Ok, so lately all I have been posting is my essays that I write for my film class and other classes. So here is another essay from my film class that I had to compare simular but seperate film characters so I decide to do it on Basic Instinct and on Basic Instinct 2. I had to talk about how the director makes us like these guys in the movies instead of hating them for their actions. I think that i did a good job, so I hope that you guys like it as well. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks.

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Films have to be realistic in order for people to be able to identify with the characters and be able to watch the whole thing with out getting bored and keep them engaged with the progression of the story line. But there is always that one character that people identify with the most and that is why they enjoy the film so much, because they can see that the film isn't just a story that someone made up and decided to make it into a movie. People love to see different types of characters in films and that's how our personal preferences are developed and how we decide what films we want to see. But the one character that I want to focus on is the "lonely men" that we sometimes see in films. I'm not talking about men that are alone because they have no social skills, I'm talking about the men that choose to be alone because something tragic happened in there past. There is to film that project this "lonely men" picture and it's Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992) and Basic Instinct 2 (Caton-Jones, 2006). It's interesting the way that director makes us fascinated by the behavior of these men. Normally the actions that they take during the film would get people arrested for "stalking", but we sometimes find ourselves defending their actions and their motives.

While it may seem that I'm comparing movies that are the same, let me just say that it isn't true; both of these films where directed by two different directors and have different storylines. While they do have some similarities, the story line is essentially different and it's perfect to be able to compare the two "lonely men" in the films.

In Basic Instinct, a detective named Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) in charge of a murder chase gets involved with a book writer named Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) who is the prime suspect in the murder case. And in Basic Instinct 2, a psychiatrist named Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey) who has to do a psychiatric analysis of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) after she is accused of the murder of a famous British Football player. In both films she is a very cunning women that always gets what she wants, no matter what she has to do, and since she is rich and famous she has an enormous amount of resources that she can draw upon at any given time making her a very powerful person. While it may seem weird that I'm going into so much detail about Catherine is because she is a key part in the behavior of the men on both films and it will all be made clear in the following paragraphs.

In both films, Catherine likes to toy with people, but in particular with Nick and Dr. Glass. She seem to get a certain pleasure from tormenting them and this is what drives them to act in the way that they do, and now let me explain. In the Basic Instinct Nick started out like any other guy, he had his job and he seemed like there was nothing bothering him. He had a few issues, but if we look at it from a realistic point of view everyone has their own issues so at first glance he was relatively "normal." Then there was a murder and he was the detective in charge of the investigation and they had some clues that were leading straight to Catherine. They interrogated her and she didn't look intimidated or nervous at all, instead she started to turn their own statements against them and out smarting them in their game. When they took her to Police Station to question her regarding her relationship with the murder victim. It even looks like she enjoys making the men inside that room feel uncomfortable and acts in a way that gives her the upper hand. An example of this can be seen as soon as she walks in the room she lights up a cigarette and when a cop tells her that she can't smoke in the building she answers: "What are you going to do? Charge me with smoking?" This just shows how powerful of a character Catherine really is just like Karen Rutter says, "On the surface, her attraction could be said to be purely physical. But a large part of her appeal lay in the fact that she was dangerous in ways which weren't stated obviously, but more subliminally amalgamated into her character: an economically independent single woman, a person unafraid to challenge society's ground rules for gender behavior." (101)

This kind of behavior just drives Nick insane, and I think that it's because he has never meet a women that has so much trouble for him. I think that this started to wake up some feelings that he had stored away inside of him to the point that the just had to let them out. These feelings weren't of love or anything cute and cuddly, they were violent and they made him want to find out why he had those feelings. "Strong violence also acts on the mind by refusing it glib comfort and immediate resolutions. If successful socialization depends on a neutralizing of extremes, then violence of this kind amounts to a rent in the curtain of rationality, a glimpse of the ultimate questions one spends a lifetime denying." (McKinney, 17) This kind of means to me that depending on how strong the violence is in some films, it can actually start to make us feel uneasy inside which starts to make us question our own integrity.

In Basic Instinct 2, Catherine is still pretty much the same person that she always has been. Still smart as ever and there doesn't seem to be anyone that can stand up to her and uninitiated by anyone, the only thing that changes is that by the time of this second film she has moved to London. The thing that set the whole movie in motion is the death of British Football player like I mentioned before, but the thing is that he died and he was last seen with Catherine. This puts her as the number one suspect and they quickly take her to Scotland Yard and start to question her, they try to pin stuff on her so that they can arrest her but she makes quick work of the accusations and is let go. Before her trial, she has to have a psychiatric evaluation to make sure that she isn't a risk to herself and others. Catherine is appointed to Dr. Glass as her evaluator since Dr. Glass has been very successful and is renowned in his field of study. He testifies in the court that she is a very dangerous person and that it's addicted to risk, to the point that she might one day take a risk so big that it will end her life and even the life of others. And this is where it all the commotion starts for Dr. Glass.

Dr. Glass starts to take Catherine as his patient and learn a lot about her past and he starts to get more and more interested in her. She starts to toy with his mind just like he did to Nick in the first movie. I think this is what drives him nuts because he just wants to make sure that nothing bad happens to Catherine. I think that Catherine also got to Dr. Glass because after a while he couldn't think of nothing else but Catherine; he also seemed to get more and more violent as time when on for no reason. Since there is some stuff that both Nick and Dr. Glass share, it would be pointless to repeat something that I already stated above, so for the sake of this paper lets just assume that both characters are almost identical with a few minor variations.

We can clearly see the connection between both Nick and Dr. Glass, which are the following. They both are being manipulated by a woman to the point of insanity, and they both have a past that torments them. Nick is guilty of killing bystanders in a police shoot out, but he never went to jail for that and still felt guilty all the way to the end of the first movie. Dr. Glass had a patient that killed his girl friend and Dr. Glass feels that he had seen it coming and did nothing to stop him from doing it. But I think that the director manages to get us to actually b e fascinated by these guys even if they behave like "stalkers." I think that this happens is because of the positions that their characters have in society, Nick is a detective and Dr. Glass is obviously a doctor. They both have a position which is respected and that we may even look up, these people are suppose to try and help us as much as possible because that is their job. This may have become the images of how they view them selves, and subconsciously they probably thought that they were actually helping Catherine. They really cared about her and the must have thought that it was their jobs to protect and help her, just like its their job to help everyone else. I really think that to them it didn't seem like they were doing anything wrong, and they only had the purest intentions at the beginning. But as time goes on, that dedication that they have for their job warps into an obsession that drives them insane and to the brink of a total brake down.

The way that character like Nick and Dr. Glass act makes like them and not hate them because of behavior is due to the fact that the films are realistic and that we ca identify our selves with the characters to the point that we ma even see or selves in the screen; "when a film artist makes us cry over spilt blood it can start to seem like the project is worth it." (McKinney, 22) By this I don't mean that we are al bad people or anything like that, I just mean that we all have our own issues that we have to deal with. We just have to be careful with those feelings; because if we aren't careful, all those feelings that we have bottled up might explode to the point that we might go out of control.

Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992.
Basic Instinct 2. Dir. Michael Caton-Jones. Sony Pictures/MGM, 2006.
McKinney, Devin. "Violence: The Strong and the Weak." Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer, 1993), pp. 16-22. Jstor. 7 April 2008.
Rutter, Karen. "Stoned Crazy." Agenda, No. 20, Politics, Power and Democracy (1994), pp. 101-103. Jstor. 8 April 2008.