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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
When the stripper extravaganza "Showgirls" opened, nearly every American critic howled in a Victorian rage. They would have felt better had they surrendered to its great, dirty appeal.
Mar 31, 2004 | A film scholars' round table on "Showgirls." It sounds like the setup for a punch line about those wacky academics who find value in any kind of popular culture, the perfect new joke for people who realize that their old gibes about the French and Jerry Lewis are getting a little tatty at the edges.
The round-table symposium on "Showgirls," consisting of seven pieces by academics and one filmmaker, did appear last year in Film Quarterly. I mean no condescension to the participants to say that the overall effect was very touching. As a critic who loves "Showgirls," who has loved it since it was released in the fall of 1995 and as it now enjoys heavy rotation on Viacom channels (VH1 and Showtime, in particular), and who bought it on laserdisc and then on DVD, I was happy to see the film being taken seriously but even happier by the sight of people owning up to their admiration.
To fully understand the critical ridicule flung at "Showgirls" when it opened, you have to understand the expectations attached to it. The director Paul Verhoeven and the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas set out to make the first movie released by a major studio (United Artists) that deliberately sought an NC-17 rating. Because that meant the film's marketing would be relatively limited, it was made on a modest budget ($40 million). U.A. was hoping that it would tap into a market that would show how movies could be profitable without a huge teen audience. Critics, too, were hoping for the same sort of commercial success, so that the 5-year-old NC-17 rating would attain the same acceptance that the old X rating had when studios released "Midnight Cowboy," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Last Tango in Paris" with that classification. They had pinned all their hopes for commercial adult movies on "Showgirls" -- and they reacted with fury when it seemed to aspire more toward exploitation than artful seriousness. The movie became a public joke, it did poorly at the box office, and the NC-17 rating was a commercial pariah and has remained so.
I first saw "Showgirls" a couple of weeks after it opened, in a sparse midweek evening crowd, and I was convinced I was watching a new camp classic. The movie had a brashness that made it more fun than many better movies, and a ferocious desire to entertain that bad movies seem to have lost. I admit that my love for "Showgirls" has to do with my love for melodrama, for displays of flesh, and above all for the disreputable, which can be a way of keeping in touch with the rude energy that's at the heart of the appeal of movies.
But a weird thing happened when I showed it to friends after it was released on laserdisc. They were just as amused by it as I was, but their amusement was absent of any real affection for the movie. "Showgirls," as everyone knew by then -- whether they had seen it or not -- was a bad movie, and thus everyone knew perfectly well how to take it.
I was no longer so sure. The film seemed less campy (and less sexy) each time I saw it. If true camp is unconscious ("seriousness that fails," in Susan Sontag's typically oblique and obvious formulation), then how could a movie as deliberate as "Showgirls" be camp? How could a director like Paul Verhoeven, who had consistently -- and often crassly -- gone for the outrageous in movie after movie, be unaware of what he was doing?
Verhoeven is not a director blessed with subtlety. When he's entertaining, as he is in "The 4th Man" or "Basic Instinct," it's because he finds a way to make his calculated effrontery funny. At his worst, in "Total Recall" and "Starship Troopers" and "Hollow Man," he operates like the sleaziest pimp, delivering the kinky, violent goods in a manner so bludgeoning that any intended irony erases itself. Verhoeven doesn't have the sensibility to do what Hitchcock did, making moviegoers aware of their complicity in the shocks they have paid to see. The unremitting cartoon brutality of "Starship Troopers" may have been intended as satire, but the movie drips with contempt for the mass audiences that go to the movies looking for just this kind of brutal thrill; the only way to be in on the joke is to share in that contempt. And it's just that superiority that seems to be celebrated in most of the admiring critical appraisals that have come Verhoeven's way in the past few years. The no-hope dystopia of "RoboCop" has to be acclaimed as a dark view of the future instead of just a pulpy excuse to make a brutal but entertaining vigilante picture.
Verhoeven delivers the flesh in "Showgirls" as blatantly as he delivers the blood in other pictures. The movie is loaded with strip scenes, lap-dance scenes, topless audition scenes, lesbian scenes. And Joe Eszterhas' dialogue is just as blatant. ("Molly," says one showgirl to a harried costumer, "they're gonna see a smilin' snatch if you don't fix this G-string"; the heroine's former strip-club boss after she's made the move to a big-time Vegas revue tells her, "Must be weird not having anybody come on you.")
What's missing in "Showgirls," and what makes it Verhoeven's best movie, is contempt for mass culture. For all of its deliberate outrageousness, all the points it scores off the tits-and-ass milieu, the movie isn't judgmental about the tackiness of Las Vegas. In the Film Quarterly round table, Noel Burch tries to make the case that American critics dismissed "Showgirls" because it's a ruthless indictment of America's capitalist ideals. (If that's so, then why, as Burch admits, didn't the film find favor in France, where Verhoeven is taken much more seriously?) But no one in "Showgirls" is more ruthless than the heroine Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), and we cheer for her at every turn, just as we do for Scarlett O'Hara at her most manipulative.
That point is a lapse in what is otherwise just about the sharpest piece in the Film Quarterly round table. Burch gets it exactly right when he says " 'Showgirls' ... takes mass culture seriously, as a site of both fascination and struggle. And it takes despised melodrama seriously too, as indeed an excellent vehicle for social criticism." If I'm reading him right, Burch is saying that "Showgirls" throws critics because it refuses to hold itself as superior to its subject, to deny the fascination and attractiveness of the flashy, trashy world it shows us even as it acknowledges its ruthlessness.
In that sense, for a certain type of educated audience, the ones for whom Las Vegas and strip clubs and the desire for fame are indicative of nothing more than the shallowness of contemporary culture, "Showgirls" is camp precisely because it takes seriously something that they don't. It isn't hard to sense a class disdain in the sneering directed at "Showgirls." "Despised melodrama," as Burch so succinctly puts it, has traditionally been aimed at the mass audience. Dickens and Griffith raised it to an art form (and so did Verdi and Bizet), but melodrama is still judged to be incapable of the nuance and intelligence of "high" drama. There is, though, an overwhelming, unsubtle bigness in melodrama that provides a large, meaty satisfaction. My guess is that at the root of the high-cultural disdain for melodrama is a disapproval of emotion that can't be tidily contained, a failure to understand how deliberate overstatement can be used to articulate a subject, and perhaps a belief that the art of the "lower orders" is beneath serious consideration.
