Nayman Adam - It doesnt suck : Showgirls

it doesnt

suck.

showgirls

adam

nayman

ecwpress

the pop classic series

#1 It Doesnt Suck.
Showgirls

#2 Raise Some Shell.
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MASTERPIECE.

In August 2012 , I went out for drinks in Toronto with Mia Hansen-Lve, a talented young French director whom Id recently profiled for the Globe and Mail. I liked her movies, but I was most eager to meet her as a fellow film critic. Before becoming a director, Mia had written reviews for the legendary French publication Cahiers du Cinma. This change in vocation placed her in a long national tradition of film critics turned filmmakers that stretched back to Jean-Luc Godard, Franois Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer in the 1950 s, and more recently included her husband, the gifted writer-director Olivier Assayas.

I also knew that Mia was a fan of the films of Stanley Kubrick and had just cited Eyes Wide Shut ( 1999 ) on her ballot for the British film journal Sight & Sounds decennial poll of the greatest movies ever made. Because I had recently finished teaching an adult-education course on Kubricks oeuvre, Eyes Wide Shut was on my mind even more than usual, and I thought that itd be fun to talk about it with somebody who liked it as much as I did. (Actually, she liked it more than I did: the Kubrick movie Id picked for my own Sight & Sound ballot was 2001: A Space Odyssey [ 1968 ], a more conservative choice.)

We did end up talking about movies and comparing notes on our favorites. Eventually, the conversation settled on a film that we both admired very much: an epically scaled Hollywood production from the 1990 s with fluid camerawork and a surreally rendered all-American location; an epic erotic comedy populated by an ensemble of leering, lecherous men and nubile naked women; a famous flop that generated plenty of idle gossip and dismissive giggles en route to being rediscovered as a modern classic. But that movie was not Eyes Wide Shut. Instead, I discovered that Mia was a great and devoted fan of Paul Verhoevens Showgirls ( 1995 ).

Imagine my delight at meeting a fellow traveler! Mia also told me that shed included a scene about Showgirls in the screenplay for her next movie, Eden:

Arnauds apartment. Int. Night

Scenes on a TV screen from the Paul Verhoeven movie Showgirls. Slumped on a couch or in an armchair: J-C, Guillaume and Anne-Claire, Cyril, Paul, Arnaud, and MIDORI, his new girlfriend. End credits. Arnaud gets up, finds the remote, and shuts off the DVD player.

ARNAUD

Showgirls. Masterpiece.

ANNE-CLAIRE

Junk!

CYRIL

Id even say: trash.

ANNE-CLAIRE

Seriously the actress could be nominated for the worst actress of all time.

GUILLAUME

She got several Razzies.

MIDORI

What are Razzies?

GUILLAUME

Prizes for worst actress of the year. Oscars, but negative.

ARNAUD

I guess youre referring to her at times over-the-top performance.

GUILLAUME

Thats putting it mildly.

ARNAUD

But its on purpose! Verhoeven directs her like that to emphasize his take on things. He accentuates the monstrosity. Hes targeting the vulgarity of the United States. This is the third time Ive shown it to you and you still dont understand. Its pathetic!

J-C

Which is why I suggest we move on.

ANNE-CLAIRE

You take advantage of us each time. Were totally exhausted. You could show us any crap you want.

ARNAUD

But its not crap. Its the masterpiece of the 90s.

PAUL

Id take the middle road: its not the piece of junk critics said it was when it came out. Its still Verhoeven, but not one of his better ones.

CYRIL

Pfff. The movie is a piece of shit. Youre crazy.

(He stands up and goes for his cigarettes.)

In his essay Beaver Las Vegas, critic I.Q. Hunter writes that Paul Verhoevens lap-dance musical Showgirls is that rare object in cultural life: a film universally derided as bad. No one seems to like it. At a time of alleged cultural relativism and collapsing standards of aesthetic judgment, Showgirls has emerged as a welcome gold standard of poor taste and world-class incompetence. Hunter was writing in 2000 , when most of the people who talked about Showgirls probably sounded like Cyril. Nearly years later, there are more and more people who would side with Arnaud.

This swing makes Showgirls an even rarer bird than Hunter suggests. It is a film that, previously universally derided as bad, is now widely suspected of being good. (It even received a single, lonely vote on that aforementioned Sight & Sound poll, from Greek director David Panos, who slotted it alongside Andrei Tarkovskys Mirror [ 1975 ] and Orson Welless Touch of Evil [ 1958 ].) Film canons are built and guarded as sturdily as fortresses, but intruders sometimes slip through the back door. Once a ratified anti-classic to rank with the likes of Plan9from Outer Space ( 1959 ) or Valley of the Dolls ( 1967 ) on lists of the worst movies ever made, Showgirls has now become the beneficiary of shifting critical polarities, revered both at the low end of pop culture as a hardy cult favorite, and at the high end by academics as a critical fetish object. Its diverse defenders include feminist theorists, drag queens, old-school auteurists, and octogenarian superstars of the French New Wave, and theres nary an apologist among them because, as Ryan ONeal and Ali MacGraw reminded us in Love Story, love means never having to say youre sorry.

The attitudes toward Showgirls may have changed, but the movie has not. It has not been re-edited into a Directors Cut like Blade Runner ( 1982 ) or Apocalypse Now ( 1979 ), to cite two examples of major (and majorly flawed) movies that have over the years required rescuing from their imperfect original incarnations. It has not been re-released on DVD with a bevy of additional scenes lifted from the cutting-room floor, which might have implicated studio tampering or an overzealous editor as the cause of the films derided original version. It has been edited for television and home video, but only to trim the naughty bits: the films stately parade of both scantily and entirely unclad young women had finally earned Verhoeven the verboten NC- rating hed managed to avoid for his previous boundary-pushing hits RoboCop ( 1987 ) and Basic Instinct ( 1992 ).

Showgirls has the same running time now that it did when it premiered on September , 1995 : it is minutes long (including credits), which makes it shorter than an average Best Picture winner from the 1990 s and longer than any of its fellow Razzie Award winners for Worst Picture except for The Postman ( 1997 ) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ( 2009 ). It is still organized as a guided tour of pre-millennial Las Vegas in the company of burger-scarfing exotic dancers, tyrannical choreographers, callow rock stars, and coke-snorting hotel executives. It still features a trick brassiere, several runaway chimpanzees, and a scene about the professional ethics of applying ice cubes to a dancers nipples. And it still begins and ends with a young woman hitching a ride by the side of a crowded superhighway.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

When we first see Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) in Showgirls, shes thumbing a lift to Las Vegas. In the last scene of the movie, shes getting the hell out of town. The two scenes are mirror images of one another, and Showgirls as a whole is filled with mirrors. There are the deluxe models that dominate the lavish suites at the chic Stardust Hotel, providing a panoply of reflected perspectives on Nomi and her idol/mentor/rival Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon) as they stalk each other through their backstage power play cum seduction. There are the more functional row mirrors, adorned with tacked-up personal items and Polaroids of loved ones, that the secondary performers in the Stardusts various soft-core musical spectaculars use to apply make-up before and in between production numbers. There are the smaller, dirtier, dingier versions of the same at the more down-market flesh fair the Cheetah Club, these mirrors topped by a proprietary neon sign reading Als Girls so that his employees can quite literally reflect on their job status as they prepare to shake their moneymakers at businessmen and tourists.