Shock and Ohhhh God! - Paul Verhoeven Offends Again

At the ripe old age of 83, Paul Verhoeven is as controversial as ever. Having returned to Europe after Hollywood became too conservative for him, his new film Benedetta, a French period piece set in 17th Century Black Plague infested Italy (something we fascinatingly look at with new perspective after living through our own pandemic), portrays the life of a lesbian, mythic nun in a convent. Far from becoming sophisticated and respectable with the passage of time, Benedetta, proves Verhoeven is still the same, with its erotic female nudity, abrupt, intense, absurd violence, and a serious yet ridiculous tone that veers toward B movie bombasticness. These stylistic trademarks can be seen throughout his filmography in films such as Turkish Delight, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls, though the film is possibly most similar to Verhoeven’s Danish WWII film Black Book as it ties his over-the-top sleaze and violence into a historical setting. Add into the mix the aliens, explosions, and leftist dystopian politics featured in Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers and your journey to the cinematic world of this mad Dutchman gone Hollywood is complete.

Throughout his career Verhoeven has shocked and offended audiences consistently. From Rutger Haur’s penis caught in the zipper of his pants to the vagina shot of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, to the gratuitous nuditidy and exaggerated soft core porn of Showgirls to the rape scene in Elle, Verhoeven has never been one to resist taboo subjects, and, to reiterate once more, Benedetta is no exception. Two people walked out of the showing I attended as a young nun was unrobed, chained to a table, and tortured with a medieval device inserted in her vagina. Though that was just the straw that broke the camel's back as the audience previously bore witness to self flagellation, a heart to heart on the toilet amist farts, a sexualized Jesus with vagina who seduces our protagonist in her dreams, several scenes of passionate lesbian lovemaking, and, most memorably, a statuette of the virgin Mary carved into a dildo. Suffice it to say that though the film lasts more than 2 hours, there is enough visual stimulation both sensual, and eye coveringly, seat wringlingly, painful to keep you from falling asleep.

Verhoeven has been making such shocking films since the beginning of his career. His first big success was in 1973 with Turkish Delight, a film that begins with two grisly revenge murders by a young, attractive, Rutger Hauer in his first film. It then proceeds to depict a series of scenes of Hauer forcefully, sometimes violently accosting young women and convincing them to come back to his art studio to have sex. The film relentlessly punches the audience with politically incorrect content in the first 20 minutes before eventually settling into a slightly less vulgar love story between Hauer and his sexual equal played by Monique van de Ven. The film has a French New Wave aura to it in the way it portrays young people behaving badly, resisting the social norms of society in the big city. Here Amsterdam replaces Paris. Yet, as can be assumed, Turkish Delight is far more provocative than even the most explicit French New Wave film, mixing the aesthetically and thematically daring with the unabashedly gross and offensive. The film was a huge success and remains the highest grossing film in Dutch history. It would launch the careers of all involved, with Verhoeven and Hauer becoming hugely successful in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s. 

Verhoeven’s sexually explicit style would follow him to Hollywood where he would become infamous for films like Basic Instinct, an enormous box office triumph, and Showgirls, a tremendous flop. Basic Instinct is forever enshrined in the common consciousness of pop culture because of the aforementioned shot up Sharon Stone’s skirt. You would be hard pressed to find anyone unaware of this twenty second sequence even if they have never heard of or much less seen the film in its entirety. Perhaps superficially, the obsession with this shot defines one of the most important elements of Verhoeven’s cinema. It is sleek, sexy, threatening, and, suddenly, shocking and anything but PC. Yet Verhoeven does not only seek to mindlessly offend us. Though his films are often all over the place, he is constantly playing with the audience’s capacity to take in socially unacceptable content and fearlessly delves himself into the violent, sexual, and sexually violent facets of the human condition.

Basic Instinct is one of his films that at times seems to really be on to something, and at others completely loses it. It scratches the surface of inspecting a certain dark side of human behavior by introducing us to characters who may or may not be addicted to murder because they enjoy it. This connection between pleasure and violence and pain is a theme that can be seen from Turkish Delight to Benedetta, but is perhaps never more present then it is here in Basic Instinct. The sex scenes leave nothing for the imagination and are filmed with a choreography as intricate as a fight in a kung fu film. Every stroke, thrust, and moan is plotted and planned. The scenes are extremely erotic, yet suspesful. Verhoeven keeps us on the edge of our seat, because any sudden movement becomes threatening. Sex and passion in this case are the equivilant to danger and at any moment an ice pick could make a fatal appearance where moans of pleasure are exchanged for cries of agony.

Unfortunately the film fails to tie together both its themes and its thrilling film noir plot by failing to answer or come to a conclusion on any of the loose ends it puts forward. With that said, it is a fascinating watch as Verhoeven takes a crack at Hitchcock. It has strong hints of Vertigo and is set in and around San Francisco. The coast, cliffs, and forests are just as captivating and beautifully chilling as its protagonist Sharon Stone whose star making turn here perhaps outshines any of Hitchcockian blondes for whom she stands in for. The film may be remembered for a glimpse of her private parts, but her icy blue menacing eyes and scathingly sexy yet sinister line delivery are the real reason the film will be remembered.

If Stone is the reason Basic Instinct was such a success in its day, it could be argued that the utterly dismal performance of Elizabeth Berkely in Showgirls is the main reason for its failure (Though it does feature a fantastic performance by Gina Gershon that has gone sadly overlooked). Whereas Stone perfectly balances the layers of her performance, Berkely overacts to the point that her character is less believable than the three boobed prostitute in Total Recall. She screams, shrieks, and pouts her way through the film with the subtlety and grace of an actor in a porn video which is the last thing the film needed as it was already being criticized for being nothing more than a big budget softcore porn vanity project. The script by Joe Eszterhas does not help either, and suffers the same setbacks as his previous script for Basic Instinct. In both cases there is a masterpiece somewhere inside, yet the inability to bring things together in Basic Instinct, and in Showgirls, the outlandishly, WTF, laugh out loud ridiculousness of some lines of dialogue, most memorably when two dancers have a heart to heart and share their affinity for eating dog food, (Oh my God, they have so much in common!) makes the film really hard to take seriously.

Despite these cringe inducing moments, the film is a well directed, if obvious critique of the capitalist, sexist Las Vegas industry. Verhoeven gives it all in his extravagant big budget interpretation of stripper turned Showgirl in the surface world of glitz and glamour with a dark underbelly of drama, backstapping, money, and sex. It may not be a very original idea in the end, but the conditions of its production were anything but ordinary. It was the first and remains the only film with an NC-17 rating to receive a Hollywood sized budget, and, of course, who better than Verhoeven to take on this challenge. Unfortunately, yet perhaps, unsurprisingly, the film was panned critically and failed to attract an audience on its release. Yet, as has happened with several of Verhoeven’s films, critics are having a second look at Showgirls with many now considering it a cult classic. Audiences needed less time to appreciate it, with VHS sales of the film skyrocketing after its release. It seems that the problem may have been that the US public was not ready for Showgirls in 1995, too ashamed to publicly attend a film that was regarded as little more than high budget porn. They had to wait until they could sneakily buy a copy at a video store and watch it in the comfort of their homes with the drapes drawn for fear of societal judgement for watching something surely deemed indecent.

While Verhoeven’s nudity ridden, sex films form an important part of his style and reputation, without a doubt, what really makes his one of the greatest and most unique directors of his time are his trilogy of science fiction masterpieces RoboCop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers. The three films, though unrelated in content, share a similar B movie style of over the top action, explosions, sex and nudity (of course), and, most importantly, a dystopian social commentary. All three films feature comically parodic news clips and advertisements from the future which, like a Greek Chorus, introduce us to the worlds where they take place, and comment on the events taking place in the plot. These ingenious clips show us a world of crime in Detroit where the public is being sold the need of the use of military robots to control criminals, a politically unstable Mars where capitalists look to squash dangerous freedom fighters, and propaganda commercials convincing youngsters to join the military to become citizens with rights by saving the world from the evil bug monsters from other planets. The satire is as biting and dead on as anything done by Black Mirror.

RoboCop was Verhoeven’s breakout in Hollywood and would set the stage for his following outings in the science fiction genre. Though skeptical of his ability to make such a film, Verhoeven knocks it out of the park in every way by brilliantly mixing spectacle and politics. The outrageous violence matched with the 50s style acting by the cast and the social political backdrop are the perfect combination of a director embracing the artifice of the genre to entertain yet critique at the same time. One of the first scenes takes place in a skyscraper where suits are introducing a robot to replace the police. However, the presentation ends drastically when the robot kills one of its creators in explosive fashion. The suits with their pearly white hair and teeth lament the failure of the inability to privatize the police more than the bloody loss of their companion. Eventually a brutally murdered officer played by Peter Weller will provide the perfect opportunity for the bloodless corporation to create a slightly more ‘humane’ super cop by reviving the officer's brain and rebuilding his body in a sort of Darth Vader way to make him the perfect cop. 

In the end, the film is not only a critique of capitalist society, but is also humanitarian in its depiction of RoboCop who, despite his programming, maintains his humanity. It is a bitter sweet, hilarious, wonderfully entertaining futuristic satire that will go on to influence science fiction for generations to come.

In 1990 Total Recall would take off where RoboCop left off but this time with world famous action star Arnold Schwartzenegger. Here, again, the villains are capitalists exploiting the people of Mars to mine valuable resources and even have created segregated neighborhoods where people affected by poorly controlled private protection from radiation are excluded from high society and where they even have the power to turn off certain parts of the city’s air. Again the film seeks to warn us of the danger of privatization, and shows us the unfortunate glamourless future of space travel, where a trip to Mars is anything but a 2001 A Space Odyssey epic. Instead it is a cheap, cheesy travel package just like any cruise trip on offer in the present. How familiar this depiction of space travel looks in a world where Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are shooting themselves into space. And the exploitation of Mars is an obvious comparison to the exploitation of any third world country. 

The film features some incredible makeup and special effects work as Schwartzenegger must remove a golf ball sized tracker from his brain via his nose, the aforementioned three boobed prostitute along with a plethora of mutated humans, bug eyed exploding heads, and an old red headed woman transforming herself into Arnold. Rewatching it today gives off a nostalgic feeling for when these types of things had to be done by hand and were not simply drawn by computers. The goofy special effects, violence, comedic tone, and presence of the unactorly, unassuming, smiling unperformance of Schwartzenegger places the film squarely in the same universe as RoboCop. Ronny Cox, the actor who played the business executive villain in RoboCop even returns to play basically the exact same role here.

The wonderfully open structure of the film also leaves the viewer in doubt as to whether what we are seeing is a dream or reality, setting itself up for a perfectly executed open ending that even outdoes Christopher Nolan’s dream extravaganza Inception. This is thanks to another one of those pitch perfect futuristic advertisements, this time for a vacation that is implanted into your brain. Why travel for real when we can put you to sleep and put a chip in your brain? Again, it is clearly a plot device that has directly influenced Black Mirror. Is Schwartzenegger really a spy? Or does he just think that because that is what he has been made to think? Reality and Fantasy become impossible to separate. We are already seeing today in our own world with digital technology that truth is becoming easy to replicate.

Last but not least in Verhoeven’s sci-fi filmography comes Starship Troopers, which, like Showgirls, was critically panned in its day and is only recently being reconsidered a classic. It is easy to see why the film was not understood in its day as it is more extreme both in its satire and in its B movie presentation to the point where it is not as easy to catch its brilliance at first glance. Peter Wellen and Arnold Schwartzenegger do not give what one could call empathetic, realistic performances, but here the actors are so good looking, hollow, and uninteresting, that it is impossible to emotionally invest in them. This is, of course, as intentional as it was with Weller and Schwartzenegger, but here taken to an even further level of blandness. 

The satire also at some points is hard to understand. It seems at times that we are actually supposed to be rooting for our protagonists, and when they are being attacked and brutally dismembered by giant insects, it is kind of hard not to feel some pity for them no matter how plastic they seem. And maybe they really do deserve our pity, not because they are being destroyed by alien insects, but because they are living in a society that seems to have been overtaken by American military extremism. In many countries it is illegal to make publicity for the military, but not in the United States, and Verhoeven has a great time parodying it. In the future, the obsession with the military has been taken so far that in order to be a rights holding citizen you must dedicate your life to the military by risking it in space wars against giant, supposedly evil insects. Unlike RoboCop and Total Recall, we spend all our time with the military. There is no representation of a resistance movement against this human military power, therefore the critique is much less obvious. We are forced to fill in the gaps ourselves, and here, Verhoeven and RoboCop screenwriter Edward Neumeier imagine a world of American Exceptionalism gone wild. Like the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and its involvement in Latin American politics, America is obsessed with spreading its ideals, or, better said, controlling the world as it wishes. In this dystopian future, it seems that the military continues these endless bug wars simply to control its own population. The fact that our gungho heroes are actually not no really the good guys becomes more obvious once you notice that certain military uniforms are almost exact replicas of those worn by the Nazis. It is an incredibly subversive film that seems like a crappy B movie with actors that are not even worthy of Sharknado but is actually a propaganda military film blown out of proportion to critique exactly what it seems to be celebrating. 

Despite all the talk of how B-like the film seems, the special effects and action scenes are absolutely stunningly made. The bugs may take their designs from monster movies of the 50s, but they have been perfected thanks to the special effects of the 90s which are so well created that it is hard to imagine them looking better even today. The mixture of on site locations, namely Badlands National Park, which, having been there, really does look and feel like another planet, give the setting a real looking outer space setting.

Returning to Benedetta after this analysis of his filmography, it shares the same faults as his other erotic dramas which his science fiction outings overcome. There is a moment in Black Book when the protagonist, after seeing her family murdered, having to prostitute herself as a spy, being betrayed by her so called comrades, being imprisoned and humiliated, and surviving I do not know how many shoot outs and boat and car chases and execution attempts, finally breaks down and screams, ‘Will it never stop, then?!’ seemingly reading the audience's mind. Verhoeven has an ability to put his audience through the ringer with so many uncomfortable and stimulating images that they leave one exhausted. Benedetta is another such film, and though it lacks the structure and cohesion of his science fiction films, Verhoeven has not lost his touch with age and shows no signs of slowing down. Let's hope he does not and continues to disturb our civilized sensibilities as long as possible.