CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
PAUL VERHOEVEN and Joe Eszterhas’ latest collaboration, Showgirls, is at once the tackiest movie ever made by a major Hollywood studio and a satisfyingly bitchy backstage melodrama overlaid with all the usual sexual peccadillos common to both men’s previous work.
Verhoeven’s first major hit was the Dutch art film The Fourth Man, with Jeroen Krabbe as a bisexual novelist entwined in the murderous web of femme fatale Renee Soutendijk. Eszterhas had his major break with the vacuous script for Flashdance, where Jennifer Beals outdid the men with a welder and searched for Terpsichorean fame in a loin-revealing leotard. They complement each other perfectly — both professing to explore moral ambiguities while thrusting soft-porn in the viewer’s face. In Basic Instinct, the mindless, ultra-chic thriller, both took great pains in the script and its execution to make all its women beautiful, horny and completely psychotic.
Showgirls is no different. It has more tits than Ben Hur (and those were all sported by extras posing as slaves anyway). In this epic, at least 20 percent of the dialogue revolves around mammaries. Before one dance routine, the performers prep their breasts with ice, prompting the remark: “I want my nipples to press but I don’t want them to look like they’re levitating.”
In this movie Las Vegas becomes the world where nipples are king. And Verhoeven and Eszterhas once again hone their talents for obnoxious lesbian-like parrying between the female stars.
The story is simple enough, even classic in an old Hollywood musical kind of way. Elizabeth Berkley is Nomi Malone, the girl with a mysterious past who arrives in Las Vegas, starts working in a sleazy bar as a dancer and eventually gets cast in the big spectacle at the five-star hotel — where she proceeds to go to any length to become the star of the show.
Along the way she encounters what Eszterhas predictably calls “the dark side of the American dream”, abusive and weak men (Kyle MacLachlan as a spineless entertainment director and Robert Davi as the sleazy stripshow proprietor always after a blow-job) and powerful, alluring, scheming women (Gina Gershon as Cristal, the control-freak star of the revue Goddess). The only decent character in the movie is a costumier who helps Malone out when she arrives, but she ends up being violently gang-raped when the movie has to get some kind of revengeful climax in motion.
For most of its over-long two-and-a-half hours, in place of the action sequences of Verhoeven’s Robocop and Total Recall or the questionable suspense of Basic Instinct, we’re dished up dazzlingly choreographed semi-nude dance sequences.
Editors Mark Goldblatt and Mark Helfrich use the same overtly emphatic cutting technique they mastered in Terminator II and Predator and the thumping sound effects and very Eighties-style heavy rock music overwhelm the senses just like any other self-respecting big-budget Hollywood opus.
Verhoeven and Eszterhas stoically maintain they are empowering women in their movies — Eszterhas went so far as to plead on the Larry King show for under-18s to force their way into cinemas to learn the powerful moral message implicit in the movie.
Their pretensions are highly debatable. Showgirls is really just big-budget misogynistic trash, but with all the finish and twisted moralistic verve one expects of 40-million Hollywood dollars. If you’re looking for really good trash, I’ve seen a few porno movies that beat Showgirls hands down.