I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined) Read online

  Straight Outta Compton will never disappear. It will always be the most important gangsta-rap document and the first hyper-meaningful hip-hop record to come from the West Coast. In its aftermath, N.W.A slowly collapsed in a less than electrifying manner: Ice Cube quit the group in 1989 over financial disagreements. The other members accused him of cowardice, but Cube’s solo career was colossal (he’s now mostly an actor, shilling for products like Coors beer and often playing the type of character he once bragged about murdering). On his 1991 album Death Certificate, Cube tried to revise (and reverse) the group’s history with the Raiders, essentially claiming the organization had somehow ripped him off (“Stop givin’ juice to the Raiders / ’cause Al Davis / never paid us”). This, however, faded with time: In 2011, Ice Cube even directed a documentary for ESPN in which he interviewed the (by then decrepit) NFL owner and treated him like a don.

  After Cube’s evaporation, the four remaining N.W.A members still managed a number-one album in 1991 (Niggaz4Life), but it lacked the incendiary insight of their previous work. Dr. Dre left the group in ’91 over an ugly dispute with Eazy-E and created one of the biggest hip-hop albums of all time, The Chronic. Dre is now primarily focused on production and entrepreneurship, sometimes appearing in Dr Pepper commercials as himself. Eazy-E’s subsequent musical career was less memorable; he died from AIDS in 1995 at the age of thirty-one, having sired at least seven kids from six different women (the real number of his offspring might be closer to twenty, but these things are hard to verify). The two less famous members, DJ Yella and MC Ren, are generally only mentioned in retrospective discussions about the heyday of N.W.A (but almost always in a complimentary manner, as is so often the case with forgotten role players). On the whole, it’s impossible to view N.W.A as anything except an irrefutable success, simply because they only espoused two highly attainable goals: to make a lot of money and to not care about anything. They were bad guys on purpose, so they were able to define their own rules.

  If I was reading this book, the following thought might occur to me: I might wonder if publishing a sympathetic book about villains is the author’s way of actively placing himself within the villain category, which would mean the author is trying to be a villain on purpose (which is what the previous chapter was all about). I would wonder if this was some kind of attempt to write about himself through the guise of writing about other people.

  At first, this would seem self-evident. But then I would think about it longer and realize the exact opposite is closer to the truth.

  ARRESTED FOR SMOKING

  Because so many mercantile intellectuals now write about television for a living, it’s become pretty much impossible for any TV critic to express views that make straightforward sense. The volume of deep television writing is (suddenly) much too large; everything except the most unorthodox perspectives is instantly ignored. The expectation for those who cover modern television is that they will consistently interpret the experience of TV in radical, personal ways. Writers always need to be seeing something that isn’t obvious (and, preferably, they need to be seeing things that serve as a parallel commentary on unrelated problems). Here’s one example: Around the Presidents’ Day holiday of 2012, the PBS series American Experience broadcast Clinton, a four-hour examination of the forty-second POTUS. The New York Times wrote about this documentary. This is how the article opened:

  “Monica Lewinsky doesn’t matter anymore.”

  One sentence. Five words, one paragraph. I was immediately intrigued. What might this mean? What was the author suggesting? It felt telling.

  But then I read the next two sentences.

  “It’s remarkable, really, how little resonance that Clinton sex scandal has today. The White House intern who shook the world is barely ever mentioned in the 2012 presidential campaign.”

  What the writer was trying to do was set up her main criticism, which is that this four-hour documentary invested too much time on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and failed to unpack the more meaningful political hot spots of his eight years in office. (The story’s conclusion: “Clinton is fun to watch . . . but mostly a wasted opportunity.”) I can’t fault her for doing this. I did the same thing at various points in my newspaper career. Sometimes you just need to write something to fill a space that must be filled, and sometimes that filler makes no sense when dissected critically. This is simply another illustration of that omnipresent media problem. Because in those three sentences, the writer manages to be misleading in four different ways:

  1) The Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998. In what possible framework would any political candidate (or even a political reporter) directly bring up Lewinsky’s name in 2012? How would that work, exactly? In what context would it not seem specious, attacking, and unrelated to the election at hand?

  2) Moreover, there are many things that don’t come up in presidential elections that still remain historically important. How often do modern political candidates mention the Vietnam War?

  3) Clinton was a comprehensive documentary. Doesn’t the fact that the filmmakers themselves saw this affair (and Clinton’s subsequent impeachment) as integral to his legacy serve as a significant contradiction to the premise that “Monica Lewinsky doesn’t matter anymore”? She clearly mattered to the creators of this program, most of whom likely considered this problem more than anyone else.

  4) Is there anyone who doesn’t see Clinton’s inability to stop himself from receiving oral sex from an intern as the most unavoidable prism through which we attempt to understand the complexity of his character (not to mention how totally fucking insane it was that this happened at all)?

  Now, it’s entirely possible that what the writer of this New York Times piece was trying to argue was that Monica Lewinsky shouldn’t matter anymore, and maybe she thought that writing those words might somehow make them true. Certainly, there’s a vague sophistication in insisting that Clinton’s sexual misadventures are irrelevant to any serious discourse about political history. But that’s backward. In truth, it matters way more than we like to admit (and in a hundred years, it will be the only thing non-historians will remember about Bill Clinton, unless his wife somehow becomes president). The machinations of politics are mostly fake; they are performed and constructed for our psychological benefit with little tangible impact (at least for those in the intended audience). But there was nothing unreal about this scandal. It personalized an issue that no normal person could possibly experience.

  It was a five-sided predicament.

  Unless you view the Starr Report as a nonfiction Fifty Shades of Grey, the first memorable book hoping to exploit the Lewinsky scandal was American Rhapsody, a gonzo fiction-memoir hybrid that includes one section delivered from the perspective of Bill Clinton’s penis (Philip Roth’s The Human Stain was inspired by the controversy but establishes its own narrative). Written by Joe Eszterhas, American Rhapsody was widely publicized but generally unsuccessful. It depicted Clinton in a manner that seemed weirdly self-congratulatory — the book opens with the author having a grunge-era phone conversation with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner about how the newly elected president was “one of us,” which he translates to mean, “the real deal: undiluted, uncut rock and roll.” The idea (I think) was to comically boil the imbroglio down to its allegedly essential truth, which (I suspect) was that all powerful men are driven and controlled by their sex drive, which (I suppose) is at least partially true. [I am forced to use a lot of qualifiers because American Rhapsody isn’t very clear about its purpose.] But a much, much clearer version of how sex informs what we feel about reality can be seen in Eszterhas’s screenwriting, most notably 1992’s Basic Instinct.

  Like so much from this era, Basic Instinct is better to remember than to rewatch. The film you imagine in your mind is closer to its original intent than the film that actually exists. The film in your mind is an erotic thriller; the film that exists is more like a comedy. This is the underrated brilliance of the Eszterhas wr
iting style: His work begins as controversy and evolves into satire, so it succeeds twice. Twenty years after its release, the dialogue in Basic Instinct often resembles Mr. Show. The narrative details are awkward, except when they’re straight-up ridiculous. But don’t think about what the movie Basic Instinct literally is. Think about the movie you remember (or — if you’ve never seen it — imagine the movie I’m about to describe in a best-case scenario): A troubled San Francisco cop is investigating the ice-pick murder of a rock star. All clues point to the victim’s girlfriend, a beautiful bisexual novelist (Sharon Stone) whose book perfectly mirrors the grisly actions of the murder. When questioned by authorities, she shows up for the interrogation without underwear and argues that she obviously can’t be the murderer because she’s so obviously the murderer (“I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about killing and then kill somebody the way I described in my book,” she says before flashing her vulva at Jerry Seinfeld’s least likable neighbor). The cop (played by Michael Douglas, the only actor who could possibly be in this movie) starts having a lot of intense sex with the novelist while still trying to prove she is, in fact, a diabolical murderer (this paradox does not seem to particularly bother him). Virtually everyone in the story has killed someone in the distant past, so no character is above reproach; woozy Hitchcockian music reminds us that every unassuming person is potentially evil. A jealous lesbian (Stone’s crazy-eyed lover) tries to kill Douglas with a motor vehicle, but she ends up killing herself instead (Stone cries when she hears about the accident, humanizing her for the first and only time). We eventually discover that the original rock-star murder was possibly committed by the cop’s psychologist (whom Douglas was also sleeping with), even though this makes little logical sense and is subsequently contradicted by the film’s final scene, in which we realize that Stone keeps an ice pick under her bed (thereby suggesting she either intends to kill Douglas in the near future or that she harbors some relatively untraditional methods of household tool storage).

  At the time of its release, the most vocal criticism of Basic Instinct came from the homosexual community. The argument was that portraying lesbian characters as psychopathic killers implied that all lesbians were psychopathic killers, and that this would make people afraid of lesbians. [Remember, it was 1992. This was what people worried about.] A secondary critique was that Basic Instinct was misogynistic, an accusation habitually directed at movies in which unrealistic women attempt to destroy Michael Douglas’s life (other films in this category include Fatal Attraction and Disclosure). A third criticism was that the film was simultaneously exploitative and reactionary: Despite an avalanche of nudity and eroticism, it subtextually connected loveless intercourse with depraved violence, latently promoting puritan ideals (this is the same academic criticism invariably chucked at teen horror flicks). A fourth criticism was that it glamorized smoking. A fifth was that Camille Paglia seemed to like it way too much. I suppose all of those attacks are quasi-valid. Still, the most interesting thing about Basic Instinct falls far outside its alleged problems. There is no question over who the villain in this movie is supposed to be: The villain is Sharon Stone’s character, Catherine Tramell. There’s no confusion on this point. “She’s brilliant, she’s beautiful, she’s rich, she’s bisexual,” Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven remarked at the time. “I see her as a special edition of the devil.” Granted, it’s odd that Verhoeven imagines “a special edition of the devil” to be the female combination of four mostly positive qualities. But why he thinks the way he thinks is not the issue; what matters is that Verhoeven absolutely and irrefutably projects Tramell as the antagonist in this production. No one watches Basic Instinct and thinks Sharon Stone is a good person. No one argues that she’s the counterintuitive hero. She does not deserve sympathy. Yet she still generates empathy. Audiences may root against her, but they don’t want her to go to prison. They want her to get away with murder. They view her actions as less insane than they plainly are. And this is because Catherine Tramell’s crimes are not motivated by love. Her crimes are motivated by lust.

  I concede this feels backward.

  I concede that our natural inclination should be to feel more tolerance for a character who kills for love. A love-driven murder seems more classically humane. But here’s the thing: Love is significantly less crazy than lust. Love is a mildly irrational combination of complex feelings; lust is a totally irrational experience that ignores complexity on purpose. Tramell is never driven by love. Like some kind of amorous apex predator, she is driven by the insatiability of her lust, which we unconsciously understand as something beyond her control. She exists in a constant state of super-arousal, and that makes her mentally vulnerable (while still remaining sinister). There’s a long history of this in the erotic-thriller genre. Take 1981’s Body Heat: It somehow seems reasonable for William Hurt to throw a chair through a glass door to get his paws on Kathleen Turner, because his destruction is driven by lust. We relate to his unhinged reaction. We want it to happen. It’s electrifying. However, our feelings toward both parties change as their relationship deepens (and they start plotting to murder Turner’s husband). That same year, Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange illuminated a similar dissonance in The Postman Always Rings Twice (their illicit, rapey intercourse is wrong yet explicable, but the ensuing relationship is explicable yet wrong). People make terrible decisions when they are in love, but they usually know those decisions are bad; they make those decisions anyway, only to look back later with all the predictable regret. But people consumed by lust make no decisions. They just react. It’s neither emotional nor intellectual; it’s physical and unmanageable. It is, I suppose, the most basic instinct there is.

  It’s hard to say if Stone’s disquieting superpower in Basic Instinct was her own conscious intent and a product of her acting ability, particularly since she’s appeared in about forty movies since Basic Instinct and was only good in one of them (Casino). It may have been a combination of timing and chance. But that doesn’t make the performance any less amazing: Her character is simultaneously calculating and out of control. She can write books and make witty banter and lie to policemen, but she can’t stop herself from killing everything she fucks. It’s a one-dimensional compulsion that informs every aspect of her life. And that makes her seem more human than she actually is.

  If you believe Christopher Andersen’s low-rent 1999 book Bill and Hillary: The Marriage, Bill Clinton would often “gush” to friends about his favorite scene from Basic Instinct, which was (of course) the famous interrogation/vagina scene. Stone and Mr. Clinton have always remained tangentially connected, sometimes publicly (they’ve worked together on multiple charities, most notably for AIDS research) and sometimes speculatively (there were always unfounded rumors of a Clinton-Stone affair, almost to the point where even dogmatic Democrats seemed titillated by the star power of the premise). The consensus now holds that Clinton almost certainly wanted to have sex with Stone and that Sharon was probably up for it, but it just never came together. Here again: an exceedingly nineties problem. Very Sliding Doors. Tori Amos and Trent Reznor had the same missed connection.

  It’s almost too easy to look back at a former president and insist he’s fascinating, because any life that culminates with that specific job is going to require a handful of unorthodox, contradictory traits (even Gerald Ford deserves more attention than he gets). But Clinton’s textbook hyperthymia pushes this to another level. He’s the kind of man you could trust to lead the world, but not to drive your wife to the airport. He was a tireless, talkative, highly functioning sex addict. When his affair with Lewinsky was on the verge of exploding nationally, he continued to deny its existence to every single person he worked with except for Dick Morris (his one political advisor who viewed the universe amorally). What he told Morris was this: “Ever since I got here to the White House, I’ve had to shut my body down — sexually, I mean. But I screwed up with this girl. I didn’t do what they said I did, but I
may have done so much that I can’t prove my innocence.” It’s an explanation that embodies so much of what made Clinton the figure he will always be. He describes his libido like a world-class athlete coping with an ACL injury; he suggests that there are elements of real innocence within his undeniable guilt; he admits his deepest fears are ultimately pragmatic. [Now, granted, this is a secondhand quote from someone remembering a phone conversation that happened over a decade ago, and it might be a paraphrase — but a sentiment like “I’ve had to shut my body down” is so deeply bizarre that no one could misremember those words in any other way. Moreover, Dick Morris is the type of guy who would lie about a lot of things, but not something like this (where there was no personal benefit to him). In this scenario, he’s probably being more honest than necessary.]

  If described to someone with no memory of the recent past, the villain in the Lewinsky scandal seems stupidly obvious: We have a married, serial adulterer who receives multiple blow jobs (in the Oval Office) from a powerless subordinate half his age. He lies about it to the entire world, is exposed as a liar (and admits this on television), is impeached by the House of Representatives, and jeopardizes both the reputation of the office and the memory of every positive thing he accomplished as president. It should be a simple equation. But it isn’t. Clinton’s impeachment worked to his short-term political advantage. Though the impeachment charges were technically for perjury and obstruction of justice, the trial was perceived as a sanction for sexual impropriety; the public saw this as excessive and unjust. [Only about one third of Americans saw the impeachment charges as valid, which isn’t that far removed from the percentage of Americans who always feel the president should be impeached.] The larger vilification was ultimately split five ways. Mr. Clinton, of course, was first against the wall. But Monica Lewinsky was next, and she was hammered just as aggressively (and with much less justification). So was Linda Tripp, Lewinsky’s comically untelegenic gal pal who coerced her into detailing the affair while secretly taping their phone conversations. So was Kenneth Starr, the obsessive lawyer who spent most of the nineties trying to destroy the Clinton administration and forced the American public to participate in his quest. And so was Hillary Clinton, a person who did nothing wrong (but whose willingness to accept the actions of her husband eroded her status as a feminist and validated the perception that her marriage was nothing more than a loveless House of Cards agreement).