“One thing this endlessly prurient film never shows is female sexual pleasure”: Showgirls reviewed in 1996

As is clear from the plot summary alone, director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s first collaboration since Basic Instinct (1992) is driven by preoccupations other than psychological and narrative credibility. At the end of the screening I attended, the audience emerged in a half-derisive, half-dazed mood. Derisive because Showgirls’ ludicrously crude dialogue, acting and sexual imagery invite the laughter of disbelief (Nomi has only to step naked into Zack’s pool for stone dolphins to ejaculate water and champagne to overflow); dazed because after two hours the film’s relentless tits-in-your-face display – intensified by Verhoeven’s trademark high-impact visuals – comes to feel like a never-ending nightmare. Coming at a moment when Verhoeven’s reputation as an auteur is on a roll, ShowgirIs’ failure to attract a big star cast – let alone US audiences – tells its own story. 

Although the hype around ShowgirIs’ status as the first major studio picture to be released with a US NC-17 certificate might lead you to think otherwise, it’s not the subject matter itself that offends. Atom Egoyan’s recent Exotica (1994), which also has plenty of female nudity, is proof enough that the darker undercurrents of the psyche, which find their outlet in the buying and selling of sexual illusion, can generate a subtle, complex and humane cinema. What really repels here is the deep moral corruption of what the press notes refer to as Verhoeven and Eszterhas’s ‘vision’ and the perverse conception of sexuality and human relationships which their film naturalises. 

Eszterhas plunders the A Star Is Born school of showbiz narrative not to satirise it but to abuse it. Through the doggedly persistent James, who functions as a token moral commentator on Nomi’s values, the script dimly acknowledges the limitations of Nomi’s career goal – to snarl her way through a pseudo-lesbian routine in a look-but-don’t-touch upmarket show as opposed to snarling her way through a similar routine in a strip dive. Yet everything else about the film requires us to suspend this knowledge and identify with her ‘progress’. The film presents James as sincerely believing in Nomi’s natural talent as a dancer; but the message we gain from Nomi’s rejection of him is that such a valuing of the authentic self over the commodified self and of erotic self-expression over commodified sexual display is to be despised. Indeed, it is by repeatedly exploiting herself as a sexual commodity that Nomi achieves domination and success, and when we finally see James dancing it turns out that he too works in a sex show. 

Showgirls’ would-be-Sadeian conception of female sexual ‘power’ – in which sex is fundamentally a weapon that women wield over men – is not only expediently self-justificatory in a film which ceaselessly exploits its female performers, but is itself milked for maximum voyeuristic potential by a set of visual codes culled straight from porn. Nomi twice pulls a knife on a man – once when the driver who gives her a lift to Vegas makes a very mild pass at her, and later, in vengeance, on the ludicrously-imagined rockstar Carver. In both cases, Verhoeven ensures that she also exposes her breasts; thus the nominal message that Nomi is not to be messed with is subsumed beneath another message that her knife and her anger mean nothing because they are simply part of the sexual spectacle. If this sounds bad, Showgirls’ voyeuristic exploitation of relations between women beggars belief: predictably, the snarling rivalry between Cristal and Nomi has clearly been conceived entirely to yield a series of butch-femme catfights, and even Nomi’s friendship with Molly constantly teeters on the verge of lip-glossed pseudo-lesbianism. 

It hardly needs stating that the one thing this endlessly prurient film never shows is female sexual pleasure. Like the spectacularly-staged numbers in Goddess, the fictional show which makes Nomi a star, the only fully consummated sex act in which we see her participate – with Zack in his pool – is a display of choreographed gymnastics from which any sense of inner sexuality is absent. Feature-film debutante Elizabeth Berkley, who plays Nomi, combines the non-personality and permanently gaping mouth of an inflatable doll with weird mood swings that are presumably meant to hint at Nomi’s crack-addicted past – but then a director who sends her hitchhiking with her breasts hanging out and shopping in little more than a Wonderbra is clearly driven by considerations other than realism. “You’ll love the music and the dance and the message will find an echo in your hearts,” Eszterhas is quoted to have declared in a ludicrous defence of the movie. One wonders which of ShowgirIs’ messages he had in mind. 

► Showgirls is back in UK cinemas from 6 June to mark the film’s 30th anniversary.