Even Rich People can be Losers

Sharon Stone falls for a cheesy voyeur in the sleazy 1993 thriller Sliver. But when I saw the screenplay was by Joe Eszterhas I knew what I was in for and was quite prepared to enjoy his distinctive brand of greasy imitation Hitchcock.

I think the concept here, either conceived by Eszterhas or Ira Levin (who wrote the source novel), was of a world where Marion Craine fell for Norman Bates. Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins would've made a slightly more plausible couple, though, than Sharon Stone and William Baldwin. There's a reason William never approached top Baldwin status.

Stone plays Carly, a book editor who, as one character directly states, likes to be in control. She counters this by saying that she stayed in a bad marriage for seven years. So she certainly has her subservient side, which becomes clear when she succumbs to the advances of the wealthy owner of her apartment building. She stays with him even after she finds out he has a secret room filled with television screens monitoring everyone in the building, including her. So he's seen her doing such things as masturbating in the shower.

Baldwin's character, Zeke, tells her his mother was a soap opera actress and, for him, watching the private lives of his tenants is clearly like watching soap operas. This is Eszterhas world so it turns out everyone does behave as though life is a soap opera in their private lives. The screens show scenes of dramatic revelations and racy sex scenes. One shot of a woman shaving her face with an electric razor is the only nod to the truly embarrassing things people are likely to do when they think no-one's watching.

Audiences and critics didn't go along for Eszterhas on this one, they evidently preferred his version of Vertigo (Basic Instinct) to his version of Psycho. The real problem is that Zeke is never for a moment attractive. Eszterhas wants him to be some kind of dark, Phantom of the Opera anti-hero but he just comes off as a pathetic dweeb. The film originally had an ending more sympathetic to him but test audiences disliked it for being "immoral". I think you can get audiences to vicariously enjoy immoral behaviour, as in A Clockwork Orange. The problem is that voyeurs aren't just immoral, they're pathetic. You can give a worm all the dramatic noir lighting you like; a worm is still a worm. Most people watching this movie are rooting for Carly to dump this guy and it's somewhat satisfying when she finally does. But the fact that she was in any way attracted to him remains inexplicable.