It's all part of film's wholly artificial world. The hotel's entertainment manager (slyly played by Kyle MacLachlan) lives in a mansion with four neon palm trees lining the swimming pool. At one point, Verhoeven includes a shot of Nomi sitting on a bench with a replica of the Sphinx and the pyramids in the background.

That's why the complaints about the movie's vulgarity and tastelessness missed the point. How could a movie about Vegas be otherwise? You can't make a tasteful movie about vulgarity. And unless you exaggerate a world that's already so exaggerated, it becomes just a gaudy, colorful backdrop. For the fantasy of Vegas, you've got to look at something like Stephen Soderbergh's remake of "Ocean's Eleven" (a movie I enjoyed). In that picture, Vegas is a playground with all the exploitation and crassness swept under the casino's wall-to-wall carpets. The dirt is right upfront in "Showgirls," and the joke of the movie is that it doesn't diminish Nomi's hunger or ours.

Vegas' unreality (the heart of its appeal) is nowhere more evident than in the production numbers we see from "Goddess," the show that Nomi schemes her way into. These are among the movie's high points and were widely criticized as though Verhoeven had no idea they were ridiculous. What's interesting about them is that they're perfectly calibrated to appeal to the all-American desire to feel, while you're on vacation, that you've stepped into a movie. Cristal emerges from an erupting papier-mâché volcano in a number that's like the old Italian sword-and-sandal epics reimagined as a choreographed love-in. She mimes getting gang-banged in a biker number that's like a disco version of one of the '60s AIP biker movies. The numbers are just naughty enough to make the tourists in the audience feel that they've seen something daring but not pornographic. And all the money on display tells you this parade of flesh is designed to strike the audience as "classy" in a way that a night spent watching Nomi at the strip club would never be. The sleek, hard bodies of the dancers and strippers have exactly the same allure as the hard sheen of car chrome seen under an oasis of neon. (The cinematographer, Jost Vacano, shoots the entire movie to look like one yummy temptation after another.) The nudity and sex, the stripteases and lap dances here are all about aggression, the expression of characters primed to gain the next foothold on the ladder. Berkley dances with the sort of choppy, abrupt movements you'd never see in a real strip club. Nomi's body is her fortune and she's too impatient to resort to the soft sell. No, it isn't erotic, but sex here isn't the motivator, just the product.

"Hunger" is the word that most accurately describes Berkley's fearless and untutored performance. In the early scene where she meets Molly (the immensely appealing Gina Ravera), Berkley stabs a straw into a giant soda cup, shakes a bottle of ketchup like a rabbit caught in a hunting dog's jaws, and mashes the ketchup into a plate of French fries. In the course of the movie, she takes ravenous bites out of oversize burgers and attacks a bag of potato chips. She's all appetite and movement, as if she were challenging Verhoeven to keep up with her. Berkley had her admirers, among them the great French filmmaker Jacques Rivette, who declared, "That woman is amazing" (he also called "Showgirls" one of the strongest American movies in years), but she bore the brunt of the jeering. One of the ironies of the critical reaction to "Showgirls" is that critics saw no contradiction in charging the film with reducing women to bodies for the audience's delectation while treating Berkley as if she were a brainless bimbo. "Her breasts may be more expressive than her face," wrote Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, echoing the kind of character assassination we'd expect from John Simon. But Lane, who has done more than anyone else to reduce criticism to the level of cocktail party chat and resurrect the notion of the clever, uncommitted "gentleman" critic, was not called to account for the sexism of that remark. (There is no more telling example of how much the idea of criticism and the idea of art has become devalued than the way otherwise intelligent people have been suckered into praising Anthony Lane.) Lane again: "[Berkley] can't act, but the sight of her trying to act, doing the sorts of things that acting is rumored to consist of, struck me as a far nobler struggle than the boring old I-know-I-can-make-it endeavors of her fictional character." That he also declared, "There is not a whisper of satire in this movie" should give you an idea of just how seriously to take him.

It's easy to imagine that, given a starring role in a major studio movie after playing on the teen TV comedy "Saved by the Bell," Berkley felt something like Nomi's desire to prove herself. She works so well in the movie because she hasn't learned the more experienced actor's trick of self-protection. Her performance doesn't have the conscious irony of Gershon's or MacLachlan's, but that would be wrong for Nomi who, if such a thing is possible, is a wised-up naif. What the role needed was (no joke intended) naked ambition, and that Berkley has in spades. For the likes of Lane it may not be what "acting is rumored to consist of," but premeditated career moves should not be what acting consists of either. Asked by Charlie Rose recently if she had feared she was taking a chance with "Monster," Charlize Theron bluntly and admirably answered that taking chances was an actor's job. Berkley's performance shows some of the fearlessness that acting is supposed to be about.

In Film Quarterly, Chon Noriega ends his contribution to the round table by saying of Berkley, "In 'Showgirls,' her blood is everywhere." Noriega is referring to the way Berkley's career crashed and burned following the movie. If Hollywood did its part to chew her up and spit her out, critics did as well. Some have survived this treatment. Jessica Lange's wonderful parody of a breathy starlet in "King Kong" was reviewed as if she were really just the dumb blonde she played. Lang has had the last laugh. Berkley has not. She turned up as an in-joke in the truly vicious comedy "The First Wives Club" as a target for that picture's bitchy tirade against young women. And she was added to the ranks of young actresses who have to pretend to find something irresistible about Woody Allen in his "Curse of the Jade Scorpion," where she looked just right in the '40s setting. On the brighter side, she opens on Broadway Thursday in a revival of "Sly Fox," Larry Gelbart's hilarious updating of Ben Jonson's "Volpone." She deserves far better than she has gotten.

And Verhoeven and Eszterhas deserve to have "Showgirls" regarded as more than an embarrassment. The most American of Verhoeven's American movies, "Showgirls" is, like the city it's set in, a deliberately artificial ravishing of pop culture. It's a backstage musical, a rags-to-riches show biz exposé, a sex melodrama, and one of the great celebrations of that great movie icon, the bad bad girl. The only thing missing -- thank goodness -- is any desire to be reputable or moralistic or uplifting. With "Showgirls" Verhoeven and Eszterhas tapped right into the trash energy that powers American popular culture and understood how much that culture powers our fantasies of success. You get the sense they'd be appalled if they weren't having such a great time. When Nomi comes to the realization that, as Cristal told her, we're all whores, she's not condemned. She's welcomed into the fold. Near the end of "Die Hard," Bonnie Bedelia tries to shame Alan Rickman by calling him a common thief. "I'm an exceptional thief," he answers with a streak of pride. In "Showgirls" Verhoeven and Eszterhas are exceptional whores.

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