I never thought in a million years I’d be defending Showgirls (1995). Although a fan of Verhoeven, I absolutely loathed his collaboration with Joe Eszterhas and couldn’t stand how Basic Instinct kept being passed off as this sophisticated erotic film noir when getting down to it, it was nothing more than a cheap, tawdry sex fantasy. So, when this second collaboration of theirs came out to instant scorn, I thought, “Finally. Hollywood has woken up to what a hack and creep Eszterhas is,” and passed on the movie.
Years later, when I finally decided to watch Showgirls out of intellectual curiosity, I went into it completely ready to tear it apart. Instead, I found a movie that was both entertaining and very nice to look at (the production values and cinematography are surprisingly good for such a trashy movie). Not only that, there were so many interesting things going on in Showgirls that I couldn’t join the chorus of haters who insisted that it was the Manos: Hands of Fate of soft core. If anything, I wanted to pull for the movie. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I want to pull for it, if only for the following reasons:
It Never Pretended to Be Anything But a Guilty Pleasure
I’ve seen quite a few trashy soft core and exploitation movies, including stuff by Zalman King and Russell Meyers. Make no mistake, movies like these pander to the lowest common denominator and would never in a million years ever be in the same league as The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Gone with the Wind. But does this automatically mean that they’re bad films, in the sense that they’re Valley of the Dolls-level of bad?
No, not necessarily. Some of them can be quite bad, but others can be both competently shot and entertaining. Movies like this are what you file under the category of, “Good for what they are”–or, to use a more succinct term, a guilty pleasure. They’re lowbrow films meant to be enjoyed for being lowbrow.
Showgirls is a classic guilty pleasure film. It’s a film that’s trash, knows it’s trash and never pretends to be anything but trash yet is entertaining all the same and has some great cinematography and production values. I can totally understand people flipping the movie off as campy and cheesy, but the ridiculous amounts of hatred that keep being piled on this film just smacks of snobs finding an easy target through which they can show off how cultured they are.
Showgirls was an Epic Troll
If you know anything about Verhoeven, you know that he’s always been a prankster. Throughout most of his career, he’s always done this thing of pretending to shoot one type of movie, while really shooting a different type of movie filled with satire, subtext and scathing social commentary. For example, Robocop on the surface played like this juvenile 12 year old’s fantasy of a superhero cop cyborg but in reality was a gritty, violent movie attacking corporate America. Total Recall looked like a brainless live action Heavy Metal movie with three-boobed hookers, but the movie explored the question of self and identity. Starship Troopers seemed to be pro-military but was making fun of militarism and jingoism.
With Showgirls, Verhoeven pulled his biggest prank yet. To understand how, we have to deconstruct the movie. On a basic level, Showgirls is about an ex-prostitute named Nomi Malone who travels to Las Vegas and becomes a stripper. She then gets toyed with by Cristal Connors, the headliner of a “classy” Las Vegas topless show, who helps her get a gig there. One night after a performance, Nomi sees a backup dancer on Cristal’s show purposely trip another dancer. After she has a particularly nasty exchange with Cristal, Nomi does the same to her and as understudy, takes over her spot as major headliner at her show.
So, what do we have here? A simple story of a cutthroat bitch who screws over another cutthroat bitch to become Las Vegas’s biggest star on the showgirls circuit. All the while, there is sex and nudity galore. In a nutshell, Showgirls is basically a tits and ass soft core version of All About Eve.
Ah, but you know what? There’s an interesting running thread throughout the film that involves not just the women of Las Vegas (like Cristal) but its men. There’s the trucker who picked Nomi up on the highway and left her high and dry. There’s the creep at the casino who propositions Nomi, then sneers at her when she turns him down, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to sell it.” There’s Nomi’s ex-boss, who expects all his strippers to give him blow jobs if they want to keep working at his strip club. There’s the pathetic black guy, who–using his dance troupe to sleep with women–gets more than he bargains for and winds up knocking one of them up.
There’s the incident in which Nomi and another showgirl are set up for a sleazy gig by a handler who expects them to have sex with him and his client. There is Molly–the sweetest, innocent and most morally upstanding character in the movie–getting brutally raped and beaten by a famous male celebrity. And lastly, there’s Cristal’s boyfriend, Zack, who blackmails Nomi into keeping silent about the rape.
Taking all of these incidents together, what we have in Showgirls is a scathing expose of the sex and showgirl industry in Las Vegas, in which all the men who run it are disgusting, opportunistic sleazebags. What we have, in other words, is Verhoeven up to his old tricks again, of pretending to shoot one kind of movie (sleazy soft core) while actually shooting a different type of movie (feminist screed against sexual exploitation at the hands of men).
If you think that is all there is, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Verhoeven didn’t just pull a cute, harmless prank. For the first time in his career, he attacked his audience. But he didn’t attack just any member of the audience. He attacked a specific demographic that he had purposely baited into seeing the movie–the “Horn Dog.”
What is a Horn Dog? He is a pervert, a guy who has sex on the brain 24/7, who sexually objectifies women to such an extent that they’re little more than walking blow up dolls who exist for his sexual gratification. In making Showgirls, Verhoeven wanted to do more than point the finger of blame for the sex industry at its sleazy managers and executives. He wanted to also point it at the Horn Dogs, the average man on the street who keeps going to strip clubs and other venues where women are sexually exploited. Why? Because they are the reason why the sex industry exists and the driving force that keeps it going. Sure, we could simply lay all the blame at the feet of the actual people who create all of these sleazy venues. However, were it not for the Horn Dogs creating demand, these venues wouldn’t exist in the first place.
It was for this demographic that Verhoeven made Showgirls about and for. But he didn’t just want to blame and expose the Horn Dogs. He also wanted to express his contempt for them by trolling the living hell out of them. And how? By pulling a bait and switch–not once, but twice.
The first major bait and switch was the movie’s salacious marketing and NC-17 rating. Months before it was ever released, Verhoeven teased audiences with the promise that there would be so much sex and nudity in Showgirls, that it would make Basic Instinct look like Mary Poppins. Baited, the Horn Dogs went to see the movie in droves.
True to Verhoeven’s promise, Showgirls was indeed filled with wall to wall nudity and sex. It even threw in bisexuality for good measure. Yet, oddly enough, the Horn Dogs came away from Showgirls complaining about “too much” nudity and how “boring” it all was. Even Roger Ebert chimed in, whining that the most erotic part of the film was when the women put their clothes back on.
People saw the lack of titillation as a shining example of what a major failure Showgirls was. What they didn’t get is that the failure to titillate was done on purpose. The reason was to get the Horn Dogs who had come to Showgirls to get off on naked women to get over their sexual fixation of the nude female body.
Why did Verhoeven want the Horn Dogs to get over their fixation? Because it’s this fixation that is the entire basis of the sex industry. When men become so sexually turned on by a bare tit or ass that they practically cum in their shorts right away, they create a demand for the type of venues in which they’re willing to pay women to sexually exploit themselves.
By constantly beating Horn Dogs over the heads repeatedly with boobs, boobs, boobs, snatch, snatch, snatch, Showgirls created a dampening effect. Instead of becoming titillated like they’d hoped, the Horn Dogs became increasingly turned off and even disenchanted by what they were seeing, much like an art student or medical professional who sees so much of the naked body that it loses its sexual mystique.
Another bait and switch Verhoeven trolled the Horn Dogs with involved the infamous pool scene. Everyone likes to point it out as yet another example of how poorly made Showgirls was. However, given Verhoeven’s track record, it doesn’t make sense that he could’ve shot a sex scene this incompetently after having directed Basic instinct, one of the most stylish erotic thrillers of all time. Besides, there is a major clue that the goofiness of the scene was planned.
If you noticed, Nomi isn’t just having sex with Zack; she’s repeating her lap dance routine down to the letter. If you don’t believe me, look at both scenes again. You’ll see that exactly like in the lap dance sequence, Nomi suddenly flops backward in the pool at the moment of climax. There had to be a reason why Verhoeven had Elizabeth Berkeley reenact the lap dance routine from earlier in the movie. But why?
Zack isn’t just another Las Vegas big wig running the showgirl circuit, he is also a Horn Dog–i.e., a pervert who goes to sex clubs to get off on women. The Horn Dogs in the audience were supposed to identify with him. In the lap dance scene, Verhoeven baited them into getting hot and bothered over Nomi, in order to build anticipation for the “hot” sex scene that he promised would come later.
When that moment finally arrives, it seems as though it will be even hotter than the lap dance Nomi performed earlier. Instead, it becomes the wackiest thing you ever saw. Nomi flops around like a fish–with water splashing left and right– and looks and sounds like an idiot. The sex, in stark contrast to the lap dance she performed earlier, is anything but hot; it’s downright comedic. All that’s missing is the Benny Hill theme song.
This is Verhoeven pulling the rug out from under the Horn Dog’s feet, having a laugh as in, “Ha ha, you thought this sex scene was going to be so hot, didn’t you? Well, think again!” It was, in other words, the director doing the equivalent of Lucy Van Pelt yanking the football away just as Charlie Brown is about to kick it.
There was probably another reason behind this bait and switch besides pranking the audience. The reason why Horn Dogs go to sex clubs and shows is that they’ve fallen under the illusion that performances have anything to do with sex. However, no matter how hot a lap dance or striptease routine, performance is not sex, any more than people doing acrobatics in a porn has a thing to do with sex. It’s just theatrics, a show, fantasy.
To make matters worse, a large part of the reason why the performances are so sexy has nothing to do with the routine itself but the setting it’s being done in. The atmosphere of a sex club or show is designed to get patrons to get turned on by every single thing they see. However, performed in a completely different setting, the routines not only lose their eroticism, but become ridiculous, almost embarrassing. All of this is why the pool sex wound up looking so stupid even though Nomi was repeating her lap dance routine exactly. At the strip club, it was hot as hell, but performed as sex and outside of the strip club, it didn’t translate into “hot sex” or even average sex. It came out looking completely stupid.
Because Verhoeven directed Basic Instinct, some people might be skeptical of this idea that he was attacking his audience. The reason why is that it seems strange that the same director who catered towards a particular demographic in one movie would then turn the tables on them in the next one. However, believe it or not, there is a scene in Showgirls where Verhoeven drops a major clue that he had, indeed, turned on the very demographic that made Basic Instinct a smash success.
The clue is in the hotel scene when Nomi attacks Andrew Carver. Notice that it’s shot from an unusual position. It’s shot from behind Carver’s back, and looking up at her from a low angle. By doing this, Verhoeven establishes that we’re looking up at Nomi from Carver’s point of view. But then something weird happens. Once Carver hits the floor and Nomi really starts kicking the crap out of him, Verhoeven never shows his face; he shows Nomi’s face the entire time. Not only that, but in the most intense moment of Nomi’s attack, Verhoeven has Elizabeth Berkeley both glare into and aim her kicks directly at the camera. As a result, we–the audience– are forced to take Carver’s beating from his perspective (down on the ground looking up at her), as if Nomi was kicking us, not him.
Here are closeup shots of Nomi. As you can see, she looks directly into the camera:
Verhoeven putting the audience in Carver’s place is his one last big final FU you to the Horn Dogs he had baited into seeing Showgirls. It’s him as Nomi saying, “If you came to this movie to get off on all the naked hot chicks because you see women as nothing but sex objects to get your rocks off to, guess what? You are the perverted strip club patrons who hassled all the girls at Nomi’s strip club, Nomi’s ex-boss who demanded blow jobs, the Alvin Ailey dropout who knocked up his dancer and Zack, the creep who cheated on his girlfriend and blackmailed Nomi to protect Molly’s rapist. But worst of all, you are Andrew Carver. It’s because of you that the sex industry exists; it’s because of you that women get raped, and this is what I think of all of you.”
I confess that I can’t take credit for discovering this clue; it was discovered by this IMDB reviewer, who caught on that Verhoeven had purposely baited audience members into watching the movie so he could judge them:
I had gone to see this movie for its supposed sexiness. And sexy it was, if you managed to ignore the somewhat wooden acting. But there was something going on underneath the surface of the story which I found much more interesting than well-shaped bodies and the obvious plot: I felt caught in the act. There was no difference between me and and the strip-tease and night club audience. The film was actually dissecting me and the role as a member of the audience I played in that setting.
There is a scene which, in my mind, proves my theory: when Nomi takes brutal revenge, we suddenly switch perspective and watch the scene through the eyes of the miscreants who had beaten up her best friend, and who are now under vicious attack by Nomi – which means we, the audience, are found guilty by Verhoeven, which again is ironic, because it is his film in the first place that tricked us into this position (or did it?).
All of this isn’t to argue that Showgirls is deep, multi-faceted or intelligent. It’s to make the case that it can’t be so casually dismissed anymore as just another bad film. Had it only been a story about a prostitute who sabotages a showgirl’s career to become a Las Vegas star, it could have been laughed off as that. But because it’s really a director pulling a mean-spirited prank on his audience, the film becomes a little bit too clever to be written off as pure junk.
That Cum on You Line Was A Lot More Clever Than People Gave It Credit For
Years before I had even seen Showgirls, I had heard about the infamous “cum on you” line, which is what people often use as an example of how terrible the movie is. For some reason, I had misremembered the line as ending with the word, “anymore.” It wasn’t until I saw the movie the second time when I realized my mistake. The line, as it turned out, wasn’t, “Must be weird not having anybody cum on you anymore.” It’s, “It must be weird not having anybody cum on you,” and it’s said when Nomi’s old boss and colleague come to visit her to congratulate her on becoming a showgirl.
If the line had included “anymore”, it would’ve been a very cheesy line. But without it, it’s a very clever and brutal dig at Nomi’s pretensions of being a “classy” showgirl. No matter how many times people remind her over and over again that being a showgirl is the same as being a stripper and whore, Nomi insists that because she’s in a “high class” venue, she’s no longer a part of the sex industry. In her mind, she has risen above all that. She has now become a “respectable” performer–i.e., a dancer.
But her former boss knows better. If you’re getting paid to sexually exploit your body for the benefit of men who are looking to beat off, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a hoity toity showgirl or a stripper; it’s all one and the same. It’s why he says to her that it must feel so weird to not get cum on as a showgirl. Nothing has really changed for Nomi just because she’s now a showgirl; the only difference is that the men at her show don’t get the luxury of splooging all over her when she’s done.
You can actually tell in this scene that Nomi knows exactly what her boss is saying. As she walks away, she stops momentarily as if the winds have been taken out of her sails. For the first time she gets it, but only for a brief second before falling right back into denial mode again.
The Rape Scene
Molly’s rape was a scene that many people hated, and I can understand why. Not only was Molly sweet, she was the least sexualized out of all the major female characters. (There is not one scene in which she’s naked.) In addition, she was the most principled person out of everyone in the movie. When Nomi, her best friend, screwed over Cristal Connors, she actually sided with Cristal. So, to have this morally upstanding character get brutally raped not only seemed to come out of nowhere, but mean-spirited, cruel and gratuitous. Yet, for all its shock value, there was a very valid and important reason behind it.
Nomi, from the moment she stepped foot in Las Vegas, was constantly harassed, disrespected and exploited by its men, from the guy who she hitched a ride from, to the suits who demanded that she and another showgirl spend the night with a businessman. Yet she immediately zeroed in on Cristal Connors as her mortal enemy the entire time. Not only that, she stopped at nothing to curry favor with the men of Las Vegas, even though they had kept harassing, exploiting and humiliating her at every turn.
Why was Nomi so focused on Cristal but not on the men? As the movie shows, backstage politics in the showgirls industry is defined by a lot of cutthroat competition and bitter rivalry among the women, in which all they do is claw each other to the top. The first time we see this involves the subplot with the two backup dancers at Cristal’s show. One of them gets so angry she purposely sabotages her rival’s career by injuring her leg. Nomi, who actually witnessed the incident, decides to do the same to Cristal. No sooner does Nomi become headliner does the backup dancer decide to screw her over. We then later learn that Cristal became headliner the same way Nomi had, by injuring the previous headliner.
On the surface, Showgirls plays this all off as women being their stereotypical catty selves. The reality is that the women are all behaving this way because the men who are managing and running the showgirls circuit have encouraged them to turn on each other, but under the guise of fierce competition. The reason why is to get the women so focused on hating each other that they don’t notice or care how badly the men are treating them.
Nomi, when she becomes part of the Las Vegas scene, immediately buys into this idea that she has to screw over other women to get ahead. For example, when a male casting director asks her to ice her nipples for an audition, she doesn’t hate the director; she just sees what he did as one more excuse to hate on Cristal. Again and again, when the men of Las Vegas humiliate, degrade or lie to her, she may give them a few choice words, but it’s the women–especially Cristal–who she sees as her biggest enemy.
What Molly’s rape does is finally show Nomi who the real enemy had been the entire time. Cristal may have been a bitch, but then again, she wasn’t the one who was treating Nomi and the other sex industry workers like pieces of meat, sexually exploiting them or feeling entitled to rape them. It was the men who were doing all of this to her and other women working in Las Vegas. Not the women.
Not only does Nomi realize that the men were the enemy all along, she finally learns that her ambitions to become a major headliner was based on a sham. She thought that becoming a major star in Las Vegas would make her equal to the men who are driving the industry. An incident that fueled her illusion involved the executive who wanted her and another showgirl to whore themselves out to a businessman after a gig. As soon as Nomi complained to Zack, he stuck up for her and reprimanded the executive. This led her to feel that she had clout–i.e., pull among the men. This also made her feel as if they were her allies.
But then look what happened when she asked Zack to help her go after Andrew Carver. He was not only hostile but blackmailed her into keeping silent. This change of face is Nomi’s rude awakening that the entire industry is run by an Old Boy’s Network in which the women will always be at the very bottom regardless of status. What this means is that it no matter how far up the ladder a woman climbs, she will never be anything more than a second class citizen to the men. Not only will she never have enough clout where it counts, the men will always protect their own, even at her expense. Molly’s rape is why Nomi finally quits the showgirl circuit for good and even buries the hatchet with Cristal. She finally wakes up to the reality of what the Las Vegas scene was all about.
Molly’s rape may have also been included to make a larger point about the reality of any industry that sexually exploits women. There’s this idea that the industry is completely harmless because it’s all between consenting adults. The problem is that sex clubs and shows have negative consequences for women who have nothing to do with either. The reason why is that these venues don’t just cater to the harmless pervert who wants to cop a feel once in awhile and jerk off. They also cater to and embolden dangerous sexual predators like Andrew Carver, who feel that because women are nothing more than warm holes to stick their dicks into (and not human beings), it’s perfectly acceptable to beat and rape them when the mood strikes. By crossing paths with Carver, Molly unwittingly becomes a victim of the sex industry that has guys like him as patrons, even though she’s never stripped or tricked a day in her life and dresses more modestly than most.
It’s Molly’s rape, more than anything, that has always made me want to pull for Showgirls. It’s not that it makes the movie any less superficial or trashy, but the intent behind it was so well-meaning that I can’t just write the movie off as “pure garbage.”
Verhoeven’ s Sly Dig at Hollywood
I cannot take credit for this one and don’t remember who pointed this out, but kudos to the sharp-eyed viewer who did.
In the very last scene of the movie, when Nomi hitches a ride from the same trucker from the opening scene, the camera pans, unveiling a highway sign that shows Los Angeles as Nomi’s next destination. What it suggests is that she’ll repeat the same misadventures she had in Las Vegas there, perhaps as a porn actress or (wink wink, nudge nudge) as a major Hollywood movie star.
In the wake of the whole #metoo movement, you can’t help but wonder if this was Verhoeven referencing all the sexual exploitation that was going on at the time in Hollywood at the hands of Harvey Weinstein and other major bigwigs. Given that the casting couch was a well known part of the film industry decades before #metoo, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Nowhere As Bad as People Said It Was
I have seen a lot of bad films in my day, movies that were poorly written, directed and shot. Is Showgirls one of them? No. Is it trashy? Yes. Is it sleazy? Yes. But it’s nowhere near the bad film that detractors want to claim it is. Being trashy and sleazy may put a movie out of the running for beloved classic, Oscar contention or Best Movie of the Year title, but that also doesn’t make it one of the worst movies ever made.
Also, the scorn being heaped on the movie is suspect, and I’m not just talking about snobs, either. I’m talking about the Horn Dogs. If you ever wanted evidence that the sole purpose of the movie was to bait and attack them, watch Siskel and Ebert’s review from “At the Movies”. It’s a hoot. They criticized Joe Eszterhas’ screenplay, saying it wasn’t original and that he hadn’t earned his paycheck. So, they criticized him as a screenwriter, not a person, and in the most diplomatic way possible. Verhoeven, they didn’t even mention at all.
It was Elizabeth Berkeley who got the full brunt of their scorn, and they didn’t attack her as an actress; they attacked her as a sex object, and in the most malicious, mean spirited way possible. It was as if they were so personally offended by how little she had turned them on that they wanted to go out of their way to insult her for wasting their time. Siskel not only said flat out that she was ugly and unsexy, he even compared her looks to “the other girl”, saying her costar was more attractive.
Both men also whined about how Showgirls was tame compared to Basic Instinct in spite of its NC-17 rating, and said that it hadn’t used the rating to its fullest potential. Not wanting to give the game away, Ebert made that point by pretentiously prattling about how the movie could’ve made the most use of NC-17 to”explore social issues”. However, anyone with an IQ over 7 knows that the rating is only granted for graphic sexual content that would normally get a movie an “X” rating. Plus, the movie did tackle social issues (a woman was brutally gang-raped, for Chrissakes, and Nomi was sexually harassed throughout the entire film). So, reading between the lines, it’s clear that Ebert wasn’t complaining about the movie failing to address important issues; he was upset the movie hadn’t become the nut busting extravaganza that he’d hoped.
If this vicious, cruel, mean-spirited Siskel and Ebert review doesn’t prove that so much of the hatred for Showgirls was the result of horny audience members being successfully exposed and trolled by Verhoeven, I don’t know what does. Boiling down the rating of a movie to a personal attack on the lead actress’s looks, her lack of unsexiness and how tame the film was in terms of sexually explicit scenes? It doesn’t get any more revealing–or damning–than that.
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