UPDATE: Emerald Fennell’s team has denied that the filmmaker is in talks to direct a Basic Instinct remake. A representative for the filmmaker commented, “there’s no truth in this. She is not involved in any way,” per Variety.
To paraphrase a popular Star Wars meme, somehow Emerald Fennell returned. Since her critically acclaimed (and honestly pretty good!) debut feature Promising Young Woman, with each subsequent film the writer-director has managed to attract bigger box office — and a greater number of detractors along with it. Like the pink slime in Ghostbusters II, however, Fennell seems to feed off of that hate, growing stronger with every Reddit thread wondering why people on the internet hate her so much.
To answer the question implied in the previous paragraph, people on the internet hate Emerald Fennell for her style-over-substance approach, which is flashy and provocative with absolutely nothing behind it. And when there is something behind it, that thing is often staggeringly clueless, particularly when it comes to issues of race and class — which, come to think of it, does make her an ideal candidate to reboot the iconic erotic thriller Basic Instinct.
Even before its release back in 1992, Basic Instinct was the target of protests by feminists and lesbian groups who took offense to the film’s portrayal of its bisexual villainess Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone), who they said personified the stereotype of sapphics as evil, predatory man-haters. “It's hideous. It's awful. It's very anti-bisexual. It's very anti-lesbian. And it's misogynistic in general,” one protestor told NPR at the time.
Since then, queer fans have reclaimed Catherine as a camp antiheroine — a figure that, if one were to revive it for a potential reboot, would require the type of nuance that Fennell simply does not have. (At least, she hasn’t shown it in any of her movies thus far.) That being said, if Amazon Studios simply wants to re-create the controversy that surrounded director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’ original, then hiring Emerald Fennell is one way to accomplish that.
Eszterhas is the driving force behind this new reboot, and is being paid a total of $4 million to rewrite his own screenplay, according to a new profile of the 81-year-old screenwriter published yesterday in The Guardian. His concept for this new, “anti-woke” reboot of the film sounds, frankly, bonkers: It “juggles copycat serial killers with elements of the supernatural,” according to the Guardian piece. (For her part, Stone, who says she was tricked into performing the film’s famous flashing scene, is not involved in the reboot, saying last summer, “I hate to break it to you, but Joe Eszterhas couldn’t write himself out of a Walgreens drug store.”)
His justification for Fennell as its director is slightly more grounded, if perhaps a more than a little misguided: “Her sensibility is exactly right. She’s someone who is not afraid of controversy and sexuality. So I’m thrilled by that. I hope it works out,” Eszterhas told The Guardian. And, again, if you want to piss off the “woke” crowd with a new version of a movie where a psychotic bisexual murders people with an ice pick, hiring Emerald Fennell to direct it is one way to do that. But at what cost?
