Hollow Man
With Elisabeth Shue, Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Joey Slotnick, Mary Randle, and William Devane.
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In retrospect, I turned against Verhoeven mainly because of the way he combined misanthropy and potent eroticism–which I mistook for misogyny, a common error. I still think his misanthropy is problematic, and I don’t think his clear liking for and identification with his powerful women characters–a constant in his recent work, Showgirls included–necessarily excuses including a couple of rape fantasies in Hollow Man, even if both sequences are ambiguous and never get very far beyond voyeuristic preliminaries. (One turns out to be a dream of the heroine; the other is an aggressive encounter whose outcome we neither see nor hear about.) I would argue that Verhoeven is something of a dark moralist who’s fascinated by our worst impulses and that he’s also a very sexy director–which can create edgy and troubling overlaps. In Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone’s exuberant sexual exhibitionism and aggressiveness overlap with male fears about lesbian ice-pick killers; in Showgirls, we get both an exciting lap dance and mordant observations about capitalist sleaze, which are even harder to distinguish from each other. The easiest way to avoid analyzing all the resulting ambiguities is to hoot at everything, and I joined most of my colleagues in doing so.
Comparable ambiguities can be seen in Verhoeven’s considerable talent as a pop artist, fully apparent in his decorous billboard compositions and their clarity of line, which led director Jacques Rivette to compare him to Roy Lichtenstein (and to conclude that the giant spiders in Starship Troopers are superior to Spielberg’s dinosaurs). What often registers in Verhoeven’s work as mockery or irony, with all the trappings of satire, can also be read as just yarn spinning and gross-out mongering by a gifted comic-book artist, and much of the fascination of Starship Troopers rests on this sustained ambiguity.
Griffin (Claude Rains), the invisible man, is given a former girlfriend–played by Gloria Stuart, who played Kate Winslet’s character as an old woman in Titanic–and she continues to dote on him, while he, by contrast, never shows the slightest interest in becoming a voyeur or unseen lover of her or any other woman. Yet paradoxically, though Rains’s character is every bit as selfish and mean-spirited regarding both people and animals as Wells’s and Verhoeven’s invisible men, he differs from both of them in that he becomes downright courtly whenever the leading lady is around. It’s not clear why, apart from the casting of Rains in the part, but there’s not a trace of leer in his comportment–in contrast to Verhoeven’s Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), a creep from the very outset. Rains’s Griffin is full of mischief, but none of it’s sexual. (Furthermore, when he steals money from a bank and gaily distributes it to the general populace, this Depression-era prank doesn’t register as altruistic, but more like the idle whim of an anarchic Nietzschean superman, in keeping with Wells’s hero.)
“It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror anymore,” Caine remarks toward the end of this picture. This is what Verhoeven movies always pretend to promise us–it’s their perpetual cynical escape clause. Happily, they never begin to deliver, for looking into a mirror of one sort or another is precisely what his movies get one to do, regardless of how ugly and distorted, or how grotesque and accurate, the reflected image turns out to be. Total Recall gave us moviegoing as mindless tourism, Showgirls gave us America as a giant Las Vegas whorehouse, Starship Troopers gave us the whole planet as a fascist utopian America. And what does Hollow Man give us apart from a gripping genre exercise? Moviegoing as leering and chortling over crushed mice.
