Hollow Man

Hollow Man was the last of Paul Verhoeven's run of Hollywood genre films, made following the lackluster reception of his previous two pictures, Showgirls and Starship Troopers. Both of those box office flops were later reappraised by various audiences as trashy cult/camp successes or genuine masterpieces, but that doesn't seem likely to happen for Hollow Man, which similarly flopped upon release but seems to reveal the director reaching the limits of his interest in making this kind of film within Hollywood. That's a shame, because the film's concept is certainly the kind of thing one would expect Verhoeven to eagerly embrace, to transform into the kind of morally ambiguous, pulpy genre deconstruction/celebration that he does best. Instead, while the film is good — even bracingly potent — in isolated stretches, it's sabotaged at every turn by indifferent scripting, disconnected acting, and one of the most absurd action denouements in Verhoeven's career. The film introduces some interesting concepts, some tantalizing hints of the film Verhoeven at his best could make of this material, and then destroys everything in a raging inferno.

The film is the story of government research scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), who's leading a project to discover a way to make people invisible. Naturally, once he's perfected the process, or believes he has, he wants to switch from testing the procedure on apes to, in the grand tradition of movie mad scientists, volunteering himself as the first human test subject. It's a heady concept, and Verhoeven hints right from the beginning that the film's going to be about Sebastian exploring his darkest impulses without moral accountability. Even before he turns invisible, Sebastian is kind of a jerk, a brilliant guy who treats his co-workers with barely disguised contempt, particularly the women, with the one exception of his ex-girlfriend Linda (Elisabeth Shue), who he treats just slightly better because he'd like to sleep with her again. He's also a voyeur, habitually spying on a woman who lives across the street from his apartment; she generously feeds his voyeurism by stripping down to her lingerie every night, tantalizing him, before closing the shades to finish undressing. It's obvious, then, what kinds of things Sebastian will want to do once he's invisible. This is a classic pulp premise, the invisible man who primarily uses his gift so he'll get to see lots of naked women.

To some extent, Verhoeven delivers on this premise, having Sebastian immediately abuse his power for sexual thrills. Tellingly, it's not being invisible per se that gets him off, but the ability to do what he wants without being held accountable. His first sexual assault, walking up to a sleeping girl and unbuttoning her blouse, doesn't necessarily require him to be invisible in order to do it. The invisibility comes in handy only when she wakes up, so he can escape literally unseen. Being invisible doesn't so much open up new things for him to do, it merely allows him to do what he already could've done, except now he can do it assured that he won't get caught. The moral dilemma at the story's core, then, is the question of whether morality disappears with the possibility of punishment and accountability: if a man can do what he wants without anyone ever seeing him do it, what will he do? Unfortunately, Verhoeven seems largely uninterested in these questions, or at least uninterested in the possibility of exploring them in this particular movie. Instead, the film rapidly degenerates into a rather typical, if particularly lousy, horror film.

The second half of the film does have some inventive, tense horror sequences, in which Sebastian stalks his fellow scientists after trapping them in the underground bunker where they work. These sequences revolve around the clever back-and-forth as Sebastian tries to maintain his edge of invisibility, while the other scientists attempt to find ways to track him, from spraying him with various substances to using heat and motion sensors. These scenes have the claustrophobic intensity of something like Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World, one obvious touchstone among many similar films where a group of potential victims are trapped in an enclosed, inescapable space with a killer. But as good as these scenes sometimes are as slasher/victim duels, it can't help but be disappointing that Verhoeven abandons his premise's moral concepts for such generic fare. Moreover, the final twenty minutes are an absolutely torturous attempt at a big action finale, in which Sebastian seems miraculously unkillable as explosions fill the underground complex. This ridiculous final battle all takes place in an elevator shaft where the last surviving protagonists, Linda and her scientist boyfriend Matt (Josh Brolin) struggle to escape and fight off the half-materialized Sebastian while an elevator literally bounces up and down the shaft, rocketing around crazily amidst the flames. It's a mess, a halfheartedly assembled compendium of action movie clichés that definitively erases any possibility that the film could have redeemed itself with its conclusion.


The film has other problems, too. One of these is that Sebastian is such a jerk to begin with that his gradual transformation into an even bigger jerk isn't really that interesting or morally complex. This should be a Jeckyll and Hyde story, a story about the dark impulses contained in all men, but in this case it's not exactly shocking when we learn that this sexist asshole is capable of rape, sexual assault and murder once he's invisible. The film's subtexts about male sexual voracity are poorly developed to begin with, limited to a handful of throwaway scenes, like the one where Sebastian's fellow scientist Carter (Greg Grunberg) is caught reading a porn magazine and talking dirty to the pictures. If the script, by Air Force One scribe Andrew W. Marlowe, intends this stuff to be a clever way of showing that all men are pigs, let's just say it doesn't work.

In fact, the script is arguably responsible for much of the film's failure, in that it takes a striking premise and then slowly, methodically, wears away anything that might be interesting about it, replacing it with clichés. The dialogue is almost unrelentingly generic, riddled with awkward phrasing and lines of almost astonishing mundanity. It's the kind of script that sabotages any possibility of meaningful acting, and the cast mostly responds by not really bothering to act. Bacon is a sneering cipher, and then he disappears altogether, spending most of the film unseen, acting from behind a rubber mask or various CGI effects. But even then he's not nearly as bad as Shue's sniveling, characterless Linda, who keeps giving in to steamy moments with her former lover Sebastian and then pulling back at the last moment to show she's a good girl after all. She's cheery and empty, while Brolin's Matt is stoic and empty, and most of the rest of the cast are just warm bodies, biding their time in waiting for the slasher finale. Only Kim Dickens, as the veterinarian Sarah, turns in a decent performance, emanating the low-key bitchy resentment that Verhoeven has always seemed to cherish in his female characters.

On the positive side, the film does make interesting use of its special effects. The CGI used here hasn't dated well, as tends to be the case with CGI, and the effects have a blatant unreality that makes them look cartoony. Even so, there's a real sense of wonder to scenes like the one in which an invisible gorilla rematerializes one layer at a time: first its veins become visible, its neural pathways, its muscles and organs, its skeleton, the layers of skin piling on before finally reaching its hairy exterior. Even with effects that today look substandard, the scene amply captures the sense of magic and awe in this scene. Later, when the effect is reversed for the scene where Sebastian disappears, it's equally powerful and unsettling, an image of the human body peeled away layer by layer, revealing what's inside, making us tick, and then obscuring all of those innards as well.

The film comes alive in moments like this. It comes alive, too, in a scene preceding Sebastian's disappearing act, when, in the hallway leading to the lab, Sebastian tells an astonishingly dirty joke. It involves Superman, a nude sunbathing Wonder Woman, and an invisible man, and it neatly encapsulates the film's anxiety about what men will do when granted power and true freedom from responsibility. It's a joke about what happens when someone can do something without anyone ever knowing, and its twist relies on the fact that while Sebastian is telling the joke, the audience suspects that he's implicitly comparing himself to Superman; after all, he's always joking that he's playing God. But it turns out that he doesn't aspire to be Superman, and despite his patter he doesn't really think he's God either. He just wants to be the invisible man. He aspires to be a man shorn of the moral responsibility that comes with having a face, a tangible presence in the world. This lewd, tasteless joke is one of the film's best, most revelatory moments. It's very tempting to attribute it to Verhoeven; it seems impossible that it could be a product of the same script that is everywhere else so lifeless, humorless, and blind to the ideas and possibilities embedded in this material.

The film is undoubtedly a failure, and it's probably no coincidence that after this Verhoeven finally departed from Hollywood, returning to the Netherlands to make his next feature, the creatively rejuvenating Black Book. Hollow Man, though interesting at times, reveals the limits of Verhoeven's ability to play around within Hollywood genre tropes. He seems constrained by his material, prevented from really taking this story to its naturally lurid, morally inquisitive excesses. And a reined-in, neutered Verhoeven is a director who has had his best tools and resources stripped away from him.

Total Recall

Total Recall was Paul Verhoeven's second movie in Hollywood, following up on the blunt, ultraviolent satire of RoboCop with an even loonier, more abrasive vision of totalitarian control. The film, loosely drawing its inspiration from a Philip K. Dick short story, imagines a future in which Mars has been colonized as a mining colony, producing a metal that is much in demand on Earth. The whole operation is presided over by the power-hungry Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), who maintains an iron grip on Mars by tightly controlling the air supply doled out to the inhabitants of the red planet, who live in specially controlled domes. If they want to live, they'll breath the air Cohaagen supplies — at a price, of course. It's a perfect situation for a would-be tyrant: complete control over people's very lives. His subjects need to bow to him just to survive, and there's no bargaining when it comes to a necessity like air, especially when Cohaagen's the only supplier.

As in RoboCop, Verhoeven is depicting a model for how a future authoritarian state might emerge — seizing control of natural resources, monopolizing the things people need, controlling the media to disperse only the information they want to get out, in this case propaganda about the "terrorist" rebels who resist. Not much information about Mars reaches the outside world, but one man becomes interested in the red planet when he begins obsessively dreaming the same dream over and over again, in which he is walking across the planet in a spacesuit with a mysterious woman. This man is Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and he seems to be perfectly ordinary: he's a construction worker, he's got a pretty wife, Lori (Sharon Stone), and he's never been off Earth. But his dreams persist, and he begins to want a solution to this mystery. He suspects maybe something is up. Of course, the audience knows long before he does that something's up. One of the film's most brilliant maneuvers is casting Schwarzenegger as a secret agent whose mind has been erased and his identity changed to that of an ordinary working man. This is Arnold we're talking about here, with his Bavarian lisp and his bulging, elephantine muscles. He looks absurd as a normal guy. He looks out of place in normal clothes, without a gun in his hand. He looks vaguely ridiculous kissing his wife goodbye as he leaves for work, as though he was a sitcom husband going through his daily routine. Today, he looks absurd too as a politician, but that's another story. The point is, it's obvious from the moment we see him that Douglas is not just some ordinary guy. He looks like a secret agent in disguise, a brawler, and it's no surprise when he's attacked and fluidly demolishes his assailants with a barrage of countermoves.

It turns out that someone's been messing with his mind, and his former self was a government agent working on Mars, an agent who had apparently switched sides to the rebels at some point. This is when the fun really begins. As a satire of totalitarianism, the film has its moments, but Verhoeven doesn't go nearly as far with the ideas as he did in RoboCop. But as a totally crazy, goofy sci-fi action movie, Total Recall is pretty hard to top. The explosive violence and gore of RoboCop is carried over here, and each fight scene is basically a collage of inventive ways of dispatching people, with Arnold in typical action hero mode, racing around, pounding bad guys, and tossing off his usual ludicrous one-liners. (His best, because it's simultaneously the cheesiest and the nastiest, is directed at his faux-wife Lori: "consider this a divorce.") The action scenes are occasionally clumsy, and there are several scenes where it's obvious that stunt actors are simply throwing themselves around to give the impression of a frenetic fight that just isn't actually happening, while in another scene everybody vibrates spastically to make it seem like the ground is shaking. Verhoeven's occasionally awkward with stuff like this, the big epic fight scenes so central to the film, though he also stages much of the violence with panache.

A bigger hurdle to enjoyment (except of the campy variety) is the lame dialogue and inconsistent acting. No one expects a real performance out of Schwarzenegger — the guy's most famous for playing a robot, with good reason — but the rest of the cast mostly seems to be acting down to his level. Cox especially hams it up as the villain Cohaagen, though his theatrical mustache-twirling fits the film's over-the-top B-movie tone well enough. Out of everyone in the cast, only Sharon Stone turns in an actual performance, in the small but crucial part of Lori. Her sexy-bitchy mannerisms and stop-on-a-dime transitions from seductive to icy seem now like a rehearsal for Basic Instinct's Catherine Tramell, and it's obvious why Verhoeven cast her in the part for his next film. As for Total Recall, despite its generic, pulpy dialogue and weak performances, for the most part the film is a visceral action showcase, and that's really all it tries to be. Verhoeven's political subtexts are increasingly overwhelmed by the wildly entertaining surface, which makes it a rare Verhoeven film where, in the battle between surface and subtext that always takes place in his work, the surface wins.


Still, it's a pretty entertaining surface. A lot of the credit has to go to the special effects work of Rob Bottin, who crams the film with inventive plastic and rubber effects. Most of the film's most memorable images are a result of this effects work: the bulging, cartoony eyes of Douglas as he flails about on the surface of Mars, gasping for air; the special robot suit that allows Douglas to disguise himself as a woman; the infamous three-breasted prostitute; the various deformed "freaks" who inhabit Mars' Venustown. These images have a sense of wonder, not because they seem futuristic, because they really don't, but because they're so tangible. They're not realistic by any means — in fact they're grotesque and deliberately exaggerated — but they nevertheless feel real. In that respect, the effects are reminiscent of the equally potent gore and viscera in David Cronenberg's 80s horror films, which seem like an important touchstone here. As in Cronenberg's work, the use of plastic effects rather than CGI grounds the film in a real, lived reality, even if in this case it's an absurd alternate future where three-breasted women and freakish mutants coexist, and where a mask of a woman's face can unfold itself like a flower opening to reveal Schwarzenegger inside.

These images provide much of the film's energy and vitality, particularly when Douglas finally comes face to... uh, faces with the rebel leader Kuato (Marshall Bell), a seemingly ordinary man who's hiding a baby-like tumor under his shirt, growing from his chest. This creature, which has psychic powers and leads the rebel army, is a stunningly grotesque puppet, slimy and very organic-looking. Such striking and memorably horrific images are a big part of the film's enduring appeal. Certainly, the creature and makeup effects have dated a lot better than the crude work done to create the surface of Mars itself; the red planet sometimes looks like an Earth desert tinted red, and sometimes looks like a blatant studio set with a painted backdrop. In a way, though, this artificiality only enhances the film's sense of unreality, as its protagonist tries to untangle his fractured mind. The plot races through multiple reversals and false detours, suggesting at various times that Douglas is delusional, that he's really a secret agent, that he's stuck in a virtual memory simulation gone wrong, that he just needs to swallow a red pill in order to wake up — presumably into The Matrix, which would eventually run with that particular idea. At the very end of the film, Douglas' last line even casually, jokingly suggests that maybe all of this was simply a dream, and he's about to wake up, at which point the sun flares in the distance, whiting out everything.

It's a telling little joke, because ultimately it doesn't really matter what's going on here. All of the material about multiple identities and the mind and memory are essentially red herrings, distracting from the real point. The film could be a paranoid delusion, it could all be happening in Douglas' head, but even if it isn't, it's always clear that the film is a fantasy in somebody's head, that it's unreal and ridiculous from the very beginning. It's Verhoeven's fantasy, basically, in which a capitalist nightmare — a monopoly run amok — is defeated through the efforts of freaks, outcasts and deviants. Verhoeven's touch shows through most clearly in the portrayal of these outcasts, who are both ogled as freaks — including a real dwarf mixed in amongst the makeup-enhanced mutants — and simultaneously treated as the only decent people in the film besides Douglas and his rebel girlfriend Melina (Rachel Ticotin). It's surely no coincidence that the film's rebels dwell in a section of Mars given over to sex clubs and exotic pleasures of all kinds. Even here, in probably Verhoeven's most impersonal film, the evidence of his overblown sensibility is everywhere. The film might be just a silly action movie at heart, but its anything-goes aesthetic propels the action along and gives the film its verve; Verhoeven is never content to simply show an image when he can rub it in the audience's face.

Flesh + Blood

Ugly, brutish and relentlessly bleak, Paul Verhoeven's Flesh + Blood is perhaps the director's idea of doing a realistic period picture, though of course with Verhoeven any concept of "realism" is entirely relative. The film is roughly made, with little concern for period detail or verisimilitude — in one shot, a soldier stabbed with a sword falls to the ground, the blade sticking out of his chest, and in the next shot he's clutching his bloodless chest, the sword gone altogether. The film is riddled with moments like this, evidence of a loose, casual approach to filmmaking. Verhoeven's realism is different: he's interested in including the details you don't normally see in period costume dramas. He wants to include all the grit, the ugliness, the grime and filth and rot. His actors are caked in dirt, and they perform with crass broadness; the performances are as messy and grandiose as everything else in this over-the-top film.

The film follows a group of 16th Century mercenary warriors led by Martin (Rutger Hauer). The mercenaries help the deposed lord Arnolfini (Fernando Hilbeck) regain control of his walled city, but once the job is done, Arnolfini has no more use for the looting, raucous mercenaries, and he has his warrior captain Hawkwood (Jack Thompson) drive the mercenaries away, disarmed and without pay. Martin won't tolerate this, so he leads his men back against Arnolfini, slaughtering the lord's guards and stealing his wagons, as well as kidnapping the virginal princess Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who was betrothed to marry Arnolfini's scientist son Steven (Tom Burlinson). Agnes is initially terrified, but in order to stay alive and relatively safe, she cozies up to Martin, seducing him and expressing her love for him, refusing to allow any of the other men in the mercenary gang near her.

The film is epic and nearly operatic in its melodramatic intensity, as Martin and his men careen across the medieval countryside, finally finding a castle which they clear of its inhabitants and take over. They settle in like lords of the manor, guided by the "signs" dictated to them by the half-mad priest Cardinal (Ronald Lacey), who believes they are being led by a statue of St. Martin, and that Martin is himself acting as an earthly incarnation of the saint. Of course, Martin helps nudge the statue into place to deliver the signs he wants the others to see, establishing himself as unequivocal leader and making sure he keeps Agnes for himself. The barbarians are on a parody of a holy quest, and once they take up residence in the castle, they also parody the manners of the elite they're displacing, spurred on by Agnes, who attempts to control Martin by showing him how to eat with a knife and a fork. There ensues a mad orgy in which the mercenaries attempt, clumsily and roughly, to mimic her courtly manners, shoveling massive pieces of meat into their mouths with their forks, chopping awkwardly at the food with dull knives.

The film makes every effort to separate these 16th Century barbarians from the present, to establish that this is a different time, a cruder and meaner time, a time guided by a different morality. None of these characters are likable, neither the mercenaries nor the soldiers, led by Steven and Hawkwood, who pursue them in order to rescue Agnes. If the mercenaries are brutish and violent and crude, Arnolfini's soldiers aren't much better. In fact, the film's opening attempts to align the audience's sympathies with the mercenaries, as they are betrayed by Arnolfini after loyally doing his bidding. Of course, the mercenaries are hardly sympathetic protagonists themselves, raping and pillaging their way through every city they come across. Even when Martin decides to surreptitiously help Agnes avoid the attentions of the other mercenaries, he does it not so much because he feels sorry for her, but because he seems to want to keep her for himself. He was won over into something like love when his attempt to rape her was met with feigned pleasure, the girl pumping her hips against him and urging him on the way she'd seen her maid do it in the bushes.


Throughout the film, Agnes remains an ambiguous figure. It's not at all clear if she's simply faking her devotion to Martin to keep herself safe, or if she's hedging her bets on which man will win out in the inevitable confrontation. She manages to secretly slip signs of her love to Steven to show him how she feels, but at the same time she aggressively pursues Martin, and it seems that at some point her charade slips into genuine feeling for the mercenary leader. She's an interesting character, seemingly another of the film's many sly critiques of religion. She was educated in a convent where, with access to the nuns' many books, she ironically learned more about the ways of the world than most other young, virginal girls could. She has, as Martin says at one point, an innocent face — he calls her an "angel" — but the rest of her is not so chaste. Even when she first meets Steven, she overcomes his initial reluctance to marry a girl he doesn't know with her bold, straightforward seduction. She wins his heart beneath the dangling corpses of two bloated, rotting hanged men, and at the climax of the scene Verhoeven switches to a wide shot of the kissing couple framed between the dangling bodies of the dead men. Ultimately, Agnes is only as innocent as she can be in an era like this, surrounded by death and brutality — she is unflappable and tough despite her exterior appearance, and she is willing to do what she must to survive and get what she wants.

The film is a typically excessive, sensually overwrought piece from Verhoeven, who has always brought his uniquely skewed sensibility to all manner of genre films. Here, he's made a lurid, bloody, outrageously sexual period piece, a film in which the barbarism and cruelty of these people is paraded around relentlessly. Verhoeven isn't concerned with making his characters likable, and he cheerfully revels in their amorality. Even Steven, the closest thing the film has to a genuine hero, becomes hard and cold after Agnes is kidnapped, viciously threatening Hawkwood in order to force him to help, and later purposefully infecting the mercenaries with the bubonic plague. The film's ending is thus a parody of the conventional "happy ending." The hero has rescued his bride-to-be and vanquished the villains, but it somehow doesn't seem like such a positive outcome. Steven's soldiers, taking over where the dead mercenaries left off, grab the mercenaries' surviving women to rape and sleep with them, while Hawkwood rides back to the half-mad former nun he keeps as his woman after nearly killing her in an earlier battle. The film isn't so much about a battle between heroes and villains, but a struggle between opposing sides of nearly equal amorality and ugliness; one can't root for any of them to win, and the film is unceasingly unpleasant and grim. This makes Flesh + Blood staggeringly ambiguous in its effect; all of this bloodshed and misery and hatred seems to have been over nothing, despite each side's conviction that God or justice were in their corner.

Showgirls

Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls must surely be among the most absurd movies ever made, a gaudy, nasty, hysterical tribute to excess and bad taste. Made from a script by the notoriously exploitative Joe Eszterhas, Verhoeven's collaborator on Basic Instinct and a seasoned peddler of sleaze, the film is a glorious mess, a neon overload of sexploitation. It's the inspirational story of an ambitious young girl who fights and claws her way to the top of her profession, struggling to be the best she can be, fighting to make her way on sheer talent and drive alone. Uh, yeah. That's what it's supposed to be, anyway. That's the kind of movie that Showgirls models itself on, the movie where the small-town girl makes it in the big city because she's just so talented, so tough, so pretty — she gets the gig, gets the guy, wins the hearts of all America in the process. These kinds of films are capitalist fantasies, melodramatically romantic visualizations of the idea that anyone in America can pull herself up by the metaphorical boot straps. There's a reason these kinds of films are so popular, why they're an enduring mainstay of the American cinema, virtually a genre unto themselves: everyone likes to feel like this success is possible, that anyone can make it with enough hard work and dedication. Everyone likes to think America is a meritocracy where those with talent rise to the top.

Showgirls is, defiantly, outrageously, not this type of movie, though it pretends to be right down to the very end. It is a remarkably straight-faced parody of the genre it supposedly represents, probably because its lead actress, Elizabeth Berkley, seems to think that's the kind of movie she's in. Berkley pours herself into her character, the aspiring dancer Nomi Malone. She stomps around, she pouts and cries and squeals (actually squeals!) with delight, she eats junk food with the ferocity of a true carnivore. She dances so vigorously she looks like she's in the midst of a particularly tough fight, flailing her arms around as though throwing punches. She pumps her hips and flashes her body for anyone who'll look. She intones Eszterhas' frankly ridiculous dialogue with earnest intensity. She completely sells every moment, and it's obvious: Nomi thinks that her arc in this film is one of self-discovery and self-realization, because that's exactly what Berkley thinks. By the end of the film, as she's unleashing vicious roundhouse kicks (Nomi, kung fu master!) at the head of a brutal rapist, or dramatically heading out of town in her six-inch stripper heels, she seems triumphant, redeemed, a new woman born from the shell of the old, a beautiful butterfly emerging from her cocoon. Or some crap like that, anyway.

In her own way, Berkley delivers an astonishing performance, though certainly not a "good" one. Then again, what would be a good performance in this context? The character of Nomi demands a certain badness, a wide-eyed enthusiasm and intensity. She's larger than life, and Berkley is the perfect actress to play Nomi because she's just so raw and sloppy, so awkward, so completely without barriers. She never seems to catch on to the fact that she's in a farce, which is probably a good thing, because that would kind of ruin the fun. And oh what fun there is. The film is delirious and pretty much batshit crazy, a neon-tinted orgy of American enterprise run amok. It's a delicious satire, because on its surface it doesn't seem satirical at all. It's a fairly accurate portrayal, one suspects, of exactly what goes on in this kind of milieu: the bitchiness, the catfighting, the trading of sexual favors, the ugly, seedy underside to all the glitz and glamour. Nomi arrives in Las Vegas, running away from her past, hoping to become a dancer. She starts working in a strip club, not exactly her dream, but this film would be a tragedy if Nomi wanted to be a ballerina and wound up just shaking her tits and ass instead. No, it's a comedy because the peak of her ambition, the one thing she absolutely wants to do, the dream job that would drag her out of this hellish strip club, is to be a showgirl in a flashy topless revue at one of the Vegas nightclubs. Yes, she's a stripper who dreams big: she wants to show off her tits and ass in a "classy" setting. (The quotation marks are necessary because this is Vegas' idea of "class," class as conspicuous consumption; the brighter everything shines, the classier it is.)

There's a hilarious scene when Nomi first sees the revue, which is called simply "Goddess." It's a faux-arty melange of leaping half-naked dancers, explosions and lots and lots of glitter, and at its center is the sexy, bitchy superstar Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon). The show looks like the Cirque du Soleil with bare boobs, gloriously tacky and gaudy. And Nomi is transfixed, raptly watching from the crowd as though confronted with a heavenly vision, her hands unconsciously mimicking the poses of the dancers on stage. Her eyes shine: she knows what she wants. Clearly, Verhoeven is having fun here, offering up all these kitschy surfaces without comment, as though to say, here it is, here's the American dream in all its glory, this is the pinnacle, this is something to aspire to. It's virtually the same attitude as the director took in his equally opaque satire Starship Troopers; both films offer up exactly what Verhoeven assumes that audiences want. It's a gesture of contempt, in a way, giving them what they want in the crudest, most overblown fashion. You asked for it, you got it. Want lots of mindless violence, things blowing up, blood and gore and video game special effects? Here's Starship Troopers. Want sex and glitz and conspicuous consumption, want excess and naked bodies? Here's Showgirls. One suspects that these two films together represent what Verhoeven sees when he looks at the American film industry, and it's apparent that he doesn't like what he sees.


This perspective gives the film a wicked edge, a biting undercurrent that elevates it to the level of a camp classic, albeit a deliberately campy one. It's all in the details, like the richly funny performance of Gina Gershon, who plays the whole film with a predatory, crooked smile, permanently baring her teeth as though ready to bite into her prey. If Berkley probably isn't in on the joke, Gershon definitely is, and she feeds into the campiness of the project, relishing the overblown dialogue, rolling her tongue around her lips, looking at Berkley's Nomi with naked lust in her eyes, pouting her lips out until they look like shelves. She's lively and funny and bitchily endearing. Berkley, on the other hand, plays every scene with a deer-in-the-headlights stare; her Nomi is half lost little girl and half vicious tough dame, with a switchblade and a temper.

This is fitting, of course, because one of the film's unspoken (but nonetheless central) jokes is that Nomi just isn't that talented: she looks at home in a strip club, and even seems to be a talented stripper, as far as that goes, but once she's elevated to the moderately more demanding burlesque show, with its complex routines and choreography, she seems out of her element, awkward and ungainly. She goes far because she generates "heat," which seems to be code for everyone wanting to fuck her, both the men and the women. And indeed, one of the film's recurring lines is that she dances like she fucks, which is especially funny in light of an early scene at a club where she's spastically dancing, flailing her limbs around, obviously thinking she's cool and sexy when in fact she looks like a malfunctioning machine; one expects to see sparks flying from her joints. Sure enough, later on, when she gets a comically overwrought sex scene with entertainment manager Zack Carey (Kyle MacLachlan) in Zack's pool, she fucks him by straddling him and then flailing wildly, flopping around in the water like a fish that's just been hooked. At the moment they orgasm, she throws her head back into the spray of foamy water pouring from a dolphin statue's mouth, another of Verhoeven's typically unsubtle jokes. The film is all about details like this. See also: the way, immediately before this jaw-droppingly unsexy sex scene, Zack switches on the green neon palm trees by his poolside, doing it with a suave flick of his hand, as though it's meant to seduce her. The even funnier second punchline is that it does seduce her; of course Nomi gets off on neon.

The film is bathed in neon, too, simply saturated in it. It must be one of the most garish, brightly colored films ever made, and its visual sensibility matches its over-the-top acting and soapish storyline. It's a brilliant, deadpan satire, hilarious and tacky and relentlessly overblown, nearly operatic in its frenzied excess. It's a film about the American dream, but not quite in the way it pretends to be: it's about people who scratch, claw, betray and sleep their way to the top, about crass commercialism and the marketing of sexuality (this last of course a great irony since the film itself was marketed on the strength of its sexual excesses). It's a film in love with its own melodrama, in love with the neon overload of Las Vegas even as it satirizes and mocks it.

TOERIFC: Black Book

The films of Paul Verhoeven seldom deal with morality and appearances in conventional ways. Verhoeven's filmography represents a prolonged examination of the depths hidden beneath overly familiar surfaces; he often mines within genre templates for the emotional truths obscured by superficiality. And in his 2006 masterpiece Black Book, he turns to the question of historical truth, examining the history book truths we take for granted, exploring the vast gray areas that exist between black and white, good and evil, hero and villain. If Verhoeven was making a Western, most of his characters would wear gray hats. His is a morally ambiguous universe in the deepest sense, one with no easy answers, no pat moral conclusions.

This perspective is especially challenging here because Black Book is about the end of World War II in the Netherlands, where in the final months of the war, the Nazis, Dutch collaborators and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters continued to fight, always thinking about what would happen once the war was over. The film's central character is young Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a Jewish woman who soon changes her name to Ellis de Vries as part of her disguise from the Nazis. When the film opens, she is living with a Christian family who begrudgingly shelter her, forcing her to faithfully recite Bible verses before she is allowed to eat (exactly the kind of self-righteous hypocrisy Verhoeven most loves to mock). When her shelter is destroyed by Nazi bombs and her identity discovered, she attempts to escape with her family, but instead she winds up the sole survivor after the sinister German officer Franken (Waldemar Kobus) ambushes the boat and kills everyone else. Now named Ellis, she falls in with a group of Resistance fighters and, at their behest, infiltrates the Nazi command by cozying up to SS officer Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch).

Of course, the plot only grows more complex from there. The script, written by Verhoeven with his frequent collaborator Gerard Soeteman, is serpentine and epic, structured around the multiple twists, betrayals, moves and countermoves that characterize this tale of wartime spying and resistance. The film is lengthy, but with the exception of the brief framing segments in post-war Israel, its action covers only around a year or two, from the last few months of the war to the immediate post-war period, the time of liberation, revenge and readjustment. This brief time frame is packed with incident, however. Verhoeven has always known how to tell a story. In fact, he's often been picked on for this very skill, for his ability to work competently — even vigorously — within conventional storytelling modes. That's why he was such a good fit for Hollywood, at least for a time, despite his penchant for outrageous provocation and radical subtexts. He's a provocateur and a satirist, but even more than that he's a storyteller, an entertainer. Rather than using satire to undermine entertainment, the way so many covert satirists have, he allows the two strains of his work to coexist, to intertwine, so that in a Verhoeven film the excitingly sensual surface he offers up is inseparable from the cerebral and thematic undercurrents of his stories.


This means that his films are always rollicking good fun, if nothing else, and Black Book is no exception. His action sequences are thrilling and visceral, and the plot is a complex web of deceit and double-crosses, with new twists continually introducing complete shifts in the status quo. Of course, sexuality is also almost always an important factor in Verhoeven's films. In Black Book especially, however, Verhoeven's treatment of sexuality is far from simple exploitation or gratuitous titillation. One of the film's most important subtexts is its subtle revelation of the ways in which women are used and then punished for their sexuality, for their charm and beauty. Ellis seduces the Nazi Müntze only out of necessity, after the Nazis capture a shipment of weapons along with several Resistance fighters, including Tim (Ronald Armbrust), the son of the Resistance ring's leader Kuipers (Derek de Lint). She agrees to help by infiltrating the SS headquarters, planting a bug in Franken's office and generally providing information on what's going on, as the Resistance cell tries to figure out a way to free their captured comrades.

So Ellis uses her sexuality for the benefit of her friends; she is willing to sleep with Müntze, and even to expose herself to the unwelcome attention of the brutish Franken, the man who murdered her family. But she is not praised for her behavior; she is silently, implicitly judged. Before she goes undercover, the doctor and Resistance fighter Akkermans (Thom Hoffman) makes sure that he sleeps with her first, as though marking her before the Germans get ahold of her, claiming her as Dutch property. Her sexuality is a tool, a weapon, a resource, and also something to be fought over, but she is never treated as an equal, as someone to be respected in her own right. Even when she first joins the Resistance group, she is eager to help, but seems disappointed when she learns that all she has to do is pose as Akkermans' wife, kissing him to distract Nazi inspection parties as they smuggle underground materials from place to place. This assignment establishes the boundaries of what she will be asked to do as a part of this group, though her quick thinking when the mission nearly goes wrong indicates that she is more than just a pretty prop, that she can think for herself and ingeniously get her allies out of tight spots. Still, they do not respect her, and Ellis knows it.

One of the key moments here comes when Ellis arrives at the Resistance's secret base while they are listening in on the microphone that Ellis planted. They hear Franken having loud, raucous sex with his secretary Ronnie (Halina Reijn), and the Resistance fighters are laughing wildly, mocking the lovers and especially the girl. They call her a whore and comment on how horny she must be, and they laugh uproariously. Ellis looks uncomfortable, her head bent down, her eyes averted from everyone else, certainly not laughing. She realizes that Ronnie, an ordinary and not very bright young woman, is just doing what she must to survive, that she's no Nazi or "Nazi lover" but only someone who knew, as Ellis did, that she could use her sexuality as a way to get by during a difficult time. And Ellis knows, too, that the others might just as easily say the same things about her. She's sleeping with Müntze just as Ronnie is sleeping with Franken. Ellis has a pretext for her actions, but in the end sex is sex.


Complicating matters even further is the fact that Müntze is not an unsympathetic character, and in fact he is portrayed as a relatively decent guy. He is an SS officer, but by this late point in the war, he has realized that his country is losing, and instead of reacting out of greed (as Franken does) or self-preservation (as so many others do), he attempts to calm down the violence in his own little corner of the war, negotiating with the Resistance to halt the hostilities on both sides. He knows the war is over in all but name, and sees little point in further death, further violence and horror. Moreover, he very quickly deduces that Ellis is a disguised Jew, and not long after discovers that she is a member of the Resistance. But in both cases he keeps her secret, protecting her and conspiring with her.

There is a hint of tension between them, of course, which bursts out in the wittily Freudian scene where Ellis thinks Müntze is getting an erection under the covers, only to find he's pointing a gun at her: underscoring the forced, duplicitous sexuality that thrust them together. Even so, the relationship between them is surprisingly tender and sweet, a true romance in the midst of so much deceit and treachery and violence. He is, perhaps, a good man who had been warped by the war, forced into his position by cowardice or some other motivation — it's never made clear how or why he became such a high-ranking SS officer, or what he must've done in the past. But with Ellis, he is loyal and kind, and their sex scenes have a warmth and passion that never feels like playacting.

This brings up the question of appearances and surfaces again, and of acting. Carice van Houten is asked to virtually carry the film on her tiny shoulders — she is its center and its heart, almost never offscreen — and she gives a phenomenal performance. In many ways, she is also playing an actress, a woman who must be able to disguise her true self completely. She must do this first as a Jew, dying her hair blonde and changing her name, shedding her Jewish roots. She even dyes her pubic hair, as though changing even her sexuality; Verhoeven shows her daubing between her legs with a brush, making art of her sex. Then her disguise becomes even more complex when she is employed by the Nazis. There is an extraordinary sequence when she first sees Franken and recognizes him as the man who murdered her family. The creepy, lumpen oaf is hunched over a piano, cheerfully singing a song and playing; he is as goofy and awkward here as he was cold and evil in the earlier scene. Ellis stares blankly at him, and runs from the room, retching and throwing up when she reaches the bathroom. But she takes a moment, cleans herself up quickly and pulls herself together, and when Müntze asks her what's wrong, she smiles and takes an eager swig of champagne, then goes out to sing a torch song with accompaniment from Franken, lewdly dancing and posing as she sings the sexually suggestive lyrics.

Van Houten is excellent at conveying these sudden shifts, the way Ellis' face can quickly and smoothly transition from a sour, numb expression into a bright and seemingly genuine smile. Verhoeven, with his concern for the relationship between appearances and reality, is especially interested in this fluid masking of emotions: at what point do Ellis' faked smiles become real? At what point does her façade of affection and desire for Müntze bleed into something deeper, more true? Such questions are at the heart of the film, and they go beyond Ellis' undercover theatrics, extending to every aspect of the story, to every character. Virtually all these people are wearing masks of various kinds, and they're all more than they appear to be on the surface. For one thing, the film rejects facile categorizations of "good guys" and "bad guys," suggesting that real evil is not always as easy to identify as the cartoonish Franken, who in any event is also capable of playfulness and good humor, and who seems to love making music. Moreover, Verhoeven is saying, often evil can be mistaken for good, and vice versa — not to mention the complications of most people combining the two within themselves.


Verhoeven explicitly mocks the moral absolutism that ignores such gray areas. This is especially obvious in the character of Theo (Johnny de Mol), a devout Christian who becomes hysterical after killing a man to protect Ellis. He believes that because he has committed murder, he is now "as bad as the Nazis," an absolutely absurd idea that demonstrates a complete inability to see moral gray areas. Verhoeven, by contrast, is interested only in the gray areas, in why people do what they do, in the complicated interactions of morality and practicality from day to day. For Verhoeven, morality never exists in a vacuum, but is integrated with people's situations: the choices available to them and the choices they make as a result.

What's also interesting about the film is its almost-complete emphasis on the kinds of stories not often told about World War II, the stories that are generally overlooked and glossed-over. Verhoeven has always been interested in this material, in the history of resistance and collaboration in his homeland. In 1977, he made the epic Soldier of Orange, which is similarly engaged with issues of collaboration and resistance, with the interesting ways in which wartime can warp or divert a person's character and destiny. In many ways, that film seems like a warm-up for Black Book, a first examination of the territory he'd return to here, now mining even deeper, digging even further into the ugly contradictions of his nation's past.

Those contradictions are laid bare here, particularly during the film's final hour, in which Ellis, suspected of collaboration with the Nazis, is forced into hiding along with Müntze, who's fleeing the dubious "justice" of the post-war regime. Verhoeven has often been accused of a lack of subtlety, and the final hour of this film could certainly provide copious material for anyone wishing to make that case. He heaps suffering and degradation on his poor heroine, who is misused and betrayed despite all her efforts to do what was right, to help her friends and exact revenge for what happened to her family. Instead, she is arrested as a collaborator, labeled a "Nazi whore" who sang for the Germans. She is, at one point, stripped and slathered in excrement, at a prison where drunken soldiers and prison guards abuse and humiliate the prisoners. And then she is betrayed again, nearly killed by the last person she thought she could trust, Akkermans himself, who turns out to be a genuine collaborator, the man who kept tipping off Franken to the locations of fleeing Jews.


Verhoeven undoubtedly makes things difficult for his heroine, and he also makes her plight difficult to watch — this Passion of Ellis is harrowing and often stomach-churning, both physically (the feces bath) and emotionally (the execution of Müntze). But no matter how much Ellis suffers, Verhoeven never strips her of her dignity: her warmth and passion, her energetic spirit, her honesty, her defiance. When the prison guards demand that she sing for them like she once did for the Nazis, she simply shakes her head: "not for you." She is an ordinary woman in extraordinary times, and she rises to the occasion in every way, molding herself to be tough enough for what she has to face.

And she always retains her idiosyncratic sense of humor, her playfulness — seen in tossed-off little moments like the one where she takes a bite of a carrot meant for a rabbit, then turns around to speak with the bite stuffed into her cheek like a chipmunk, or the scene where she brushes her teeth by gargling with champagne, then opens her mouth wide for inspection with a grin. Verhoeven obviously admires her cheekiness, and he admires his actress too, admires the versatility she brings to this role: compare the matronly, melancholy Rachel seen in the Israeli framing story against bold, blonde Ellis for some indication of the range and depth van Houten brings to this character.


Indeed, "range and depth" is a fairly good summation of Black Book as a whole as well. It's an extraordinarily complex and multi-faceted film, both narratively and thematically. Even as its plot continually subdivides and changes directions, Verhoeven probes deeper and deeper into the sexual, political and psychological subtexts of his story and characters. His style is direct and bombastic, with a subtle stylization to the way he groups other characters into two-shots with his heroine, tracing her varying relationships with the men she encounters. Ellis is always turning towards the camera, flashing it a smile or a penetrating gaze; Verhoeven makes it natural enough that it never quite breaks the fourth wall, though the technique does call attention to itself, and to the continual highlighting of the star.

I could certainly find a lot more to say about Black Book — it's a film I suspect I could write a book about, delving into each scene and giving it the careful consideration it deserves. It's that rich, that layered. For now, however, I'll simply open up the discussion for others to share their impressions of Verhoeven's film. What does everyone else think?

Business Is Business

Business Is Business was Paul Verhoeven's feature film debut, and it definitely proves that, if the controversial and notoriously raunchy auteur's aesthetic was not quite developed from the start, then at least his signature themes and concerns were there all along. This rough-edged but entertaining debut clearly points the way towards Verhoeven's later work, which would continue dealing, in deeper ways, with this film's themes of sexuality, exploitation and the pressures placed on male/female dynamics by society. Verhoeven's satirical wit would be sharpened in subsequent films, as would his ability to carve compelling, multi-layered characters out of the material of cliché and melodrama. Here, his talents are more raw, less focused, and his humor is broader. Usually, the laughs in a Verhoeven film are double-edged, always threatening to stick in one's throat; he tends to lace his humor with a touch of bitterness and rage. But this story of a pair of prostitutes doesn't really delve beneath the surface in this way. Verhoeven seems content to simply mine the situation for as much humor as he can, treating it as a series of anecdotes loosely strung together.

On these broad terms, the film is certainly enjoyable. If nothing else, Verhoeven was always a consummate entertainer, and even his first feature is never less than a blast to watch. It opens with a hilarious race from the airport as a man, newly returned from a long stint in Africa, away from female companionship, rushes to the home of the prostitute Greet (Ronnie Bierman). Once there, he's in a desperate hurry to get started, and eagerly agrees as she keeps adding to the price for every little concession she makes — want my coat off? that'll be another 50. After all this build-up and haggling, the deed itself finally lasts all of a second, and Greet immediately goes to the closet, where she mechanically ticks off his bill on an adding machine and prints him a receipt. It's a great introduction of the film's central character, this staunchly capitalist prostitute for whom her job is really just another business, with little connection to her sexuality. Greet is fortunate that she can be this cavalier about her profession. Her friend Nel (Sylvia de Leur) seems to be less cut out for this line of work, and she additionally suffers at the hands of her abusive, domineering boyfriend Sjaak (Jules Hamel), who takes her money and goes fishing all day while she sells herself.

The subject naturally lends itself to social commentary of a sort, but for the most part Verhoeven doesn't seem to be interested. There are hints of themes he'd develop more substantially in his later work, like the ways in which men and women use sexuality as a weapon against one another, and the double bind of the woman's place in society, where she is punished for being a sexual creature but punished in different ways if she refuses or holds back her sexuality. Mostly, though, this is all very surface level, and there's barely even much of a plot. Nel yearns to escape from Sjaak, and from the life of prostitution in general, and eventually she finds her escape route in the form of the cleaning salesman Bob (Bernard Droog) — she's not much happier as a mundane housewife with this boring schlub, but it's a life anyway. Meanwhile, the seemingly unflappable Greet finds the same desires stirring in her, and briefly believes that she's found love with the married Piet (Piet Römer), who she sleeps with without even charging him. The film's melodrama all seems a little undigested, especially in comparison to what Verhoeven would achieve just two years later with his masterful second feature Turkish Delight, in which he twists and warps melodramatic conventions into an epic of sexual perversity and societal dysfunction.


In Business Is Business, Verhoeven's aims are more modest. Mainly, he produces a parade of eccentrics and sexual deviants to mock and satirize. The film's anecdotal structure mostly consists of one visit from a "client" after another, with each john stranger and goofier than the next. One guy likes to dress up like a schoolboy and get lectured (and spanked, naturally) by the teacher and schoolmistress. One guy likes to get naked and then have the girls scare him by donning a creepy witch mask, screaming and banging on things. Another wants a fake surgery performed on him. Another has a thing for dressing up in high heels and a maid's outfit and cleaning Greet's apartment, with her berating and spanking him for not doing a good job. Most memorably of all, one odd duck comes with a suitcase full of feathers, covering his own body with them and giving some to the girls, who proceed to run around clucking like chickens. What all of these clients have in common is that almost none of them seem to want actual sexual intercourse of any kind — they get excited by debasing themselves, by being humiliated, and all the girls have to do, generally, is play along with the game. They're as much actresses as prostitutes.

This succession of oddities and bizarre fetishes are trotted out one by one simply for Verhoeven to make fun of; each of these guys is so exaggerated, so caricatured, that there's no possible response but to laugh. And indeed the film is frequently funny, even if Verhoeven's swinging at the easiest possible targets to hit. The humor is goofy and light, not at all what one expects of a director who, though always working in debased genres, often burrows deep into the heart of clichés and conventions in order to get at the deeper essences lurking within generic stories. This is not the case here. Even when the story integrates more dramatic material — the fights between Sjaak and Nel are truly harrowing and disturbing, and Nel's meek returns afterward are a startlingly true depiction of domestic violence's ugly cycle — Verhoeven doesn't generate the tension he usually sparks from juxtaposing his films' trashier elements against the more emotionally volatile moments. Instead, the two elements within the film simply sit uncomfortably together: the emotional impact of scenes like this is undeniable, but never bleeds over into the funnier scenes, which dominate the film.

On the whole, Business Is Business is an interesting but uneven debut for Verhoeven, who would quickly progress beyond this shaky dark comedy into much more sophisticated explorations of similar territory. This film remains relevant primarily for Verhoeven fans looking for a glimpse of the Dutch auteur's roots. As such, the seeds of his later work are clearly visible, but no more; it would take until Turkish Delight for these seeds to bear real fruit.

Soldier of Orange

Paul Verhoeven's Soldier of Orange was the film that started him on the path to Hollywood, the film that made no less than Steven Spielberg take notice of the Dutch talent. It's not hard to see why: it's an epic, masterfully made film, a brisk, constantly moving wartime adventure about friendship, betrayal and the ways in which people can stumble upon their principles. The film traces the lives of a group of rowdy friends between 1938 and 1945, from their time at a Dutch university to their entanglement in World War II, as their home country is dragged into the conflict by Hitler's invasion. These youths are initially far from interested in the war or Germany or anything else. They expect their country to remain neutral, as usual, and if anything many of them are sympathetic to Germany, nursing some of the same anti-Semitic sentiments as Hitler and his followers. So they play tennis, and go to parties, and compete over women, oblivious to the impending chaos about to engulf Europe. When Britain declares war against Germany, a few off them are troubled, but most don't care: they simply switch off the radio and return to their tennis match and their gaiety. This only changes when Germany actually invades Holland, bombing civilian targets and sending in soldiers.

What Verhoeven's interested in here is defusing the usual war movie clichés: the over-the-top patriotism, the stoic heroes, the girl loyally waiting back home. He signals his subversive intent, subtly, in the opening scenes. After a mock-newsreel introduction of the Dutch Queen returning to her own soil after the war, greeted by an extravagant welcome, the first scene of the film proper is a noisy, chaotic sequence in which a group of shaved-head young men are berated, beaten and mocked by neatly dressed men who order them around like drill sergeants. The film's subject, and its opening (with a credit sequence accompanied by the Dutch flag), prime the viewer to interpret this scene through the filter of World War II history: the shaved heads, the shouted commands, the sniveling men who seem to be prisoners. Actually, it's a particularly brutal fraternity hazing, and its end result is to forge a lasting friendship between new recruit Erik (Rutger Hauer) and the fraternity president Guus (Jeroen Krabbé).

Verhoeven patiently explores the pre-war life of these young men, upper-class boys studying to be lawyers and take their place in society. Their lives are disrupted by Hitler's bombs, and the German invasion forces them to make difficult choices, to choose sides. Guus and Erik will join the underground resistance against the Nazis, along with friends like the Jewish boxing champion Jan (Huib Rooymans), the resourceful organizer Nico (Lex van Delden), and Robby (Eddy Habbema), who runs a transmitter sending messages to England. Erik's friend Alex (Derek de Lint), who has a German mother and thus sees the situation somewhat differently, joins the fascist army and goes to fight in Russia. Others, like Jack (Dolf de Vries), simply lay low and wait out the war at home, secretly completing his degree and preparing for post-war life even while the bombs are falling and his countrymen are dying and fighting back. Verhoeven doesn't want to present a simplistic portrait of patriots fighting for their country: these are real people, with complex relationships and complex reasons for what they do. The film is based on the real story of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, the aide to Queen Wilhelmina whose book about his experiences provided a starting point for Verhoeven's film.

Indeed, Erik is a hero, but he arrives at it only slowly, even reluctantly. He dabbles in the resistance, but his efforts are wasted, and he sees his friends and allies dying and being captured, seemingly betrayed. The Germans strategically allow him to overhear that they have a spy in London, a man named Van der Zanden (Guus Hermus), then they release him. So when Erik gets the chance to escape to London, he does so, along with his friend Guus, intending to help out in any way he can and especially to expose the traitor who may have been compromising the Dutch resistance. As usual with Verhoeven, such things are more complex than they seem at first. The supposed spy turns out to be a staunch ally of the Queen, and the traitor within the midst of the resistance has his own reasons for doing what he does. Robby turns out to be the weak link in the organization, agreeing to help the Germans when they threaten to take his Jewish fiancée Esther (Belinda Meuldijk) to a concentration camp.


The emotions in this film are complicated and subtle, especially for a war epic with action taking place on a grand, international scale. Verhoeven never forgets about the human dramas, never leaves behind the characters and their smaller stories in favor of the big picture. What's striking, then, is that everything that happens here amounts to so little, does so little to affect the outcome of the war either way. These people and their struggles are peripheral to the main thrust of the war, as the British officers themselves acknowledge: they're using the Dutch fighters mainly as a distraction, throwing Erik and his compatriots at the Germans in order to waste the enemy's time, to draw their attention away from more important matters. Verhoeven's storytelling is taut and his action sequences are suspenseful and perfectly conceived, and yet by the end of the film it's obvious that virtually nothing has been accomplished by all these intrigues and missions: Erik presumably does much more in his mostly unseen bombing runs than he did throughout the entire rest of the film. Verhoeven is interested in history, but he's interested in it largely as it happens on the ground, as it affects individuals and their small, historically minor lives. He is bringing historical footnotes to life, investing their stories with all the grandness and nuance and detail usually reserved for major players in these struggles. Despite the opening, in which Verhoeven skillfully blends faux-period footage of Hauer in with genuine newsreel footage, this is not a Forrest Gump kind of historical movie, in which the characters wander through major historical events. Instead, this film is all about unraveling the tightly knit story of abstracted history into the individual threads that comprise it, each small strand insignificant in itself but each adding to the cumulative experience of a time and place.

This is rich stuff. Verhoeven, so often thought of as a director of big, bold gestures and over-the-top stylization, is actually just as capable of subtlety and restraint. He largely hints at the deep emotional bonds linking Erik to his friend Robby's fiancée Esther. The two have a halting, infrequent affair, succumbing to passion for one another at times of stress, but Verhoeven communicates their longings largely through glances, through silent moments in which a great deal seems to pass between them. There is a wonderful, perfectly staged scene late in the film, when Erik begins to suspect that Robby is a traitor when he sees all the nice things that Esther has at their house, at the peak of wartime in Holland. She tells him that Robby gets all these things for her, things that Erik couldn't even get in England, through his friends in the resistance. But when Erik asks her if she really believes that, she pauses and simply shakes her head, just once, from side to side, her face steeled but her eyes sad. There is so much in that gesture, the resignation and defiance and the knowledge that her man has betrayed his principles, betrayed even his friends in order to keep her safe, and that even though she is torn up by it she has gone along with it, has allowed him to do it and allowed him to think that she doesn't know. This all happens beneath the surface, again in the exchange of looks between Erik and this woman who he loves, but who various circumstances have kept from him.

There is a similarly great dynamic at work in London, where Guus and Erik engage in a friendly rivalry to bed down the pretty English military secretary Susan (Susan Penhaligon). Again, a lot happens between the lines, as Susan flirts with both men, inviting Erik under the covers to join them after she and Guus have had very public sex in a second floor window, with Erik down below hilariously trying to prevent the Queen from getting an eyeful. Verhoeven allows a great deal of ambiguity in the way Susan manages the rivalry of these men for her affection: when she conspires to have Guus and not Erik sent on a dangerous mission, is she trying to maneuver the man she wants closer to her, or trying to make the man she already has a hero? Also implicit in these scenes is the homosocial love of Guus and Erik for one another, a love that transcends their sparring over Susan, even when she lays naked in between them. Later, this kind of love between men will bridge even the opposing sides of the war. One of the film's most memorable sequences is the extended tango that takes place between Erik and the fascist soldier Alex, when Erik stumbles undercover into a party for the Nazis. The two men dance together, their faces just inches apart, their hard profiles seemingly on the verge of a kiss, and discuss the vagaries of history that have made them enemies rather than friends.

Soldier of Orange is a typically dense, potent epic from a director who consistently manages to find the difficult and powerful emotions within blockbuster material. This is a deeply personal and contemplative war epic, even as it moves at a brisk, thrilling pace. It satisfies every expectation of its genre, packing its lengthy running time with battles and betrayals and suspense sequences — like the indescribably tense climax on a Dutch beach guarded by the Germans — and yet it is also subtle and humanistic. It's a film about the tight interplay between choice and fate in determining the flow of a person's life during times of upheaval. And it's also a visceral, rousing action picture. Verhoeven is one of the few directors who is able to have it both ways, while compromising neither.

Keetje Tippel

Keetje Tippel, based on the life of the prostitute, artists' model and socialist author Neel Doff, is a typically bracing, emotionally complex melodrama from director Paul Verhoeven. As is often the case with Verhoeven, he's working within the confines of a familiar genre, the period drama in this case, and even within the structure of a familiar story: the commoner who aspires to a higher level and gets transformed into a member of high society. It's a Cinderella story, in other words, and one of the film's characters even refers to the titular heroine Keetje (Monique van de Ven) as Cinderella. She's one daughter in a large and miserably poor family who have moved to Amsterdam in the hopes of finding better opportunities. But once there, the family continues to struggle, living in a horrible, rat-infested house that floods when it rains, with each of them trying without much luck to find and hold a steady job. Keetje's father (Jan Blasser) is a cheery, expansive guy, obviously a decent sort, but he's unable to keep a job for very long, and deeply feels the guilt of being unable to provide for his family. Keetje's bratty, lascivious sister Mina (Hannah de Leeuwe) helps provide for the family by working in a brothel — at least until she gets kicked out for drinking too much — but Keetje is too proud to sell her body, and tries to get more honest work.

This proves not to be easy. One of Verhoeven's most consistent themes is the humiliation and degradation that society heaps on the innocent and pure-hearted, and Keetje cannot escape this fate. She is a beautiful girl, but this only makes it harder for her: everywhere she goes, men want her, lust after her, and look at her poverty as a vulnerability they can exploit. She tries to work in a factory, washing clothes in poison chemicals that burn her hands and throat, but the horrible conditions there, coupled with the antagonism of the other women, quickly drive her away. A stint in a hat shop lasts a little longer, but she's not much happier. Her attempts to show some pride in her handiwork, to engage with her work as something more than a dumb drone, are stifled by her bosses, who don't want creativity. This is textbook Marxist commentary. Keetje is alienated from the results of her labor, forbidden from taking credit for what she's made with her own two hands, treated as simply an inhuman cog in an assembly line. Worse, the shop's owner has her stay late one night and, predictably, rapes her, a scene staged with a typically lurid Verhoeven touch: Keetje, always playful and whimsical, is making shadow puppets on the wall when her play is interrupted by a phallic shadow as the boss, naked and lustful, enters the room.

Keetje's humiliations only begin here, but throughout her often miserable adventures, she retains an unquenchable thirst for dignity and pleasure, and an indomitable spirit that never gives in. A great deal of the credit for this wonderful heroine must rest with van de Ven, an actress who Verhoeven had previously discovered for his film Turkish Delight. She has an impish smile and bright eyes, a waif's face that gives her a girlish, innocent appeal. It is obvious from the first moment she appears on screen that she does not belong in rags, filthy and laboring in a factory; she's too bright and charming, too kind-hearted. She wants the best for her family, and tries to protect them from predators, though it turns out that they mostly do not want protection and respond with spite. But when her family pushes her into prostitution, with her mother hovering outside during her visits with johns, waiting to snap up the money afterward, Keetje does not hesitate to finally abandon them when she gets a chance. She falls in with a crowd of painters and socialists and intellectuals, among them the banker Hugo (Rutger Hauer) and the socialist agitator Andre (Eddie Brugman). These men are able to raise Keetje out of her poverty, giving her fine clothes and, in Hugo's case, moving her into his house.


But Hugo, as it turns out, is actually only a few rungs up the social ladder from Keetje, and the strain of supporting her in a grand lifestyle proves to wear on him — he eventually abandons her for the promise of marrying his boss' daughter, moving up in status and wealth through this match. The film is continually driving home the ways in which poverty and class insecurity affect people even at the level of their one-on-one relationships. In this film, and in these people's lives, class is not an abstract concept, not the proletariat rhetoric of the Communists, but a concrete factor in everyday reality. Class and status are what they must escape, what they must struggle against in order to eat, in order to sustain their families. Life at the bottom is brutal and harsh, as Keetje knows well. She is beaten by the police for stealing bread for her hungry little brother. She is sexually exploited whenever she simply tries to find decent work for herself. Her family seems to grow every time she sees them, inexplicably gathering more children, which suggests that either Verhoeven is elliptically passing over long periods of time, or he's employing a subtle surrealist touch to emphasize the hopelessness of Keetje's family. Every day their family seems to be larger and harder to feed. So Keetje knows all about class, and knows about it from firsthand experience rather than conceptual reading. When Andre and his friends are admiring a painting, praising the pride and nobility of the way the workers are depicted, she corrects them, saying that the workers aren't proud but hungry.

And Keetje is hungry, too, and determined to get what she wants. In one of the film's best scenes, Andre and Hugo take her out to dinner at a fancy French restaurant, where she is oblivious about such niceties as how to order and how to use her utensils. This is a typical scene for this type of movie, a cliché even, but van de Ven plays it with such exuberant energy that it becomes fresh and exciting all over again. With her toothy smiles, her awkward way of shoving her spoon all the way into her broad, rubbery mouth, her easygoing adaptation to any circumstances, she's charming and fun even when she's being somewhat oafish and silly. She manages to make even her greed charming: she's been denied everything for so long that she feels no shame about taking what she can get, when she can get it. Verhoeven has great sympathy and affection for this woman, great respect for her refusal to be cowed or broken. She takes everything that the world can throw at her and simply shakes it off, smiles, moves on.

This is a quality that Verhoeven prizes in his protagonist, a kind of paradoxical joie de vivre in spite of the harsh conditions she faces. The film itself reflects this appreciation for the finer things in its hazy, brightly colored imagery, with many of the exterior scenes seemingly shot at the "magic hour," the many-hued glory of the sky hovering just between day and night. This is a vibrant, powerful film, frequently difficult to watch in its exacting portrait of lower class degradation. But the purity and grace of its heroine, and the fluid visual style of Verhoeven, make it a bittersweet delight as well.

The Fourth Man

The Fourth Man, Paul Verhoeven's final Dutch-language film before his sojourn to Hollywood to direct films like RoboCop and Basic Instinct, is a typically delirious fantasia from this gleefully controversial director. Awash in lurid Christian symbolism and a fluidly multisexual eroticism, the film is a nightmarish adventure that would do David Lynch proud: a man's dreamlike, elliptical journey into strange territory, guided by a possibly deranged imagination that finds unexpected patterns and recurrences in his experiences. The writer Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) travels to a distant town in order to give a lecture. Once there, he meets the mysteriously alluring but icy Christine (Renée Soutendijk) and spends the night with her, having sex with her while praising her for her boyish body. In the morning, Gerard plans to leave but is stopped by the discovery that Christine's regular lover is a young man named Herman (Thom Hoffman), who Gerard had previously seen and desired during a brief encounter at the train station. In the hopes of seeing more of Herman, Gerard stays on, supposedly working on his next novel but mostly just drinking and bouncing around within Christine's palatial home, which is adjacent to her lucrative beauty salon.

Christine, it turns out, is a "black widow," a precursor to Basic Instinct's Catherine Trammell, another icy blonde with a predilection for devouring her mates. Just in case Christine's deadly undercurrents aren't apparent from the sinister, gloating smile she displays when she realizes Gerard is going to stay with her, Verhoeven layers on the unsubtle symbolism: the opening credits feature a nasty-looking spider crawling across Christian iconography and wrapping its victims in a web cocoon, while the sign for Christine's "Sphinx" beauty parlor keeps flashing out to read "spin" instead, the Dutch word for "spider." The film is so packed with tongue in cheek visual symbols like this that half the fun is in spotting the references and unraveling the densely tangled webs of meaning. Gerard's story is a confused mingling of Christian sin/redemption and gay fetishism, no more so than in the hilarious sequence where Gerard goes to church and finds a vision of Herman, clad only in a speedo, nailed to a cross like Christ and waiting for Gerard to unclothe him.

Indeed, Gerard's entire story is driven by dreams and visions, by his writer's imagination, which can't help but spin out wild variations on whatever is in front of him. He's obsessed with death. As soon as he steps off the train, he encounters a funeral party that he's at first convinced is for him: the letters on a wreath seem to spell out "Gerard" until the funeral director unfolds the banner, revealing an entirely different name. Later, Gerard makes the same mistake with a letter to Christine, baffled to find it seems to be from him until he smooths out the paper and finds it's from Herman. Throughout the film, appearances can be deceiving, and often the illusory surface falls away to reveal something else. In one of Gerard's dreams, a woman (Geert de Jong) who keeps appearing in both his dreams and his waking life seems to be pointing a gun at him, but then turns the "barrel" to the side to reveal it as a harmless key instead. At another point, a door Gerard sees in his dream, with a distinctive cross-shaped design, is mirrored in a cabinet at Christine's house, which holds film loops chronicling her three dead husbands. Later, Gerard stumbles upon the real door and location from his dream, discovering that it is the crypt where the ashes of Christine's husbands are kept. Dreams and reality weave into one another: a literal resting place, a grave, is echoed in a film vault, which also retains the traces of dead men.


Gerard's portents and nightmares, his outlandish fantasies, lead him through the film, slowly discovering the truth about Christine even as he tries to seduce her lover. This writer's rich fantasy life provides Verhoeven with ample opportunity for visual indulgence, and there are several marvelous tour de force scenes, packed with overt Freudian symbolism and references to the director's cinematic forebears. Early on, Gerard is pulled into a poster in a train car, a photo of a hotel: he wanders into the photo, steps into the eerily empty hotel and walks through its corridors clutching a key, looking for his room number. When he gets to his room, however, the number on the door turns into an eye which stares at him for a moment before oozing out of its socket with a trail of blood and slime behind it — foreshadowing the film's gory conclusion. The whole sequence is reminiscent of Kubrick's The Shining, with its haunted hotel and endless tracking shots down creepily barren hallways. The connection becomes particularly apparent when Gerard is snapped out of this disquieting fantasy to the realization that the poster he was staring at has been streaked with blood — or, actually, tomato juice leaking from a woman's bag in the overhead compartment.

Later, during an even more horrifying sequence, Gerard wanders down a tree-lined path in pursuit of a woman wrapped up in a cloak — the same woman from the train and elsewhere, who he comes to think of as the Virgin Mary, sent to save him. She gives him a key and leads him into a crypt where three slaughtered pigs hang above buckets, their blood dripping out of their flayed carcasses. Finally, Gerard seems to wake up in bed only to experience an even more Freudian nightmare: he is literally castrated, his organ snipped off with Christine's scissors. The scene recalls both the most excessive moments of Fassbinder's oeuvre — especially the slaughterhouse sequence of In a Year With 13 Moons and the hallucinatory epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz — and the languid, dreamlike imagery of Maya Deren's avant-garde classic Meshes of the Afternoon. These disparate influences bubble through the film, much like the blending together of ordinarily incompatible elements like religious allegory, dark comedy and the sexual thriller genre.

Of course, this confusion of moods is typical of Verhoeven: he's definitely a genre director but is seldom content with mining just one genre at a time. The Fourth Man is a fun, ridiculous farce, a self-referential loop of a movie that revels in the blasphemous, erotic chaos of its imagery. The film evokes a multitude of potential readings, dealing as it does with gender confusion, male fears and insecurities about women, the complicated intersections of sex and religion and the ways in which ideas about death color and inform all of these things. Verhoeven irreverently throws all these loosely developed ideas together, allowing them to flutter like ribbons through his colorful, visually sumptuous and unforgettable entertainment. Verhoeven defies the usual template of the genre director who smuggles his themes into his films beneath the cover of surface thrills and shocks. With Verhoeven, surface and subtext are flamboyantly united: the ideas of his films are impossible to miss, scrawled as they are with the brightest possible crayons right on the most apparent layer of his films. Verhoeven is not a smuggler, preferring instead to amplify his subversive subjects, to make them entertaining in themselves. In Verhoeven's best work (a long list which surely includes this stunner) he is able to take the subversive and mold it into something garish, beautiful, exciting and viscerally entertaining. He takes the dark undercurrents of other films and lets them out into the sunlight to play.

Basic Instinct

Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct is a typically complex and ambiguous film from a director whose erotically charged work, at its best, explores and prods at the assumptions about sex, gender, violence and power that underlie various Hollywood genres, even as, on its surface, the film fulfills those genre conventions in every way. It's a delicate balancing act, and it opens Verhoeven's films up to multiple contradictory readings. Is he a skillful provocateur, looking to push buttons and provoke uncomfortable feelings in his audience? Is he probing for something deeper, a treatise on sexual power games and the ways they're presented in popular cinema? Or is he simply a purveyor of exploitative but well-crafted sleaze, reveling in the dirty fun of the trashy stories he's telling? Most likely, of course, it's a little bit of all three, and it's precisely this combination of high-brow deconstruction and low-brow junk cinema that makes Verhoeven such an interesting and slippery filmmaker. He is continually peeking beneath the surface of his films, letting all the interesting subtexts and sociopolitical commentary of the material bubble up, but he never lets his forays into the cinematic subconscious undermine the surface thrills he delivers.

This is certainly true of Basic Instinct, a sexual thriller that engages with received ideas about sexually aggressive women, the femme fatale archetype, and the power games and manipulation involved in male/female relationships. Catherine (Sharon Stone) is perhaps the ultimate femme fatale, and Verhoeven never flinches away from exactly what makes her so troubling to the men she encounters: her fearless sexual promiscuity, her calm demeanor and coolness about ideas like love and romance, the openly manipulative way she uses her sexuality. She's not just sexy and scary in equal measure; she's scary because she's sexy, and vice versa. She's a blatant confrontation to masculine ideas about what women are supposed to be like, and she flaunts this confrontational persona, which is both seductive and intimidating to men. And especially to the disgraced cop Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), who is recovering from the latest in a line of "accidental" shootings on the job. While undercover, he killed a pair of tourists, and seems to have barely made it through the resultant inquiries with his badge intact. This makes him especially vulnerable to the manipulations of Catherine, who he begins investigating after her club owner boyfriend shows up dead, riddled with bloody holes from an ice pick.

Catherine, of course, is the perfect suspect for the murder: she's got a shady past, shadier associates, has a fondness for ice picks, and, as a writer, has even written a trashy novel in which a former rock star is killed by his girlfriend in exactly the same way as her own lover. But Catherine is too clever, and neatly avoids the murder rap even as she begins sucking Nick into her clutches, researching his past and setting him up as the "inspiration" for her next novel. The bodies start piling up, but Nick is soon more of a suspect than Catherine, and even knowing that she's probably responsible for it all, he can't help being seduced by her. Verhoeven makes Catherine an iconic icy blonde, cool and deadly and always able to make things fall exactly her way. Stone's performance here is legendary for a reason, not just because she's great at projecting Catherine's quietly threatening sexual energy, but because she's embodying the cumulative image of decades of Hollywood genre fiction. She's the dangerous woman, the beautiful but treacherous blonde with an icy heart, just as likely to fuck you or put an ice pick in your throat — and if you give her half a chance, eventually she'll probably do both. Verhoeven delivers the expected story, the twisty neo-noir in which the sex-addled detective falls for "the wrong woman" (as Catherine herself describes the premise of her next mystery novel), but the undercurrents of the story, the inquiry into sexual roles and the battle of the sexes, is never far from the surface.


In this respect, the film's most famous scene is Catherine's interrogation, the cool blonde facing a roomful of tough detectives and calmly dominating them with the simple gesture of crossing and uncrossing her legs. It's a brilliant scene, tracing the way these men, supposedly in control of the situation, are actually undone just by that simple flash of Catherine's bare crotch under her short skirt. They're interrogating her, and the bright lights are directed on her, but they're the ones who are sweating, stuttering, breaking down and getting angry. She simply lights a cigarette, deftly brushing aside their protestations that she can't smoke, and soon turns the line of questioning around on Nick, interrogating him when she's supposed to be the one under examination. It's an especially clever reversal because it toys with various clichés about the male gaze and Hollywood cinema, the way that exploitative films treat women as objects to be looked at rather than active protagonists in their own right. Well, Catherine is there to be looked at, her body on display, but she's also never less than active, never less than in control, presenting herself for the gaze of others; you can say a lot about Catherine but she's certainly no object. Catherine reverses the typical balance of power by making the focus of the male gaze the one who's in control, the one who has all the power in the relationship. Among other things, she's the embodiment of male fears about women in the workplace, women who are not mere beautiful playthings but are smart and capable and in control.

The film also deals with this very notion of sex and gender relations as founded on power games. Once again, it's in one of the most sexually explicit scenes that Verhoeven locates some of his most trenchant observations. The first sex scene between Nick and Catherine is a study in sex as power, the couple rolling around and exchanging roles, first one on top, in control, then the other. It looks as much like a fight, a battle, as it does like sex. Verhoeven is also interested in the possible differences between "fucking" and "making love," terms that the people in this film never use interchangeably. Catherine is of course the first to make the distinction, emphatically insisting that her relationship with her murdered boyfriend consisted only of fucking, that there was nothing deeper to it, at least for her. It comes up again after Nick violently has his way with his occasional lover and therapist, Beth (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who angrily tells him afterward, "you weren't making love." Among the film's many concerns is the question of what sex actually means, whether it can or does constitute deeper connections between people or whether it's just fucking: manipulation, power games, who's on top, who's fucking and who's being fucked. Later, a visibly softened Catherine asks Nick to "make love to" her, but one of the film's many unresolved questions is whether Catherine's icy exterior is actually melted by Nick, or if she just decides he's an especially great fuck.

What's great about Verhoeven's film, like so many of his films, is that Basic Instinct raises all these questions about sexuality and power and the media image of women without even seeming to verbalize anything greater than a grisly whodunnit with a lot of T-and-A. The film can be read just as easily either way, as a surface-level exploitation or a complex satirical commentary, and one suspects that Verhoeven likes having it both ways. This is one of the most troublesome aspects about his films, the suspicion that he enjoys smirking at his audiences, enjoys the fact that most people walk out of the movie talking only about Sharon Stone's body or the lingering mystery of whether or not Catherine "did it." At the same time, though, Basic Instinct is simply too complex, too potent, to dismiss entirely as Verhoeven condescending to popcorn moviegoers. The film ultimately positions Catherine as a surrogate for the director, manipulating and seducing the audience even as she does with Nick. Verhoeven, like Catherine, seems to enjoy the audience's appreciative gaze, but he knows that he's always the one in control.