Notice I didn’t say it was a GREAT movie. Certainly, it’s nobody’s favorite Paul Verhoeven flick (unless you grew up with a major crush on Jesse Spano). But you know what? I like it better than The Hollow Man.
Showgirls tells the story of Nomi Malone, a tough blond who hitchhikes into Vegas with nothing but a single suitcase (which immediately gets stolen). But she’s got two things nobody can take away: a great body, and a gift for dancing. Nomi starts out at the seediest strip club in town. But soon she breaks into the chorus of Goddess, a lavish stage show at a big casino. There, Nomi faces off with the queen bee, Cristal Connors, who either wants to befriend her, destroy her, or turn her into a sex toy.
Nomi may be a topless dancer, but she repeatedly insists she’s not a whore and she’ll never be like Cristal. But (surprise surprise) the higher she climbs, the more she becomes everything that once made her seethe. It’s a story as old as All About Eve, but with the sex jacked up to eleven. This is the most-expensive NC-17 rated film ever produced, and you will see more breasts than Frank Perdue.
It sounds fun, right? It IS fun, damnit. But for reasons I don’t fully understand, conventional wisdom firmly believes that this film is one of the worst of all time. It has an abysmal 14% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it won the un-coveted “Worst Movie of the Decade” award at the 2000 Razzie Awards. In fact, Showgirls has won more Razzies than any movie ever made. It’s a cinematic punching bag. And I don’t think it deserves it.
André: Paul Verhoeven isn’t some kind of hack who never made a decent film. I don’t think anyone who could make a movie as beautiful and exciting as Basic Instinct should be called a “bad filmmaker.” I think he’s a talented satirist, and I’m not alone. As an idea, Showgirls is wonderful. A massive epic, full of dance numbers, comedy, thrills, love, about the things a poor woman has to do to make it in a world run by men and money.
Where it went wrong wasn’t the execution. I think critics were a little blindsided by the bizarre sex scenes and the idea of having a sympathetic female main character who wasn’t very smart. As much as I have a problem with some of the misogyny in the script, a lot of the reviews were even worse. Film critics can be incredibly stuffy and closed-minded, especially in America, and especially when it comes to sex. As far as critics go, Showgirls never had a chance.
For instance, there’s a great scene where Nomi goes to audition for Goddess. We know she’s incredibly excited for this–she’ll do anything for the part. But when the producer offers her ice and demands she get her nipples hard (it’s a topless show, after all), she calls him a dirty word and storms off the stage. That makes her the only girl in the audition who’s offended by this request. She’s also the only girl to get the part. In another scene, a bigwig at the casino tries to pressure her into having sex with a high roller. Once again, she storms out, while the other showgirl meekly agrees. Nomi would rather lose her job than cross that line.
Yes, there’s a scene later in the movie where she sleeps with Kyle MacLachlan, the Entertainment Director of the casino. But I don’t believe she does it to help her career. I think she does it to spite her female rival, who’s dating the guy. (Although come to think of it, that’s just as sexist, so maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.)
We ask, “what does Nomi want?” The answer is “to dance.” We ask, “what does Nomi fear?” The answer is “becoming a whore.” Throughout the film, she is reminded that being a whore is both the worst possible outcome, and inescapable. For sex workers, for dancers and for women, that’s a little insulting. The men in the film aren’t presented with this problem, except for the choreographer played by Glenn Plummer. Who’s black.
There are two classes here: those who can make the life they want, free of the fear/hope dialectic (white men); and those who must be whores to the first group or face destruction. Rather than taking issue with this system of power, the film says, “that’s the way it is, and ain’t it a shame?”
So it seems that to make the case that Showgirls is misogynistic, you first have to show that it’s misrepresenting the culture of Vegas. I don’t know much about the town myself, but it doesn’t seem like a place where the fine arts are prized. There’s an interesting moment late in the movie where Nomi, now on the cusp of stardom, goes to see the choreographer you mentioned perform a work of dance art. Earlier, he told her he used to be part of the Alvin Ailey dance company. This is a bit of an obscure reference, but Alvin Ailey is based in New York, known for its modern and athletic choreography. This man is clearly talented, and in New York he’d probably find an appreciative audience. But in Vegas, he is literally booed off the stage mid-performance. One person shouts, “Bring on the real dancers!” By which he means, strippers. So Showgirls set up a choice: dance for art’s sake and be poor and unappreciated, or dance sexy and be queen of Vegas. To Nomi’s credit, she eventually makes the right decision: she leaves town entirely.
I think we can accept that Robocop and Starship Troopers are clever critiques of the American fascination with violence. Isn’t Showgirls basically a critique of the American obsession with sex? Do you think the movie gets Vegas wrong somehow? Or do you think it doesn’t wag a disapproving finger forcefully enough?
Apart from the feminist critique, I also dislike the way the film deals with lesbianism. For me, the film’s problematic relationship with lesbian desire is illustrated in Nomi’s fingernails. Nomi and Cristal have this weird flirty animosity throughout the film, culminating in that bizarre kiss in the hospital bed at the end. Their back-and-forth between sexual attraction and cruel violence is twisted by the repeated reference to Nomi’s intricate, razor-sharp fingernails. While the film seems to want to use the “you can do my fingernails” line as a repeated subtextual reference to their mutual attraction, it reveals how completely ridiculous this supposed subtext is. Those fingernails would make sex impossible.
The fingernails issue is a cliché in critiques of uninformed representations of lesbianism in film. The incapacity of existing cinema language to express the notion of lesbian subjecthood or lesbian desire is often shorthanded as “lesbian invisibility.” Instead of a relatable, realistic lesbian narrative, cinema traditionally presented us with either cautionary stereotypes, or “fake lesbians” who perform lesbian desire (unconvincingly) to titillate the male viewer. Seeing Nomi and Cristal “flirting,” intertwining their fingers with their ridiculously long and dangerous fingernails, is to me as troubling as seeing a performer in blackface.
Anyway, you mentioned earlier that for all the movie’s flaws, it didn’t deserve the excoriation it got in the press. (An exception is Roger Ebert, who gave it two stars and wrote a pretty fair review.) I think part of the backlash had to do with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. The guy was pretty hated in Hollywood, for a combination of:
- Writing Basic Instinct, which was widely accused of being obscene, misogynist, and homophobic.
- Being the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood history, which everyone either envied or resented.
- Being a complete dick, in general.
People WANTED Showgirls to be the worst movie of all time, just so he would get his comeuppance.
I’m not saying Verhoeven is completely off the hook for the way Showgirls deals with women. He’s guilty of the same kind of condescending attitude that clings to a lot of filmmakers who decide they’re going to make a “problem film.” But Joe Eszterhas wrote Jade. And Sliver. Freakin’ Sliver. No one has hated women that much since William Shakespeare.
By the way, in a case of sleazy life imitating sleazy art, Joe Eszterhas claimed in a recent book that Paul Verhoeven was totally porking Elizabeth Berkley. However, Eszterhas is himself a pretty sleazy guy, so you can take that with a grain of salt.
