Violence, Liberation, and Desire

Abstract

Catherine is a wealthy, successful writer with a degree in literature and psychology from Berkeley. She also likes to fuck men she does not necessarily like, wears no underwear, and exposes her vagina to five police detectives she has just met during an interview. The spectator sees Sharon Stone’s body from the voyeuristic point of view of the middle-aged male detectives and the protagonist, Nick. Basic Instinct (1992), with its classic shot/reverse shot sequences, constructs the type of male gaze Laura Mulvey had discussed two decades earlier. An international blockbuster at the time, this film is remarkably lacking in female pointof-view shots; it sutures the spectator into a male heterosexual viewing position, and the narrative reinforces a male heterosexual construction of sexuality. After an explicit, semi-violent scene in which he forces his girlfriend, Christine, to have sex, Nick criticizes her for not being able to “get off.” Even though the scene does not indicate that Nick makes any effort to satisfy Christine sexually, the plot represents her failure to achieve orgasm as completely her own. Indeed, despite the sexual deficiencies of this relationship, and despite the fact that Nick betrays his girlfriend by having sex with another woman (who orgasms very easily), when Christine is accidentally murdered by Nick at the end of the film, she still manages to whisper “I love you” with her dying breath.KeywordsSexual HarassmentGender IdentityFemale CharacterMovie TheaterMale ViolenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.