Showgirls: A Non-Perverted Re-Examination

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.

It may be some form of social-distancing madness setting in, but when Showgirls (1995) appeared on cable last night in lurid HD I watched it all the way through. I realized it was only the second time I have watched this film (excepting the bits and pieces I would run across while channel-surfing). Showgirls was first released when I was in Los Angeles, if I recall at a decent venue, like the Chinese Theater: I was unable to persuade anybody to go see it with me.

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.



• Corruption - Good government and sound corporate management are not things that exist in Verhoeven films. His films are populated with cutthroat and immoral executives, weak mayors, sociopathic governors and degenerate police detectives. America is shown as a country in deep moral decline. Democratic norms have been replaced by corporate rule and transactional graft.

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.

Nomi as we first meet her.

• A Brief Synopsis:  Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkeley), a beautiful young woman with a mysterious past, hitchhikes into Las Vegas. She manages to get a roommate and a job at Cheetahs, a nude club, where she gets the attention of a casino entertainment manager (Kyle MacLachlan) and the star of the casino’s topless show (Gina Gershon). They pull strings to get her a place in the show’s chorus, which begins a story of intense backstage rivalry as Nomi begins her ascent to star status.

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.

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.

• The Narrative Synthesis. Here’s the part that makes this a truly weird, very telling Verhoeven film: Every other character loves Nomi Malone. Her roommate adores her, James the dancer is in love with her, and she manages to charm the entire staff of the Stardust Hotel and Casino. The star of the topless casino review she is in and the casino’s entertainment director compete for her affections.

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.

Nail polish is another major thematic detail; it serves
as a metaphorical battleground between Nomi and
Cristal (Gina Gershon). Weird but effective.

One of the most telling details I noticed in this screening is one that only a director could add: Nomi’s eating habits. Burgers and fries, burgers and fries, burgers and fries. When confronted with a menu at a respectable restaurant (respectable for Vegas: it’s still laminated) she confesses “I don’t know what all this is,” and admits to, in the past, have been content eating dog food. This is a huge character tell. Nomi is Verhoeven’s perfect American: uncultured, selfish, amoral and ignorant— but also self-possessed, confident, and recklessly aggressive.

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.”

Brush With Greatness: A Short Memoir

This true story happened in the early-to-mid-nineties, and that's important to know because the context explains a lot. Something else that you should know is I've loved bad movies almost all my life. One more thing to know is this was so important to my development that I'm astonished I haven't told this story already, but I just did a search through the archives and somehow, only now can it be told.

So, back in the nineties I used to keep a journal. It was mostly an emotional steam valve, not for anyone's consumption. But now and then I'd read a passage and think, this is good stuff! I can't publish it, of course, because it's very personal and it would ruin my life and the lives of those around me. But the idea nagged at me nonetheless. And there was a point where I realized that MS Word could export HTML without much trouble, and Apple provided we with a a little web publishing space for free. So I started publishing PARTS of my journal. I wasn't advertising it or anything. It was the web equivalent of an old couch on the sidewalk. If you happen to be in the neighborhood and you need a couch, take it away.

So, given that any post about people I knew was off-limits, I mostly published complaining about things. Maybe that would mean bad traffic or airline food to a normal man. I mostly weighed in on TV and movies.

Okay, so going all the way back to my first movie theater job, I had been stunned by TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, an early 3D effort by Cannon Pictures. It was awful. It starred Tony Anthony (an Italian with a much longer real name) but I noticed that it also starred, and was written by, a man named Gene Quintano. And throughout the ensuing decade, that name stuck with me and I watched for it, and every time he came up he was associated with a movie that I thought was terrible. (Most of them were also from Cannon Pictures, and almost everything they ever did was terrible.) But by the time I started this online journal, so-called because no one had coined "blog" yet, I was a kind of expert. A Quintanologist.

Gene's Acting Debut, COMIN' AT YA

And one day I did a whole entry about how much I hated all those movies. Having gotten it out of my system, I moved on to saying nice things about Twin Peaks or something.

Then, a week later, the weird part.

I got this unsolicited email from Gene Quintano.

My first thought was OMG GENE QUINTANO IS WRITING TO ME HE'S FAMOUS HE'S A WORKING SCREENWRITER THIS IS GREAT THIS IS GREAT and that faded as I read the email and realized that he was furious with me and I had made his kid cry because the kid didn't understand why anybody would hate his daddy.

And I wrote back, respectfully and explained that I was devastated that I had caused that trouble and had no idea that he would ever see it (also that he would care about my opinion but I kept that part to myself) and I'd do anything I could to make it right. He replied! If I could write an email to his kid and explain that I didn't hate Gene, that might help. So I did. I composed a short note in which I said that Gene Quintano himself was surely a wonderful guy and I just didn't care for the movies he was associated with.

That smoothed it over, kinda. Quintano wrote back a week later and pointed out that he was only the screenwriter and he didn't make the final decisions and his drafts were much better than the movies wound up being. I suggested he direct more. He did eventually helm 4 films, Including Honeymoon Academy and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon. You be the judge.

What's the takeaway from this? It seems like a really early example of the internet's power to magnify a grievance. I think Mr Q and I were both sucker-punched by this, which is why it became such a thing. I was a nobody pretending to be a real film critic and not realizing that I had the reach of one, as long as you were an artist Googling yourself. Eventually all "real" film critics lost their clout to this phenomenon.

Anyway, maybe I'll issue another apology to Gene Quintano every 20 years or so until one of us is dead. If it's any consolation he's made a LOT more money in this business than I have, and rightly so.

Oh, and don't get me started on Lorenzo Semple Jr.