.I.P. Whitey, a cute rabbit in a film that was, surprisingly, full of adorable moments. (See also: Quincy the dog and Ellen, one of the most adorably androgynous children in movie history.)

But Fatal Attraction isn't a celebration of a cute family and its many animals, it's a horror movie. However, reading reviews from when the film debuted, I'm fascinated by how many critics seem annoyed that it's a horror movie. Roger Ebert writes about how FA becomes Friday the 13th in the final moments, destroying what was, for him I guess, an otherwise adult and psychologically-astute character drama. But is that what's really going on in FA?

In Ebert's defense, the first ~30 minutes don't feel like a horror movie. But when the weekend fling turns dark, the dutch angles come out and stylistically we're not in, like, Ordinary People territory anymore. Alex cuts her wrists and smears blood on Dan's face, sending Dan running around her apartment, and then there's that big juicy canted shot of a bloody Dan as he shreds fabric to bandage her up. This is the first of a number of formal tip-offs (more Dutch angles later in the movie, the cross cutting during the bunny scene and the roller coaster ride, and the use of first person POV for Alex when she spies on the family) that shout horror movie.

But it seems like a number of critics didn't want to hear that. They thought they were watching something nuanced and probing. Which is where the conversation turns fishy, right? Since it seems endorsing this movie as insightful and psychologically astute up until the real horrorshow finale means co-signing a pretty gross example of a "bitches be crazy" film (a genre that includes sorry stuff like Shutter Island and Inception)?

LDP: My guess would be that we want our horror movies to be metaphorical, not literal. We don't want to acknowledge that some of the scariest things aren't supernatural or otherwise neatly tucked away into genre films/fiction but the awful things that can happen in real life. Make one dumb mistake, lose your family. (And hello, it was 1987, height of the AIDS epidemic; WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE NOT USING CONDOMS WITH YOUR ONE-NIGHT STANDS?)

And yes indeed, Alex is a certifiably crazy bitch, but acknowledging that she's crazy when she's insisting that Dan "take responsibility" puts the viewer in some interesting territory, given the weird amalgamation of conservative and liberal attitudes towards sex she embodies. On the one hand, she's a liberated no-strings-attached kind of lady, who can have sex for pleasure because she wants to, and then promptly turns into a kid-obsessed exceedingly-strings-attached woman who might as well have voted for Reagan.

I had forgotten that this was one of the few movies in recent memory to have a character actually say the word "abortion," and the way she reacts when Dan says it is both unnerving and oddly honest.

There's a whole lot of stuff about FA in Susan Faludi's Backlash, mostly involving the extensive rewrites Adrian Lyne did on the script to make it more conservative and family-centric (Beth doesn't kill Alex in the original, for instance). It's of a piece with some similar work he did on the 9 1/2 Weeks script, oddly enough.

Ross: And not just a one-night stand! He spent an entire weekend in Alex's apartment (located conveniently—as far as ominous imagery goes—in Manhattan's ritzy meat & fire district)!

Speaking of 9 1/2 Weeks, can we talk about the sex scenes? I'm particularly interested in the ways the first sex scene echoes the genuinely harrowing scene when Dan attacks Alex in her apartment. The camera movement and editing becomes frantic in both, and the action occurs in the kitchen. They both involve running water from the sink, too. In the sex scene, the running water is playful and (I guess?) erotic for the pair.

During the attack, Alex turns on the faucet to drink after Dan nearly strangles her to death. Those rhyming sequences link the sex to the violence, and make it feel like the film needs you to know that they both have to pay for their weekend. Considering this alongside the film's lack of a sex scene between Dan and Beth painted FA as conservative for me, and not sex positive. Dan and Beth's home never seems to be a space with much erotic potential; it's entirely domestic, with the child and the damn dog in the way. (I got the sense that maybe Dan would never have slept with Alex had the dog not screwed up his chances when he and Beth return from the party.)

There's also some very paint-by-numbers conservative stuff going on with the film's treatment of the urban vs. the suburban. Two minor moments jumped out at me: when Dan's nearly hit by a car trying to cross a street and the random shot of Ed Koch on TV talking about some ghastly business with a Taser. Get out of the city if you want to keep your family and your life.

What are your feelings about the film's attempts at developing Alex, the details about her father, her miscarriage, and her desire to have a child before she gets too old? It felt like the film wanted to legitimize her behavior. But, of course, the filmmakers weren't ultimately interested in her; this is Dan's movie. The only solo Alex we get is the scene where she turns the light on and then off over and over again in her apartment, listening to Madama Butterfly, and the scene where she stalks around Dan and Beth's suburban home, before vomiting in some bushes. Alex is a difficult, confusing character, and I don't think the filmmakers had any idea, really, what they were doing with her, writing-wise. Glenn Close is awesome, though.

LDP: That sex scene was bizarre not only because of the random water splashing (that looks like it would get chilly fast) but also Dan's goofy schlumping around with his pants around his ankles. For a movie about intense erotic passion leading a happily married man into temptation, it makes him out to be kinda pathetic. He can have The Sex or The Family, but not both (heavens, no), and Ellen's more of a cockblocker than the dog is. It's also worth noting that I think this is the heaviest I've ever seen Michael Douglas.

Lyne really likes wet clothing as an erotic signifier, now that I think about it, between Flashdance and the refrigerator scene in 9 1/2 Weeks. Some of that may be practical—it's a good way to show the outlines of body parts without actually showing them, though he's perfectly happy showing those too. Boobs! Butts! I had practically forgotten what they looked like outside of HBO shows.

Re: the urban vs. the suburban: when Beth remarked about "how much money we'll save not living in the city!" I wanted to yell, "Yes, but do you have any idea how much that apartment will be worth in 27 years?!" And of course, in 27 years, the Meat and Fire District would be subdivided up into North of Meat and Fire or something, and it would consist of nothing but lofts. (Alex is quite the trendsetter in this regard.)

The film doesn't develop Alex so much as identify all of her attributes as threatening or disturbing in some way. They aren't personality elements so much as they are red flags: lying about dead father, belief that she couldn't get pregnant, biological clock, etc. I did crack up at the "I'm 36!" line, but then I remembered just how aggro the media was at that point in time about convincing every single woman over the age of 30 that she was a dried-up husk incapable of ever knowing love and certainly never having any hope of motherhood, and I stopped laughing. The movie isn't just about male insecurity, though that's the majority of it.

Glenn Close totally brings it, though, and she deserved that Academy Award nomination for making Alex even remotely plausible. The character was rewritten so many times, it's amazing anything worked. For instance: The Madama Butterfly stuff was supposed to be more on-the-nose, as Alex killed herself by slashing her throat in the original ending. I approve of that change in this regard, if not any other.

Ross: Yo, there's one shot of Dan putting on his shirt in Alex's bed, and you can see he has genuine and drooping man boobs. Is it worth noting that I don't really understand Michael Douglas as a sex symbol at all? I don't see it in Basic Instinct, and I don't see it here, where he's even younger. I understand that he's got the sexy voice. But beyond that? He's a total schlub in this movie. He can't get his umbrella open, can't get the server's attention at the restaurant, can't get his freaking pants off. Yikes, Mike. What the hell is happening?

Re: red flags—yes. I guess I was being generous. Glenn Close basically lifted this spit-and-tape threadbare role up on her back and hulked it into the collective American imagination. She's magic. The look on her face when she's riding the roller coaster?

The change in ending is interesting, as it doesn't require Beth to shoot anyone. The film is makes the weekend of infidelity everyone's problem. No one is left unburdened in the wake of this. Maybe Quincy walks away okay. Maybe.

LDP: I get the impression that part of Douglas' appeal was his willingness to go bare-ass nekkid in roles like these. It's called "courageous" when dudes do it, after all. I'm not entirely certain that I get his status as a sex symbol, either, even if you go a lot younger (say, The China Syndrome), but I suspect part of it is genetic. Kirk Douglas, I understand.

It really is an acting tour de force on Close's part. The roller coaster, and the glances she gives him in the seduction scene in the I Come Here All the Time Restaurant of Futility. Sharon Stone wishes she did praying mantis that well.

Ah, but the test audience for the original ending did require Beth to shoot someone. According to Backlash, said audience had grown to hate Alex and wanted to see some retribution—but it couldn't be from Dan, since he bore a whopping portion of the blame. No, it had to be sinless, sexless Beth.

At least Quincy gets off the hook, but even he strayed and went running in the park with Alex! Whitey is the only innocent here.

Ross: One last stray thought: More than a little racism directed against Asian countries here, no? There are the jokes about bowing at the book release party, and then Dan makes some crack about his umbrella being made in Taiwan. Then the Japanese jokes return during the dinner party sequence. Is '87 too early for the "fear of Japan" insecurity that afflicted money-making Americans like Michael Crichton?

LDP: Nope, it is right on time for that sort of updated Yellow Peril nonsense. See also: Die Hard (1988). The Meat and Fire District also appears to border Chinatown.

Did you notice Dan's shame in the law library about possibly being overheard by the black law librarian? This is a super-white movie, and I don't just mean the color scheme.

Basic Instinct (1992)

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Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct hit theaters on March 20, 1992 and proceeded to gross $353M in theaters. (Sales figures do not include tickets for other movies bought by 14-year-old boys who then snuck into BI screenings.)

Its cultural reaction ran the gamut from Academy Award nominations (two, for the score and film editing) and a Golden Globe nomination (Sharon Stone, Best Actress) to Razzie nominations (three, for Stone, Michael Douglas, and Jeanne Tripplehorn). The film also provoked several high-profile gay rights protests and helped cement elements of a nascent bisexual rights movement due to its portrayal of Stone and Leilani Sarelle as murderous and untrustworthy bi/lesbian film cliches with great hair. The latter helped form the early '90s "bisexual chic" trend, to the vast annoyance of bisexual chicks everywhere.

Its enduring legacy remains, you know, That Scene.

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Ross: So. Wow. This movie is wildly incoherent, but my first reaction is I think a lot of it works as a parody of heterosexual men/heterosexual male fantasy/heterosexual male paranoia. Maybe I'm being too generous in my reading. (I'm on Team Starship Troopers and generally give Verhoeven the benefit of the doubt when it comes to questions of satire.)

LDP: I would fall on the side of "too generous," mostly because I saw it a couple of years after it came out in theaters, and I vividly remember the wildly enthusiastic dudely reaction to it. Which is not to say that it isn't a satire, but if it was, then Verhoeven was really off his game. The portrayal of women in particular falls under the heading of "standard Hollywood portrayal of bisexuals/sexually aggressive wimmenfolk." 

Ross: I hear that. But watching all the men gulp and sweat during the underwear-less interrogation, I really wanted to believe that I was being asked to laugh at these guys and their boners.

Couple that with all the incredibly over-the-top talk about how Nick has had his "brain fried by pussy," and I feel like I have enough evidence to make the case. But like you said, to do that requires overlooking the film's treatment of Catherine and her lover.

LDP: You might be laughing, but the original audience very definitely was not. Keep in mind: This was just before Internet porn was a thing, and an actual real live beaver shot in an R-rated movie that aired ad infinitum on late-night cable was OMIGOD THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER (according to all the guys in my homeroom, and a depressing number of somewhat older guys I've overheard discussing it over the years).

Rewatching it for the first time in two decades is fascinating, not least because I've realized how much of the movie is real estate porn of the highest degree. San Francisco was made to be the backdrop for movies. Shame nobody films there anymore. But yes, you are free to make that argument, and Eszterhas has made it easier for you than anyone else might have. Dear sweet Fillmore Avenue, but some of those lines are terrible.

It also gets into some interesting questions about satire and people not getting the joke. However, when nobody gets it, it ain't a functional satire.

Ross: That shot of Nick standing in the driveway of her beach house is as much about ogling the house as it is about peeping on Catherine while she moves about the space in the nude.

Nick's partner Gus helps bolster my satire argument, I think, especially the way he's suddenly connected to the Western and becomes a gross parody of a Cowboy, one of the ultimate signifiers of American masculinity. Gus also has the most ridiculous dialogue in the film, I think.

Of course, maybe my argument is ultimately a kind of fool's effort, since so many people seem to have watched it "straight," so to speak. Although, isn't that an imperfect critical science? For instance: Twitter provided ample evidence that Zero Dark Thirty was watched by people who walked away wanting to "torture terrorists." But I'd argue that that film is a more nuanced look at American failure than those Twitter timelines give it credit for. This also applies to Breaking Bad, and the "bad fans" who cheered on Walt until the end. Maybe it's about art that allows for misreading, since it seems to be that if an art object were so clear in its instructions to the viewer about how it should be watched, that it would be flimsy propaganda, a kind of totalitarianism.

LDP: And don't forget that Lotus! The whole movie is about desirable objects, some of whom just happen to be women.

I think a large part of the straight (ha ha) appeal of BI is that it so explicitly references Hitchcock in a non-parodic and obviously reverent way. I need to think about this more, though.

Ross: I think the most uncomfortable/difficult part of the BI conversation for me is that, by arguing for the movie as parody, I'm implicitly arguing for a way to "enjoy" it, which brings me maybe a little too close for my own comfort to the misogynistic horndog's appreciation for the film. I'm afraid that by arguing for a way to laugh at the film for all its straight maleness, I'm blinding myself to what the misogynistic horndog is also blind to. Like, the way the film paints bisexuality and homosexuality as crazy, and women as essentially murderous.

If to read the film as a satire, blindness to those failures is necessary, it's not worth reading it as satire, then, is it? (Of course, Camille Paglia seemed to have appreciated the movie. Not sure what I do with that fact.)

So, question: Is there anything to salvage from BI that go beyond its "snapshot of male fear in the 1990s" time-capsule qualities?

LDP: Nice things that could be said about BI:

1) The costumes are great. 1992 was not a good year for fashion, especially women's fashion, and nearly everything Sharon Stone wears is not only gorgeous but also relatively timeless. Ditto the makeup. Not too many movies manage to avoid being dated in either regard 22 years out.

2) It's beautifully shot. It looks like a Hitchcock movie, especially all those overhead shots.

3) The sexual politics are complicated somewhat in that Nick is an asshole, too, which is also the case in FA.

4) It's a relic of a time in which it was possible to make fairly graphic sex scenes integral to the plot of a movie and have it make a bajillion dollars in theaters. I'm not going to say that it does so in either a mature or an adult way, but that hasn't happened for about a decade and a half now. People prefer to watch graphic sexuality either as straight-up porn or premium cable (or, more recently, less-premium cable a la Spartacus), which is to say, in the privacy of their own homes in the company of someone with whom they want to watch nekkid people, not in a movie theater with strangers. This is the main reason why I am unconvinced that Fifty Shades of Grey will be the box-office juggernaut that everyone seems to assume.

I don't think that you're trying to come up with a justification for enjoying BI; if you like parts of it, just own 'em. I find it deeply interesting if problematic as hell, mostly because of the portrayal of lipstick lesbian/bisexuality that is just so over the top.

And it really does play nowadays like a comment on something, even though I still think those elements are just bad or titillating rather than intentional commentary at the time. That isn't sympathizing with misogynistic horndogs so much as it is responding to the extremely overt message of the film.

And it is a really handy snapshot of male insecurity in the early '90s.

Ross: To the list of nice things I would add:

5) Dialogue that, in 2014, can be drunk down as ripe and pulpy camp. Exhibit A: "Well, she got that magna cum laude pussy on her that done fried up your brain." Watching a gutsome and sloppy middle-aged man in a massive cowboy hat shout this line at his past-his-peak partner, seemingly in earnest, is awesomely bad and special. Also, the weird kinks of syntax in the line—"pussy on her" and "done fried up"—really sell it as a kind of object of ridicule. It's so unnatural, the line just sits there, leaden and radioactive.

6) It's very serious (lulz) about the possible murderous danger and definite intellectual prowess that comes with being a writer. Cheers to all of us who have taken up this pursuit.

And I would elaborate on three, saying:

3) Not only is he an asshole, Nick is perhaps deluded enough to think that his invitation into a monogamous life of fucking like minks is enough to persuade a murderous woman from not murdering. It's macho hubris turned up to 11, turned up so high that my brain sparked and short circuited while I watched it. How could this not be a big joke, I wondered, as the ice pick appears in the final shot and the credits roll. But I can't disagree that the movie is such a mess that it's hard to really define the something at the movie's center. I'll take my something as "points and laugh at sweaty older hetero men with boners" and own that.

And your point about four is an important one. The last time I watched graphic sex in a theater was Blue Is the Warmest Color, a movie that had its problems but one I like a lot all the same. But this was in New York, with a typical art-house crowd (though maybe one that skewed slightly younger, which is cool), and the movie didn't gross anywhere near a bajillion. Maybe this desire to try and explore or, at the very least, depict sex is the nicest legacy of the erotic thriller of the late '80s/early '90s?

LDP: 5) At least some of the actors recognized what sort of movie they were in and cheerfully just went with it. I still can't decide if Sharon Stone is one of them.

6) And the awesome homicidal capacity that stems from being a Lit major!

3) So, it occurs to me that you are onto something re: male hubris and that Verhoeven may in fact be critiquing the male gaze in general with that damn icepick. We're clearly supposed to identify with Nick earlier in the movie; everything is from his perspective (especially looking at Catherine). But by the time we get to the end and the rugrat speech, something big changes. For the first time, we see something that Nick doesn't (the icepick) and it serves to keep up that erotic tension for us, not for him.  It switches up the whole point of the movie: she doesn't exist for his consumption, but for ours, as 15 billion teenage boys figured out implicitly.  By telling us that he's 1) an idiot and 2) we know what's up, the icepick confirms the superiority of the audience.

Unfortunately, it does so in a super-regressive manner, and the net result of the critique is not "Don't do this to women because it sucks," but "Ha ha, look at how smart you are in comparison to this moron! By the way, that was totally Sharon Stone's magna cum laude pussy you saw. Yay!" For a movie about male insecurity, it's designed to reassure. Bleagh.

Disclosure (1994)

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Imagine, if you will, a movie asking for your outrage over a middle-aged white man getting passed over for a promotion in favor of a woman. Imagine that same movie bending your ear with a plea for really real talk about the double standard of sexual harassment. (The double standard being that when a man is harassed, no one will believe him.) Imagine that movie going on to gross $214 million, making it one of the most successful releases of the year, bigger even than Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction

Disclosure comes from the imagination of novelist and noted yellow-peril truther Michael Crichton. He wrote the novel in '92, just a year after Anita Hill testified that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Director Barry Levinson, a replacement for Milos Forman, brought Disclosure to the silver screen on December 9, 1994. Crichton was at the height of his commercial power then, thanks to the success of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Jurassic Park in 1993 and the premiere of a television series Crichton created called ER. It was the "writer/creator equivalent of an EGOT," as The Dissolve's Nathan Rabin puts it.

In Disclosure, Michael Douglas plays Tom Sanders, a middle-of-the-rung guy at a tech company named DigiCom. He's got a family, a nice home in Seattle, and, thanks to an important merger, is due for a big promotion. But what this squeaky-clean plan doesn't account for is Meredith Johnson, played by Demi Moore. She's a former flame of Tom's, and is being brought in for the job he wanted. 

Her first day on the job, she invites Tom to her office at the close of the day to talk. That's where things get complicated. The question of who acted inappropriately is the movie's big dilemma.

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Ross: I'm broken. Disclosure broke my brain. As someone who loves the possibilities of sound x moving pictures, someone who appreciates an insightful thought delivered via a crafted piece of art, someone who ultimately wants to respect people and places and things, I no longer know what to do with myself. Because I watched Disclosure last night.

Truly, I don't think the movie has a single redeeming quality. It thinks it's so fucking smart and provocative and brave enough to say what we (older white men) all know is true. This movie is the hottest of hot garbage.

The specifics:

Like FA, Disclosure opens with the scene of domestic bliss, preparing us for the assault on the bliss of this regular-type family, specifically its greaseball patriarch. Has Michael Douglas's hair ever looked worse? It was disgusting, especially when it was wet and the tendrils dripped on the back of his neck. Blech.

Back to the opening: I really loved that it's a long take of a living room without people in it. It's like, "Look at what this family owns! Don't you want this?" And then there's the business about how they'll be very rich if Tom gets this promotion. They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves without the promotion, tbh.

I love the inadvertent thesis that comes from the laughing-stock character on the ferry that Tom takes pity on. He says something like, "Used to have fun with the girls, now she wants your job." Ruh-roh. Tom doesn't listen to this guy, and so he becomes the prophet of doom everyone ignores before it's too late, before Demi Moore is asking you for a back rub.

I think my favorite part was when Michael Douglas as Tom is looking at himself in the mirror before his EOD meeting with Meredith. He takes off his sad, stained tie. He stares at his sagging face, maybe notices how extra flaccid his entire head/haircut is these days, and it's like he's thinking, "This is the end. My career as a sex symbol is over." I read it against the grain of the movie, which I guess was asking me to do something more like sympathize with Tom?

What sort of acid do you want to spit on this movie? How did you feel about the grossest seduction/sex scene I've maybe ever seen? Those two spouting off porn dialogue at each other was so uncomfortable and awful. The scene was also stupidly long.

I broke my arm once, and it was worse than Disclosure. That's the nicest thing I can say about this movie.

LDP: Hey, man. I warned you. Never let it be said that I don't have your best interests at heart, especially when it comes to terrible techno-thrillers masquerading as erotic thrillers. OOH BABY POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS AND MEDIATION HEARINGS.

One interesting thing about that long living room take: there's a bas-relief of Medusa's head over the fireplace which I didn't notice the previous time I watched this movie.

 

In addition to being a, um, unique interior decorating choice, it also parallels weirdly with a bas-relief of Pallas Athena in Tom's office. Basically, you've got your dangerous and overtly sexual femininity contrasted with cool rational asexual femininity, in the personas of Meredith and Catherine/Stephanie/Mrs. Sanders. (I don't know enough about Haida iconography to tell if any of the paintings in the background of various offices have similar meanings.)

Remember when I said that the early '90s were a dark time for fashion? Well, this movie is proof. Vests! The unstructured look! Viscose blends! That hairstyle, which was meant to convey the right combination of rebelliousness (length) and control (front with styling paste or wax or something giga-hold) but mostly just looks like a mullet got lost on Wall Street! Point in favor: BI.

And the thesis-spouting dude: Why, exactly, is an out-of-work conversation-inserter riding the ferry every day? He's basically representative of the entire movie in that regard as well: When scrutinized, absolutely nothing makes any sense. Not the dialogue, not the characters (extra-especially Meredith), and certainly not the plot. I imagine a law professor could use this film as a final exam and tell students to identify all of the legal and HR-related issues raised in a given fifteen-minute block, because yeesh.

But that sex scene. I'm not really comfortable calling it a sex scene; if the genders had been reversed, it would be a rape scene, no ambiguity at all. I get that the idea is that Tom is torn between passion and what passes for intellect (see: Medusa and Athena), but 1) Douglas is not selling it at all, and 2) the only real convincing element is that Demi Moore is hot. But the words coming out of her mouth bear no resemblance to anything anyone would ever say, not even in porn, and the whole thing is creepy as hell even out of context. The emphasis on oral sex as "not really sex" was no doubt reassuring for Bill Clinton several years later, but then the horror movie lighting raises the question of what that scene is, if it isn't sex.

The whole thing is definitely meant to reassure you, especially the part about how sexual harassment is just a game ginned up for other, more important things, the way that rational man can use technology to defeat evil temptress woman, and the bits at the end where Tom is revealed to be a perfectly nice guy who can take a joke—even when his assistant playfully smacks him on the butt with a file!—and is just fine and dandy having a woman for a boss, so long as she's reassuringly maternal and therefore not sexual at all. A friend indeed.

Nice things that can be said about Disclosure: It would make for a hilarious double feature with either The Hunger Games or Catching Fire, because Donald Sutherland did not change a thing from Bob Garvin to President Snow. That's a thing, at least. I'm having trouble coming up with another.

Seattle doesn't come off half as well as either San Francisco or New York, the whole thing looks cheaper, and Demi Moore may be outclassed in the femme fatale department by even Sharon Stone.

Ross: Something I want to add: virtual-reality filing cabinet chase. That has to be the nadir of suspense in techno-thrillers.

Parting Thoughts

Ross: Which of the movies do you find the most interesting? Is it the one you think is the most polished? I know for me it isn't. I think, of these three, Fatal Attraction is the most holistically well constructed, if you can look beyond the basic premise. Like you said in an earlier email to me, it works great as a horror movie. It's suspenseful, well acted—and not just by Close, either; Douglas is pretty great, too—and beautifully shot.

But I think Basic Instinct is the one I most want to revisit or show to friends. Partially because I find it so funny in parts, and partially because it's so ridiculous. It's the most appealing part of Verhoeven's stuff, the craziness, and the sense of loss because most directors working with big budgets right now, making movies that lots of people in the country will see, aren't doing anything nearly as unhinged.

Where do you still see the influence these films? Is there something analogous happening in our current decade? What's reflecting fears in the American unconscious right now, the way that these movies reflected what straight older men were really afraid of in the late '80s/early '90s?

I, for one, would like to program a double feature of Spring Breakers and 12 Years a Slave, my two favorite movies from last year, movies that both come at race in America in strong, distinct ways. Of course, both of those movies are good and smart in their own ways. They do work.

Maybe a better analogy for the Sex Trilogy would be movies like the Red Dawn remake and Olympus Has Fallen, two nu-Yellow Peril movies, both directed at North Korea. But those films didn't have the kind of buzz or make the kind of money that Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and even Disclosure, made.

Maybe our Time Capsule movies are 9/11-recreation porn like Man of Steel and The Avengers.

LDP: It depends on how you define "interesting." Of the three, I was most interested in revisiting FA, mostly because I remembered it as pretty decent. As you noticed, it took some effort to force myself to watch Disclosure. BI... I dunno. It's one thing to watch it analytically for a discussion like this, but I don't think it's something I'd ever show to friends or revisit for entertainment purposes. There's just too much ick involved, and I still feel that it's too straight, in every sense of the word.

In terms of influence, it's definitely FA; Glenn Close apparently still gets random men telling her that she scared the ever-loving shit out of them in that movie. Hardly anyone remembers anything about Disclosure except that it was bad and BI has been reduced to a beaver-shot punchline in the collective conscious, near as I can tell. I am grateful that it doesn't seem to be feasible to make such nakedly sexist movies any more, at least.

See, I didn't think Spring Breakers dealt with race very well at all, though it clearly hit a lot of buttons re: young female sexuality, which I have already expounded upon at great length. (I haven't had a chance to see 12YaS yet, unfortunately.)

Probably the most analogous movies today are those that address American insecurity re: race, though not well and mostly in the vein of reassuring white people (mostly women, now that I think about it) that things are actually okay and they are not bad people: The Blind Side, The Help, Crash, etc. This isn't new, either, but what does seem to be new is that a wider swath of the population is recognizing them for what they are. That wasn't the case back in the day with the Sex Trilogy, but they've made comparable money and done much better in terms of awards. I would hazard a guess that it can be broken down to the difference between guilt and anger (which is weird, because as a society, we definitely feel way more guilt about sex than race issues).

Ross: I genuinely love Spring Breakers, chiefly because I have a different response to it every time I watch it. (I've probably seen it four or five times now.) The first two times, I focused mainly on the film's engagement with race. The very first time, I was made so uncomfortable by the movie I thought I hated it. But the second time I found that discomfort useful, and what became very important was that it's a movie about white people killing black people and then calling their parents to talk about needing a break from fun. They get to walk away from the massacre. That registered in a very powerful, meaningful way for me. Now when I watch the movie, I find myself more and more sympathetic to the friendship between the young women, am moved by it. Of course, this makes the movie's ending more complicated, but in ways that I dig thinking about it and trying to work through.

I just spent the last few minutes looking at box office returns for the last decade and am having a hard time drawing conclusions, based on just the top 20 or so highest grossing films, that go beyond studio fixations on sequels and franchises. They really do make more money than anything. Couldn't find The Blind Side or The Help anywhere near the top. I do think you're right, though, in that the analogous films are the ones seeking to soothe white concerns about race in America.

One last thought—and this is something you spoke about earlier—is how few of the big, important movies of the last decade have sex scenes. I think of the rise of filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, whose worldview doesn't even seem to accommodate the idea that sex is a thing that happens. He made a movie about dreams that didn't have anything to do with sex, somehow. (I really dislike Nolan, but that's another story.)

There are exceptions, but many are films that are far from being sex positive. I'm thinking of Munich and its astoundingly bad sex scene, the one that connects the act to the bloodshed at the Munich Olympics.

When was the last time I saw a sex scene in an American movie that was meant to approximate something like the erotic? Last year's The Spectacular Now has a very candid, sweet sex scene between two young characters, but it's doing a different kind of work. I'm blanking on anything more.

LDP: I love SB to bits (as you probably figured out already). It's the only movie I own two copies of (one iTunes, one Blu-ray) because I couldn't wait for my physical copy to arrive in the mail prior to rewatching it. That isn't to say that I don't have big problems with it, but they're interesting big problems. Plus there's Vanessa Hudgens in a bikini.

Well, okay, but you can find Avatar at the top, and that's totally the White (Blue) Man's Burden rendered large and pretty, and it has the same reassuring vibe and resultant criticism.

The last American movie I saw in a theater that had a sex scene was Cloud Atlas, and I thought it was both well-done and relevant to the characters and themes, which is what makes them work narratively rather than just being titillating (for me, at least). I didn't think Munich's was all that bad just as a sex scene, but you're right that it was jarring contextually. They really are box-office poison these days, it seems. (CA had other, bigger problems when it came to making bank, though.) Heck, Avatar had a sex scene, but it was cut (and I haven't worked up the interest in checking out the special features). But yes, that was one thing Inception was missing in a big way, not least because of the presence of Tom Hardy. Nolan likes his sex subtextual if at all; for a movie with so little sex, the scenes between JGL and TH sure have inspired a lot of slash.

Ross: Three cheers for that slash correction.

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