As I watched this endlessly entertaining film with a sold out audience, I began to see it in a different light, maybe as author Adam Nayman has presupposed in his terrific book, It Doesn't Suck: Showgirls, the film is actually a masterpiece.
There are several reasons I have begun to embrace this perspective on the film, which has become a cult classic 20 years after it was first released to brutal reviews and box office.
First of all, the film's director had been working towards the bombast and absurdity of Showgirls for years. Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch transplant here in the U.S. had been skewering American hubris, consumerism and coarseness effectively since 1987's Robocop.
He managed to top that film with one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's best, Total Recall, and then made the best erotic thriller of the '90s, Basic Instinct.
These movies have several elements in common. They are all gleefully over-the-top, revel in the vulgar and tread the line between earnestness and self parody with relative ease. My point is Verhoeven was too smart to make a purely horrible film. The excesses of Showgirls very well may be intentional.
And it is a well made film from many standpoints. The camerawork is often sublime, constantly in motion and hedonistic to the extreme. The Elizabeth Berkley lead performance is so crazy, so tonally jarring that it seems to be something out of a Russ Meyer or David Lynch film. I think Verhoeven chose to not rein her in intentionally, just to heighten an already extreme screenplay.
Her nemesis in the film, Gina Gershon, seems to be much more knowing about what kind of movie she is in. She actually gives a credible, camp classic performance, even though she has to utter dialogue like: "How do you like having nice tits?"
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| Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls |
Verhoeven's next major film, Starship Troopers, has earned praise and fans for doing many of the same things Showgirls does. It just appears that more audiences were in on the joke with that subversive B-movie, where perhaps Showgirls was hurt by the hype around it when was first released.
The film's biggest liabilities (besides being the most aggressively unsexy film to feature copious nudity and copulation ever) are its dialogue and narrative inconsistency, but I am sort of obsessed with both.
I remember I once played a drinking game where anytime someone in this movie says something no human being would ever say (like "Everybody got AIDS n' shit") you had to take a swig. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas creates a truly stunning collection of some of the dumbest, most judgmental, shallow and obnoxious characters ever committed to film. And yet they are endlessly watchable. There is not a single boring moment in this film. How often can you say that about a movie?
The plot holes are just as fascinating. Berkley's character, Nomi Malone, veers wildly from naive to wise, and at one point transforms into a Kill Bill style assassin-vixen. There are spans in this film where, in 30 seconds, so many wild things happen that you can barely digest them all. And yet at one point the movie jumps six weeks showing Berkley's character and her obligatory new black best friend living in domestic bliss after meeting by chance on the Las Vegas strip.
Last night a friend made a suggestion that I desperately want to steal -- there should be a film or a play based on the those six weeks. It should be told from the perspective of the black best friend character. She would write in her diary, venting about how whenever she ask Nomi where she's from she flails around and screams "Different places!"
Showgirls the Musical already proved this material is fertile ground for exploitation and the movie itself deserves a 30 for 30-style expose. In the meantime, I will keep on enjoying a wildly audacious film, that is more consciously funny than some people realize, and that I keep loving more and more, every time I see it.
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