Bad Movie Night: Showgirls Revisited

Regarded as an apogee of misogynistic bad taste by some, admired as baroque, satirical camp by others, the GFT’s Bad Movie Night! is offering up Showgirls as worthy of reappraisal. While it has been revived as cult by drag queens and fanboys, and continues to be slammed as nudie exploitation by feminists and academics, director Paul Verhoeven’s controversy-baiting film is still denied the nuanced attention it deserves on either side of the critical fence.

In its rags-to-rags narrative of a former prostitute trying to make it as a Las Vegas dancer, Showgirls without doubt satirises the seedy reality of the American Dream – but that’s an easy target. More subversively, it rips into the sexism and lesbophobia that is very deeply built into the country’s cinema. Like all of Verhoeven’s films, Showgirls refers avidly to landmark Hollywood movies for this purpose. Protagonist Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley)’s planned toppling of her nemesis Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon) as lead dancer at the Stardust Casino is based on All About Eve. In the latter, Anne Baxter schemes against Bette Davis, stabbing her in the back and stealing her stage star crown. As is traditional in filmic schtick, the very palpable erotic tension between the two women is undercut by their mutual hatred. In Showgirls, this implicit sexual desire between two female rivals is literalised in scenes of seduction between Nomi and Cristal, who flirt with outrageous exaggeration – “I like nice tits... how about you?”

For the majority of the film, the pair are bitter enemies. Cristal taunts Nomi, calling her cheap and tricking her into a modelling job that turns out to involve sleeping with the Stardust’s rich business clients. Usually in such cinematic circumstances a male hero character would perform a de rigueur rescue operation. In Showgirls, not so. A blond prostitute being shunned and humiliated by a snobby brunette is almost certainly a reference to Stagecoach, a staple of the all-American film canon. At the 1939 film’s denouement, the two females, competitors for the entirety of the titular carriage’s journey, bond and share a briefly affectionate moment. And then good guy John Wayne strides in and scoops up the damaged woman, whisking her to his ranch where he’ll ‘liberate’ her from her shameful past by marrying her.

In Showgirls, by contrast, all the guys are differing shades of bad. Zack (Kyle MacLachlan), the Stardust’s entertainment director, is initially set up as Nomi’s white knight but turns out to be an evil woman-hater. He abets and then condones the rape of Nomi’s best friend Molly (Gina Ravera), a black female who lives in a trailer park, by his buddy Andrew Carver (William Shockley), a white male millionaire rock star. This quite explicitly parodies and then eschews a patriarchal plot line endemic to American movies. In the end, Nomi and Cristal reconcile with a sensual kiss, again making explicit a taboo connection, as they discuss with world-weary insight the roles to which they’re confined. Those roles – whore, saint, victim – are stereotypes on which the Hollywood aesthetic is founded. Showgirls pastiches them, demonstrating through imitation and then distortion how females are conventionally kept apart and pitted against each other, forbidden emotional or romantic contact.

Reactions to the film also ensure Verhoeven’s parody spills over into film culture as a whole. Marketeers tried to sell it by telling viewers in a teaser trailer to “Fantasize, Surrender, Indulge.” Journalists duly came out of a movie featuring a brutal sexual assault complaining that it wasn’t ‘sexy’ enough, demonstrating that dodgy gender politics in the industry isn’t confined to the screen alone. Endlessly bashed for her wild-eyed affectation, Elizabeth Berkeley as Nomi was subject to chauvinist ridicule by the same critics. Whether deliberate on her part or not, Berkeley’s performance is, in fact, a masterclass in Brechtian technique. Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers all contain such exaggerated, cartoon characters, commensurate with his sarcastic riff on the bubblegum psychosis of American social and cinematic values.

Showgirls is a brilliantly seditious satire of those false beliefs. Yes, it’s also misogynistic in that it replicates the degrading inequality traded in by one of the world’s most dominant propagators of the seventh art. But it does so in order to twist and undermine the ideological bias contained within that cinema. For that reason, it needs to move beyond ironic appreciation and take its rightful place as a viscerally important film in the post-classical Hollywood landscape.