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Dir. Paul Verhoeven
France-USA
Film #27 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema
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It is amazing that Paul Verhoeven exists. There have been
European directors, known for art films, which get put at the helm of Hollywood
blockbusters. Verhoeven is something
else. That he went from this box office bomb to the large scale 1997 adaptation
of Starship Troopers – which has its
cake and eats it majestically by both revealing in the nudity and gore, but
with enough morality to make itself a satirical masterpiece that decimates the
fascist tendencies of science fiction – is incredible. A director as
intelligent as Verhoeven, and as
subversive as he is still, would not walk into a film like Showgirls blindly. Following a down-and-out girl Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) as she travels to Las
Vegas with star struck aspirations in her eyes, the film is a fairytale. It is
comparable to classic Hollywood melodrama, with its sweeping camera curves and
brightly coloured and decorated environments, following a wide eyed young girl
– Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz,
Alice and her Wonderland – but one inside an NC-17 film with graphic nudity,
continuous swearing, back stabbings and obscene neon lights. It’s Oz on a
terrible cocaine daze, and where the monkeys don’t have wings but run amok
around the dressing room and leave faeces over the stage.
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And wide eyed young girl is
appropriate for Nomi. Berkley has
been lambasted for her role, but it slowly dawned on me, once I got use to her
abrasive personality and the twisted quirks of Joe Eszterhas’ script, that she is a little girl in the body of a
beautiful but far-from-innocent woman. She is tough, but at times cradling or
holding a symbolic teddy bear missing an eye, she’s also childish, pointlessly
obstinate even to people trying to help her and consumes junk food like a five
year old. She will have to learn a lot, or even less, committing questionable
behaviour before she becomes Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon), giant mouth and teeth, sequined and moulded eyes and
face, and Texas drawl hiding someone who has fought mercilessly, sadistically,
for her top spot in Vegas. And that turns out to be Showgirls’ ignored virtue in that it’s a slap in the face,
contained in a glamorous mirror, of this sort of place and of this kind of film
narrative, full of betrayals that are petty rather than dramatic, slime horn
males whoring out their female clients, while a strip club is at least honest
and thoughtful about allowing their male client to see the women’s naked
bodies, and insidious behaviour. Only Nomi’s friend Molly (Gina Ravera), a seamstress for the major
Vegas theatre production Nomi becomes part of, is completely virtuous and free
of sin, only to get thrown in the garbage in a horrifying way. Eszterhas’ script by itself is too lurid
and ridiculous to be completely serious, but I have to wonder if Eszterhas himself or Verhoeven when he got the script
realised that it worked in depicting a Las Vegas that is so wrong and bizarre
as it is seen in the film and added to it. Three years later the adaption of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)
was released, but despite having only read Hunter
S. Thompson’s original book way back in college years ago, the film feels
too arch and kooky to work now when I rewatched it. Showgirls shows this place far more potently, more decadent and
depraved, with only my memories of Thompson’s
original prose as a more damning piece of this city of gold shown in the film.
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The film is a sordid overload. There
is so much female nudity, especially from Berkley
who I did grown up seeing in Saved By
The Bell (1989-1993), that it batters you senseless and yet, to its
advantage, makes every moment of it stand out. The dialogue is legitimately
abstract at times, perfectly conveying the melodramatic tone, of a young woman
climbing up in fame in all its clichés, while being jaw dropping in where it
goes, such as Nomi and Crystal, in the only time they have a friendly banter
with each other, discussing eating the same kind of dog food in the past. Having
worked with writers who have had absurdist ideas in their scripts, intentional
or not, like the news breaks in RoboCop
(1987), I can see Verhoeven in
his second collaboration with Eszterhas
taking advantage of how ridiculous the film gets. And if the film is camp, the
Las Vegas shown is horrifying in its gaudiness in the first place, the reptile
zoo Hunter S. Thompson envisioned
while on mass quantities of drugs even more insane and over congested as a g-string
and shrimp cocktail hellhole. Made in the nineties, the many clear layers of
the film, even if moments of Showgirls
do not work on this first viewing, are clear even if they are within an
exploitative tone. It’s a far more fascinating take on the struggles a female
performer has to go through – the pain, the leering from men – than Black Swan (2010) by embracing its
scuzziness, rather than being above it, and by questioning the whole desire at reaching
the goal if it makes you less of a human being. What could be Nomi’s potential
love interest (Glenn Plummer) skirts
between the one who got away and another victim/predator of the Vegas strip because
of his human flaws, while Kyle MacLachlan’s
character, perfectly played by him, shows a two faced nature that is fitting
for the whole narrative. Yes, the sex scene with him where Berkley flops around like a fish in a pool is silly, but its clear Verhoeven is between a balancing act
between intentional silliness for humour and kicking this type of story in the
ribs in a damning way.
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It’s not the sort of film, sadly,
that large audiences, and more sadly, film critics like, which dares to not be
a safe art cinema drama which repeats everything we know of already, or a
merely okay genre film which doesn’t push itself into taking risks, but
something which is confrontational, is attempting its hardest in a sincere way
to be something brave even if it has unintentionally funny scenes, and more of
a taboo for critics, dares to skirt and question the line between being serious
and satirical, not in a cynical wink-wink sort of way accepted now, but in a
way that relishes the sleaze but cautions people of how terrible it would be to
see in real life. It would be viewed as hypocritical, but Verhoeven actually managed to balance out the fine line between
this in his American films by making sure the critiques of his own material
within the films was poignant and black humoured rather than tedious
moralising. Very few Hollywood directors dare this sort of thing now sadly,
with maybe a few exceptions like Neveldine/Taylor
being the only ones in existence, and sadly not getting the chances to make as
many films like Verhoeven let alone
high budgeted ones. Probably the shift to more teenage friendly content,
probably not helped by Showgirls,
waving the flag for the NC-17 rating, bombing as badly as it did, has affected
this, but I would also argue we’ve let
the politically correct mentality, mixed with the hipster sense of irony,
undermine American cinema, where films with sexual content are not actually sensuous
but passionless, where violence is festishistic
or numbingly forced like Michael Haneke fostered
on the world with Funny Games (1997),
when once before very violent films like RoboCop
actually made you cringe with real pain and horror even if you laughed or
cheered it on. Feminism in cinema has been changed from being a real drive for
women’s voices to be more heard of in films to being an excuse to accuse any
film which plays with titillation or real sexuality as sexist, and the desire
for peaceful liberalism hides a lot more morally objectionable and sick
attitudes to violence in films than what Arnold
Schwarzenegger did to villains in Total
Recall (1990). Most films now are ‘edgy’ but have no actual courage to
offend, divide, scrutinise, dissect or
willingly blur the lines between mere titillation and real intellectual meat,
and finally seeing Showgirls after
all this time, its disappointing something like this no longer, unless pigs
fly, will get released in multiplex theatres if it did back in 1995. I want the
people who like this as a legitimately great, or flawed but fascinating, film
to crush the individuals that merely view it as empty, crap trash and take
control of its cult following from them, the side where champions of vulgar
auteurism on sites like MUBI.com and
the legendary French director Jacques
Rivette can bond over it, despite being on different spectrums of cinema at
times, and give something like this the due it deserves or admit that it was a
brave attempt that, fittingly, has survived many of the critics of the time who
lambasted it.
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