Some battles are so hard, you forget they're not worth fighting. The protagonist of 1995's Showgirls has this experience. My experience was to find out how good this movie is, despite its reputation. People have argued about whether it was intended to be funny or if it's "so bad it's good." I'd say it's definitely the former, at least as far as director Paul Verhoeven is concerned. I think it's possible screenwriter Joe Eszterhas wasn't in on the joke. I think he might've thought he was making another Flashdance (which he also wrote). But the movie actually has more in common with Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, another movie with satire so deadpan that a great many people didn't see it for what it was.
Another thing that surprised me about the film was its energy. It starts with Elizabeth Berkley as Nomi Malone, walking briskly at a strip mall, and the camera pans from this bland location to a sudden, glorious panorama of snowy mountains.
This may be Verhoeven showing himself to be a foreigner, someone marvelling that American sleaze can exist side by side with natural beauty. Surprising juxtapositions occur elsewhere in the film, like when an innocent scene of Nomi and her friend, Molly (Gina Ravera), shopping suddenly cuts to Nomi naked onstage at the strip club.
Despite what many contemporaneous reviews said, the movie is very sexy and the eroticism works. American critics generally seem to be tone deaf when it comes to sex for some reason.
Berkley's performance is as bad as people say it is but I think Verhoeven cast her the way Kubrick cast Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon. He wanted someone genuinely dumb. There's a certain kind of sincere stupidity I think is difficult for actors to mimic, it has to be real sometimes. Verhoeven has said in interviews that he told Berkley to go as big as possible with her performance. This combined with the constantly moving camera and the surprising juxtapositions in the first third of the film makes everything feel unstable and conveys an impression of Nomi as an unstable person. Which she certainly is.
People who find her unconvincing have probably never met someone like her, or maybe they don't want to admit they have. But, oh, trust me, she is so true to life. This girl whose pride is a millimetre under her thin skin, is quick to anger, who has no compunctions about lying, who sees no problem with mentally erasing her past. She's ruthless and an asshole but her stupidity makes her kind of innocent in spite of herself so she can be a sort of heroine in this world of people who are bigger, smarter assholes than she is.
Director Jacques Rivette said of the film, "it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's Verhoeven's philosophy." Everyone is an asshole in this movie but Verhoeven's use of satire makes you forget it for minutes at a time, and then a punchline drops and you're reminded with another of those abrupt juxtapositions. A handsome bouncer (Glenn Plummer) at a club takes an interest in Nomi and starts trying to convince her she's better than the strip club, but even the strip club is better than the dishonest big show at the casino Nomi aspires to join, which is still a strip show, just one under a thin veneer of artistic respectability. He has his own aspirations of being a choreographer and musician and he wants her to be his muse. In the normal language of the rising star film, he'd be the moral centre, the guy who sets Nomi on the right path. But then, when she goes to tell him excitedly that she'd joined the chorus line at the Stardust Casino, she finds him at home, sleeping with another stripper. That still feels very typical until Nomi leaves the scene and he starts immediately telling the other girl all the things he'd said he was only saying to Nomi, "I can teach you to dance--I wrote this song for you," etc. Verhoeven undercuts the standard plotline even further when it turns out actually this guy is a terrible choreographer who gets booed and winds up having to work at a grocery store.
A funnier piece of satire is when two of Nomi's former coworkers from the strip club visit her at the Stardust. Nomi had stormed out of the strip club, bitterly proclaiming she'd never return now that she has the big job at the casino. But some time has passed and here's the fat burlesque comedienne from the strip club and you think, "Oh, yeah, I guess they were kind of friendly so this is a sweet reunion . . ." And then the manager from the strip club (Robert Davi) walks on screen, too, and the film maintains this tone of oh, look at all these old comrades she's meeting up with again. And she's smiling and happy and it's sweet. Then, as they're parting, the strip club manager comments, "It must be strange not having people cum on you all the time." It's funny because it's so wrong for the tone of the moment. It's also funny because it's an abrupt reminder that this is the guy who coerces girls into giving him blowjobs, that he's vicious, just a little more honest than the big wigs at the casino. But Nomi's so believably dumb we know it never clicks with her, she exists in the emotions of the moment, forgetting or intentionally erasing the events of days previous in her mind. This is how she continually falls for the manipulations of Crystal (Gina Gershon), the show's leading act.
In scene after scene, Crystal pulls some asshole move or says something snide, but then follows it up with some friendly word or gesture and Nomi, like a schmuck, always swallows the hook. It's the same with Zack (Kyle MacLachlan) who fools her into thinking he's a sweet guy by chewing out an underling who propositioned her. And all the time, we know how the normal language of these rising star movies work, how some people genuinely want her to succeed and others are just out to get her. Verhoeven shows us it's not so simple--or rather, it's much simpler. Everyone is ready to betray her, and maybe those same people also have genuine feelings of camaraderie. They're all assholes, but that doesn't mean they can't have some vague feelings that might be called friendly in a generous mood.
The movie is so funny, you could just die laughing.
Showgirls is available on The Criterion Channel.
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