Fridge / Basic Instinct

• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Considering what kind of a person Catherine is and how the story shows that even the most hard-assed man can be swayed by a woman, the infamous interrogation scene actually makes a lot of sense. Additionally, since this is a Verhoeven movie and the director is making fun of the audience as usual for wanting to see sex and violence on screen, it could be read as a metaphor for the audience watching the movie - if she gives you what you want, you'll ignore some of the movie's gaps of logic.
  • When Nick is giving Catherine a ride home after her interrogation, they discuss the polygraph examine she underwent. He says that it cannot have been easy to beat the machine. She says "If I was guilty, and I wanted to beat that machine, it wouldn't be hard." Note that she says "If I was guilty," not "If I were guilty." The failure to use the subjunctive seems like a strange error for her to make, since she is, after all, a professional writer. Unless, of course, it was intentional: the subjunctive mood, and not the indicative, is used for hypothetical or counter-factual statements because they refer to things that are not so. She uses the indicative because, in fact, she did do it.
    • Also, considering she's writing a book based on the events seen in this film, she may have purposefully worded her response like that because she plans on writing this conversation out in a similar manner and decide to use this as a hint to the readers of the book that the femme fatale is the killer.
• Fridge Logic: The pantyless scene has become a trope in itself over years, lampshaded, exaggerated, imitated, parodied, nearly qualified for being a Dead Horse Trope, and yet it doesn't make any sense in context. Real police detectives are trained to be tough and hardened men with plenty of interrogation experience, and yet all of them seem stunned by a nearly-childish trick.
  • The leg crossing bit was an improvised moment by Paul Verhoeven based on an actual incident he encountered during his time at university, and was not a part of the original screenplay by Joe Eszterhas, who was a former crime reporter for a newspaper and more than likely written the scene straight.

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