Showgirls

Contextually, I might suggest a comparison between Showgirls and Verhoeven's third Dutch film, Katie Tippel. Take how much it shares with it the whole concept of a young, beautiful, rebellious, and brash girl who breaks through to the highest ranks in a corrupt and unbreakably caste-ridden city, especially because of how readily she is able to abandon any ethical and moral values. I might also suggest the uncomfortable comparison that Katie Tippel is a film that was originally intended to provide an understanding of the rise of socialist movements in late 19th century Holland, whereas Showgirls tells essentially the same story only set in the present day, with not so much as a shadow of the development of socialist movements in sight, so the film doesn't actually offer a way out of the marasmus depicted. But I don't quite want to do that because it might come off as me defending Showgirls in some context. And at the same time, I think it's quite possibly Verhoeven's best film. The production design has incredible drive, the characters are almost constantly in motion, and yet the individual shots are very long. The one-shot scenes transitioning from dialogue to dancing or weaving between dozens of extras in backstage dressing rooms with millions of light and reflective sources are often far more elaborately choreographed than the chorus dances themselves, but they don't show it at all. During the dance scenes, the camera is almost static (except for Nomi’s breathtaking first performance, which is shot in a way familiar to anyone who has ever been on stage in front of a full house) yet becomes more dynamic with editing. At the same time, it has a minimum of shots purely for aesthetic effect, rather they convey several pieces of information at once. ___ I am aware of the discomfort that Showgirls must have caused in artistic and critical circles in its day, because it describes the entire world of show business as an unalterable patriarchal rape-cult jungle that cannot be conquered and in which you can only succeed by conforming to it. It must have been uncomfortably familiar to the emeritus cultural establishment of the time to watch everyone well-dressed at a party dancing to smooth jazz while a brutal gang rape takes place one floor up, with nowhere to turn. The most charmingly amoral scene in the film, then, is the one where the protagonist gains confidence through the recognition from her former pimp, an otherwise macho rapist who auditions his dancers based on whether they will suck his cock. ___ When you watch Showgirls, you see the formal qualities of the film (you can complain about the acting, but show me the good acting in any of Verhoeven's films with the honorable exceptions of Sharon Stone, Kurtwood Smith, and Jennifer Jason Leigh), you watch the panic that ensued after the film, and you are retroactively aware of how the showbiz backdrop worked in the 1990s. You realize that here Verhoeven and Eszterhas hit on certain public secrets with such emphasis that the discomfort America had to deal with in this film had to be reeled in. ____As for the acting, Berkley (for whom Showgirls practically ended an acting career that hadn't even begun yet) is not a bad actress, as can be seen in some crucial scenes, but her inexperience makes her unable to quite cope with Verhoeven's direction of his actors, where he gives the actors the required performances by performing them himself using exaggerated hand gestures. It compares very well to other acting performances in his films, especially from his Dutch period. What is of course unquestionable is what an excellent dancer she is, and once she’s supposed to express herself in that way the film picks up incredibly. Personally, I prefer dance movies with less skilled dancers more than dance movies where a snotty Nicole Kidman is stepping on her coattails pretending to be a posh prostitute. _____ Nowadays Showgirls is starting to get rehabilitated by the public and the critics, which only proves the unrivalled hypocrisy of Western pop culture, which is unable to contextualize actual works unless it starts analyzing them years after the film has become socially harmless, however much it has decimated the careers of most of those involved in the meantime. (04/28/2021) (less) (more)