SHOWGIRLS
"Trashdance"
A film review by Greta Christina
Copyright 1995 Greta Christina
[Originally published in The Spectator, October 6, 1995]
United Artists. Written by Joe Eszterhas. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Produced by Alan Marshall and Charles Evans. Starring Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, and Gina Gershon. Rated NC-17.
Before I get into all the sex stuff, I should tell you right off the bat: This is a really bad movie.
No, I mean really bad. I can't even begin to tell you (although, of course, I'm going to try). The acting is dreadful, a blend of woodenness and scenery-chewing that's generally identified with the Movie-of-the-Week. The writing is just laughable; some of the most poignant moments had an audience of hardened critics howling with glee. I think it was trying to say something about power and morality and the price of success, but mostly it had a lot to say about hard nipples and gold lame and Joe Eszterhas's girl-girl fetish.
I guess I'd better do a quick summary here. SHOWGIRLS is the brainchild of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven, the same creative team that inflicted BASIC INSTINCT on the world. (Eszterhas was reportedly paid $3.2 million for the script. You have to wonder where it went. Writing lessons, I hope.) SHOWGIRLS tells the gripping tale of Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley), who comes to Las Vegas carrying a suitcase and a dream and leaving behind a cloudy past. She gets a job as a lap dancer at the Cheetah Club, but soon claws her way into a place in the chorus at the Stardust. She ... oh, I can't do this. Let's let the press kit take over from here, shall we? "Possessed of a raw and riveting talent (yeah, right--GC), Nomi is soon introduced to the vastly different world of the big Las Vegas shows--and the powerful men and women who run them. Zack (Kyle MacLachlan), the handsome and ambitious entertainment director at the Stardust, could push Nomi into the spotlight. Cristal (Gina Gershon), the glamorous star of the stage show 'Goddess,' is inexorably drawn to Nomi's beauty and spirit and may make her ... or break her."
The main character, Nomi, is completely indecipherable. She's supposed to be a wild, hot-blooded, untameable tigress, but to me she just seems petulant and ill-tempered. In theory, she's driven by obscure but powerful ambitions and passions, but as she's the kind of girl that gets shivers and goose-bumps watching a cheesy Vegas stage show, it's a little hard to swallow. Supposedly she finds herself by the end of the movie, but I'll be damned if I could figure out where she was. Behind the sofa, maybe?
Even as simple, unchallenging entertainment, SHOWGIRLS isn't very successful. The dance routines are pretty great in a Vegasy way, hot and fun and glitzy. Some of the sex stuff is not bad (more on that in a bit). But there's a whole lot of really bad plot in between--the filler between the dirty bits is just as ludicrous and boring as it is in most porn flicks--and there's more and more of it as the movie progresses, bringing the whole thing to a grinding crawl. It clocks in at just over two hours. It seems longer.
Essentially, SHOWGIRLS is soft-core porn with very high production values. So that's how I'm going to review it. After all, I don't think you were expecting CITIZEN KANE. You wanna know two things: You wanna know if it'll get your dick hard, and you wanna know what it says about sex.
First things first. Will it get your dick hard? Well ... it might. There's a pretty good chance that it will. Depends on your dick, I suppose. If your dick likes tall, skinny, long- legged, hard-muscled women, then it will probably like this movie pretty well. If it likes tall, skinny, long-legged, hard-muscled women who prowl around backstage and do pseudo-lezzie dance numbers in skimpy gold-lame and black-plastic outfits, then it will definitely like this movie quite a bit. And if it likes deranged, erratic, power-hungry women who slam doors and carry switchblades and have hissy-fits every twenty seconds, then it'll probably stand up and sing the "Hallelujah Chorus."
Your dick had better like being teased, though. Because for all its sexy, sleazy, boldly-go-where-no-one-has-gone-before come-on, SHOWGIRLS is essentially a high-budget cock-tease. There is one--I repeat, one--fuck scene in the entire movie. It takes place in a swimming pool, where all you can see is some thrashing around. (I'm sorry, but all I could think was, "Chlorinated water. No lube. Ouch." Also, there's no condom, unless Kyle MacLachlan had one cleverly tucked up his butt for safekeeping. But I digress.)
I don't mean to say that it won't turn you on. The lap dancing scene, where Nomi does Zack in the lap-dance booth while Cristal watches, is pretty spectacular. The scene where Nomi and James (Glenn Plummer) practice their dance number and wind up fooling around is quite wild and nasty--as long as it lasts. There's a fairly sleazy bit, in which show director Tony Moss (Alan Rachins) makes Nomi take off her bra and play with her nipples on stage during an audition, that wasn't bad. And a lot of the dance sequences are pretty steamy.
But again, it's all a tease. It winds you up, but it doesn't take you anywhere. The lesbian stuff is especially disappointing; more accurately, the lack of lesbian stuff is disappointing. There's lots of flirting and vamping and attempted seduction, and lots of girl-girl erotic dancing, but there's not one single scene in which two women actually do it. I was crushed.
Maybe I'm down on this movie for the same reason that I'm down on a lot of porn--most of the women didn't interest me. I like smart and imaginative and funny and fleshy. Bony is fine if there's brains and imagination, but bony and brainless--forget it. And the main character, Nomi, was a complete washout in the clit-hardening department. She has the face of a mall-rat, a bargain-basement Sharon Stone, and her eyes are mean and empty and hard. To put it mildly--not my type.
What it mostly comes down to, though, is that the movie hasn't stuck with me. I only saw it a few hours before writing this, and already the images are beginning to slip away. Not a good sign for pornography; I like porn that I can think about and jack off to for at least a few days. With a couple of exceptions, SHOWGIRLS has provided me with very little in the way of jack-off material. Big-screen production vales notwithstanding, you might be better off with a decent porn video.
So enough about getting your dick hard. What does SHOWGIRLS say about sex?
That's a tough one. The movie is such an unholy mess. Deciphering its subtext is going to be tricky. Hell, for that matter, deciphering its over-text is going to be tricky. I'm pretty sure that Eszterhas and Verhoeven were trying to say something about sex; I've read interviews and press notes, and they definitely seem to have had something on their mind. But I'll be damned if I can figure it out.
The movie's attitude towards sex work and prostitution, for instance, is rather startlingly muddled. On the one hand, it wants to be positive about it. One of the more comprehensible messages is that Nomi's lap-dancing job at the Cheetah Club is more honest than shaking her tail at the Stardust. It's all sex work, the movie says. Some of it pretends to be something else, but if you're going to do sex work, you might as well be up front about it.
But at the same time, SHOWGIRLS is very down on whores and whoredom. Nomi doesn't want to be a whore, and every time someone suggests that that's what she's doing, or invites her to take it a step further, she gets pissed off and flounces out the door. She shakes her ass and gets men off for money, but she's not a whore. God forbid. (I think we're supposed to see her as an artist, who wants to dance more than anything else in the world--Eszterhas wrote FLASHDANCE, so this may be what he was trying to get at--but it ain't convincing.) SHOWGIRLS constantly uses "whore" as a pejorative; in fact, according to the movie, it's just about the nastiest thing you can call someone.
So what's the point here? Being a whore is honest work, but it's also an insult? Selling your talent makes you a whore, and that's a terrible thing to do? Sucking up to the boss is one thing, but sucking off the boss is quite another? There's a hazy distinction between being a whore and making a living, but it's a line that you shouldn't cross?
But what struck me the most about the SHOWGIRLS world is that nobody in it seems to actually enjoy sex. Very few people in the movie have sex just for fun. They use sex for power, for a weapon, for a manipulative tool, and of course for money. But they don't use it as a means to achieve pleasure. They all want it ... but they don't seem to like it very much.
I'm very confused. But in my defense, I think Eszterhas and Verhoeven are very confused as well. The ideas and feelings about sex as expressed in this movie are, to put it kindly, ambivalent. I think they want it both ways. I think they want to be all groovy and sex-positive and cutting edge, but they also want to moralize. I think they want to glamorize sex work and sleazify it at the same time; or, to put it bluntly, I think they want to fuck whores and then condemn them for doing it. The movie loves sex, adores it, drools over it--but it doesn't seem to think that it can make anyone very happy.
-- Greta Christina http://www.blowfish.com/
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews