SHOWGIRLS EXPOSED
Some are now arguing 1995 box office flop was a ‘stealth masterpiece’
The Los Angeles Times said the movie’s main virtue was “to make extended nudity exquisitely boring.” USA Today called it “an outlandish exercise in excess.” The San Francisco Examiner indignantly labelled it “a calamity — a vulgar, overinflated excuse to look at women’s breasts and shaved pudendum.”
And then there was the verdict of Roger Ebert, who saw the film as a product of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s “masturbatory fantasies.” But did this indictment go far enough? Twenty-five years after the release of Showgirls, one still has the sense that Ebert was letting the movie’s Dutch-born director Paul Verhoeven off the hook too easily.
The most reviled big-studio film in recent Hollywood history is now getting renewed attention, thanks to the arrival of two new documentaries. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of its weird saga has to do with the demonic forces driving the masterful filmmaker responsible for this piece of drooling voyeurism, as well as other calculatedly lurid movies.
Verhoeven, who has openly admitted that he “loves photographing naked women,” is the director who persuaded Sharon Stone to dispense with her underwear and spread her legs for a notorious scene in Basic Instinct.
He has defended onscreen violence for its entertainment value. Hence the justification for Total Recall in which Verhoeven gleefully depicted a human body reduced to confetti by bullets.
And then there is Showgirls with its acres of female flesh and a gratuitously ugly gang-rape scene.
Unlike Verhoeven’s other Hollywood output, Showgirls was a box office bomb at the time of its 1995 launching. Yet, this calculatedly sleazy chronicle of the rise and fall of a Vegas showgirl has developed a bizarre afterlife — one seemingly impervious to the #Metoo movement.
When it went into home entertainment release, sales quickly reached the $100-million mark. An elegant VIP Limited Edition boxed set contained such bonus items as a pair of shot glasses, a lapdance tutorial, a deck of Showgirls playing cards, and a game called Pin The Pasties On The Showgirls.
Now we’re being told that Showgirls is a misunderstood masterpiece — well, sort of.
Filmmaker Jeffrey Mchale has lately been trudging the interview circuits on behalf of his new 25th anniversary documentary, You Don’t Nomi — scoring a jump over rival producer Jeffrey Schwarz’s Goddess: The Fall and Rise of Showgirls, which is still awaiting release. Mchale is telling the world that his effort, which is now streaming in Canada, exonerates an unjustly reviled movie: the implication, made repeatedly in interviews, is that although Showgirls may well be a piece of crap, that very fact that it continues to have a life turns it into a kind of “stealth masterpiece.”
The “Nomi” of Mchale’s film refers to the purported heroine of Showgirls. She’s Nomi Malone, a young wannabe dancer who lap-dances and pole-nuzzles her ruthless way to a stardom of sorts at the Stardust Casino.
Advance reviews of Mchale’s documentary have ranged from amused tolerance to exasperation. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers is incredulous that the creative minds behind Showgirls now attempt to take the high ground and contend that is really about “moral values and spiritual choices.” Such a defence, he snorts, amounts to “pretentious gibberish.”
However, Travers does see Showgirls as an essential piece in the puzzle surrounding Verhoeven, a brilliant visual stylist whose mystique has always been fuelled by “sex, violence, misogyny, homophobia and hard bodies unlined by thought ...” Putting it more bluntly, Rolling Stone’s veteran critic sees him as “an auteur with the eye of an artist and the instincts of a pornographer.”
Showgirls almost destroyed the career of Elizabeth Berkley, who took on the role of Nomi and spent most of her work days clad only in a G string. And when controversy erupted over the film, she felt she and fellow actress Gina Gershon had been left to twist in the wind.
At the time of the movie’s 1995 release, MGM imposed limits on media interviews. But Postmedia managed to talk to veteran actor Alan Rachins who revealed he had tried to persuade Verhoeven to tone down the scene in which he, playing a casino producer, hands Nomi a bucket of ice cubes and orders her to make her nipples more erect. Verhoeven eventually overruled the actor, arguing that he wanted to deliver a “disgusting scene from hell.”
Over the years, Verhoeven was unmoved when reporters took him to task for going too far on screen. He followed Showgirls with Starship Troopers, a cinematic bloodbath that he defended on the grounds that he had a “respect” for showing reality — so “soft-toning it and making it cute is not the best way.”
Verhoeven was 59 when he made Starship Troopers and still incorrigible. He was happy to tell reporters that for a shower scene requiring his young cast members to be totally nude, he countered their objections by stripping to the buff himself to get them in the mood.
But there have also been repeated glimpses of a filmmaker driven by his own demons: the adult Verhoeven was haunted by childhood memories of atrocities carried out before his very eyes in German-occupied Holland. You sensed an unspoken plea: given his personal history, was it fair to accuse him of excess in his films?
So does that let Showgirls off the hook? Not according to Travers in Rolling Stone. But he does shrewdly see it as an essential piece in the puzzle surrounding director Verhoeven, that brilliant visual stylist.
In chronicling human misbehaviour at its most unspeakable, Verhoeven has even evoked Plato in his defence: “Plato suggested there is no universal moral code inside us that leads us to being good and just. We behave because we don’t want to go to jail.”
But, having now reached his 80s, he expresses a less lofty sentiment. “I’m a child — I think it’s funny to provoke.”