1. Kitsch: A Working Definition To call Final Analysis a triumph of kitsch requires first establishing what kitsch means in this context. The term, derived from the German verkitschen (to make cheap), has been theorised extensively since the mid-20th century. In its classic formulation by Clement Greenberg, kitsch is the antithesis of the avant-garde: a mechanical, formulaic art that borrows the devices of genuine art but empties them of their critical or transformative potential. Hermann Broch expanded this into a moral-aesthetic category, arguing that kitsch is not simply bad art but a "system of imitation" that substitutes an effect for the real thing. Later theorists, notably Matei Călinescu, situated kitsch within modernity as one of its "five faces," linking it to the rise of mass culture, the middle-class hunger for cultural status, and the postmodern erosion of the high/low distinction. For the purposes of this analysis, kitsch can be defined by five interrelated features: 1. Parasitism: it feeds on established artistic achievements, borrowing their prestige without their substance. 2. Formulaic predictability: it operates within rigid generic templates that satisfy expectations rather than subverting them. 3. Emotional dishonesty: it manufactures sentiment on demand, eliciting feelings (lust, fear, pity) that are divorced from any authentic situation. 4. Surface without depth: it presents the appearance of complexity while remaining fundamentally simplistic. 5. Cultural reassurance: it ultimately confirms the audience’s existing worldview, however disturbing its ostensible subject matter. Final Analysis embodies every one of these traits, and its failure as high art is precisely what makes it such a revealing cultural artifact. 2. The Parasitic Text: Borrowed Grandeur, Borrowed Meaning The most immediate indicator of the film’s kitsch sensibility is its parasitic relationship to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The parallels are so overt that critics at the time diagnosed the film with a new condition: “dementia Hitchcox,” defined as “a brain inflammation primarily afflicting young movie directors who’ve seen too much Alfred Hitchcock” and who labour under “the delusion that it is possible to make an Alfred Hitchcock film if they are not Alfred Hitchcock.” The Baltimore Sun captured the essence of the borrowing with surgical precision: the film is “Vertigo freeze-dried, calorie-leached, flavor-drained, frozen in a little plastic sack and then fired up in the old Hollywood radar range.” This is not homage in the creative, transformative sense. Homage enters into dialogue with its predecessor; kitsch simply ransacks it. Final Analysis takes from Vertigo the San Francisco setting, the male protagonist’s obsession with an enigmatic blonde, the themes of psychological manipulation and vertiginous disorientation, the bell-tower climax, and even the stylistic gesture of Saul Bass-inspired opening titles. Yet where Vertigo uses these elements to explore the nature of illusion, identity, and the male gaze—constructing a profoundly unsettling meditation on the very act of looking and desiring—Final Analysis deploys them as mere decoration. The borrowed iconography signifies “prestige thriller” without doing any of the philosophical work that made the original prestigious. The Los Angeles Times observed that “most of the film’s effects are derived not from Hitchcock but from his imitators,” noting a “double-removed flimsiness.” This double removal is crucial: Final Analysis is an imitation of Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock pastiches, themselves already second-order appropriations. It is kitsch squared—a copy of a copy, drained of whatever residual tension the intermediary might have retained. As one reviewer quipped, “It’s even De Palma lite.” The parasitism extends beyond Hitchcock. The screenplay attempts to graft onto its narrative a dose of Double Indemnity (1944), with its insurance-motivated murder and double-crossing lovers. But the reference is weightless. Billy Wilder’s film earned its darkness through a genuinely corrosive vision of human greed and the corruptibility of desire; Final Analysis invokes the same plot mechanics as if they were narrative Lego bricks, interchangeable and depthless. When Joanou runs out of Hitchcock to steal from, one critic noted, “he starts stealing from Lawrence Kasdan.” The result is a patchwork of citations that point to nothing beyond themselves—an empty hall of mirrors. 3. Psychoanalysis as Branding, Not Inquiry The film’s treatment of Freudian psychoanalysis is perhaps the most philosophically instructive dimension of its kitsch character. The protagonist, Dr. Isaac Barr, is explicitly identified as a Freudian psychiatrist. His patient Diana recounts dreams that Barr interprets through a comically literal Freudian lens: the famous “phallic stage” of psychosexual development is name-checked with the subtlety of a textbook heading. But the film’s engagement with Freid is actively anti-intellectual. Real Freudian psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method for uncovering the hidden, uncomfortable truths that the conscious mind represses. It is inherently disruptive, subversive, and unsettling. Kitsch Freudianism, by contrast, is a repertoire of branded signifiers—dream interpretation, pathological intoxication, the Oedipus complex—that signal “psychological depth” without ever requiring the audience to actually think. The film uses psychoanalysis the way a fast-food restaurant uses the word “artisanal”: as a marketing term divorced from its original meaning. The concept of “pathological intoxication,” which provides the central legal plot mechanism (Heather’s defence is that alcohol triggers uncontrollable psychotic episodes), is a case study in kitsch appropriation of scientific discourse. A real diagnostic category is stripped of its clinical context and repurposed as a convenient plot device, allowing the narrative to have its Freudian cake and eat it. The audience is invited to feel intellectually engaged—“Ah, a psychiatric defence!”—while being asked to do absolutely no intellectual work. The film’s psychology is a theme-park ride through Freud’s greatest hits, complete with dream sequences, Oedipal sibling rivalries, and a psychiatrist who spectacularly violates every ethical boundary in his profession. This ethical dimension deserves attention. A real psychiatrist reviewing the film in 2000 expressed astonishment at the “pathological antics indulged in” and noted that “people have had licenses suspended for less.” But professional accuracy is not the point. The point is that Final Analysis wants the erotic charge of transgression—a doctor sleeping with his patient’s sister—without the moral or psychological consequences that would attend such a transgression in reality. Kitsch always seeks the thrill without the cost, the sin without the guilt. 4. Eroticism as Empty Spectacle The film’s treatment of eroticism further exemplifies its kitsch logic. Final Analysis was marketed as an “erotic thriller,” a genre that reached its commercial zenith in the late 1980s and early 1990s with films like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992). But genuine eroticism in cinema requires tension, vulnerability, and the intimation of real human connection. What Final Analysis offers instead is what might be called “kitsch eroticism”: the simulation of passion through soft-focus cinematography, saxophone-heavy scoring, and Basinger’s strategically lit nudity. The central problem, identified with devastating consistency by contemporary reviewers, is the “almost zero chemistry” between Gere and Basinger. The film’s entire narrative hinges on the premise that Isaac is overwhelmed by “instant lust and overwhelming attraction” for Heather, yet the actors “look as if they still remember all that sloshing around in the cold and murky swamp in No Mercy and wish they couldn’t.” This absence of chemistry is not merely a performance failure; it is a structural feature of kitsch. Kitsch eroticism does not require actual desire between actors because it is about the idea of desire, the recognisable signifiers of passion arranged in the correct order: a lingering glance, a rain-soaked embrace, a silhouetted love scene. If the audience recognises the code, the code has done its job. The referent—actual human longing—is irrelevant. The film’s “steamy sex scene” is particularly instructive in this regard. The sex scene exists because the genre demands it, not because the story generates it organically. It is a checkbox to be ticked, a product feature to be included. This is kitsch in its purest form: the substitution of a formulaic stimulus for a genuine aesthetic or emotional experience. 5. San Francisco as Scenic Backdrop Kitsch has a distinctive relationship to place. Where genuine art can make location integral to meaning—Vertigo’s San Francisco is inseparable from its themes of history, memory, and ghostly repetition—kitsch uses place as décor. Final Analysis is set in San Francisco for the same reason it features a Freudian psychiatrist and a Vertigo-style bell tower: because Hitchcock did it. The city is reduced to a series of postcard images—the Golden Gate Bridge, fog-shrouded hills, the Palace of Fine Arts—that signify “atmosphere” without being atmospherically effective. The Baltimore Sun noted that Joanou “uses Hitchcock’s favorite city… in such a pretentious way the city’s magic is lost in film-school pyrotechnics. He’ll zoom in dramatically on… a man getting out of a car.” This observation captures something essential about kitsch aesthetics: the stylistic gesture that calls attention to itself without justifying itself. A dramatic zoom implies that something significant is happening; when applied to a man exiting a vehicle, it reveals itself as empty rhetoric, a directorial tic that has learned the vocabulary of suspense without understanding its grammar. The film’s lighthouse setting, where the lovers rendezvous, is another telling detail. Lighthouses are symbolically rich locations—they suggest isolation, the boundary between land and sea, warning and guidance—but in Final Analysis the lighthouse is simply a picturesque spot for a tryst. It is meaningfulness without meaning, another borrowed signifier that points nowhere. 6. Star Persona as Kitsch Commodity The casting of Richard Gere and Kim Basinger is itself a kitsch operation. By 1992, Gere was firmly established as Hollywood’s designated handsome leading man, fresh from Pretty Woman (1990). His screen persona was built on a specific kind of charm: suave, slightly smug, eminently watchable but rarely emotionally demanding. To cast him as a brilliant Freudian psychiatrist is a category error that the film never acknowledges, let alone resolves. But from a kitsch perspective, this casting makes perfect sense. The film does not need an actor who can convey intellectual depth; it needs an actor whose presence instantly signals “intellectual depth” to an audience that recognises Gere as a star. His function is semiotic rather than dramatic. He wears glasses, furrows his brow, and intones psychoanalytic jargon with a straight face, and these gestures are sufficient because the film’s relationship to its own content is purely gestural. Basinger, similarly, is deployed as a sign rather than a character. Reviewers consistently noted that “her character never comes into focus: She’s sultry, pouty in a white-trashy way, but there’s nothing else there. She has no inner life, no resonant mystery.” But this emptiness is not a bug; it is a feature of the film’s kitsch economy. The femme fatale in kitsch cinema does not need interiority because she is not a representation of a woman but a representation of the idea of the femme fatale—a composite of prior cinematic images (Kim Novak, Kathleen Turner, Barbara Stanwyck) that the audience is expected to recognise and accept. Basinger’s Heather is “your basic issue femme fatale, from a long line of grasping, violent spider women who’ve figured all the angles and use men like disposable tissue.” The character is a cliché, and the film depends on the audience’s familiarity with that cliché to do the work that character development would otherwise require. 7. The Cinematography Paradox: Beautiful Images, Empty Vision One of the more interesting complications in reading Final Analysis as kitsch is its cinematography. The film was shot by Jordan Cronenweth, the legendary director of photography responsible for Blade Runner (1982), and it undeniably contains “gorgeous shots, light filtered through slats, up tilts into spiral golds, sublime primaries.” Some critics have noted that the courtroom sequences are “magnificently akin to something Roger Deakins would achieve further down the line.” On a purely technical level, the film is visually accomplished. But this very beauty reinforces rather than refutes the kitsch diagnosis. Kitsch is not necessarily ugly; it is often extremely attractive. Its seductiveness is part of its power and part of its danger. The gleaming surfaces of Cronenweth’s cinematography serve the same function as the film’s Freudian references and Hitchcockian quotations: they confer an appearance of quality without requiring any corresponding substance. The film looks like a serious thriller, just as it sounds like one (George Fenton’s score is a transparent imitation of Bernard Herrmann’s work for Hitchcock), and in the kitsch economy, looking like something and being something are indistinguishable. The film’s technical polish is the very mechanism of its kitsch operation: it is designed to be mistaken for quality by audiences who have been trained to equate visual sumptuousness with artistic merit. 8. Cultural Significance: Kitsch as Historical Symptom If Final Analysis were merely a bad film, it would merit no more than a dismissive review. What elevates it to the status of a cultural case study is the way it crystallises a specific moment in Hollywood history. The early 1990s represented the tail end of the “erotic thriller” cycle that had begun with Fatal Attraction in 1987. The genre was exhausted, its formulas calcified into rigid templates that could be reproduced with minimal creative investment. Final Analysis arrived in 1992, the same year as Basic Instinct, which pushed the genre’s lurid excesses to their logical extreme and essentially closed the book on the cycle. Final Analysis is, in this context, a film of the in-between—neither innovative enough to revitalise the genre nor self-aware enough to function as camp. It takes the genre seriously (or at least maintains a straight face) while reproducing its conventions mechanically. It is, as one IMDb reviewer noted, simultaneously “an original, psychologically clever and rather twisted” film and “a typical early 90s generic Hollywoodized Basinger/Gere cliché.” This simultaneity—the coexistence of ambition and formula, pretension and banality—is precisely the condition of kitsch. Culturally, the film also illuminates Hollywood’s relationship to its own cinematic heritage. By 1992, the generation of filmmakers who had grown up on Hitchcock were now in positions of power, and their relationship to the Master was complicated. De Palma had spent his career working through a genuinely productive Hitchcock obsession, transforming the master’s techniques into something distinctly his own. Phil Joanou, by contrast, represents a subsequent generation—what the Los Angeles Times called “one of the first thriller filmmakers of the post-De Palma era”—for whom the Hitchcock reference had become automatic rather than generative. When Joanou borrows from Hitchcock (or from De Palma borrowing from Hitchcock), he is in an act of brand management. The Hitchcockian elements serve to position the film within a market category, not to open up new aesthetic possibilities. 9. The Philosophical Stakes: Kitsch and Inauthenticity The deepest critique of Final Analysis as kitsch operates at the level of existential philosophy. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concept of das Man (the “they-self”) and the inauthentic mode of existence—in which one lives not according to one’s own projects but according to the anonymous dictates of the social crowd—kitsch can be understood as the aesthetic mode of inauthenticity. It is art that lives according to the “they,” reproducing what “one” does, feels, and desires. The characters in Final Analysis do not experience emotions; they “one experiences” emotions. Isaac performs the script of falling in love with a mysterious woman, following a template laid down by countless previous thrillers. Heather does not scheme; she “one schemes,” executing a plot that the audience recognises from Double Indemnity and Body Heat. The film’s psychology is about what “one” says about the human mind, the received ideas and pop-Freudian commonplaces that circulate in a culture that has absorbed psychoanalysis without ever taking it seriously. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, famously defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit”—that is, the denial of everything in human existence that is uncomfortable, messy, or unacceptable. Final Analysis is kitsch in precisely this sense. It is a film about lust, murder, betrayal, and psychosis that contains no real lust (only the performance of it), no real horror at murder (only the excitement of the plot twist), no real confrontation with psychosis (only the deployment of it as a narrative gadget). Every potentially disturbing element is buffered, sanitised, and rendered safe for consumption. The audience is never challenged, never unsettled, never forced to confront anything that might disrupt the smooth functioning of the entertainment machinery. 10. The Triumph of Kitsch “Triumph” is a strong word, but it is justified here. Final Analysis triumphs as kitsch because it so completely, so unselfconsciously, fulfills every criterion of the kitsch aesthetic. It borrows its prestige from genuine works of art without engaging with their substance. It deploys psychoanalysis as a decorative vocabulary rather than a mode of inquiry. It simulates eroticism through formulaic gestures that require no authentic passion. It reduces a city to a set of scenic backdrops. It uses star personas as semiotic shortcuts, substituting recognition for characterisation. It wraps all of this in a sumptuous visual package that invites the audience to mistake polish for quality. Yet the film also enjoys a kind of retrospective interest that many similarly mediocre thrillers lack. Because it is so legibly a product of its moment—the final years of the erotic thriller cycle, the twilight of the high-concept Hollywood thriller, the age of Gere and Basinger’s stardom—it functions as a cultural fossil, preserving in its layers the assumptions, aspirations, and limitations of its era. To watch Final Analysis today is to see, with almost archaeological clarity, what Hollywood in 1992 thought seriousness looked like. This, perhaps, is the ultimate irony. Kitsch aspires to timelessness but is always, inescapably, historically specific. The very features that made Final Analysis a second-rate thriller in 1992—its derivative structure, its borrowed signifiers, its anxious reaching for prestige—are what make it fascinating now. It is a document of its culture’s bad faith, and as such, it repays the kind of analysis that the film itself only pretends to perform.