Zimbalist, Andrew.In the Best Interests of Baseball? The
Revolutionar y Reign of Bud Selig. Hoboken, N.J.:
John Wiley & Sons, 2006. An account of the com-
missioner’s role in baseball, focusing on Selig’s
tenure as acting commissioner and subsequent
term as commissioner.
Jacob F. Lee
See also Baseball; Baseball realignment; Griffey,
Ken, Jr.; Home run race; McGwire, Mark; Ripken,
Cal, Jr.; Sosa, Sammy; Sports.
Basic Instinct
Identification Erotic thriller film
Director Paul Verhoeven (1938- )
Date Released on March 20, 1992
This film tapped into an audience accustomed to violence
and sex and made a star out of Sharon Stone.
InBasic Instinct, Michael Douglas plays detective
Nick Curran, whose accidental shooting of two tour-
ists has led to his going cold turkey on his favorite
vices—alcohol, drugs, and sex. When he investigates
a rock star’s kinky death and finds that it has been de-
scribed in a novel written by the rock star’s girl-
friend, Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone,
Curran regards Tramell as his prime suspect. When
he interviews her, however, she and he start to use
sexual innuendo, and he becomes infatuated with
her. The film manipulates its audience as it plays
with the probability of her guilt or innocence.
Clouding the issue is the presence of Dr. Beth Gar-
ner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the police department’s
psychologist, who is Curran’s lover and Tramell’s
former university lover, and Roxy (Leilani Sarelle),
Tramell’s jealous lesbian girlfriend.
Impact Basic Instinctcapitalized on Douglas’s ear-
lier performance inFatal Attraction(1987), another
film in which his desire for an attractive blond
woman led to his possible demise. InBasic Instinct,
however, it is Stone who has the greatest impact. In
the interrogation scene at police headquarters,
Stone’s character, who is not wearing underwear,
flashes the two detectives, creating the most dis-
cussed sex event in film during the 1990’s. Actually,
some of the sex in the original film had to be cut in
order to get a rating of R, rather than NC-17. The de-
piction of Stone and Roxy also provoked much con-
troversy because gay activists criticized Hollywood’s
tendency to portray lesbians as twisted and evil. The
other controversy in the film involves the manipula-
tion of its audience, since the clues are ambiguous,
and Tramell’s guilt or innocence is not revealed
until the shocking end. The plot is so designed that
either of the two possible endings would be consis-
tent with the information the audience has.
The actor most affected byBasic Instinct was
Stone, an intelligent woman whose looks had rele-
gated her to playing blond sexpots. InBasic Instinct,
she is sexy, but she is also a manipulative, ambitious,
dangerous bisexual woman who seems in control
throughout the film. Her role allowed her to vault
into the next level of performance and led to better
roles in such films asCasino(1995) andDiabolique
(1996). In fact, afterBasic Instinct, Stone made fif-
teen more films during the 1990’s. Such was the ap-The Nineties in America Basic Instinct 89
Basic Instinct’s Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone.
(©Bureau L.A. Collection/Corbis)