"Showgirls," as Noel points out, is a classic rise-and-fall-of-the-bad-girl melodrama. Nomi Malone hitchhikes into Vegas to find work as a showgirl. Starting off as a stripper, she manages to get into the chorus of a Vegas hotel revue called "Goddess" and proceeds to screw, cheat and literally push her way into the lead. Except that here, there's more triumph than comeuppance in her fall. Nomi insists throughout the movie that she's not a whore, that she's operating on her terms. The struggling choreographer (Glenn Plummer) who's attracted to Nomi tells her that working as a stripper is more honest than flashing her tits in a gaudy Vegas revue and pretending that she's moved up in the world. The star of the show, Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon in one of the great bad-girl turns in movies), tells Nomi that everyone is a whore. At the end, when Nomi has done things she never thought she'd do in her pursuit of success, she stops kidding herself, adopts Cristal's style and, in the movie's last line, says that what she won in Vegas was "me." The suggestion is that she has learned the truth about herself, and the final shot of the movie finds her on the road to Los Angeles, where, having learned the tricks of her trade, she can become a first-class whore.

What makes that finish so remarkable is that Verhoeven and Eszterhas abandon the moralism that is the price the movies have traditionally made us pay for enjoying women like Nomi. Cecil B. DeMille was the master of making audiences feel upright and moral by condemning the very things he used to titillate them, and more recently no one has worked that territory better than Adrien Lyne in movies like "Fatal Attraction," "Indecent Proposal" and "Unfaithful."

"Showgirls" simply refuses to put the breaks on its id, to deny or decry the material and fleshly desires of the characters, precisely because they are the very same desires that movies have always encouraged -- even when pretending to disapprove of them. Movies have traditionally allowed us to enjoy the tough, salty girls in supporting roles, but it was the nice girl in the lead we were meant to root for. In Busby Berkeley's "42nd Street," the chorus hoofer played by Ruby Keeler gets her big chance when the star of the show breaks her leg. In "Showgirls," Nomi gets her big chance when she pushes the star of the show down a flight of stairs.

Along with "42nd Street," another one of the templates of "Showgirls" is "All About Eve," except that here we experience the story through the eyes of the hungry little gold-digger out to pick off the aging star. But the "aging" star isn't just the object of our pity. Gershon's Cristal (she tells Nomi she named herself after the champagne) is every bit the schemer her younger rival is. Cristal, who calls everybody "darlin'" in a voice that drips with both honey and vinegar, can't be the villain any more than Nomi is. The movie wants us to enjoy the deviousness of both these women without any moralistic wet blankets thrown on our fun.

In "Basic Instinct," Verhoeven and Eszterhas tried to encourage our identification with the sort of character that movies usually condemn, getting us to cheer on Sharon Stone's ice-pick killer. But the constant intrusion of Michael Douglas' cop kept derailing that amusing perversity. He was the conventional cop hero we were supposed to root for, and next to Stone he was numbingly dull. There's no conventional upright character here to get in Berkley's way. Stone's character was named Catherine Trammel. Nomi's last name might be Untrammeled. The movie starts with her zooming down the road to Vegas and never downshifts into a lower gear.

"What happens here stays here," says Las Vegas' new tourist slogan, rejecting the family-friendly image it had tried to embrace. Verhoeven and Eszterhas are saying that what happens in Vegas is simply an exaggeration of what happens everywhere else. Selling it and buying it are, for them, the truth of mass culture in which we're all happy hookers or johns. As movie messages go, that's a bit of barroom braggadocio no different from that of the gambler who tries to pick up Nomi in the opening scenes and tells her, "Everyone sells it sooner or later." The difference is, in "Showgirls," that nugget isn't held out as bitter truth but as the source of a satirical celebration of the way mass culture works.

The unapologetic lust for fame and money and the unimpeded pursuit of them are the keys to the movie's attitude and to its style. At times, "Showgirls" seems hell-bent on doing justice to the swank that every disreputable character in movie history would have chosen if they could have lived out their most excessive fantasies. (What flights of gaucherie would Barbara Stanwyck have indulged in if she'd gotten away with it in "Double Indemnity"?) Nomi may wear a dress by -- as she calls it -- "Ver-sace" (rhymes with "face"), but in "Showgirls" Versace seems to have been body-snatched by Frederick's of Hollywood. When Cristal takes Nomi to lunch, she's dressed like a rodeo hooker in skintight lamé pants and matching midriff wrap top with accompanying cowboy hat. The predominant style of Ellen Mirojnick's witty costume design is a trashy marriage of dance wear and lingerie. The movie takes the maxim "Dress for success" as seriously as any junior executive does. It's just that the girls here are dressing for far less respectable -- and far more spectacular -- success.

Recent Stories