The Lavender Menace: Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992)
She’s evil!! She’s BRILLIANT!!!
Queerness is, first and foremost, a mystery. In his book Bad Education, queer theorist Lee Edelman defines “queer” as that which is outside the social order, and which therefore structures the social order, the way “zero” is not a number, but gives form and meaning to every number that comes after it. There is no such thing as a queer person, Edelman says, because to the extent that we try to incorporate ourselves into society and become legible as “gay” or “trans,” we stop being queer. You cannot really say what queer is, only what it isn’t: Queer is not straight, not gender-conforming, not how we think a person should be.
It’s admittedly hard to wrap your head around a concept this abstract, and Edelman’s theatrically academic prose doesn’t make it any easier. (Every time someone mentions Lacan, I black out and wake up wearing a trucker hat at a Nascar rally.) Edelman points to the example of the killers in Funny Games — not only are they two men who threaten the heterosexual nuclear family, they also make us aware of the unspoken rules that govern that family’s existence, by pointing out that they’re in a film and defying its narrative conventions.
This is the advantage of moviegoing. Saying queerness is the zero that defines the one seems abstract and mystical. Saying queerness is the structuring absence outside the Symbolic (or whatever it is you’re supposed to say when Lacan gets involved) is worse. But if I say “queerness is Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct,” you get me right away.
As you can see, this one (almost literally) checks all the boxes. It’s raw maximalism, a bombastic Wagnerian saga of tits and ass, the Disintegration and/or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy of erotic thrillers. Other movies came earlier, or were more influential, but this is the most erotic thriller that any erotic thriller can possibly be, a cross between an MGTOW message board and the episode of Law & Order where Dov Charney dies by autoerotic asphyxiation. (Or does he???)