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| Showgirls was a bomb in theatrical release. When it was released on home video it made a $100 million profit. I suppose the audience was more, um, "comfortable" watching it the the privacy of their own homes. |
Anyway, as this loud, garish anti-bildungsroman played out, I realized I may have a few things to say about it. I’m not actually recommending you to see Showgirls (I did that for you) but if you run across it and decide to take the challenge, I’m offering tools for a fresh re-evaluation.
This re-evaluation starts with an overview of Paul Verhoeven, a very successful director in the 1980s and 1990s, possessed of a very unusual auteur vision. The concepts and values he explores are so strange and unique they energize his films to this day. His major themes:
• Commodification - Paul Verhoeven’s films often explore the idea that human relationships are purely transactional, and human life can be converted into various forms of marketable property. RoboCop (1987) is about a person who is transformed into the property of Omni Consumer Products. Total Recall (1990) is about a company that creates pre-packaged memories— the core of human experience— and offer them up for a price, with optional add-ons.
The only time he shows a functioning governmental organization is in Starship Troopers (1997), which depicts the Mobile Infantry as a force capable of sound leadership, correcting it’s mistakes and achieving victory— however, this depiction is clearly marked as completely unreliable.
• Sexual Fear - I don’t know what happened to Paul Verhoeven when he was a kid (maybe it was some trauma from his childhood in occupied Holland living near a German V-2 rocket base) but something messed him up a little. Sexuality—especially female sexuality— is often depicted as destructive and menacing (Basic Instinct, Fourth Man) or, in the case of Showgirls, omnipotent. Attraction is always balanced with fear and, as mentioned above, weighed as a transaction.
On to Showgirls, which channels every aspect of Verhoeven’s auteur vision in an open, lurid, unsubtle way.
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| Nomi as we first meet her. |
And yes, Showgirls is NC-17 and all about titillation, filled end-to-end with nudity and sex acts. But take my word for it: after about 15 minutes or so, the visual spectacle becomes numbing. Women show up nude because that’s their job, nothing more.
Verhoeven protagonists are often new-born characters— ones that really didn’t exist before the start of the film. Nomi Malone enters the film from places unknown, with an unknown past, under an assumed name (“No Me, Alone”), no money, possessions stolen. RoboCop was a synthetic creation that in Act I only existed as an OCP boardroom proposal. Douglas Quade, the nice guy played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, may be an artificial personality implant. Verhoeven is not afraid to question the bedrock reality of his protagonists— and it’s always a neat way to kick off a movie.
• Las Vegas World - Showgirls is mostly about Las Vegas and what a deeply insane place it is. Founded as a city where any and all vices are accommodated, it is in Verhoeven’s vision the capital of America, the final embodiment of the values of a corrupted, amoral country.
The system of Las Vegas— money is all-important, ends always justify means— is contrasted against, of all things, culture. Dance, theater, and music are all represented in Showgirls in one form or another— all crushed flat under the weight of the Vegas version of show business. Dance is stripping. Theater is a hugely overproduced topless show. Music is represented by a pop star who is nothing less than a sadistic rapist.
And Nomi fits right in: she is the trash princess of a trash city. She has no values outside of purely transactional ones. The value-free system that rules Vegas rewards her, over and over. Nomi Malone is a rags-to-riches success story, a Horatio Alger story with G-strings.
• Nomi the Verhoeven Protagonist - Nomi Malone is extremely unlikeable. She shares this unlikely protagonist quality with Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct (1992) and Kevin Bacon in Hollow Man (2000).
Nomi is selfish, vain, deeply ignorant (“I love Ver-sayse”) and has a hair-trigger temper. About half the one-on-one scenes Nomi has in the film end with an angry physical outburst. Part of the fun of Showgirls is how it reproduces the queasy feeling of being around someone with mental issues: you don’t know moment to moment what will trigger them, which keeps you on your toes.
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| Reviewer Mick LaSalle described Showgirls as a film that, like most of the characters, puts on lipstick well past the natural borders of the lips. |
This is the insane, coked-up, glitter-coated heart of Showgirls: one messy scene after another, all mismatched emotions and screaming and throwing things and storming out of rooms. The other characters watch her go, eyes wide in love and lust, eternally forgiving.
This isn’t some example of bad writing—though overall, it's not very good. Joe Eszterhas got $2 million for the script, and it ended his superstar career. It is not poor direction either. Paul Verhoeven is… hanging a lantern on it. For all his quirks he is a very capable director, and he would not have crafted such jarring interactions without a purpose. He WANTS you to notice how weird and off-putting it is to have every character in Showgirls sucking up to a horrible, vindictive person like Nomi Malone, who would just as soon spit in your face than thank you for a lovely dinner.* Why?
Why do people put up with Nomi’s shit? Because Nomi is America. She is the embodiment of Late Capitalist American values. Everyone else is simply trying to appeal to her to get ahead, much as Americans have to buy into the system, deal with corrupt corporations and no unions and no health coverage, to get ahead. We are all prepared to be screamed at, spat on, be thrown down the stairs.
Nomi succeeds because in Las Vegas sexuality is a commodity. She proves to everyone she is the most skilled at leveraging her sexuality to ascend the ladder of success. Everyone is constantly trying to figure out how to attach themselves to her success so they can succeed as well. It may look like love or lust but it's pure, heartless transaction.
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| Nail polish is another major thematic detail; it serves as a metaphorical battleground between Nomi and Cristal (Gina Gershon). Weird but effective. |
That’s the realization. Showgirls wasn’t just 131 minutes of tits and screaming in a hideous neon Las Vegas hell-scape: There’s a message in the middle of it, a sharp indictment, and in recent years it has only become more apparent it was a prescient message. In the 25 years since the premiere of Showgirls all the emotionally unstable trash people, the ones that swim in the muck of vice as if it was the River Jordan, moved out of the trash capitals and into our real one.
*There was as similar complaint voiced about the dramaturgy of Starship Troopers, that it was filled with incompetent, flat acting and childish relationship dynamics. It was called “Archie, Betty and Veronica in Outer Space.” Again, this style was chosen very much on purpose. We are supposed to notice how silly and clichéd the narrative elements were, because it’s a propaganda film from the future. The movie we’re seeing is not a movie: it’s a government-engineered work of fiction, designed to increase enlistments and validate a fascist military government. None of it was supposed to be “real.”
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