Falling in Love with Verhoeven

Sometimes we fall in love with a filmmaker and don't know we're there until we search IMDb and find out he's made some of our favorite guilty pleasures....

Falling in love with a filmmaker is, I think, different for guy film buffs and female film buffs. Knowing a few guy film buffs, I know they don't necessarily think of films in the 'guilty pleasure' category. Guy film buffs admire a filmmaker's technique, or storytelling, lighting, etc. They talk a lot about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking and the excitement of it. Few are willing to admit they'll watch a film for the t&a.

As for female film buffs--and there aren't too many of us in the overall world of filmbuffery--I think we're more inclined to admit to a film's "hunk appeal." We just don't care--what are ya gonna do? call make fun of us and call us "girls?" Hardcore Female film buffs can, like their male counterparts, talk technique with the best, but are also far more open about our desires to just watch a film for the guys--sound optional.

And while there are some guy film buffs who, in fine fanboy manner, will admit to a "love" for a filmmaker, I think there's a different sense of that "love" for some of us female film buffs...there's a bit more emotion invested in it...

So, when I went looking to see the availability of "Turkish Delight" (yes, I found it...yes, I ordered and watched it and you know what? after awhile, a penis is a penis...but what it's attached to really makes the difference)
I also found myself looking at the filmography of its director Paul Verhoeven.


Weirdly, Verhoeven--a dutch dude--has been responsible for making some of my East Coast Catholic girl's favorite films. The first Verhoeven film I saw was The Fourth Man.

I can't recall if it was in NYC or if it was on video, but I remember laughing and being shocked by it...mostly for its sexual frankness which was something that, in my 20's, I hadn't seen in too many films (porn doesn't count.)

Prior to that, I used to see posters for Spetters all the time in the lobby of the 8th St. Playhouse.
I wanted to see it, because I'd seen Blade Runner and wanted to catch another Rutger Hauer film, but we never got around to it. At the time I didn't understand why the 8th St. Playhouse would be so hip on showing Spetters on a regular basis, but given what I've learned about it--from the sexually expressive main female character to the homosexual rape scene--I can understand why now (hint: the predominantly gay audiences probably could identify with the female lead...)

Then, it was an encounter with Flesh + Blood while I was working at a video store. It was one of those films that we got in shipment that we had no idea what it was about. Never saw it advertised in the theaters, so we were pretty clueless. We all took turns taking it home and watching it--which was de riguer with unidentifiable new releases--and it got into the standard rotation of films to recommend to folks who went for any of the fantasy/historical/swashbuckler genre.


After renting it, lots of folks came back and said they loved it. Guess the "rape" scene didn't put too many off.

It also became seriously good fantasy fodder for my fertile writer's mind ;-)

And then came RoboCop--with the surrealistically tortured,
intensely blue-eyed Peter Weller and a really nasty Miguel Ferrer (setting the stage for his role in Crossing Jordan)


Not to mention the terribly silly Total Recall,



the flash-happy and incredibly implausible (not to mention bad adaptation of Fourth Man) Basic Instinct,


the homo-erotic Starship Troopers (Casper Van Dein in blue--'nuff said

And, of course, that Great Train-Wreck of a film: Showgirls
....there were times during that movie where I was doubled over laughing ("Nomi has heat") and others where I could just stare, agahast, at the wreckage.

Before Showgirls I used to think Kyle McLachlan was sexy--after that, I just couldn't look him in the eye any more...kind of like when a guy just doesn't (you know) perform quite the way I expected...

Oh, I even saw Hollow Man...but that barely counts...

It's strange how one can see pretty much everything one filmmaker has made and not realize it. Some of that comes from watching way too many films in the course of some 40-or so years. Some of it, too, comes from getting all caught up in the imagery and the story and forgetting about who was responsible for orchestrating all that action....

And when I put all this together, and looked at it, I wondered what it was about Verhoeven films that captured my particular imagination.

I also loved the films of Martin Scorsese, but with Scorsese, it was easy to figure out why I liked him. It had less to do with his leading men, and more to do with his own life--an artsy, weird Italian kid from the East Coast. There are themes in Scorsese's films that were easy for me to interpret, even while others struggled over them. The whole Catholic thing makes it easy to see Christ figures in every pathological, suffering guy who ends up, at the end of a story, bathed in blood.

So, what is it about a Dutch guy with a frighteningly strange sense of humor?

It wasn't the humor, but the frank sexuality. Verhoeven's Dutch films have an erotic quality that is unique--and it's from watching the Dutch films that I finally got the difference between what is erotic and what is pornographic--a natural "earthiness" makes the difference. Nothing posed, no perfect bodies, no gravitas or violence, or strum und drang or faked ecstasy. In his Dutch films, and his first American film, Verhoeven made sex look like the fun it's supposed to be.

The later American films...well, that fun isn't there. There's all the American gravitas and violence along with the sex. So there's funny--as in a strange wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense of badboy humor. But not quite the same kind of fun of the Dutch films.

It really makes me see how uptight Americans are about sex, and how we will never be able to understand different sensibilities about sex. We just can't get over our own obsession with punishing ourselves for sex--that, IMHO, is the reason we almost always have to link sexual content in films either with violence or with such seriousness that the sex ends up looking like an awful lot of psychological work.

Ah, the Protestant Work Ethic. Kind of kills any sense of the sensual, the humorous, the fun-loving aspects of sex...

So I guess, in those strange foreign Verhoeven films, what I'm seeing is some of my sensibilities about sexuality reflected back. When I see the American Verhoeven films, I can see the humor in them when others are horrified (or bored--except Hollow Man--that, I found boring.)

It makes me think of the universal aspects of various art forms--how certain sensiblities can echo across cultures--and that there's *something* about "B-movies" or "action films" that might often go unappreciated and misunderstood because we don't see them as anything other than "mindless entertainment."

We don't have to make them into rocket-science and dissect them to death--but we can acknowledge and appreciate them just a bit more than we first thought....

and remember that a "guilty pleasure" doesn't really need to be guilty...it can simply be Pleasure...