The Bechdel Cast - Basic Instinct with Sarah Marshall

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Sexy novelists and possible murderes Caitlin, Jamie, and special guest Sarah Marshall discuss Basic Instinct!(This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast.Follow @Remember_Sarah on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing.

They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts what happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on i am going to share my journey of how i went from christianity to now a hebrew israelite for some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns and church. Voila! You got straight away. They try to save everybody.

Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated Crooks Everywhere unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. on the Bechdel cast the questions asked if movies have women in them are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands or do they have individualism the patriarchy's effing vast start changing it with the Bechdel cast hey Jamie hey Caitlin I have an idea for a new podcast that I want you to co-host with me. Okay. Yeah, no, I'm in. Great, because here's what it's going to be. It will be me describing how I will murder my lovers. Okay. And then when my lovers end up dead in like a year or so, this podcast will be my alibi because I'm not going to be so foolish as to kill my lovers in the exact same way I described on this podcast oh okay yeah okay so I mean and and honestly because you got so close to my face while you were telling me that I believe you and also

I'm in love with you perfect and don't worry I will not frame you or anything oh no you would no because what we have is real as opposed to all the others i'm not like the other boys i'm i'm michael douglas great kiss kiss i'm katherine zeta jones's i honestly i there was like a world in which i was going to try to go through this whole episode referring to Michael Douglas as Catherine Zeta-Jones' husband. That's how I think of him. Welcome to the Bechdel cast. My name is Jamie Loftus. My name is Caitlin Durante.

And this is our show where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point. But you know what the Bechdel test is? I jumping off point. But you know what the Bechdel test is? I don't. Because I do. Can you tell me? Well, it is a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test. A lot of different versions of it. The one we use requires that a piece of media have two characters with names of a marginalized gender talking to each other about something other than a man for two lines of dialogue and it should be a sort of meaningful interaction you know it when

you see it and you know we've we've we've got it we've got kind of a car it's complicated today everything Everything is complicated today. It's a very complicated day. Yes. Here on the Bechdelcast. Do you remember that Facebook? Did you ever have that? Oh, it was like a relationship status?

I loved that. That's so inviting conflict that you have to respect it. I don't have the personality to publicly declare it's complicated, but there were plenty of teenagers who did. Oh, wow. Yeah, they'd be like, it's complicated with Chris R. They were like doing it in earnest, because everyone I saw who put that it was like a joke. It would be like, it's complicated with my BFF tee hee hee joke, joke, joke. Oh, right. Yes. No, no. When you're 14, it's serious. Okay, sure, sure.

It really is complicated because you don't even understand what's happening to your body. So everything, even if it's going great and you're in a relationship, it's still complicated. Fair. Yeah. Anyways, welcome to the Vipelcast. We're talking about basic instinct today. Yeah. Long time request. And we were simply waiting for the perfect guest to come along and here she is yes let's get her let's get her in the mix she is the host of you're wrong about podcast and the co-host of you are good podcast it's sarah marshall hi welcome this is what i how are we going to talk about this movie like it just defies

what is it yeah i don't know it is so i've i've read so many takes that my brain started leaking out of my nose there doesn't seem to be any right or i mean this is true of every movie but like this one in particular it's like there's just no right answer it doesn't seem like everyone's got a different take we hate it we love it we're reclaiming it we're putting it in the trash it's good it's bad we don't know it's empowerment for women it's horrible for women yeah it's it's every take on every end of the spectrum it's anti-cop we don't know we don't know i'll tell you what we know it is it was a three million dollar screenplay that is one thing that is known what a thing to know which is absurd and which is more than sharon stone got paid to be in the movie she only got paid five hundred thousand dollars to be in

this movie right which is like obviously good money but not for what she fucking did also this screenplay was written in 13 days which makes so much sense they're like right right and the budget was 49 million dollars and only 500,000 of that went to the lead of the movie that makes me feel very bad there there's so much i mean there's also not only is there a ton to talk about about the content but there's so much to talk about about behind the scenes some of it i mean we'll just see where this goes because there's like some things that aren't necessarily relevant to the topic of this show that I was sort of still like what the fuck I just wrote so much stuff down every fact I learned was scarier than the last right yeah I think this episode may just

be as chaotic as the movie itself that sounds great we'll see I'm very excited to talk about it and I feel like this discussion honestly I I hope it will be clarifying for me because i'm all over the place i did enjoy watching it it's highly entertaining yeah or is it i don't know sometimes i'm like i'm bored it's over two hours long why isn't this a half hour shorter it's taking itself very seriously which is a flaw that girls doesn't have but like one of my favorite things about this movie is that we have two women famously and to distinguish them from each other and create some symbolism, one wears beige clothing

and the other wears brown clothing. It's, I mean, how else were you supposed to tell high status white women apart in the 90s? It's the only way you could do it. Except by what color neutrals they put on head to toe that morning so many loose neutrals in this movie which have kind of come all the way back around much like many elements of this movie i was just thinking that true murdering murdering people is so in right now it's totally in fashion look as a as a bisexual

murderer representation matters it's just nice to see an early version of the media landscape we have today i'm so excited to hear your thoughts on this movie sar Sarah? Like, what is your history with Basic Instinct? I think I first saw it when I was like 14 or 15. And I just knew that it was a movie that adults talked somewhat fearfully about. I think specifically I'd heard of it in the part in Sleepless in Seattle, where Tom Hanks's son obviously alludes to it because he's like, so if you date, you're probably gonna have sex right and his dad's like i certainly hope so and he's like and if you have sex then she's gonna scratch up your back which he like learned from probably from watching basic instinct on cable or

any of the other abundant like sort of glossy got really reviews, but did amazing when they hit the video rental market movies of the time, like other Joe Esterhaz films, including Sliver and Jade. So I think I guess like I watched it because I was like, this is a movie that scandalizes adults, and I want to see something that scandalized adults. And then I remember just being like, I don't know what I think about this. It felt like it was too deep a look into like the sordidness of adult culture. And then when I came back to it as an adult, the thing I really noticed was that the score by Jerry Goldsmith is doing so much work, I think, to sort of try and be Hitchcockian.

Right? It's like it's its own character, and it's a very loud character that won't stop screaming. And it always kicks in after Catherine is like, I enjoyed having sex with him. It's like, a big scary reveal just happened and it also does that when she's like I was having sex with my girlfriend or whatever right it did feel like I was trying to put myself in like 1992 brain and I was like that was supposed

to be like a huge reveal right like her queerness was a reveal when it's like you could also watch that scene and still have it be very verhoeven uh exploitative where she like grabs her girlfriend's boob the second she enters the room but it's like you could also watch that with 2022 goggles and be like oh okay she's with someone and that is why he's upset but it's clearly like he's upset that she's yeah with someone and that person's a woman another woman yeah yeah it's very upsetting to him this movie is so weird this movie is so weird jamie what's your history with it not much um i i had never seen it before we started prepping for this episode. It's weird. I feel like Sharon Stone is just popping up in my life a lot recently. I've gotten many, many recommendations to read her memoir that came out last year, which I haven't started yet, but I'm very, very excited.

And then I also recently saw Casino for the first time, and she's amazing in that movie. Because, Sarah, you were talking to me about Casino. Yeah, I love her so much in Casino. Oh, my gosh. She's amazing in that movie because Sarah you were talking to me about Casino yeah I love her so much in Casino oh my gosh she's amazing everybody watch Casino if you've seen Basic Instinct go watch Casino and see what it's like when Sharon's giving it a hundred percent right and like she's given like a part that's maybe a little more cogent um but but yeah I don't know I've been in a Sharon state of mind I was very ready and excited for this and also Paul Verhoeven just came out with a new movie that I want to see

Benedetta it's a lesbian nun thriller so I will be seeing that yes yes yes well this is interesting too because it's like he's returning to lesbians I hope he does a good job. Growth is important.

Yeah. We'll see. I know. I've got a series of... He's tricky. He's tricky. This is the second Verhoeven movie we've covered on the show. We covered Starship Troopers last year, which is an extremely different movie.

But there are still themes that kind of cross over in most of his work and I'm interested to talk about how this movie depicts police work also like there's just there's just a lot going on I don't know how to feel about any of it my take I I've done a ton of research I've done a ton of reading which I know how to do. Congrats, Brad. My takeaway is that I love Sharon Stone. So we're gonna have to really tease this apart today. Caitlin, what's your history with Basic Instinct? My history is that I saw Hot Shots Part Deux as a child, a movie I watched over and over and over again, which very heavily spoofs. Oh, it's a spoof it is a spoof not specifically of basic instinct because it spoofs a bunch of different movies of that era oh it's

so it's like that yeah it's sort of like what are those other like it's like scary movie scary movie but like a leslie nielsen movie yeah exactly So I'm learning. Anyway, the very famous scenes in Basic Instinct are heavily referenced in Hot Shots Part 2. But I didn't understand the references to Basic Instinct or any of the other movies, it spoofs until years later when I finally got around to watching all those other movies. But anyway, so a lot of the like famous imagery from basic instinct i was very familiar with and then when i saw the movie for the first time which was i think i was in college i was like oh that's what hot shots part do was referencing so i saw that'd be so funny what are the things that it specifically spoofs in this the scene where you see sharon

stone's vagina like the scene the i just kept referring to that as the scene because i had not seen this movie and everyone knows that scene right it's like the chestburster in alien it's that big of a surprise in hot shots part do however you that's shot differently it's shot with the woman from behind and you just see her leg very um exaggeratedly lift up over her head to like cross to the other side that's pretty good and then there's a sex scene in Hot Shots Part Deux where she's having sex with Charlie Sheen is unfortunately in the movie. And she ties his arms to the bedpost with this white silk scarf. And then she is like reaching for something. And you're like, oh, my God, what's she reaching for?

And then she grabs a screwdriver and kind of unscrews part of the bed frame to make it creakier so that when they continue to have sex it's like way more like that's pretty fun ideas you have to hand it to hot shots part do because those movies can get pretty like gnarly and exploitative and like really bad and that sounds just like some goofs i like that she's just like super handy in this yeah yeah what if katherine was just really handy did either of you ever watch those uh thumb movies yes oh my god and those took forever to download too thumb wars there's a caitlin i should show and show to you thumbtanic yes there's i'm in it's a series it's the thumb reverse but it's like a series of spoof movies

where it's just like a spoof movie but only with thumbs oh my gosh it was really funny me and my cousins used to watch thumb wars long before i saw actual star wars i thought i saw thumb wars many times beautiful and it's just as good so in conclusion i saw basic instinct for the first time in college i saw it again i think i re-watched it right when we covered fatal attraction because i get those two movies confused a lot because they're both michael douglas and it's both about a scary woman who murders and who wants to have sex with michael douglas for some reason right it's uh it's like literally it's like oh michael douglas is uh a character who's threatened by a woman's agency but it turns out he's right yes that's a classic a class so sorry the movie was called thumb wars the phantom cuticle

pretty funny great love it it's pretty great sorry okay i'm done so anyway yeah i i had seen basic instinct a couple times before prepping and i've seen it twice since we started prepping and i similarly don't really know what to make of this movie i'm kind of all over the place there's so much to unpack i feel like my notes are so long and yet I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. It sounds like we're all kind of on the same page here of like, well, let's just talk about it and see what happens. You got us Verhoeven. Verhoeven movies are honestly very hard to cover on this show. That makes sense.

So we're going to try. Let's take a quick break and then I'll get into the recap. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere,

a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel,

available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing.

They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I felt too seen. Um, dragged. I'm N.K., and this is Basket Case. So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown. I was crying, and I was inconsolable.

It was just very big, sudden swaps of different meds. What is wrong with me? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies. On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in. Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you. And it will call you a basket case.

Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wait, sorry, I'm like, the guy who wrote Thumb Wars has written so many famous movies. What has he written? He wrote The Nutty Professor. He wrote Patch Adams. He wrote Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius. He wrote Kung

Pow Enter the Fist, which I used to really love. And he wrote Bruce and Evan Almighty. Wow. Wow. I know. And also most famously, Thumb Wars. I am interested in Thumbtanic. It's pretty good. The next time I come over, it's's got to be somewhere i'll find it okay i'll pay money to rent it let's charge it to the yeah that's what patreon money is for to watch

thumbtack i think our our matrons will will understand maybe maybe that's what we could cover for our for our titanic episode because we're running out of titanic content uh speak for yourself sorry you're right yeah it's on youtube in full okay oh perfect we're all good okay great okay so here's basic instinct and i'll place a trigger warning at the top here because um there is a rape scene in the movie okay so we open on a woman having sex with a man we never quite see her face because her blonde hair is obscuring it we see her tie up the man's hands with a white silk scarf then she pulls out an ice pick and stabs him repeatedly to death titanic reference oh because of the ice pick slash iceberg yeah maybe if they that the joke going there was um maybe if they had an ice pick yeah they could have what if sharon stone was on board

she would have been like oh man i love doing this to ice a whole glacier just for me exactly wow makes you think yep then we cut to detective nick curran played by michael douglas and his partner gus moran there at the scene of the crime we are in san francisco by the way the victim johnny boz was last seen the night before with his girlfriend katherine tramell so nick and gus go to katherine's house to question her she isn't there but katherine's friend roxy is and roxy directs them to where katherine is which is like her second home. Somewhere where she's being hot on a balcony. Right.

Yes. Nick and Gus find Catherine Trammell. She is Sharon Stone, of course. She's very sultry and sexy, and she has the same exact hair and body type and skin color as the lady who murdered johnny boz i wonder if she did it which is so wild you're like she and she did right and then katherine tells the detectives yeah i was fucking that guy but i didn't go home with him and i didn't kill him now go away that's a fun

place to start the movie where she's just i mean and and yes does the movie ultimately undercut the fact that she enjoys sex it isn't a shame to admit it and implies that if you if that's you you too could be a murderer yes but i really enjoyed her like delivery in that scene and when she's just like telling like sharon stone telling two cops to go fuck themselves is an inherently satisfying experience no matter the subtext of what the movie wants me to think i like to see her neg cops i hope that if ever I have the misfortune of having to interact with a cop, I have the guts to say, I don't want to talk to you. Fuck off and get the fuck out of here. I mean, she's also yeah, she's also protected by a lot of privilege, but it's

still very cathartic to watch. Yeah, they got to go on a tour of all her real estate before they meet her and see all her sports cars in the driveway. Yeah. They're like, oh, she's got holdings. She's got a Picasso. Yeah. Yeah. So then they leave at her request.

And Nick goes to see a counselor, Beth, played by Jean Triplehorn. Awesome name. Who he is mandated by internal affairs to see for reasons that we don't yet know they're talking and he refers to the sexual relationship he used to have with beth and then she tells him that she still misses him so already like it's so funny there's like police corruption from the jump where they're like oh okay so everyone in the office is aware of this relationship which we find out right away and uh his him keeping his job relies on you know him remaining in her good favor or her being hung up on him and everyone's

like yep that's fine that's which i'm sure which which is like'm sure is not too far from the truth. You're like, go nag your ex-girlfriend. It'll be very therapeutic. Right. Oh, gosh. There's so much. This movie's views on psychiatry. There's so much to talk about.

Oh, my gosh. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so then Nick and Gus go over more details of this case and the victim, Johnny Boz, who was a former rock and roll star. They also discussed Catherine Trammell as a suspect. a retired rock and roll star who gets murdered by his girlfriend when she ties up his hands with a white silk scarf and stabs him with an ice pick amazing so katherine is starting to seem extra suspicious so then nick and gus bring katherine to the station to question her on the way she tells him about a new book

she's writing about a detective who falls for the wrong woman. And then she kills the detective. I think that there's so many scenes in this movie that I know that we, what did we rename the Buscemi test, but we could run the Buscemi test on Sharon Stone several times in this movie. And be like, if this were a regular looking person saying these things she would be so in jail like it's wild how in jail she would be yeah absolutely so then at the police station the assistant district attorney aka wayne knight questions her wayne knight was like cranking out the hits in this series of years oh yeah because in the next year he's in jurassic park and oh my gosh he gets to see a vagina and a dinosaur in a single calendar year we should all be so lucky so he's questioning her and this is when we get the famous sharon

stone uncrosses her legs and flashes her vulva scene. There's plenty to talk about with this. We'll get to it. Yeah. Catherine says, do you think I would be so foolish as to murder someone in the exact way I described in my book? So she's basically using her book as an alibi, which is what a few psychologists had said she would do if she is in fact the murderer right and even though katherine passes a lie detector test nick still thinks that she's lying and that she is probably guilty especially because of some deaths in the past that katherine could be linked to such as her parents died in a boating accident, a professor she had in college was murdered, and a boxer boyfriend died while they were dating. To quote her,

everyone I love dies. And she doesn't seem to be wrong there. And Stephen Tobolowsky is there, which I think is fun. Yes. Yes. Didn't see that coming. That's yet another thrilling basic instinct twist. He's also having a good couple of years because he's in Groundhog Day right around this time being Ned Ryerson. Well, I'm glad that the boys are thriving in the early 90s. Good for them. The white men are having a blast. I think that they're still doing well to this day.

Yeah, I think maybe you're right. Okay, so that night, Nick goes home with Beth, the counselor. And then, again, trigger warning for rape. He rapes her. Although the movie, as far as I'm concerned, treats this as a consensual sex scene. I think that there's a, well, let's, we'll get to that conversation. We'll get to it. Yeah.

Yeah. I felt a little bit differently, but I see what you're saying. Sure. Then Nick tails Catherine for a while. There's a scene where she's driving like a bat out of hell and he's chasing her. He pays her another visit he discovers that she has all these articles about him and we find out why he has been mandated to see a counselor apparently he had shot a couple tourists a while back and Catherine has been following this story for

quite some time because according to her she's using him as inspiration for the detective in the book she's writing. He's a killer cop. It's, I mean, there's so much to talk about. She keeps calling him shooter. She also fixes him a drink and then breaks the ice with an ice pick. Buscemi test. She's in jail. Again.

Right. Then Nick realizes she has access to his psychiatric file which she apparently got from this guy in internal affairs uh this guy nelson who then ends up dead he was shot in the head and everyone thinks that nick did it so he gets put on leave but nick thinks katherine trammell did it so then katherine shows up at his place. She's being all seductive and messing with his head. He meets up with her a little later at a dance club. Then they go back to her place and have sex. She ties him up with a white silk scarf and we think maybe she's going to stab him with an ice pick, she doesn't she just like collapses on

him in pleasure or something um and it's called ecstasy caitlin ever heard of it yeah nick had had a great time he's like wow that was the fuck of the century catherine is like he's so embarrassing it was a good start yeah we also have learned by this point that Catherine is in some sort of romantic and or sexual relationship with that woman Roxy who we met at the beginning although we don't really well we can talk about this too but we don't know that much about their relationship but Roxy does seem to be very jealous of Nick. Yeah.

And then someone tries to run over Nick in what looks like Catherine's car. There's a high speed chase. The person chasing Nick crashes and it turns out to be Roxy who has died in the crash. They kill their gays, folks. And we're maybe meant to think, oh, so was it Roxy who maybe killed Johnny Boz? But no, it's the person that you are told in the opening scene did it. Right. So then Nick goes to see Catherine again.

She is upset about Roxy's death. She's all like, oh, i have such bad luck dating women and she tells him about this woman that she met in college lisa hoberman who she slept with once and then this woman started stalking katherine i immediately was like oh so beth but the movie takes you like 15 minutes to be like and it was beth you're like i think i could i think you could tell because you you're told like why else would you be told they went to college to get right this movie kind of like skirts around some stuff the movie thinks nobody knows there are multiple nicknames for elizabeth and that this is a really big twist right yes that too especially

yeah because also catherine originally was like her name is Lisa Oberman and then he's like I couldn't find anyone named Lisa Oberman and she's like I said Hoberman that's so goofy I like why what a waste of five minutes but I it made me laugh the two lines that made me laugh the most in this movie were I said Hoberman uh which should be added to every movie at some point a very human misunderstanding that has no place in a thriller and then at the end when beth says i love you i was dying i was like this makes this damn movie makes no sense have some dignity beth i know she's she's like the twist. I'm not a murderer. And I love men so much, even when they're rapist murderers. Remember my little Simpsons key chain?

I only loved you. I know. Shout out to Bart. Bart. High Bart visibility. Truly. Yeah. There's also some Pizza Hut visibility.

Just wanted to shout out that. My favorite line of dialogue in the movie toward the very beginning uh one of the few people of color in the movie it's another cop named sam he says there's cum stains all over the sheets he sure does and that is a line of dialogue. Yep. And then that's a SAG card. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. So Nick looks into this Lisa person who turns out to be Beth, the counselor who works for the police department.

Beth says Catherine stalked Beth in college. Catherine says Beth stalked Catherine in college. They're both claiming that the other one was like single white femaling the other. Which also comes out this same year, right? So it's not even like they were ripping it from there. They were just this was just something that was on the brain. I wonder if there's like a real life story that was like on people's mind. Because I was I was like, that's so bizarre. Why were women all supposed to be murdering each other in the early 90s right yeah which you've covered extensively yeah not so much the the idea that women were murdering other women at this time though that's really interesting yeah i've covered men's perpetual fear of being murdered by women right yeah so

single white female really subverts some tropes it's like yeah women can murder other women too like hey we can murder each other too don't forget it and that's feminism yes that's uh third wave feminism is amazing it makes so much sense um okay so we're not sure who to trust we're not sure who's telling the truth but now nick thinks that beth is the prime suspect and she's seeming more and more suspicious because beth's husband was mysteriously shot and killed a few years back meanwhile katherine ends things with nick because she was just using him for her book which she has finished nick is all hurt and then he goes with gus to meet up with another woman who knew katherine and beth in college but it's a setup the killer stabs and kills gus with

an ice pick nick rushes in beth is right there and again because nick thinks that she's the prime suspect he shoots her so abruptly like yeah i mean really is uh being a cop about it right and then the cops find a bunch of incriminating evidence at the crime scene and in beth's apartment So it seems like she was the killer all along. Nick goes back to Catherine. She takes him back. She's all like, I don't want to lose you. They have sex. It seems like, again, maybe she's going to stab him with an ice pick, but then she doesn't. But then we pan down to see that she has an ice pick on the floor that she maybe was or is going to kill him with. So now we're like, oh, she is the killer. She apparently just framed Beth. And that's the end of the movie.

Every woman is a murderer. How many times have we talked about this on the show? Every woman is a stone-cold killer. So let's take another quick break and we'll come back to discuss. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October

16th,, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do.

One session. 24 hours. BPM 110. 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare.

This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm.

Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I felt too seen. Dragged. I'm NK, and this is Basket Case. So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown.

I was crying, and I was inconsolable. It was just very big, sudden swaps of different meds. What is wrong with me? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies.

On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in. Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place And we're back. Where should we start, gang? i mean where where makes sense i mean i guess what we can sort of just state the obvious of katherine trammell being a pretty classic femme fatal character you know she's seductive she's cunning she uses her sexuality to lure men in and then

kill them but she's also like a femme fatale dialed up to an 11 because a lot of like femme fatale characters were from movies of like the 40s and 50s which were under the haze production code restrictions which meant that there couldn't be sex nudity overt sexuality any romance or implied sex had to be heterosexual there could be no graphic violence things like that so Catherine is this like post-production code version of the femme fatale which means we see nudity we see sex sex. She loves to have sex. She loves fucking. She talks about it all the time.

And then she also seems to be able to like very easily detach emotion from sex, which the movie seems to be making a judgment call about because of these are all the things that make Catherine Tramiel so sinister and so fatal. Right. make Catherine Tramiel so sinister and so fatal. It's like she's probably a murderer if she's having sex casually. Right. Right. Like that's repeatedly insinuating, you know, all while and it's I guess part of what I struggle with with this movie is I can't parse out always how self-aware it's being.

But yeah, like all all while you know michael douglas is having casual sex all the time and including non-consensual casual sex and um isn't he's not a well actually he is a murderer but it's not as big a deal when he does it it's so confused like he does it while he's at work so it's better it's very confusing something's been in the air on the pod lately we've been covering a lot of different femme fatale characters we did double indemnity we did a simple favor now we're doing basic instinct and yeah i mean it's i understand i guess why people have a hard time with this movie because a lot of katherine's dialogue and a lot of Sharon Stone's performance I think is like very reclaimable

because it's so matter of fact and good where she you know when she's like I wasn't dating him I was fucking him you're like yeah that's exciting you know or like are you sad he's dead yes because I liked fucking him like that it's so like campy and funny and like you don't get to see women talk like that very often but also we're supposed to think that she's a super villain right so it's a it's it's tricky right on one hand it's the villainizing a sexually liberated woman, which is what the femme fatale's whole thing is, is like, well, a woman who is sexy and you're seduced by her and she likes sex. Well, obviously she's evil because sexual liberation in a woman is scary. But then, like you said, Jamie, like there's an argument to be made that that's still representation on screen of a sexually liberated woman. And you don't often get to see a woman just like very openly talk about how much she enjoys sex and how she likes men who give her pleasure. And she seems to be

prioritizing her pleasure over giving a man pleasure and right all these things it's not a role model situation but it is like uh i don't know this movie's for adults uh and hopefully i mean i guess what i saw in it was like it is kind of cathartic to see whether this was intended or not which i don't really think it was but like see a woman who is like by far the smartest person in the room playing a bunch of cops and doing whatever the fuck she wants like that is inherently exciting like and and fun to watch i mean she's she's cool she is she's like what if i commit a bunch of murders and don't try to hide it and then when i'm questioned about it i'll basically be like yeah i'm a murderer and then i'll just keep getting away with it let's just do that again that was fun last time it's i mean and it's like she oh god

when they quote unquote arrest her the first time to take her down for the scene like the questioning scene i just like it is the most like rich white lady arrest ever where she's like you're arresting me okay well let me change first you're just like oh sheesh but like the way that Sharon Stone like owns every second of it is so I mean I really love watching her in this movie and and I'm not that's not even really in defense of the movie as much as it is of like watching this I get why this movie has severe detractors and I get why it has huge camp fans which I feel like is true of a lot of Verhoeven stuff um and also it's like most of the people that she kills

seem like they sucked well maybe not her parents we don't know though we don't know they were rich white people so chances are also she and she's awesome so it's kind of hard right anyways and i and i like that okay so other elements of her character before we get to the biphobia discussion which we oh yeah which needs to be had uh things i liked about katherine i like that she everyone in this movie is doing a police corruption like literally everyone every main character is involved but she's the she's the only one that's doing like police corruption for sort of good like she's she's the only person in the movie who i mean and it's for selfish means she doesn't care but she does um almost expose michael douglas as a

murderous cop in a way that most people wouldn't have been able to she gets his records she's constantly like four shootings in five years all accidents doesn't sound legit to me like which i i again it's like paul verhoeven didn't write this movie but it sounds like he demanded that it be rewritten a lot of times and he does have a preoccupation with like militarized police which i do think kind of comes out in this movie at several like such as making the call to make your protagonist a cop who is a rapist and a murderer which is not uncommon things for cops to be in uh in the u.s in particular so i thought that that was like interesting that she was kind of using her power and like intelligence to do a police corruption in her own interest.

Meanwhile, everyone else's police corruptions are for the police. Right. Where it's like, we got to protect Michael Douglas. And therefore they're fine. Yeah. I also love how he's the protagonist. And I feel like this was made with the expectation that he's like like i think he's supposed to be kind of a noir anti-hero but i assume that the audience when

this came out was supposed to be like oh no that poor rapist and murderer he's going straight into the path of that murderer right i do think that was the intent yes which is like uh it's so i i feel if i had watched this movie when i was younger it would have fucked me up so bad it's so it's like it scrambles your brain how much you see michael douglas like you see him do like basically nothing right like at what point does he do something that is good at his job or good morally like you i feel like usually with anti-heroes they're at least like good at their job like don draper was good at advertising there's a scene where he pulls out his little like notebook where he's allegedly keeping his clues and all it just has like a few different addresses written on it there's no like oh yeah i'm like is that all the

is that the extent of the police work you're doing you're just writing down addresses that other people have told you like to go to and at this point he's been on the case for months he's like all right i think he's just checked out and he's using being a detective as a way to find girlfriends now probably yeah that is what it seems like because yeah he has everything he does is either bad police work where he's like recklessly driving and like putting everyone in danger he's having sexual relationships with both his counselor and his primary suspect and his prime suspect, which is like very noir, but you're just like, buddy, the conflict of interest in everything he

does is staggering. Well, I think that that's kind of like, again, just like, I guess we're sort of like talking about his character here as well. Like, he's gullible to the point where it's kind of like attributing like a magical power to Sharon Stone's character like it's giving her like I mean it is a combination it's not just like it's her like powers of manipulation and like sexual prowess is like I feel like the movie wants you to think it's making him bad at his job and you're like he might just be bad at his job it sounds like he's bad at his job at the beginning he can't stop murdering people and having sex with everyone he shouldn't like and there's no mention of him solving a crime previously like there's so you know it sounds like maybe he just

always wasn't very good at it but i feel like the movie wants you to think like she has led him so you know far off a cliff with her her various college degrees and right boobs she has a master's degree okay she's capable of anything caitlin can you attest to that yes can confirm as someone who has a master's degree in screenwriting from boston university which i don't like to mention you can kill people i can yeah murder people and get away with it wow to quote gus when he's talking to nick about katherine uh quote she got that magna cum laude pussy on her that done fried up your brain sorry that is that is another line i wrote down is um one of the greatest things i'd ever heard honorary oscar worthy oscar for best single line in a screenplay for joe esterhaz i want someone to say i've got magna cum laude pussy that's so nice i

really honestly do that's the thing what a compliment He meant it as an insult, but I'm like, yeah, go for it. I'd be like, thank you. I also like how I read the screenplay to Basic Instinct this morning that was really fun. And one thing I like is that Gus in the screenplay is supposed to be like 20 years older than Nick. And Culverhovenven was like, what if they were the same age? Interesting. Which is funny because in the beginning,

when Gus doesn't know who Johnny Boz is, Nick is like, oh, he's before your time. And it's like, really? They seem to be about the same age. So that's confusing. But Jamie, to go back to what you were talking about i feel like that's part of like one of the characteristics of the femme fatale yeah archetype where she's like a witch basically who will right put you in a trance and make you bad at your job and make you

do things that an otherwise reasonable man wouldn't do. But because he's under the spell of this femme fatale, he's not himself anymore. And to kind of complicate that, I mean, it's like, I think it's interesting the ways where this trope is like updated for the 90s. Or just, I mean, I guess this run of Michael Douglas movies, where it's like in the 40s, you know, your femme fatales, they were, you know, mostly cunning wives because that is, you know, majority what you could be as a middle class white woman at that time. But when it leveled up, it's like, I feel like they think they're doing a good thing by like giving her a higher and higher level of education and achievement.

But it just kind of becomes messy in a different way right where i feel like it also is like bizarre i don't know what did either of you think of i just was like obviously michael douglas doesn't believe in um mental health in this movie like but i i also thought it was interesting that like both of the women that he's kind of like ping-ponging between are authorities in mental health where like Sharon Stone has a master's in psychology and Beth is a psychologist or a like a police therapist I don't what's her job title either way like they both work in that field right and he is clearly unwell and also doesn't believe it and i'm like does the movie believe in psychology like it's so confusing i couldn't tell does the movie believe in psychology i couldn't tell either but i mean when you have a protagonist who has certain opinions and the

movie asks you to go on this journey with this protagonist and like see the world through his eyes i feel like and that's not the case for every movie but it's tricky when it's noir i don't know yeah but because he's like you're a psychologist well your job is to manipulate people and obviously your whole thing is to play games with people's heads. And that's what psychology is. It takes a very mid-century view of therapy. But I feel like it's also very obvious in text that he's unwell. And so I don't think that we're necessarily supposed to take him at his word in that moment. So it's confusing.

Yeah. Right. I feel like the script is maybe like he doesn't need therapy he just belongs to the fraternity of killers or something but like i mean i feel like the noir has its roots in like the concept of confusing vulnerability with strength or i guess just being like well i'm traumatized in this way and i have to do. I have to make use of it somehow, I guess now. And I feel like that's where the tradition of the detective partly comes from. This idea that like, the detective sort of has to stand between society and the frontier in whatever way necessary.

And he can't really like be a happy family man he has to be a loner right right yeah which lines up with the anti-hero stuff as well it's so it's i mean i like that it's great verhoeven movies are so challenging like i and i like that about them but it's um it's tricky i i felt like my, and again, I think I was maybe, I had too much 2022 brain when I was watching this because I was like, oh, well, obviously he's very unwell. So the movie is probably like, he should probably believe in psychology. He'd get something out of it. But that's almost definitely not what people would have you believe in 1992.

I don't know. I don't know. Verhoeven sometimes will go rogue and like doesn't have a high opinion of cops and so i'm sort of like maybe but i don't know to whatever degree the movie wants you to think that nick is unwell every woman meet, the movie does want you to think is way more unwell and scary. And because they're like you said, Jamie, they're all murderers. Like every woman in the movie who has more than a line of dialogue is either a confirmed murderer or for some chunk of the movie, the audience is led to believe that she probably is a murderer.

Well, and they're also all some. Well, actually, I don't know about Roxy, but they're also all like the depraved bisexual to some extent. Right. All the women that we're supposed to believe are murderers. I believe. I think so. Yes. Or, you know.

Yes. Except, again, we don't know if Roxy's bisexual or she's we don't know right right right movie doesn't uh care but between like katherine who you could argue that the ending is ambiguous but also pretty clear that yes she was the killer all along yeah beth because of the ambiguity of the ending is also then ambiguous as to whether or not she was a murderer of any kind but at least with my read of the movie katherine framed beth but even so beth is a character who seems to be withholding information and she still seems to be like devious in in some way and we can kind of we can get into that more in a bit but then

there's roxy who we learned killed her two young brothers when she was a teenager because she just felt an impulse to kill and she tried to kill nick by running him over with a car so she's a confirmed murderer roxy is troped literally to death in this movie. And then there's this woman, Hazel, Hazel Dobkins or something, who is a friend of Catherine's, who also might be in a romantic relationship with Catherine. I thought that was implied. That's also unclear to me. They're at least in a kissing relationship. Yeah. Yeah, they kiss. And then Catherine calls her honey at some point. I think that's enough of an implication for movie I don't know right and then Hazel uh we learn killed her husband and three small children by stabbing them with a knife so that's not good

I don't think that there's I don't think that there's very much like and that's where the I mean it's with the depraved bisexual trope which we just talked about uh which is a newer concept for us but we talked about it on the um a simple favor episode that really doesn't work as much for me but there's a bunch of um there's a bunch of opinions about this yeah should we get into it yeah let's get i mean there's there's so much to talk about there i had there there's a bunch of opinions about this. Yeah. Should we get into it? Yeah, let's get, I mean,

there's, there's so much to talk about there. I had there, there's been a lot written about this over the years, but the, the context that you need that I didn't, I didn't know that it had escalated to this point, but the queer community in San Francisco,

of which there's obviously like a huge historically queer community in san francisco were uh not happy when this movie was being made when they were filming in san francisco the production called in the san francisco police department riot police every day which is almost certainly a gigantic overreaction right but the queer community was protesting significantly they were holding signs that said uh honk if you love the 49ers and honk if you love men which is very funny um but they basically like did everything they could to stop the movie from being filmed cogently like they used lasers and whistles to interfere with the filming of the movie and one of the producers of the movie

alan marshall allegedly selected individual protesters and demand they be arrested which is um fucked up and then the protesters did a citizen's arrest of the producer which came to nothing because the cops don't give a shit but all that to say like this was at no point was the issue with the depraved bisexual tropes in this movie not an issue like before it came out it was a very controversial thing right verhoeven i guess defended the protesters right to protest but disagreed because it's his movie. So how this kind of is played out is as time passes, as time famously does,

there's a lot of people who are still, you know, very firm on the, like, this is extremely biphobic in a way that is not reclaimable and then there are queer writers and filmmakers who have found prose and reclaimable elements to it so yeah so that's the context so what's happening in the in the movie itself is that it's playing into stereotypes about bisexual people, such as that bisexual people are promiscuous. They are untrustworthy. They are immoral. They're cheaters. They're cheaters. And then the movie takes it a step further and says, any queer woman is an evil murderer who will just snap at the drop of a hat and murder without motive just because they had the impulse to do it.

That was so wow. They're like, yeah, she just saw Razor and was like, let's do this, baby. You're like, what? I don't want it to go to waste. I have to kill someone with the sharp object that's near me. And yet, like, and jamie you're a girl boss expert this is why i'm asking you is there anything more girl boss than being a sexually motivated female murderer of men exactly ladies i've been saying this um women's empowerment means getting away with murder it i wish i was oh my thorough nose t-shirts

in the mail i don't have it yet yeah but and making men fear for their right to have sex it is so like it's so messy it's so mad like i i found a piece written by a queer filmmaker named Adam Morrison who's kind of like went to bat for this movie in 2016 and I thought like and also while acknowledging the clear biphobic issues because also contextually it's important to remember that Basic Instinct came out at a time where queer representation in general was kind of at like an all-time low while the aids crisis was ongoing um like the silence of the lambs had come out the previous year which the queer community was kind of like rightfully on high alert about how they were being represented in film because it was egregiously bad yeah so yeah he he writes a quote

if we're dying of a plague can't get married can't adopt can get fired or evicted if anyone finds out our sexual orientation why on earth will we support a film that paints us as nothing more than heathens who would like to fuck hard and then stab each other unquote but then he counterpoints that 24 years later by saying the following which i thought was i don't know, which I thought was, I don't know, like, I don't, I truly don't know where I fall here. But he says, quote, When was the last time you saw a movie where a gay character was the wealthiest person in the room? Catherine Tramiel is worth 100 million. When was the last time you saw a movie where a gay character was the smartest person in the room? When was the last time you saw a gay character be the most successful Catherine's books are bestsellers when was the last time a gay character was all three of those things at once probably never and then he sort of goes on to like draw this comparison of like she has these godlike qualities she's kind of like omnipotent she's she can outwit literally anyone and in the end for her purposes she wins she gets away with it um so she's not punished or killed off and so which i think is like an interesting read of the movie i don't know

yeah i mean that to me is just like well when representation and visibility is low and bad all you can do is grasp at the crumbs and that's what that feels like well that's yeah i mean i'm not suggesting that any of that was intended in text right but like right right i i do understand that argument also sure. And then to break down the various relationships even further, because I kept thinking we were going to learn more about Catherine's relationship with Roxy. Yeah. But you never really do. You know that they live together? Question mark? I think so, right? Or was that not canon? Yeah. And I can show esther has trying to write them having a quiet night at home and roxy being like is this chicken from thursday night you know and like that's another thing i kept thinking like we never see them interact except to kiss in a couple scenes but

we don't there's no dialogue between them and so this is a movie where like if the movie passed the bechdel test between these two characters that would be great because we would know anything about their relationship yeah but and that's where it's like it's so early 90s where i bet that the writer what's the writer's name again joe esterhas really thought he was doing something by like making her well educated and like giving us a lot of information about her at the top but we never yeah like we never get information about and i don't think that it would have taken away from the non-mystery of this movie which is that she did it and we see it in the first scene right to flesh out that relationship a little bit more i think it actually would have helped the point later where it's like she is saying like i i you know really cared about roxy like that's the first person we see her have

a reaction to the death of it all and so if we saw that that i don't think it would have hurt any yeah right because what that does so when we see katherine learn that johnny boz is killed she doesn't cry she barely bats an eyelash she's just like yeah I guess I'm sad because I liked fucking him but when Roxy dies which is awesome she's sorry right iconic when Roxy dies she's noticeably upset she's crying she's having what seems to be a genuine reaction but because we don't know anything about she could be lying her relationship with roxy and because katherine's whole thing is that she's very untrustworthy i know we don't know if these feelings she's displaying are genuine because we don't have any information about katherine and roxy's relationship so it's which could be i mean

which i get why that would be a noir writing but i just like i find it so ridiculous that you're supposed to spend a lot of it's just like it's not just like but you know how like the central quote-unquote mystery of the movie doubt when it came out was like do you think he did it and you're like it's so obvious that the that the protagonist did the crime why is that even the discussion? Like, what about all the other shit going on? Right. So that's all confusing. And then Beth is also revealed to be bisexual or bi-curious. Unclear, yeah. We learn that she had a sexual relationship with Catherine in college. And she's also similarly depicted as being untrustworthy and even though she might not

have been the murderer that we're led to believe she possibly was for a while she's still not forthcoming a lot about a lot of things she seems to be withholding a lot of information you could make the argument that like why would she divulge her sexual orientation to her police colleagues they're probably not going to accept her if they learn that she is queer and she also seems to carry a lot of shame about it too because that right and i feel like that is almost like i guess maybe i talking this out in real time there's some kind of like gray area where it felt like when the more she acknowledged that she was ashamed of having any queer experience the more her kind of redemption arc started to swing back or it

seemed like even but which is hard to say because Catherine lives and Beth dies. So she is. I mean, movies love to kill people named Beth. I'm just thinking of little women. But so I don't know if that's that completely scans, but it does like she distances herself from any queer experience she's had as much as possible she tells and and i guess it's unclear because we only see her around nick who we can tell wants her to do that but she it does seem like she's genuine when she tells him at whatever that weird apartment they're always having sex that is her apartment next to the aerobic studio. Of course, it's just like 500 windows.

You're like, yeah, sure. I'm sure a police officer makes this much money. But yeah, like she she says that she's like embarrassed by it at some point. And then her literal dying words. I feel like she might as well be saying I was straight and then she dies like that was what I was getting from because her dying words are looking Michael Douglas in the eye and saying I love you yeah here's let me tell you my theory because I watched this movie maybe 10 times in the past five years and I I think that Catherine was obsessed with Beth and was playing the long game to like manipulate her ex-boyfriend into killing her.

And what that means is that Nick is sort of meaninglessly caught up in the crossfire of Catherine's obsession with Beth. And she's just going to like keep him alive a little while longer because he amuses her somewhat or something like that. Interesting. And now, I mean, he's and he's killed beth now so it's like yeah so why bother i mean she's gotta do something with her time there's i don't that's interesting like i i didn't know what to make of that i'm i'm glad that you have a theory about it because i didn't know what to make of that like who is single white femaling who and like because even in that is an implication that like in order for two women to be interested in each other they have to also be like stealing each other's identity which is just so right yes of

course like it's like oh you can't just be attracted to someone you have to also want to wear their skin and like have their social security number which apparently was a very like potent idea in 1992 there's two movies where that's a major plot point but but even even when um nick kills beth he like the last thing he says to her is inherently tied to his insecurities about her having had a queer experience where he's like i know about your husband you still like girls beth and then he kills her right like and then she says i was straight and then the movie's over he's advancing on her with a gun and he's saying it as if it's evidence again that like he's gonna have to shoot her right because maybe she still likes girls right it's like very overt yeah yeah and so it's like

it's only tragic that she dies because maybe she was straight like it's just it's confusing because she loved this horrible rapist who represents the shriveled ass of compulsory heterosexuality yeah i mean it's like that is well let's did anyone have anyone else anything else to say about the um depraved bisexual trope before we move into the next horror show that right i'll just add that and let me know if you think this has any merit but i feel like this movie also villainizes ethical non-monogamy. Totally. In a way that like stereotypes about polyamory are on display and demonized in this movie. Because it seems to be that, for example, Catherine and Roxy's relationship is ethically non-monogamous because they are

together but roxy knows about the various other people that katherine is involved with so they are in this ethically non-monogamous relationship but because they both end up being murderers that's just another way in which polyamory is demonized. Right. It's only in a relationship that it can exist between two murderers. Right. So I just wanted to point that out because that's something I'd be interested in keeping my eye on more because I feel like it's equating ethical non-monogamy with sexual deviance. Non-ethical promiscuity yeah exactly right yeah that's that is something that and it's like I feel like I mean I guess I don't know when that term came into the zeitgeist but I would guess it was not in more recently yeah so I guess I mean the last thing with Roxy we mentioned this but like she's very much subject to the barrier gaze trope where yeah we don't know

exactly like how she uh identified before they attribute a fit of murderous rage and they kill her but you know there it is which also doesn't make sense because like if she wasn't the murderer who killed like johnny boz why is she also i love the name johnny there are some good fake names in this movie joe ester haas is a good bad screenwriter yes but according to katherine roxy liked to watch katherine have sex with men right and it didn't seem as though Roxy was harboring jealousy until Nick comes along and then for reasons that go unexplored Roxy's like well I'm jealous of Nick and I have to kill him by running him over with a car but did you get the feeling and then we I know we've got to move on but like but did you get the feeling in that bathroom confrontation

between Roxy and Nick it sort of sounded like maybe she didn't like watching because she's just like, I watch because like Catherine tells me to. So it sort of sounded like maybe Roxy is getting kind of manipulated by Catherine as well. That's fair. I don't know. That was like a fleeting moment that goes completely unexamined by the movie. So it's kind of a wash. But I sort of was like, I felt for roxy in that moment if i was like reading it correctly i was like oh that sucks like maybe she doesn't like even which would complicate things even more but it i i wasn't um

i wasn't sure uh boggles the mind okay there's still let's let's get the the other difficult conversation out of the way here and talk about trigger warning again uh talk about the way that uh sexual assault is portrayed in this movie again i don't know if i'm bringing too much 2022 to it, but I was very conflicted about it. Same. So basically what happens is there's a scene in which Nick goes home with Beth. They start to kiss. It seems to be consensual at first. He gets more and more aggressive.

She is saying no repeatedly. He does not stop and proceeds to rape her, which we see on screen for several seconds, which apparently is in the director's cut, but not the theatrical cut, which makes sense. I'm glad. I'm kind of glad.

I don't know. Because if I saw this movie in 1992 which I couldn't have but if I did like I know that like the basic idea of being raped by someone you know and had already been intimate with was not like a common thing to be portrayed in movies and I feel like even having that because we've talked about this on the show a bajillion times where it's like there's many many movies where the concept of rape and a rapist is like a stranger lurking in the corner it's like you don't know who it is it's deeply traumatic and then they're off into the night and it's all very you know night stalkery not to say that that doesn't happen but it is overwhelmingly somebody that you already know and very possibly

somebody you've already been intimate with and so I thought that that was uh I mean it's a very very upsetting scene and it feels so obviously like textbook rape she says no over and over and over and then my read of the scene was that she had to protect her like she wasn't really able to fight back for her own safety but then the way that that plays out throughout the rest of the movie i thought like undercut a very like common thing that happens to mostly women so in in the aftermath the immediate aftermath of that scene we we see Nick and Beth talking. She asks about Catherine. She mentions that she knew Catherine in college.

Then she refers to the encounter they just had, saying, you've never been like that before. Why? And he says, you know, you're the shrink. You tell me. And she says, you weren't making love. It's kind of open to interpretation what she means. Like, is she calling him out for forcing himself on her and raping her? Or is the movie just not aware of what rape is?

Like, to me, it's hard to tell. Sarah, what's your take? I think that she's calling him out in the mildest possible way as if he's like put his feet up on her coffee table so you know it's i mean you can interpret that as her saying like that was rough i didn't like it that was too rough for me right and that being all the understanding the filmmakers had of this and i would totally buy that and like and then maybe they do have more knowledge than that but it's not on display right yeah yeah and then you know she continues trying to mother him for the rest of the movie and it's uh never discussed i also think it's fascinating

that this movie is taking so many cues from vertigo yeah he's totally in the barbara belgetti's role and has the same glasses it's really bizarre yeah this movie didn't dare have two blondes yeah she's very much catherine is so stylized the way that and i haven't seen that movie in a long time but yeah there's there's a lot of visual symmetry yeah there's a movie that earned its overbearing score right yes a score that's really turning your head to what you're supposed to be thinking I had a I had a so I was very mixed up on this subject and so I wanted to know more about what the filmmakers i was like i assume that they've been asked about this i didn't get i mean i can't speak to the writer's intent which i have

a quick thing on him and but just because like he's just a weird guy but verhoeven specifically has whatever themes and things that he returns to in his movies all the time one of which is women being brutalized and sexually assaulted so there was one press cycle and again i'm like i don't know how to feel about any of this uh there's a press cycle from a movie he did in 2016 called l which i have not seen i guess it's in French where he was asked kind of repeatedly about why this comes up in his movies so frequently and like what is it about this that keeps coming up for him and so this is from an interview in Slate from 2016 where he's basically just asked like why are women raped and brutalized in your movie so much?

He says, yeah, because, of course, let's say, especially with the element of rape, if you look at the statistics, they say someone is raped about 1,800 or 1,900 times a day in the United States. So that means a rape a minute. If you express that violence, then you can only express it in what it is. If you aren't honest about that, then I think that's very dangerous, because then it becomes banal, it makes it smaller than it is. If you aren't honest about that, then I think that's very dangerous because then it becomes banal. It makes it smaller than it is. It's really something where people are traumatized for the rest of their lives. Even the word sexual assault is already making it less than it is. I think the word rape expresses exactly what it is. If you hear rape, you know you're talking

about brutal violence against women, also men, of course, but if you use sexual assault, that makes it softer. And so there is, in general, a feeling that I get in the United States that it's very dangerous or very not done to use the word rape, which is replaced by sexual assault, which I think I did five minutes ago. But all I have to say, I see what he's saying, but I feel like it's a matter of execution and making sure that that is clearly telegraphed in the plot which I think this movie fails at yes exactly yeah I think that showgirls

actually does a much better job of doing what he's saying here oh interesting I still I still haven't seen showgirls it's been a request for a million years yeah we got it yeah we'll get to it it's tricky because I fundamentally agree with what he's saying i just don't think that the execution is there in this movie well it's just hard to know what the purpose of the scene is or if it even has one i don't think it does like i i know like what function my my best guess is that because this scene takes place right after Nick has gone to see Catherine in her home. And she was being, again, very femme fatale. She was being very sultry and seductive. And I think the movie is suggesting that he's starting to fall under her spell and he's getting really horny.

And he goes and he takes out that horniness on beth because she's right there and then it's doing the thing where it's conflating her who's like as far as we know having lots of sexual adventures with people consensually and he's like i'm emulating you katherine i'm raping my ex-girlfriend and it's like what no right it yeah and it's like there there is this element yeah of like all of nick's bad behavior is like the subtext of it is like and it's somehow katherine's fault that he's doing all of this because she's infuriating him she's frustrating him she's like fucking with his head she's making him drink again right she's making him smoke again like yeah right like it's somehow all of his behavior that we know

that's the thing that blows my mind like that we know predates his knowing her by a lot like so but now he has the perfect person to blame everything on yeah exactly i also love how she's like super powered for a woman like they have a part where Nick is listing all of her assets basically and he's like she fucks rock stars and boxers she has a hundred

million dollars she writes books and she has a degree in messing with people's heads and it's like yeah it seems like you finally found a worthy adversary a woman who's like yeah. It seems like you finally found a worthy adversary. A woman who's got enough expansion packs. To scare you. Right.

That's the Michael Douglas. Plot point I guess. Like it's just. It's so. And then there's other elements of Beth. Where it's like. I just think that Beth is such a like poorly developed character because really like everything about her hinges on us assuming that she still loves Nick no matter how awful he is. In a void also like we don't get any insight into what from her past might make her connected to someone so deeply toxic.

Like what? There's no attempt. Right. from her past might make her connected to someone so deeply toxic like what there's no attempt right because it's like you see she's she's negged for her profession in her first moments on screen and then she agrees with him uh where he's like this is bullshit and you know it she's like yeah it's bullshit but have a seat you're like that is a funny way to start a therapy session but like we got to do it because you're being mandated to do this not because you clearly need counseling i hope i hope my therapist says that to me someday i'm like this is bullshit she's like yeah but i sure i sure hoodwinked you out of a lot of money didn't i

also do you guys love the moment where we find out that Beth is supposed to have met, potentially met, Johnny Boz at a Christmas party that her office mate, his therapist, threw. And it's like, of course we're living in a world where therapists invite their patients to their Christmas parties. There's no ethical connection between people in in this movie i also i mean that is always an element of like any noir-ish movie that i have fun with where it's just like even when it's not necessary everyone needs to have known each other and met each other at some point and sometimes it's just like a weird stretch like that's not even necessary but just to establish as much suspicion as possible it's like maybe she's a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. And a Christmas party from 1987 could be.

You know? Like it's just wild. It is so wild. Yeah. Bottom line is the way. I mean everything in this movie is executed. Is at best mind boggling. At worst extremely harmful. again the way the the rape scene

i think you can make the argument that the movie treats this as a consensual but you know maybe more rough than beth is used to sex scene when it in fact is rape because she is repeatedly saying no and he ignores her and then then, like you were saying, Sarah, she continues to look after him and do anything that will support him for the remainder of the movie, and then he kills her for having sex with a woman once 20 years ago.

Yeah, that is, I guess, the legally prescribed penalty for that, but you so rarely see it carried out it is brutal like it's just brutal yeah um we must also talk about the scene the scene the scene scene in which sharon stone's vulva is exposed because sharon stone has spoken about how she was misled by the director who told her that it would not be visible on camera. There's an article in Vanity Fair by Sharon Stone. It's an excerpt from her memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice. The article is called You Can't Shame Me, Sharon Stone on how basic instinct nearly broke her before making her a star. So she talks about this, and I'll just quote this article.

She says, quote, after we shot Basic Instinct, I got called in to see it, not on my own with the director, as one would anticipate, but with a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project. That was how I saw my vagina shot for the first time, long after I'd been told, we can't see anything, I just need you to remove your panties as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on. Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic but since i'm the one with the vagina in question let me say the other points of view are bullshit sharon she says now here's the issue it didn't now here's the issue it didn't matter anymore it was me and my parts up

there i had decisions to make i went to the projection booth, slapped Paul across the face, left, went to my car and called my lawyer, Marty Singer. Marty told me they could not release the film as it was, that I could get an injunction. First, at that time, this would give the film an X rating. And Marty said, per the Screen Actors Guild, my union, it wasn't legal to shoot up my dress in this fashion. Whew, I thought. Then Sharon goes on to say that she gave it more consideration and tried to be objective about it. And then I'm quoting again. After the screening, I let Paul know of the options Marty had laid out for me. Of course, he vehemently denied that I had any choices at all. I was just an actress, just a woman. What choices

could I have? But I did have choices. So I thought and thought and I chose to allow this scene in the film. Why? Because it was correct for the film and for the character. And because after all, I did it. Unquote. So that's and I mean, Sharon rocks. I like that is horrifying. Verhoeven responded in denial that this had happened. But it's like I very much believe Sharon, not just because I believe Sharon, but also because she was already so disempowered in this creative process. And that was already so well established was like that she was not being paid well like she was not being treated like an equal collaborator on the scale that you know certainly Michael Douglas was or that a lot of people involved in this movie was were so that totally

scans for me that it's like she would be mistreated and her desire to not have to flash her vagina on screen and also be like duped into doing it would be something that they would try to get away with because they already got away with so much and i think that there's that that kind of assumption from especially like in acting but in a lot of industries where you're like quote-unquote paying your dues by being abused by someone who has more power than you because in that same section sharon talks about how she felt like a lot a lot of the odds were against her she was not she was like the 12th choice for this role michael douglas didn't want to work with her like there were all of these things stacked against her and then to be manipulated into like it's just it's so fucking bleak i'm glad that she like

got the last word on it because yeah it just it sucks that she just felt so disempowered to the point where she's like well what choice do i have but to just let this be in the movie right because yeah she she also describes in this article various hollywood horror stories producers and directors condescending to her harassing her her manager at the time told her that she wouldn't get hired for a part like basic instinct because she was not sexy or quote fuckable um she was always like huh she also talks about how she was considered to be difficult because she would speak out against being mistreated and that she would like refuse to have sex with her co-star of a movie after a producer suggested they have

sex because it would give them better on-screen chemistry. And she said, no, I'm not going to do that. And then she was labeled difficult by people and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, I completely believe Sharon. And there are just all these other examples of movies where the director misleads the actors, often women, to get a particular shot or to get a reaction that seems more genuine there there i remember kubrick and shelly devol i feel like it's the most famous example of that yeah

there was also um a scene from the that movie last tango in paris a story broke about that a few years ago that um really i forget specifically what it is and i'd have to go back and read it but a woman was assaulted as the camera was rolling and was not told what was going to be happening in the middle of the scene so that the director could get like a genuine reaction out of her it was something i might have some details a little bit you know i'd have to double check on some details but it was something along along those lines. And so there's various examples of actors and, again, especially women being mistreated as cameras are rolling, being assaulted as cameras are rolling. All this stuff happening without their knowledge or consent just so this auteur can, like, see his vision come to life or whatever. You know, some bullshit excuse right which is like

not just abusive it's like sharon stone is right there like she collaborate with her you've got fucking sharon why oh i i hate it it's awful so uh justice for sharon i'm very very excited to read sharon's book me too yeah one of the last things i have here in my notes uh that again i feel like i'm only scratching the surface of but um you'll never believe it but this is another movie with mostly white people in the cast which is predictable but like also this is san francisco in the 90s this is not like this is a very diverse area yes for fuck's sake the few people of color in the movie are minor characters with very few lines of dialogue no real narrative impact they're relegated to the sidelines and all the major players are white people yeah i uh i feel like ultimately like

this movie has got a very weird legacy where there's plenty to talk about inside of it but mostly it's the kind of movie where people mostly take away a single shot versus any sort of like it doesn't seem like this movie even though there's like all of this like very era-specific history involved people mostly just remember a scene where Sharon Stone was being coerced into doing something she didn't want to do and it was hailed as the sexiest thing ever committed to film there's also a there's a good vanity fair piece about sort of how that shot and like the scene had a an impact on um porn for decades after that and like the ripple effect of that scene alone is significant i think the ripple effect of like the unexamined biphobia

in this movie uh this is a very influential movie like the stuff that they got wrong here did carry on for for some time so yeah it's a tricky one yeah uh do you guys want to know all the actresses that turned down the role of Catherine do I ever yeah I have I also have this list so I'm gonna put forward two guesses and by guesses i mean i think i kind of remember this list okay wait let me guess a few okay jodie foster michelle pfeiffer kelly mcgillis michelle pfeiffer is one meg ryan meg ryan is one wow julia roberts yes yes whoa okay i want to hear the rest kim basinger was michael douglas's pick she said no greta scotchy who that i'm not sure who that is that was like the one name i also didn't British i think gina davis said no fucking way kathleen turner said no way kelly lynch i don't

know who that is ellen barkin said no. Marielle Hemingway said no. And I guess Demi Moore was considered, but I don't know if she was ever asked. And as you alluded to, Jamie, Michael Douglas was really reluctant to work with Sharon Stone because she didn't have any star power at the time. This was before she, this movie made her a star. And also- She was like, this is my star power at the time this was before she this movie made her a star and also he was like this is my star power bitch right yeah so michael douglas didn't want to work with her because she wasn't an a-list celebrity at that point and he was like well i'm an a-lister and if this movie is received poorly i need to have another a-lister to take the fall so that all the blame doesn't get

on me like i'm not taking the only l on this movie that might suck which i get but it's like come on sharon yeah sharon it's sharon get a grip so yeah i think that's really about all I had written down at least. Does anyone have any other thoughts about the film? I mean, I could go on this movie forever, but I'm going to say no. I guess I will say that ultimately I am pro-Sharon Stone and I'm happy that this movie created a launch pad for her to do more of what she wanted to in the world. And I think it belongs in a museum. I mean, it has that going for it. It really expresses like

a lot of the fear around gender roles in the early 90s and sort of the way that heteronormativity was responding to the lightest prodding yeah i'm happy that we're all like equally speechless about it yeah i'm ultimately like i don't know a lot of bad stuff going on i yeah i mean i feel like the the legacy of this movie is kind of like net in terms of like the tropes it like really really continued or popularized it's got kind of a net negative effect but how much of that is intent it's just all very messy we've spent two hours talking about it and i still have no fucking clue how i feel um yeah but does it pass the mech until death i don't think so right there two women do interact when roxy and katherine kiss each other a couple times and it's implied

they were having a conversation that michael douglas walks into but we don't actually hear any of their dialogue and then roxy walks away yeah so we never see them actually speak on screen and i think those are the only two women who interact in the whole movie there's hazel dobkins and katherine but we don't see them talking to each other either no there's a lot of scenes where there's a kiss and no dialogue or a boob squish and no dialogue. Or I think there might be one part where Catherine says something to, wait, what's her name? Hazel? Yeah. And she calls her honey.

She says, honey, I'll be right with you or something. But then Hazel doesn't respond. You know, things like that. There are four women in this movie and they're all convicted or potential murderers. I mean, I do. Honestly, I like that that i think that's absolutely ridiculous and yes this movie is a net negative and yet the fact that all of the female characters in this movie who have any kind of impact are actual or probable murderers is kind of amazing

you don't get that a lot i do like it's like the the camp element is hard to deny with this movie it's like it's hard to there i wanted to give a quick shout out to the woman who plays hazel uh who's an oscar-winning actress dorothy malone hello dorothy yeah this basic instinct was her last um on-screen appearance before she died. She just died a couple years ago. She's in The Big Sleep. She won an Oscar in 1956 for a movie called Written on the Wind, which I've never heard of, but she won an Oscar.

It's a Rock Hudson movie. She was a big success on TV. She was on Peyton Place in the 60s. Turns out she was a big success on TV. She was on Peyton Place in the 60s. So it turns out she was a terrifically successful actor. And this was her last movie. So shout out, Dorothy Malone. Sorry you didn't get, I don't think, a single line of dialogue, really. I think she called him a shooter once.

Yeah, she's like, oh, you're the shooter, aren't you? Yeah, but sorry you didn't get a whole scene it's like imagine being an oscar-winning actress and they're like um you're essentially a glorified extra right yeah so have fun with that and uh you know make your own movie i guess sigh which which brings us to our rating system, the nipple scale. Yes. Zero to five nipples based on how the movie fares looking at it through an intersectional feminist lens. Yes. Well, even though there are things that are arguably reclaimable about specifically, I would say sharon stone's character yeah i'm just not in a place where i feel fully comfortable doing that although isolating a few lines of her monologues where she's like i like fucking i like men who give me pleasure i like fingers and hands I want to just like tweet that out as like a big tweet thread

classic sex fingers and hands I want her to get together with Wayne Knight I like it when she tells the cops she says something like I don't feel like talking anymore so unless you're going to arrest me you can get the fuck out of here and they're like i can't argue with that okay we gotta get the fuck out of here i love it when she's like what are you gonna do charge me with smoking and they're like well doggone it she's just stopped us right in our tracks we don't know what to say to that another another thing that is spoofed in hot shots part two so i gotta watch that and i also like the moment like there's just certain Another thing that is spoofed in Hot Shots Part 2. I gotta watch this. And I also like the moment, like there's just certain moments where it's like she's being villainized, but also her reaction to anything that is like a suggestion of typical heterosexual domesticity results in her getting angry or violent.

Which I kind of do like that scene at the end where he's like i don't know we're gonna fucking pop out a couple kids and get married and her response is to like clutch an ice pick like that's kind of cool like they're he goes we can fuck like minks have a few rugrats and live happily ever after and then she's like and she's like i hate rugrats and then she's like clearly fondling her ice pick ready to like stab him and then he's like forget hate rugrats and then she's like clearly fondling her ice pick ready to like stab him and then he's like forget the rugrats we can just fuck like minks and live happily ever after and then she takes her hands off the ice pick because apparently she was going to kill him if he wanted to have children with her which is kind of hilarious who wants kids but that like

that's a cool moment i don't know oh boy he would not be a good dad i bet she's gonna kill him like four days later right because do you feel like he's around on condition of not making her bored right his day his days are extremely numbered i feel like it's very clear uh but in turn caitlin what is your what is your rating for oh right okay so even though there are things they're very isolated things i like about the character of katherine trammell and sharon stone's performance i would say overall like you said sarah this is a net negative movie between the villainizing of a woman's sexuality being open and liberated between the depraved bisexual trope because like oh gosh bi visibility was extremely low and still is but in the early 90s it was basically absent and if it was there it was being villainized in very harmful ways much like what basic instinct does so there's all these

harmful things that the movie does um and it is too long um but the score is memorable helpful right and uh the plot is uh convoluted and according to this movie, all women are murderers. And they will have no motive. They will just decide to murder for no reason. Okay. Fine. Okay. So I'm going to give the movie, with all that in mind, I'll give it one nipple.

Okay. movie with all that in mind i'll give it one nipple okay and i'll give it to sharon stone's nipple which we see many times and it's a great one two two there's two there's two of them there's two of them uh i guess i'll match you there i feel like i i see why some of the the campier isolated moments are reclaimed and i also had a lot of fun and really appreciated that um also you know there's i i don't think i have anything new to new to add i think that i'm gonna meet you at one and i'm gonna give my nipple to um hazel because um she should have had more lines or lines yeah true uh sarah i am also going to give it one nipple and i'm going to give it to sharon stone so now she has three nipples and a lot yeah because i think she's just great and at this point i've seen this movie enough times that i can just kind of enjoy the idea of this like freewheeling murderer who likes to go around announcing herself as a murderer

to men who just continually are like what no I don't I don't I'll be fine I'm different and how that just is what she does for a hobby apparently I think that's interesting i love that for her i know i'm like you have 110 million dollars we've gotta find another place for you to put this energy girl like there's she could be doing so much like a magazine i was kind of hoping i wasn't able to find one but you know how like sometimes when there's like a famous writer in a like, oh, Gone Girl is a good example. The fake book in Gone Girl was a real book that was sold like Amazing Amy. And I was hoping that Catherine's books like the fake novelizations of the Catherine Trammell books were somewhere. But I wasn't able to find them.

That would have been amazing. It's not too late to hire one of us to ghostwrite them. Wow. I know my next project. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us thank you so much thank you for uh exploring this this strange uh beast this is really fun thank you for bringing us this movie i'm glad that we talked about it and you know hopefully if you are a listener watching this movie. I'm glad that we talked about it. And, you know, hopefully if you are a listener watching this movie,

you're just as confused as we are. Sarah, where can people check out your stuff, follow you on social media, plug away? You can hear me on You're Wrong About and you can also hear me on You Are Good and other podcasts from time to time and i'm trying to not use social media so much so uh find me there if you must but i shan't encourage you perfect uh you can follow us on twitter and instagram which you know what i'd encourage it

but you don't have to do whatever you want sometimes we get stressed out and we don't check it so don't get mad if we don't you know reply right away right but uh yeah you can follow us there at bechtel cast you can also subscribe to our we would definitely encourage this subscribing to our matreon yes at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast it gets you two bonus episodes every month plus access to the whole back catalog of bonuses and it is five dollars per month and you can also get merch at tpublic.com slash the Bechtel cast if that's something that you are in the mood to do. And with that, I want to say, wait, what is that line again? My favorite line in the movie.

That magna cum laude pussy. Yes. Don't fry it up your brain. Let's take our magna cum laude pussies out of here. Bye-bye. Bye. Kay hasn't heard from her sister

in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself?

There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm NK, and this is Basket Case. What is wrong with me? A show about the ways that mental illness is shaped by not just Apple Podcasts, or at you giving me therapy, girl. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus,

only on Apple Podcasts.