showgirls

In the quarter-century (and counting) since its release, Showgirls has fractured critical opinion into disparate camps - misunderstood masterpiece, camp classic, guilty pleasure, irredeemable turkey. None of these outlooks are necessarily right, and none of them are necessarily wrong. The film has become a cinematic Rorschach test, of sorts; a multifaceted prism in which opinion tends to be shaped by which edges happen to catch the light. It’s a fascinating legacy for a movie that - let’s be honest - amounts to little more narratively than All About Eve dragged through the glitter-strewn Las Vegas gutter. But its claws cut deeper than one might think… it’s easy to snicker at the heightened burlesque lunacy and general cattiness of the plot, but if you aren’t careful you might just find blood trickling down your arm once it’s over.  

Director Paul Verhoeven (reteaming with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas following their hugely successful erotic thriller Basic Instinct) has almost certainly benefitted from an overzealous aggrandizement of his artistic intentions in recent years… but there’s no denying his pointed vision of Vegas as a toxic playground of wish fulfillment, in which dreams are granted in the blink of an eye and snuffed out just as easily. It’s a lesson that Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) learns the hard way, literally within minutes of arriving in town. She wins a small fortune playing the slots, then gambles it all away just as quickly. She thinks the rockabilly who picked her up hitchhiking might be able to hook her up with a job, but instead he turns out to be a conman who rips her off. Nomi dreams of one day becoming a showgirl, the city’s reigning class of glamour goddesses, but beneath the lustrous facade it’s really not all that different from the nude pole dancing she does at the Cheetah Club - a seedy cesspit in which the sweaty lust all but bleeds from the walls. She eventually lands a spot in the chorus line for “Goddess” (some lavishly produced pageant of volcanic pablum) at the Stardust Casino, but quickly locks horns with Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon), the swaggering star of the show, and plots to take her throne - the Vegas equivalent of regicide.   

So much of the vitriol surrounding the film’s release in 1995 was directed at Berkley, whose casting made waves… mainly due to her association with the wholesome teen series Saved By The Bell (on which she ironically played the straight-A feminist Jessie Spano). Berkley’s acting isn’t exactly good, but it also isn’t exactly bad. It’s more like she’s a vessel, channeling the movie’s hyperbolic, jacked up essence through the atoms of her very soul - you can’t say she isn’t physically or spiritually committed to the cause. As a character, Nomi has little impulse control, and neither does the performance - Berkley plays her like a feral cat whose hackles are permanently raised (“She’s all pelvic thrust. I mean, she *prowls*”). But she has a legitimate, statuesque screen presence that feels almost startling revisiting it now… it makes one wonder what might have been if the film didn’t effectively tank her future prospects. Her interactions with Gershon (“You don’t want to piss me off darlin’, now that we’re friends”) are a bitchy, backbiting delight. With the exception of Bound, this might be the signature role of Gershon’s career - she plays Cristal with a seductive contemptuousness, a Cheshire sneer that’s almost impossible to imagine another actress replicating. In arguably the film’s best scene, Cristal coerces Nomi into giving a lap dance to Zack (Kyle MacLachlan), the Stardust’s entertainment director, but he’s little more than an eager bystander; the real dance takes place between the two women, an unspoken battle of wills in which sexual desire is wielded with the bluntness of a cudgel, Nomi’s full-throttle gyrations bordering on physical assault. Even though Nomi eventually sends Cristal on a dramatic swan dive down the stairs, the venomous undercurrent of their interactions never quite feels truly dangerous… maybe that’s because Cristal comes across more as a cat toying with her food, while Nomi’s incisor-bared combativeness simply seems hardwired into her personality (you grow a bit numb to it after a while).    ​

Many have tried to claim the film is arch satire, but what exactly is it satirizing? It’s more like a mirrored lens that Verhoeven uses to distort the very cultural fabric of America into a heightened, grotesque extreme (leave it to a Dutchman to have the audacity). Not everything works, of course. Verhoeven’s bombastic craft is often at odds with the unhinged hackery of Eszterhas’s script (Eszterhas, ironically, was getting paid more and more money even though his writing got worse and worse - this is a movie that has actual lines like “First I get you used to the money, then I make you swallow” - though to be fair, the Versace gag, among others, is genuinely funny). It frankly wouldn’t have been imprudent to scrap the entire subplot featuring Glen Plummer as James, an Alvin Ailey-trained bouncer who wants to do some “serious dancing” with Nomi, but mostly just tries to get in her pants (the payoff is a somewhat poignant reminder that the side of the road is littered with former dreams, but it’s not worth the screentime it takes to get there). MacLachlan, Robert Davi, and Alan Rachins spend the movie practically tripping over one another in a bid to prove who can create the skeeziest caricature. Verhoeven’s showmanship is frequently astounding (the movie, if nothing else, is a reminder that even the most high-profile failures in the 90s still tended to look like a million bucks), but he makes one major misstep near the climax - he stages the moment all of Nomi’s fantasies triumphantly converge as high-gloss fairy tale… while juxtaposing it against her friend Molly (Gina Ravera) being brutally gang-raped. Even for a director who pushes the envelope so hard it’s usually in the mail and halfway to Europe, it’s shockingly ugly. The film’s camp attraction shrivels in an instant. Nomi unleashes righteous retribution, and it’s cathartic, but it’s a little disappointing that Showgirls ultimately amounts to the same old showbiz observation… that stardom comes down to how much of yourself you’re willing to sacrifice (even a recent movie like Pleasure, about a young Swede who arrives in LA hellbent on becoming a porn starlet, for all its unflinching “rawness” ends up peddling the same trite message). Nomi departs Vegas as abruptly as she arrived and as she leaves the camera lingers on a billboard trumpeting her as the new star of Goddess - a symbol of how she came, conquered, and left her indelible mark. Love it or hate it, one can’t deny that Showgirls has a similar legacy. It won’t ever be forgotten.