'How Very Lacanian': From Fantasy to Hyperreality in Basic Instinct 2

'Catherine is older in this film and the situations are different – she's challenging the whole psychoanalytic system...' Basic Instinct 2 production notes 'Heck, even the way she wears her clothes is fascinating. Her costume designer has given her a series of line-straddling outfits. At one point, one hand is gloved and the other ungloved, and several of her dresses feature one clothed shoulder and one bare. It's as if the costumer is telling us Catherine is both a heroine and a villain. Or that the movie is both very bad and very good.' Chris Hewitt 'How very Lacanian', psychoanalyst Milena Gardosh (Charlotte Rampling) observes at one point in Michael Caton-Jones' Basic Instinct 2 (2006): a line that would become notorious. 1 The question is: just how Lacanian is Basic Instinct 2? The astonishing opening scene, which wastes no time in immersing the audience in preposterous excess, does not immediately suggest Lacan so much as a delirial commodity porn confection of James Bond, Ballard and Bataille. The scene-auto-erotic in the double, Ballardian sense – sees Sharon Stone's Catherine Tramell pleasuring herself, 1 Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian (March 31, 2006), was one of many which found this line absurd. 'On being told that Catherine has disappeared from a drinks party she's hosting, Rampling tosses her head and says, with a little worldly sophisticated laugh: " She just walked out-how very Lacanian! " Oh yes! Ha! Lacanian! Very! Ha! If he hadn't died in 1981, Jacques Lacan could perhaps be brought on, like Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, to discuss this with Rampling.'