National Post (National Edition)
Vindicated at long last
HOW PAUL VERHOEVEN WENT FROM TARGET OF SCORN TO LAUDED AUTEUR
It was early 1996, a few months after his new film Showgirls had arrived in theatres to a riot of exuberant scorn, and Paul Verhoeven was putting on a brave face.
His picture was a catastrophe: popularly loathed, critically lambasted, commercially dead on arrival. Its failure was already legend. “A barebutted bore,” quipped Janet Maslin in the New York Times. “Akin to being keelhauled through a cesspool, with sharks swimming alongside,” was the opinion of Variety. No fewer than seven Golden Raspberries were awarded to Verhoeven at the annual ceremony honouring the worst in Hollywood film, a record sweep. It seemed a universal decree: Showgirls was a dud.
How did it feel? That’s what the press wanted to know. What it was like to arm and detonate a box office bomb?
One afternoon Verhoeven was talking to a journalist, another in the never-ending procession, and the fellow asked about it, about this whole fiasco. How did Paul Verhoeven, director of this widely mocked and execrated movie, feel about the way it had been received? Verhoeven smiled. “Well,” he said sagely, “let’s wait 10 years.” He was certain history would vindicate Showgirls as a glorious American satire once inexplicably misunderstood. Give it time! Wait 10 years!
“It took 20,” Verhoeven laughs, two decades removed from the debacle and held now in rather loftier regard. The press feting him this morning are firmly on his side as he peddles his latest picture: a sort of Euro-arthouse bourgeois satire called Elle. Most of the journalists he’s obliged to speak with are of the now-prevailing opinion that Verhoeven is a cinematic god. The ultra-violent Hollywood blockbusters for which he was routinely savaged in the arts pages of yesteryear — Total Recall, Robocop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers — have long since been inducted to the canon. And Showgirls itself has received critical redemption, just as its director predicted; with the word “masterpiece” even being invoked in certain quarters.
Verhoeven was once pilloried. Now he’s a certified auteur star. “I understood why people were talking that way about Showgirls,” he says. “But I also got the feeling they were so distracted by the nudity that they didn’t look at the faces.”
What they missed — what the extravaganza of inanity on the surface of the film made audiences and critics unable to see — was the serious tirade against deception and greed it was mounting underneath. They missed what the film had to say about race, about misogyny, about power and class.
“The film was my feelings about what was happening in the United States, and still is,” he says. “I was trying to counter cliche, to open the film up. That was always the movie for me.” He laughs, and shrugs. “I don’t think anybody saw it that way. Perhaps now.”
Even those who embraced Showgirls, who adored it ironically as a pageant of uproarious camp, failed to see what Verhoeven was doing. In fact, there is one moment that’s always vexed the film’s cult-classic midnight-camp crowd: there they are whooping it up and delighting in the movie’s comic extravagance, when suddenly an appalling sexual assault stops the fun dead.
Molly, the wide-eyed friend and sidekick, is brutally raped by a celebrity she adores – and he gets away with it. How can anyone chuckle and titter through that?
Well, that’s the point, naturally. “This was really the moment, for me, when the reality of Vegas becomes clear,” Verhoeven says. “If you look at the whole movie, you see that there is almost nobody who is sympathetic. Male or female, they’re all bad. The only good person in the movie, the only person who is honest and has integrity, this happens to her. Everybody who is evil survives very well. Innocence gets punished. I thought that was the essence of Las Vegas — and perhaps to a certain degree the United States. In that moment we look directly into the beast’s mouth. This is really what happens. This is the mentality. The guy who does it gets away. If you read the newspapers in America the last couple of years, you see that’s true.”
That wouldn’t be the last time Verhoeven addressed the subject.
While this barbarity interrupts Showgirls at its climax, Elle, on the other hand, spares nothing from its opening scene. Right away we bear horrified witness to the brutal rape of a middle-aged woman in her upscale Paris home. There is a great deal of comedy in Elle, and Verhoeven always tends toward black humour — but nobody will feel inclined to have laugh there.
“It’s done in a horrible way. Because that’s what it is: it’s horrible. There’s no way to sweeten something like that,” he says. It can’t be anything but horrible. And one can’t shy away.
“In the United States a woman is sexually assaulted every minute; 1,800 every day. So I don’t understand the hesitation to visualize that. Nobody seems to have any problem showing the most horrible car accidents, and murders, and killings on the screen all the time — while this is happening around the corner! I always felt that there was some hypocritical thinking about the rape issue. If you look at the numbers, this is an amazing thing. This is happening all the time. All the time. I doubt even if it is improving. I don’t even think so.”
Elle and Showgirls are very different pictures, for obvious reasons. But what they share is the same ferocious intelligence, the same righteous anger, the same clear moral sense. Only this time around we’re all capable of discerning these qualities in the film straight away. So just what changed?
“I think it happened after Black Book,” Verhoeven speculates, referring to the critically acclaimed Dutch-language war film he made in 2005. “That was generally accepted, applauded.” He laughs and shrugs again. “I suppose the critics saw that and thought, ‘Oh, perhaps we have to go back and look at these other movies again.’”
Evidently they did. Showgirls is regarded as a dud no longer; Verhoeven himself is beloved. He’s relieved to be on the right side of history at last – even if it took two decades.