Headscratchers / Basic Instinct

• When I saw the movie, I really wondered: How could any man, horny or not, fall for such a stupid act? One should think that a little child would be able to look through her charade.
  • Perhaps the tagline of another Michael Douglas movie, Disclosure, says it all; Sex is power. Douglas' detective is so enamoured with this woman, so enticed by her, that he basically can't see the forest for the trees, despite being a detective. Tramell's meant to be the perfect femme fatale, and that's how the trope works - older movies are full of men confounded by attractive, dangerous women.
  • Also, Nick's history suggests he likes to live life on the edge and engage in reckless behavior. He may not care that Catherine is perfectly positioned to kill him. The thrill of courting death could be a powerful rush for him. As she herself puts it, "Nicky got too close to the fire. Nicky liked it."
  • Precisely. Notice how little time Catherine spends on trying to enchant Gus. Of course this is partly because she's just not interested; but it's also perfectly possible that she's well aware he's not the type to fall for her charms.
  • Plus which, he believes that playing Catherine's game will help him nail the killer. If it's not the sexual challenge that excites him, it's definitely the intellectual one—he thinks he's a step ahead of her in regards to the murder investigation, outright telling her "I'm in love with you, but I'm going to nail you anyway", and expects to come out the victor one way or another.
  • The women aren't so smart either—Roxy stays with Catherine even though Catherine openly cheats on her and encourages her to watch her coupling with men, deliberately arousing her to violent levels of jealousy. In Real Life, regardless of gender or orientation, this would be an incredibly unhealthy and downright emotionally abusive relationship. And if Catherine is telling the truth about Beth—that Beth is the one obsessed with her—Beth herself is still entangled with someone that she knows is lethally dangerous.
• What about the fact that we see that Catherine holds the icepick barehanded? Shouldn't her fingerprints be there? Well one could say that the real murder weapon is actually one we see at the very last shot. Does that mean that she brought a glove and another icepick with her, put a glove on, picked an icepick, washed it in Gus' blood, took the real one and then left? But then again, there weren't any gloves found with the wig and the cloak, were there? So shouldn't anyone wonder why there are none of Beth's fingerprints on the murder weapon?
  • Perhaps, if the sequel is canon, they did run it through the crime lab and didn't find Beth's prints. But by the time they had thought to ask Catherine for her prints, she had already killed Nick and split out of town.
    • The film takes place over the course of weeks if not months, and Catherine was the prime suspect in the first murder from the start, so it makes no sense they couldn't use DNA to either eliminate Beth as a suspect, or get a warrant to confirm Catherine as the killer. This is likely just another case of the film being deliberately nonsensical to mock the audience (as explained on the Fridge page.)

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