Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Joe Eszterhas.
At what point does sleaze go from trashy to art? Paul Verhoeven wants to find out in Showgirls, taking g-strings off with his teeth as he tells an All-American story about ambition and exploitation in the greasy, greasy, world of Las Vegas dancers.
There’s a lot of nudity and no naked honesty in this smutty tale of grimy pimps, flashy pimps, friends, foes, and the cutthroat moves that turn one into the other. With a mantra of “sell your body!” Verhoeven lets subject matter drive his direction and the result is provocative, lurid, and almost insightful on its own terms. A crass interpretive dance that’s as transparently artificial as the Las Vegas dinner shows it features.
Elizabeth Berkley is Nomi, who’s been drifting steadily west her entire life, coming from “different places” back east. She’s now in Vegas, looking to make her way as a dancer, but her first job offer is to do some hooking, arriving some 10 minutes after she first gets out of the car. In Showgirls, her greaseball wannabe-john is like a greeter at Wall-Mart, the first person you meet and who lets you know how things work around here. He, Verhoeven, Eszterhas, and every other person in this version of Vegas wants to see her naked and for her to submit.
It’s not long before Nomi’s working at a strip joint to make ends meet, but aided by a local named Molly (Gina Ravera), Nomi catches the eye of Cristal (Gina Gershon), a true Vegas showgirl and star. It marks the beginning of a sexually-charged rivalry/mentorship that sees Nomi on a meteoric rise that’s beset with predators of every stripe.
Watching Showgirls is about the dirtiest thing you can do while keeping your clothes on. Maybe because no one else does. Verhoeven shovels tits and ass onto the screen and shies away from close-ups of anything above the chest. Eszterhas’s script also lives below the belt, and it’s from here it draws its power. It’s neither big- nor small-dick energy, but it’s certainly dick-led energy.
It goes hard at the exploitation faced by women (not just dancers) but is itself exploitative. For all its ideas of grimy exposé, it’s also completely untethered from reality, unfolding like a glitter-sweat fantasy with its dance performances the hallucinogen. Verhoeven’s direction isn’t just a dirty dream, it’s something close to a sexually-charged manic episode. It’s a world-class example of a certain type of horny man writing and directing women.
Showgirls isn’t of our world, but thankfully it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s an overblown caricature, featuring ridiculous line readings and whacked-out performances. Berkley doesn’t deliver any sort of believable performance with her line readings and interplay, but she can make her body do anything. The animalistic fury she injects in Nomi’s dance routines are a sight to behold, but the ferality extends to everything else she does, too, whether it’s called for or not. It’s funny when it shouldn’t be, like when a poolside romp looks like a seizure.
Kyle MacLachlan stars as Machivelian producer Zack, and he doesn’t have the evil in him that someone like Zack requires. We’re talking about someone who has to say to Nomi with a straight face: “Must be weird to not have anybody’s cum on you.” McLachlan, with all his virtues, is not a bad man. Only Gina Gershon as Cristal Connors understands the assignment and delivers, her diva appearing to Nomi like some Faustian dealmaker offering her what she desires, but at a terrible cost.
Unlike MacLachlan, writer Joe Eszterhas is a bad man. His combative writing style is tailor-made for the lionesses’ den of the showgirls’ dressing room, and his dialogue features more howlers than hits (see above). His reductive style is essential to Verhoeven’s simplified fantasy, though, which would be impossible with a denser, intricate and insightful script. I’m sure this sounds like a backhanded compliment, but a better script would have made for a worse Verhoeven’s Showgirls. There is no intellectual honesty here, only artful pretense, and save for one unfortunate sidestep into cruelty, it never loses that pretense.
Verhoeven had a sizable budget for Showgirls and he leaves it all up on the screen. With great production value, many scenes are eye-popping with the energy behind them irresistible. It’s a good-looking film even if you remove every person on screen. You don’t have to listen to what Showgirls has to say, and if you do, I wouldn’t pay it too much mind. Only disappointment that way. Instead, you lean back, watch the histrionics, enjoy the laughs that it offers, if unwittingly, and appreciate grand-scale filmmaking not afraid of big swings.
Mikkel Frederiksen 