BASIC VERHOEVEN
The Fourth Man vs. Basic Instinct
With an outsider’s eye, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven rewrote genre film for over a decade with his pure-surface sendups of American violence and hypocrisy. Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers all left their on-the-nose, ironic stamps on a generation. No other filmmaker rewards the viewer for not-thinking too much as well as Verhoeven does, and even his objectively bad studio movies have their fans.
But Verhoeven’s perverted soul shines best in the difficult arthouse films that bookend his studio career. Only Verhoeven could have made 2021’s convent freakout Benedetta, which is Mean Girls with ergot poisoning. His 2016 thriller Elle features the most ferocious Isabelle Huppert performance ever. After I cautiously recommended it to a relative—even with all possible warnings about its content clearly stated— they didn’t talk to me for a year. (And Mom, if you’re reading this…)
On the other side of his career, 1983’s The Fourth Man was Verhoeven’s final Dutch language film before his escape to Hollywood. The observant out there will note that this bonkers Hitchcock tribute is a gender flip of his later film, Basic Instinct. In lieu of Sharon Stone, the bisexual novelist in this instance is a man, played by Jeroen Krabbé, who becomes ensnared by Christine, a seaside black widow. Or is it all part of a novel he’s working on? Verhoeven pushes his Buñuelian sacrileges and Giallo gore to the forefront and the baroque ambiguity is genuinely thrilling. It should go without saying that Emily Schultz had a blast with this story of a book tour gone wrong.
There are spoilers galore in our talk and—as this is Paul Verhoeven day—we go the full NC-17 and also discuss sex, kink, mutilation, misogyny, Jesus in Speedos, and how Dutch really does sound like silly English.
Non-dirtbags should sit this one out. Everyone else, grab a stroopwafel.
Brian J Davis: Before we begin, what we discovered in watching two Dutch films this month—the other being Marleen Gorris's A Question of Silence—was that it’s actually very difficult to concentrate on subtitles, because our brains are sometimes processing Dutch as English. You were so riveted by A Question of Silence but you were also, “This Dutch… it’s making me so sleepy.”
Emily Schultz: I would never say that!
BJD: But back to The Fourth Man.
ES: This is an amazing film…except for the goddamn opening.
BJD: The credit sequence features the two things that Emily most hates: Spiders and Jesus.
ES: [Covering eyes with hands] Tell me when it’s over. Why is a spider even there? It’s just to torment me!
BJD: Interesting side note, cinematographer Jan de Bont went right from having his scalp bitten off while filming Roar! to The Fourth Man.
ES: And the only danger to his life here was a bisexual novelist?
BJD: I knew you would love this movie. Oh wow. It’s difficult to talk seriously during the dick tracking shot.
ES: We’re really going to follow his penis right down the stairs, aren’t we? I bet the actor was like, “I’ll play an alcoholic writer, but you must have a two-minute shot of my penis.”
BJD: I don’t want to make fun of this scene! He has the DTs and the scene of him trying to shave is devastating. And now his boyfriend is putting up some boundaries. “Nah, I don’t really care about your book event you need to get to.”
ES: The first time I watched this I mistook him for the woman on the poster art.
BJD: Verhoeven did kind of continue that through Basic Instinct where he is utilizing androgyny to sell certain points.
ES: The violence the writer enacts on his boyfriend is a fantasy scene. Setting up how this film plays with reality versus fiction. If the violence that Michael Douglas’s character enacts in Basic Instinct in that horrific scene with Jean Tripplehorn was framed as a fantasy…I would like that film much better.
BJD: This is simply the better movie and the better version of the story. I think what I love about this movie is if you pay attention carefully for the first 20 minutes, the movie keeps coming back to those moments. His encounters, his dreams. It’s the right kind of tricky.
ES: Speaking of tricks! Here he is cruising at the magazine stand. Now that I'm paying attention to it, what I see is a man who’s not led to sobriety—because he’s not sober through the movie—but he’s led back into life by his desire.
BJD: And the amazing thing about The Fourth Man being a film from 1983—it’s not the queer character who is the corrupting influence in the film. But the straight femme fatale. She corrupts him!
ES: She’s really in the masculine role in this film. There’s so much cross wiring going on. Now his writing talk in a small town. Ironically, the first time we watched this I fell asleep during the reading scene.
BJD: Here’s the shopkeeper who’s murdered in A Question of Silence! He plays the local doctor and literary festival director here. So okay, as a touring author, how much of this is familiar with you?
ES: The audience putting in their hearing aids is very realistic if you’re a writer. But at least he’s got a room full of people!
BJD: Christine is clocking him from the get go. She knows everything about him. He’s an alcoholic and she hands him a double. She has her androgynous blond-Bowie haircut.
ES: So he really decides to go home with her to avoid being alone in a hotel?
BJD: This writer mentions fate a lot. He’s trying to interpret his premonitions but is interpreting them…very wrongly.
ES: Now they’re in bed and this is pretty much the same shot that opens Basic Instinct.
BJD: The storyboards would be the same, shot-for-shot.
ES: Except he’s pretending she’s a boy.
BJD: She’s inviting it. Verhoeven said he wanted to show how much she tries to come between him and his identity, to disrupt his judgement. And now the Writer calls out for Mary and Jesus as he climaxes, as one does. Totally normal!
ES: I just remembered: Jeroen Krabbé also played a writer in Crossing Delancey.
BJD: Typecast!
ES: I mean he does look like every writer in New York. Sad eyes and a little bit of entitlement.
BJD: He has Resting BookScan face.
[Nightmare sequence involving realistic castration]
BJD [singing]: Detachable Penis!
ES: I had that on tape. King Missile!
BJD: Have you ever had to explain to someone not-from-our generation that a song called “Detachable Penis” was actually a hit?
ES: It was a hit? [Ed. #25 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart.]
BJD: We’ve seen this three times now and each time I’ve noticed you smiling during the castration nightmare.
ES: I mean, the effect actually looks like a penis. They really did try to match it to his penis in the first shot. It’s uncircumcised and the penis that winds up getting castrated is also uncircumcised.
BJD: Oh my god, you’re a penis whisperer.
ES: I appreciate attention to detail.
BJD: So it’s the next morning and Dutch men don’t seem to know how robes work. It’s simple. One: you layer it. Two: you tie your belt.
ES: “I had a wonderful night…” Except for that dream where you castrated me!
BJD: Good relationships are built on subtle omissions like that. So this movie is admittedly full of Freudian noir film cliches. But I think I figured out the difference between The Fourth Man and Basic Instinct. What makes this great—as ridiculous as it is—is the women are in on the story. They’re simply part of it in a way they’re not allowed to be in Basic Instinct.
ES: Oh, leaving money in front of a writer. Not a good idea.
BJD: And she left the letter and photo of Herman the German in Speedos out for him to find. He thinks she’s casting for a fourth husband and this is his competition, but he’s being trapped. Herman is bait.
ES: I like that this only begins at “they’re playing each other” and it suggests the writer could be a killer too. That was a flaw of Basic Instinct. There was no true suspicion of Michael Douglas ever. Hollywood would never allow it.
BJD: And now he’s kissing the photo of Herman. Pre-Instagram, that’s what we had to do! You’ve kissed a photo, right?
ES: In my youth, absolutely. Many photos, actually.
BJD: Just checking that I wasn’t the only one. Now they’re swimming in the sexy gray waters of the North Atlantic. I like this drowning fakeout because it does contribute to the ambiguity. Maybe Christine is innocent. No matter how we talk about the plot, the ending is genuinely ambiguous. We really think this could be something he’s just writing while having a breakdown.
ES: He’s now giving her “psychic advice” about Herman in order for her to invite him over for the weekend. Behind her back he’s pumping the air with his fist and practically shouting, “Dick date!”
BJD: There’s so much joy in watching someone so confident like him being played and we the audience know he’s being played.
ES: Now we see him start writing this all as a novel. During his reading he says he “lies the truth.” And this film could be just that. Oh, the dying seagull falling on him!
BJD: When I saw this the first time I was like: Emily has had days like that.
ES: I have! Now his vision of Herman, in Speedos, on the cross in the church.
BJD: Lil Nas X, please meet Lil Paul Verhoeven!
ES: He’s going for the Speedos. So many people have told me about their feelings for sexy Jesus while growing up.
BJD: In Catholicism you’re smothered in this beautiful iconography of suffering: the lips are pouty, the lighting effects are lusty, the muscles are in marble. Without a doubt my first crushes were Mary and Jesus—that was my first idea of beauty. And Paul Verhoeven has been very open about his own incident of adult-onset religious mania. I mean, way open. In an interview about this film he literally said, “I always wanted to to peek behind that loincloth.”
ES: He’s had this fantasy about Herman. What if Christine doesn’t exist?
BJD: I think that at the end of this movie, you could logically say none of this happened but in a satisfying way, not in an “it was all a dream way.” Maybe this isn’t a thriller? Maybe this is a representation of how the writing process works, where you drive yourself crazy making things up.
ES: I’m making a note now: not enough Speedos in my writing.
BJD: He’s discovered all these home movies of Christine’s previous husbands, and they’re all setups for how they died. But the great thing about the scene is he’s fall down drunk while discovering all this convenient information! It really lessens the cliché, and I might have to steal that.
ES: Now she’s brought Herman over for the weekend. And the writer is watching them through the keyhole, tormented.
BJD: Can I quote what you said on first viewing? “Now it’s turning into one of my books.”
ES: Yep! And now he’s flirting with Herman and saying that he’ll make him a character in the book he’s writing.
BJD: I think this and Basic Instinct have the same argument, which is people will do anything to be included in a writer’s novel. That is probably not true.
ES: In my experience, most people are like, “Don’t you dare put me in your fucking book!”
BJD: Okay, so this is the scene where they take shelter in a mausoleum. And he finally scores with Herman, but then…
ES: I was so sad at the scene! Like, oh my god, he finally got his dream man, he’s getting what looks like the blowjob of his life in a crypt and he realizes he’s there with all the ashes of Christine’s dead husbands.
BJD: And he figures out how they died with all the home movies he saw. She cuts the parachute cords. Then the lion on the drive-thru safari.
ES: Not to blame the victim in that particular scene where husband number two is egged on to get out of the car to tease a lion with meat…but do I buy that as a murder?
BJD: Honestly men are so stupid that if you wanted to murder a man with a lion you totally could. “You know what would be really sexy? If you went over and teased that lion with a raw steak.”
ES: Herman’s driving him to the train station to escape, but the Writer is telling him to drive faster, ignoring literal red flags being waved at them. Okay, I want a red flag to wave when needed.
BJD: And Herman’s impalement scene! The gore in this film really adds to the over the top everything of this film. This is where the movie gets very interesting. After Herman’s death he goes into acute religious mania in a hospital. He thinks he’s being rescued from Christine by the nurse, who he sees as “Mary.” This is the complexity of Verhoeven. He’s suggesting that maybe this writer just had a bad weekend that ended with a pickup and a terrifying accident. And in his mind, he’s putting it all together and his faith is giving order to it. And that is such a profound critique of faith. Now compare that ending with Basic Instinct.
ES: The shot of the murder weapon under the bed as if to say, maybe Sharon Stone really is the killer after all! And it’s so bad of a twist ending.
BJD: Whereas here, the ambiguous ending comes out of the story and character.
ES: Now Christine is going off with… the fifth man! Uh-oh, he likes windsurfing.
BJD: And the writer is with “Mary” in the hospital. They even pan to a cross above his bed.
ES: Now if there was a tiny Herman in Speedos on that cross, that would be quite the ending!
This conversation really made me want to revisit so much Verhoeven! I haven't seen The Fourth Man in a couple of decades, and I remembered almost none of the plot points you discuss.