New York City | Yes Really Titley

In what suburban basement has The Last Seduction been hiding in since its release in 1994? Beyond an enthusiastic endorsement from Samantha (Kim Catrall) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) in the 1998 pilot episode of Sex and the City, we have not heard much about Seduction or Bridget, the film’s diabolical lead, or any legacy left behind in the twenty-five years it has been around. Perhaps there is a reason for that.

Roger Ebert, in his review of the film upon its release, deliciously described the set-up of the film:

“As the movie opens, she [Bridget, played by Linda Fiorentino] and her husband [played by Bill Pullman] have made a big haul – $700,000 in illegal funds. Then he makes the big mistake of hitting her in the face. He knows it’s a mistake: ‘Hey, you can hit me anywhere, hard.’ During the course of the movie she will accept his invitation, in her own way.”

The quotation from Ebert’s review is cut off before it can get into the sausage fixings of where this film truly goes. Bridget is beyond seeking revenge or justice from her husband for hitting her and this violence is far from the turning point Bridget needs to empower herself to leave a toxic marriage. We suspect that Bridget has seen through her cheap suit of a husband for a long time and her pre-requisite to leave was $700,000 cash.

On the advice of her flypaper lawyer who is drawing up and serving her husband papers for divorce, Bridget sits tight in the upstate community of Beston. Bridget is hoarding the cash until her divorce comes through, cornering her husband into not being able to make a claim unless he wants to explain to the authorities how they came into the money. (“Are you still a self-serving bitch?,” her lawyer asks, just making sure she does not have a case best suited for the ACLU.) While in Beston, Bridget finds a job (in phone sales–yes, she is an aggressive telemarketer,) and a sexual plaything (Peter Berg, who wears a perpetual ‘huh?’ expression), all the while collecting the pieces she will later fit together into her triumph.

In collecting those pieces, Bridget embraces a specific freedom that is predicated on others buying into destructive narratives about themselves and the world around them. When Harlan (Bill Nunn), a private detective sent by her husband, corners Bridget in her car with the sole aim of retrieving the cash, Bridget taunts him about the size of his penis, wondering whether or not it would live up to her expectations of that of a black man. To shut her up, he whips it out. Bridget then crashes the car and sheepishly says to the investigating (white) police officer, “The jist of [his threat] was, he was going to, um, impale me with his…big….” The police officer finishes the story without asking for further detail.

Bridget’s Beston plaything, Mike, employs willful blindness in his relationships with the women in his life. Bridget is unambiguous about her expectations for their relationship when they first meet: just sex. He, rather than ending a relationship that does not give him what he wants or embracing the form it is taking, continues to pester Bridget for more. When she does invite him into her home and heart (what’s left of it), the condition is that he help her sell the murders of cheating husbands to betrayed wives over the phone. Bridget correctly guesses that Mike has an ex-wife and that their marriage was impulsive. “[O]ne of those sudden, horny things,” she says. Mike confirms this but does not say more beyond the following: “Trish was a mistake. Boy from Beston moves to Buffalo, gets lonely, meets girl, screws up big time.”

Intuiting that there is a secret to exploit, Bridget, without Mike knowing, goes looking for Trish (played by Serena) in Buffalo and discovers that she is a trans woman. A cis-man making love with a trans-woman is an expression of a broad spectrum of desire for both parties. Bridget contorts this narrative into one that says Mike sought out and liked sex with a man and is gay and is a joke for trying to pretend otherwise. Her final ploy to put him in his place is to verbally humiliate him about his denied queerness while simultaneously inciting him into a rape role-play that requires him to act out his violent trans-misogyny on Bridget. Bridget dials 9-1-1 so that the operator might hear her screams and pleas for help during the act. (Her reminder to Mike, “I’m Trish,” is whispered out of range from the phone receiver.) Mike is arrested as a result.

Both the character of Harlan and the character of Mike have choices, once of which is to listen to the audience screaming out ‘Don’t fall for it!’ They listen to Bridget, however. While plotting her next moves, Bridget has choices as well about when and how she will use circumstances as they present themselves. Oftentimes, these are circumstances she did not create.

Mike left his wife in Buffalo prior to Bridget arriving in town. For a man who lays his cards on the table with Bridget (he claims he is “hung like a horse” and is vulnerable in voicing his want for a life bigger than Beston can provide), his reluctance to give details about his marriage is inconsistent. Bridget intuits that he will do anything for her if it means avoiding being honest with himself about Trish and their recent history.

Bridget is tipped to how the town takes to Harlan’s presence when her office’s receptionist emphasizes repeatedly that he is a black man. (“Did you tell her about the black guy?,” a co-worker asks the receptionist on the button of the scene.) She then puts to work racist ideas that say black men’s bodies are unnatural and available for her to gawk at, and that black men’s sexuality is predatory when it comes to white women.

Linda Fiorentino’s body as Bridget is in motion—smoking, drinking, hand-writing, posing, sprinting, strutting, grinding, dressing, undressing, luxuriating or vibrating in thought—for the entirety of the film. Yes, sex and seduction are in her toolbox, but Bridget’s long game is played primarily by learning and exploiting the weaknesses of her opponents. This work is done with the voice; asking the right questions; knowing the right details; adopting the right tone; saying the right thing at the exact right moment.

It was said in the entry on Sleeping With The Enemy that “[w]omen fleeing violence often trade their voice for their security.” All the previous films in this series can be read as meditations on voice and, by extension, agency. Whore is the most prominent of this theme, with the female lead, Liz (Theresa Russell), speaking directly to the audience, in control of at least the narrative of her life, where the day-to-day realities are of a profession that can spiral into personal chaos at any second. Bridget deploys her voice to create chaos for others, to fuel her own personal agency.

And what is the root of the chaos Bridget creates? Bridget’s voice is effective when the narrative she spins centers white supremacy, patriarchy, and cis-supremacy as the secondary beneficiary, after herself of course. Her voice is listened to when she dehumanizes black men. She is listened to when she portrays herself as an innocent victim of the violence of others. She is listened to when she confirms for an insecure man that queerness is less-than and that only domination is acceptable. To know what to say at the exact right moment is to know exactly the context in which what you say will be received. Bridget embraces contexts that perpetuate systems of oppression. Her voice is violence. Let’s not give her any further credit for it.

The Last Seduction was directed by John Dahl.

Originally published on February 19, 2019.

Updated on February 26, 2019, to include the name of the film’s director.

WORKS CITED

Ebert, Roger. “The Last Seduction.” Rogerebert.com. November 18, 1994 (originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times.) https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-last-seduction-1994

“Sex and the City.” S01, E01. Sex and the City. HBO. June 6, 1998.

Titley, Hillary. “Sleeping With The Enemy.” whospeaksof.wordpress.com. February 8, 2019. https://whospeaksof.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/sleeping-with-the-enemy/

Titley, Hillary. “Whore.” whospeaksof.wordpress.com. February 3, 2019. https://whospeaksof.wordpress.com/2019/02/03/whore/

Sharon Stone’s Carly Norris – a Manhattan book editor – moves from ‘the village’ into the Sliver building, a ruddy coloured high-rise, thrusting its tip into the sky like it was asked to solve a math problem at the blackboard. We primarily see the building from the ground up, its length and width either exciting or intimidating. The truth, however, is this: it’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it.

The Sliver building can be limp and uninspired in key aspects: cramped, badly designed kitchens; no in suite laundry; mirrored, sliding closet doors-a tacky way to otherwise enliven a boxy master bedroom. The building can also pound away incessantly at you with its gauche aesthetic. Every bathroom has fixtures and layouts ideal for staging pornography scenes. The male tenants are leering creeps and are sometimes murderous on top of it. The overhead lighting cuts out just when you need it most (I.e. running for your life from a homicidal maniac in a steep stairwell.) The owner is disinterested in repairs while also surveilling his tenants via surreptitious spy cameras installed in their apartments.

Girl, put some tape over your webcam!

A new Baldwin is manufactured for every role the Alec model shows interest in but eventually turns down and Sliver‘s prototype is named William, who plays the building’s voyeuristic owner, Zeke. Zeke’s apartment suggests a certain arrested development with its student dormitory disarray, but a secret central command for his spy operation hiding within his apartment tells us otherwise. There is a control and attention to detail and a design sensibility (like if Batman commanded the bridge of the Enterprise) that betray the maturity and patience it takes to see through a project of such scope. His spy rec room is a sanctuary for his secrets. The residents of his building are not granted the same privilege of a private space in their units. Zeke oversees all as a passive watcher, content to label what he sees as ‘soap operas,’ scooping up knowledge about the private lives of his tenants, but only acting on what he see when it furthers his interests (sex, murder, preferred flower arrangements of potential dates).

Carly’s work as an editor of books personifies in her a belief in narrative, particularly in the activity of articulating and bolstering aspects of story that demand action. She is somewhat turned on by Zeke’s voyeurism, but is eventually sickened by Zeke’s insistence that they only watch. Carly eventually gains the pallor and disheveledness of an individual who has spent extended time in isolation with pornographic cinema. She has watched plenty of sex between consenting adults, but she has also witnessed secret addictions, domestic violence and a mother’s rejection of her daughter’s assertion that she has been sexually assaulted by her step-father. Her shame for her transgression of spying overwhelms her conviction that she should act on what she has seen.

Can’t stop nosing in other people’s business

In a March 2018 interview, Sharon Stone reminisces with invigorating frankness about the state of mind and motives propelling Sliver’s production:

“Well, frankly, most people making that film were nuts. They were trying to repackage me after Basic Instinct and I think they were just attempting to take that movie’s energy and squeeze another hit out of it. I think they kind of did it but they could have done a better job.”

Carly is scripted as a woman consistently surprised at the doings of others. Stone, however, radiates a vivid intelligence that shreds this enforced naiveté and layers nuances into material meant to be consumed superficially. Instead of being a separate entity we relate to via her motivation and choices, Carly, due to her embodiment by Stone, becomes an audience surrogate, lamenting the destructive ego of the surveillance state.

Joe Eszterhas, the writer of Sliver, Basic Instinct and other canonical works of A-list smut, liberally tinted his work with feminist flourishes. An Eszterhausian woman is equipped to rail against the paper bag authority figures who arbitrarily stand in her way. Clothing is optional. In Showgirls, a woman is prompted to violently fight the systems of oppression around her. In Basic Instinct, a man is drawn to a submissive relationship with a queer woman who is deploying her homicidal tendencies toward clearing out patriarchal excess. In Sliver, a woman destroys her means of seeing with a penetrative and intrusive gaze after being seduced then sickened by its soullessness.

Justice Judy

Earlier in the film, Carly’s assistant Judy (Colleen Camp) cheers on Carly’s move to the Sliver as an opportunity for “new adventures, new horizons, new lovers, new orgasms!” Carly has desires that are dangerous or benign depending on how they are acted out while Zeke’s gets off observing individuals crush themselves under the weight of their secrets. Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, relates a story of classical lore where Justice “stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in[. To] go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self.” Perhaps Judy, with her enthusiasm for “new adventures, etc.,” is Justice for Carly, gently guiding her towards the hell of dating Zeke so that a transformed version of herself might emerge. After Carly fires a bullet between the eyes of Zeke’s pervy control room she says flatly, “Get a life.” It’s an admonishment as much to herself as it is to him.

Sliver was released in 1993 and was directed by Phillip Noyce.

Originally published on January 17, 2019.

Updated January 22, 2019 to include new post category and tags.

WORKS CITED

Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Viking, 2005

Thompson, Simon. “Sharon Stone on Her First $100 Paycheck And Her Fight To Direct.” Forbes.com. March 7, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonthompson/2018/03/07/sharon-stone-on-her-first-100-paycheck-and-her-fight-to-direct/

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The Last Seduction

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