Those Times Michael Crichton Got Horny: A Brief Account of 90s Erotic Thrillers and Experiments in Early AI

Let's talk about porn. Not the "Know it when I see it" kind - the verboten kind, but the softcore - the type for which Cinemax and Showtime were initially founded. There's something inherently funny about that period in the 80s and 90s when they tried to make it more palatable to the general public. Comedian Dave Anthony often jokingly reflects on the 70s, when hardcore was first popularized and you'd attend a screening of Behind The Green Door with people from your community, like your dentist. By the time I was a theatregoer, though, they ran those in different theatres and scrambled cable channels. Before even dial-up was a time when curiosity and confusion were your only motivation. Then one day, you'd find the dilapidated, sunburnt pages of a Playboy or Penthouse from six months back in the desert and that'd be your first exposure.  

The softcore kind, however, was booming— packing in audiences of parents at the nearest multiplex right next door to screenings of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. For most 90s children, the erotic thrillers popular in their heyday are films we're only catching up with now - save for a few precious minutes we snuck channel surfing. Folks, perhaps it's only the basic cinematic competence of films from that time, but so far we've all been far more impressed with them than our parents. 

Rising Sun was one of the first such films that I stumbled upon cable one day, with a particularly graphic opening 20 minutes.  No child could possibly care about a corporate murder mystery with bizarre racial overtones, but Rising Sun had the ultimate kid cheatcode: Michael Crichton. By 1994, a year after I'd seen Jurassic Park in theatres no less than eight times, the author's name was associated only with Velociraptors and Dilophosaurs. A few years later, we'd gladly pack in for Congo, another Crichton adaptation that dealt with an extinct species, and were treated to two hours of a man in a gorilla suit doing sign language (it's a film for which I still have great affection, nevertheless). Crichton's name was everywhere in the press, and with it came promises of more Mezozoic carnage. 

There were no dinosaurs in Rising Sun, but Crichton's name got us curious. Couple that with a maturing young boy's curiosity about the female body and a crippling lack of sex education, you get something as potentially lethal as a prehistoric lizard.  And the non-dinosaur Crichton films kept coming. Rising Sun and Disclosure, his erotic thrillers adapted by Phillip Kaufmann and Barry Sonnenfeld, respectively, couldn't be more hyper focused on the issues of the decade: sexual harassment, incensed racist paranoia and corporate mergers. 

Rising Sun opens on, well, just that, and it's meant as a portend. Like the submarine under the San Diego pier in Spielberg's doomed 1941, The Japanese Are Coming. Anti-Japanese sentiment may have started right after Pearl Harbour, but it lingered and burrowed, and fears of a new economic invasion were not real, but widely reported. The end of the Cold War and the start of Japan's economic growth in the 1970s suddenly meant that it was viewed as legitimate competition. Myths about great Japanese business strategy and tradition had spread like a game of broken telephone (some true, some hilariously false), and you can still find supposed great business hysterically misusing Sun Tzu's The Art of War (later starring Wesley Snipes, and Tzu was Chinese, but, hey). 

The underlying assumption is, of course, that they're going to take our women. So when a call girl winds up dead at the LA corporate office of the Nakatomo corporation, a black detective (Snipes) and a retired liaison (Sean Connery) between Japanese and American affairs is tasked to investigate. The company's early work in AI creates some very 90s novelty that complicates the case, and gives Sean Connery Wesley Snipes' head at one point. 

The whole thing is very funny and would be much more openly laughable were it not for Connery's icy cool performance, and the lack of any real murder mystery leaves to film free to let the two of them riff. They have chemistry, undeniably, and it's about the only aspect of the film that keeps it running. 

As uncomfortable and bizarre is as Rising Sun about its racism, the book is reportedly much worse, with Crichton even outing the killer as an enemy invader. Kaufmann, perhaps more sober-minded and well-meaning, is disinterested. The killer is revealed - it's the smug corporate American - but he's killed offscreen, last seen being entombed in the very cement on which the new Japanese headquarters will be.  It's not particularly great filmmaking, but what it does offer is a glimpse into damage control - as if Kaufmann were a moderator at a debate who must cope with an inflammatory conservative. If Rising Sun makes anything very apparent, it's that Michael Crichton was an author with issues; issues that would develop into him naming a child molestor character in a book after a climate change scientist with whom he took umbrage. (It's also a good time to note that some of the research was inspired by Toronto critic Jesse Hawken's excellent podcast on the film, ep. 123 of Junk Filter). 

Disclosure's worse, whose answer to the great mystery of sex politics of the 90s is that the woman gets to slap the guy on the ass, too. Michael Douglas is the smuggest of corporate yuppies, the kind who says things like, "Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy" about someone's misfortune. Crichton and Sonnenfeld were lucky to have had Douglas, who so perfectly filled those Gordon Gekko shoes for the avarice-loving. He's the best thing about Disclosure, the cockiest son of a bitch in the room. 

That confidence is shaken when Demi Moore, a former flame, shows up and forces oral sex on him. The scene is graphic, absurd, and hysterical in ways that belong specifically to the early 90s. At once slapstick and intentionally shocking, Moore's enthusiastic. Douglas, fresh off Basic Instinct, is no slouch, the whole thing is just disgusting sensationalism.  It's no help that Disclosure also features the worst of all 90s men: Dennis Miller.  

Of course, Moore has ulterior motives related to corporate intrigue - and I use that word incredibly loosely. There's nothing intriguing about Disclosure's VR, it's aged as well as Brett Leonard's The Lawnmower Man, replete with a control command from Douglas: Doit. 

Do it. Do the sex with the millionaire. Do the client who is clearly wrapping you around her finger. Do the real estate deal that puts Michael Keaton downstairs. Do the corporate merger, as that appears to be all that was at stake in 90s thrillers: a deep-rooted, impersonator-syndrome-inspired terror at the notion that someone, somewhere, was doing it better than you. 

What Women Want (2000)

90s VR and AI, in Rising Sun, Disclosure and in works like The Lawnmower Man, are used often to expose the deep-seated kinks and urges of the brilliant basement scientists that develop them. Retroactively, it makes Elon Musk's handjob-for-a-horse anecdote funnier.