Taking in the Trash

BY Saige Walton

Showgirls is funny, stupid, dirty and filled with cinematic clichés; in other words, perfect… Showgirls will hold up; it will be great trash forever.
– John Waters

Showgirls has its fans. Apparently, the film takes precisely four viewings to transform from inanely stupid to ridiculously clever. Along with many critics’ public retraction of their initial response to the film, private screenings and rumoured parties have even prompted American distributors to re-release Showgirls as a midnight movie ‘event’. Audiences were encouraged to shout out some of the more memorable lines of dialogue (“But you are a whore, darlin’!”) and do their own lap dance. For those who actually like Showgirls – myself included – this is trash cinema gold. There are good reasons to love one of the most derided films in Hollywood history:

“We take the cash, we cash the check. We show them what they want to see”

Given its blockbuster budget, few associated Showgirls with the low-rent aesthetics of trash, cult and sexploitation film. But with its strip club clichés, lap and pole dances, simulated sex and women ‘on the run’, Showgirls harks back to the sexploitation flick’s heyday: to Russ Meyer’s buxom beauties turning a trick as go-go dancers and to stars like Chesty Morgan. It’s probably the most expensive, disastrous sexploitation ever made.

“Sooner or later you’re going to have to sell it…”

As we saw through the science-fictional settings of the fabulous Starship Troopers and Total Recall, Dutch-born director Paul Verhoeven loves to critique the American culture that embraced him. In Showgirls, the star-spangled sleaze of Vegas provides the vehicle for social comment. In the guise of tits and arse, we get a send-up of everything from consumer capitalism to the inner workings of the Hollywood star system. Nomi’s progress from hooker to lap-dancer, from Stardust showgirl to Goddess and, finally, Hollywood starlet, extends the exploitation of ‘flesh’ to all realms of consumption. Everything is a performance for sale.

“Nomi, do my boobs look any bigger to you?”

For all its display of naked flesh, Showgirls is not sexy in the least. Nope. It proved a spectacular failure with its intended audience. Little wonder: the sex is stylised to the point of hyperbolic satire. Everything is so obviously simulated, so orchestrated and completely over-the-top that all the dancing just looks like sex and all the sex looks like one of Nomi’s bad stage routines. And yet there is no real desire (and no real dancing) anywhere in Showgirls.

“Where you from?”
“Back East”

When he started working in Hollywood, Verhoeven claimed he just didn’t know enough about America’s nuances, so it was safer to make films that involved genre play. Like most of Verhoeven’s work, Showgirls manipulates and melds multiple genres, invoking the conventions of Busby Berkeley, backstage musicals and star-backstabbing (All About Eve, Beyond The Valley of the Dolls), the rape-revenge of horror, soft-core porn, melodrama and, yes, even the western. Think about it: Nomi travels from east to west, to the frontier city of sin; she mediates conflict, has her showdown with the bad guys and leaves town with order restored… wearing a cowboy hat. This is my not-so-secret love of Showgirls: it is a disguised western. Genius.

Of course, I might be reading way too much into Showgirls. I’m a fan. I can’t convince everyone. Still, I’m with John Waters… Showgirls is going to be great trash forever.