The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [356]
We then, however, switch to the world of the story's other serial-killer, who we see abducting his fourth prospective victim. This is a young woman whom, as with her predecessors, he plans to keep as a prisoner in a pit in his cellar, until he can kill her and strip off parts of her skin. We thus see the archetypal situation repeated, a second young woman rather more obviously in the power of a ruthless monster. The two elements in the story are then gradually brought together, as Clarice uncovers a direct link between this second monster and Dr Lecter and tries to strike a bargain with him. In return for being taken from his horrible prison cell to more congenial surroundings, he must give her the clues she needs to track down the other killer.
In one sense, her scheme goes hideously wrong, in that this enables Lecter to escape, savagely killing two policemen on the way. In another it works, in that he has given her enough coded clues as to the identity of the second, lesser monster to enable her to track the serial-killer down. This enables her, in classic herofashion, to save the girl in the nick of time from a fate worse than death and slay the monster into the bargain. But the fact is that this second killer, a pathetic little obsessional middle-aged man, was only ever small fry. The real monster overshadowing the story is Lecter who, as we see in the film's closing scene, has escaped to an agreeable Caribbean island. In other words, our heroine has not really fulfilled the proper role of a hero at all. Despite her little cardboard victory over his shadow, the chief figure of darkness in the story has successfully outwitted her. The monster lives on (to allow for him be brought back in the sequel).
The heroine as monster
In this new age of storytelling where so much of the once clear distinction between `light' and dark' had been lost, at least some vestige of it remained in stories like this where the conflict centres on a battle between the police, representing the values of the social order, and a psychopathic monster, representing in its most acute form the dark urge to rip all those values to shreds. But even this distinction was open to inversion, as was next year exemplified in another Hollywood film which in a sense brought the story traced in this chapter full circle.
Basic Instinct (1992) opens with a shot of an unidentified woman, her face hidden by blonde hair, engaged in passionate sex with a man. She is on top of him, in other words in the `male' position. As they approach climax we see her tying him down to the bed with a white silk scarf, then secretly reaching for an ice-pick. As they come to frenzied orgasm she plunges the pick repeatedly into her partner, blood spurting everywhere, until he is dead.
Cast in what, in conventional terms, would have been the role of the story's `hero' is the policeman sent to investigate the crime, Nick Curran of the San Francisco Police Department. His chief antagonist is Catherine, the chief suspect, an ice-cold, beautiful, blonde heiress in her thirties. Everything the detective learns about this lady seems to confirm her guilt. She had been a regular sexual partner of the dead man, not because she loved him, as she makes clear, but simply because she enjoyed `fucking' him. She has just published a seemingly self-incriminating novel about a woman who murders her lover with an ice-pick, after tying him to the bed with a white silk scarf. Nick discovers that, while she was at college reading psychology (as with Clarice Starling, this is Hollywood shorthand supposed to convey that she has a powerful, `masculine' intelligence), one of her professors had been found murdered with an ice-pick. There are even suspicions that she had arranged the boating accident which killed her parents, leaving her a rich heiress.
However, Catherine soon begins to run rings round the detective. She deliberately uses her sexuality to draw him under her spell. It seems she knows far too much about his professional and private life, such as that he is former