MB: I watched this for the first time in March and I’ve seen it a bunch of times since then because I’ve been showing it to other people.
MS: You’ve been showing your girls.
MB: Yes, exactly. Anyway, one thing that people find really stands out to them is what has been described to me as a “jarring tonal shift” with the scene where Molly is raped at the party. It’s a devastating scene, but at this point in the movie, despite the shift in tone, if you want to call it that, it feels logical for the narrative.
AS: I guess what’s upsetting is that it’s Molly, who has kind of been the voice of reason and Nomi’s moral compass.
MB: Yeah, she’s the only character who is trying to do the right thing, in a general sense.
MS: Which makes what happens to her very nihilistic. Like here’s the one good, normal, integrity-having person in the film, and here’s what showbiz does to them. It’s hard to watch, as it should be.
AS: And as much as, later, it is great to see Nomi kick Andrew Carver (William Shockley) in the face, we obviously know that that isn’t full retribution. Because the rape scene is represented in such a truly upsetting way, we as an audience understand that what Nomi has the capacity to do here is obviously not enough.
MS: I like that Nomi’s “revenge” is unsatisfying. Retributive violence can never achieve any sort of justice. If anything, I feel like Nomi being like “I’ll fuck him up and I’ll ride off into the sunset” just belies the fact that she has a very untethered passion-driven experience of the world.
MB: It’s true that the whole time Verhoeven is just kind of, pardon the pun, dancing around this very dark underbelly of Vegas. He shows it, but in an almost comical way where Robert Davi says things like “You want to last at the club? You’re gonna have to give me a blow job.” Then there’s the boat show, where Nomi is expected to have sex with one of the Hotel’s clients, but she gets out of it. By the time you get to the third act, it does just kind of seem like, of course, Verhoeven was going to shove this in your face.
MS: That anyone would ask Verhoeven for subtlety is wild to me. Which is thematically appropriate, considering this is a film about Vegas showgirls. He’s matching the campy, predatory energy of the subject matter. Okay, I need to say a couple of things about Kyle MacLachlan, because he’s just so vacant in this film…like he has no soul. Which maybe is appropriate for a detached corporate executive who gets his rocks off by using people. Also, an inspired choice to style him like a ’90s lesbian.
MB: He is in the film’s crucial scene, which is the pool sex scene. I love that scene so much. It always makes me think of Seinfeld when Jerry is dating a gymnast, and they have sex and he’s disappointed that it’s so conventional. Elaine asks him, “Well, what did you expect?” And he says, “I thought that I would be the apparatus.”
AS: Madison, I love this.
MB: I feel like this scene just encapsulates what Jerry Seinfeld was talking about perfectly. Like, physically, MacLachlan is the apparatus, but also, you know, that’s how she’s gonna get her new job.
MS: He’s just a balance beam.
MB: But yes, I also find myself fixating on the fact that MacLachlan is in this movie. It’s just hilarious that one of the big plot points in Showgirls is that there’s this job of the top star of the show. And that job comes with a boyfriend, and it is Kyle MacLachlan with Spider-Man 3 supervillain bangs.
MS: His voice is what gets me. There’s no inflection in anything he’s saying. It’s all extremely flat. I can’t describe it. It’s in an enigmatic performance. What’s the name of the lady who works at the Cheetah Club?
MB: Henrietta.
MS: She’s great.
MS: This film should have had two more hours of Nomi maiming everyone ahead of her until she runs Vegas.
AS: Next she kills Kyle MacLachlan.
MS: She would then dye her hair and get bangs and be like “I’m the boyfriend now.”
MB: What would happen if Showgirls came out, as is, today? I think people would be a little more eager to embrace its “anti-America” feel.
MS: Sure, but I don’t know if you could make a movie like Showgirls today.
MB: Oh, definitely not.
MS: I’m trying to pull up my mental deck of directors who do not care about discourse and just do what they want regardless. Verhoeven is one of the few.
AS: Beyond the “who would dare?” of it all — movies like this, budgeted like this, with this kind of material, they don’t get made. No one would give someone Showgirls money to make Showgirls now. I can’t believe they did in 1995.
MS: Why was this such a blank cheque? What was he riding high off of?
MB: Basic Instinct. Which is why we also have Eszterhas. The story of the Showgirls script is that he wrote the idea for it on a napkin and sold that napkin for two million dollars, or something silly like that.
AS: Starship Troopers had already gone into pre-production when Showgirls came out. So they couldn’t take that away. But after that, Verhoeven didn’t really work in Hollywood. Other than Hollow Man.
MS: Hollow Man isn’t the train wreck I was led to believe. But it suffers from being a safe Paul Verhoeven movie.
AS: All the safe stuff in Hollow Man feels like studio intrusion. The safeness doesn’t feel like Verhoeven trying to mind his Ps and Qs.
MS: I bet a lot of people said Showgirls was misogynistic when it first came out.
MB: That’s what I was thinking when I asked this question of “what if Showgirls came out today?” I’m reminded of Under the Silver Lake. I’m not saying that I know what David Robert Mitchell was doing, but people were so quick to write that film off for this “dated male-gaze-iness” instead of considering that there could be intention there or provocative decisions might be being made in service of a greater point. People are still not receptive to that idea.
MS: It’s frustrating when people take things at face value and equate what happens in a film with a director’s beliefs. And I mean look: Paul Verhoeven is no saint, but this film didn’t feel misogynistic to me.
MB: I agree. Maybe this is me taking it beyond what Verhoeven and [laughs] definitely Joe Eszterhas intended, but I do think there’s a strong feminist reading to be made with this movie.
MS: It’s an untangling issue: is the film exploiting women or is it a film about the exploitation of women? It’s very possible that that line is fuzzy and switches allegiances at times. But I think there’s a distinction. And I think you can tell when you watch the film in context.
AS: Characters as confident as Nomi and Cristal don’t feel like the result of actresses who didn’t feel comfortable “going there.” They are so much in charge of what the film is.
MB: To say Berkley was “taken advantage of” takes away from the credit she deserves. She deserves respect for taking giant risks that, in the end, derailed her career.
MS: What happened to her career is underserved for a couple of reasons. The first being that a “poor performance” can ruin an actress’s career whereas, unjustly, the same is not true for directors or even actors. It’s also unfair because this performance slaps.
MB: I’ve read a couple of things where Verhoeven has defended Berkeley’s performance. Basically saying: “I directed her to act that way and it was me telling her to do this seemingly ridiculous stuff in service of the film.” It’s like Verhoeven and Berkeley were going for this Nicolas Cage-type thing together, where they were experimenting with acting and asking their audience to go beyond this popular notion that good acting must be naturalistic.
MS: Great invocation of Cage. That’s an actor who has made a career off performances that are on the same register as Berkley in Showgirls. And where it ruined her career, he has been able to monetize it. Cage has his whole Nouveau Shamanic philosophy. And meanwhile, people dismiss Berkley’s performance as an unintentional, sloppy accident.
MB: We’re all Nicolas Cage fans here. But it’s interesting how he’ll be in a movie that is bad, and the movie will get reevaluated completely based on this crazy performance he delivered and these cool risks he took. And you watch these movies for Cage. This is the opposite. Anna made this point earlier, but while people have started to reclaim Showgirls, they are reluctant to bring Berkley’s performance along with that re-appraisal.
AS: By Verhoeven’s own admission: she is an actor, who did the job of acting, according to how she was directed. She did a good job. She was ridiculous in a ridiculous movie.
MB: Last night, while watching the movie, I was trying to put myself in the headspace of one of these people who are not enamored with Berkley’s performance. And something that’s probably off-putting to many about Nomi is that she really just gleefully despises men. From that first scene at the club when she starts that fight, it cuts to her face and she’s just so happy. And what’s striking about when she goes to Andrew Carver’s hotel room at the end of the movie, the way she is interacting with him and conversing with him before she pulls out her switchblade, is the exact same way she interacts with every other man in the film, regardless of how much contempt she has for them. It’s like this consistent performance of femininity that she will employ for any man, no matter the goal, no matter how terrible they are.
MS: It’s almost like people wanted her to be more damaged. Like, she’s this hitchhiking sex worker with a dark past, she should be defeated and tortured. And the fact that she is not only unapologetic but joyfully unapologetic probably clashed with a lot of people’s expectations about what that kind of character is supposed to look like.
AS: They wanted her to be a little baby deer and not a bucking horse.
MB: Can we talk about the fact that the dance instructor’s name is just “Gay”?
AS: I love the detail where she’s like, “You have to get yourself another job and a man. I got mine. He’s a dentist. I chipped a tooth on a Quaalude.” This time around, I think that’s my favorite line in the movie.
MB: That Quaalude line is incredible because it’s like: I’ve been where you’ve been, I’m going to give you guidance, I know what you’re supposed to do. My path to success was that I chipped my tooth on a Quaalude.
MS: Things like a character being named “Gay” is why I’m baffled that anyone would expect this film to be straight-on and serious. It’s dark, but if you look at the text, it’s got a tongue, if not several, in its cheek.
MB: I keep coming back to Starship Troopers, and when it came out in 1997, two years after Showgirls, and people were like, “Oh my god, the uniforms of the military officers in this movie look exactly like Nazi uniforms. What was Verhoeven thinking?” And it’s like… yeah.
MS: Gosh, I wonder why?
AS: It’s just like people are so close to getting it, and they just need the final push to realize maybe that was intended.
MS: I should clarify: we don’t mean to say, “Oh, look at all these idiots who didn’t read the text of Showgirls close enough.” The whole point of this column is to implore people to approach things, even if you’re approaching it for the second time, with an open heart. Let a film speak for itself and listen.
MB: Yeah, I mean who’s to say what I would have thought of Showgirls if I’d seen it when it came out. I think it’s great that people are going back to it now and revisiting it, but I kind of wish first-time viewers weren’t going into it with the assumption that it’s “so bad it’s good.”
AS: Don’t go into a movie evaluating it on what other people have said about it. Evaluate it on its own terms.
MS: It’s hard to come to something without the baggage of everything you’ve heard beforehand. But as much as you can: give it a shot.
AS: Just give it a shot.
MS: Which is really the main lesson of Showgirls: shoot your shot…in whatever way you want.
Related Topics: Double Take, Paul Verhoeven, showgirls
