‘Showgirls’: A Las Vegas Parable

Panned for being in poor taste on its release in 1995, Paul Verhoeven’s movie has made a comeback and is now hailed as a living legend.

“It’s probably the most elegant movie I’ve ever done,” Paul Verhoeven claims in a 2015 Rolling Stone article where he evokes, 20 years later, the calamitous period of his movie “Showgirls” in the United States, following the enormous success of “Basic Instinct” in 1992. It was seen as a provocation of late-1980s Hollywood, considering that even fans of the Dutch-born filmmaker were horrified by this latest offering, in which we see young dancer Nomi Malone’s hardcore initiation into society, played by Elizabeth Berkley (who had great difficulty finding another role following her appearance in this movie). The strength of public and critical rejection of the movie on its release — a first for Verhoeven, box office champion since Turkish Delight in 1973 — appeared to be a prophylactic reaction to get rid of the dirt and impurity unleashed on its unwitting spectators for over two hours, who were sickened by such poor taste. However, films that were equally as violent and outrageous were released in the same year, such as David Fincher’s “Seven” or Larry Clark’s “Kids,” and Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart” was awarded Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards. Thus, it is not as though the filth alone of “Showgirls” contaminated a wonderful, pure, morally inflexible world. Rather, it is the case that the film touched a nerve, a sensitive area or a limit.

However, the movie has been rapidly re-evaluated, particularly by Quentin Tarantino in a 1998 interview with French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles by Jacques Rivette, which left cinema-lovers astounded: “‘Showgirls’ is one of the biggest American movies of the last few years. Like all of Verhoeven’s work, it’s nasty: It’s about surviving in a world of human garbage, that’s his philosophy.”

Sham

The Canadian critic Adam Nayman dedicated a hilarious piece in praise of the movie in 2014, titled “It Doesn’t Suck.” As for this newspaper, we could not find a single piece of the subject, save for a 1996 article by Philippe Garnier on Las Vegas in cinema, where he says that the film is “one that most closely physically resembles the place: imitative, venal and ugly as sin.” The project failed after the collapse of its original film production company, Carolco Pictures, which was subsequently taken over and financed by the industrial group Chargeurs, which had bought out Pathé and the news syndicate of which this newspaper is part. In spite of these difficulties, “Showgirls” ended up paradoxically becoming profitable in the long term, its video sales having largely made up for its poor box-office performance. This takes us to its luxurious return today in digital format, released simultaneously on Blu-ray and cinemas a few months after Verhoeven’s return to form with his first French movie, “Elle.”

Verhoeven has little interest in the gambling, Mafia-focused Vegas that fascinates Scorsese (“Casino” came out the same year), to such an extent that he hardly uses the wide, twinkling spectacle of the city. He wants to take hold of the affirmative furor surrounding a quest for oneself, which is also a headlong rush into a world with no reflections or undersides. Everything here is a simulation without edges, a hectic environment where dislocated, bouncing bodies parade quickly through the absurd din of nightclubs at a manic pace. The synthesis of triumph and freefall is the measure with which the film-maker calculates his mise-en-scène, and rape is probably what the disorder of desires and impulsions converge toward, which is negotiated and sold off during the time it takes to achieve hyperbolic coitus and orgasms.

Sadistic

If casinos are built on the ecstasy of dispossession (only debt counts), the show’s universe, with its virtually naked dancers, who are viewed as de facto whores rather than artists by men (which places Nomi Malone outside of the group), supports itself on a symmetrical economy of abuse (by trickery, blackmail or by force). Verhoeven, whose sadistic materialism is the most inflexible that we can see by a long margin, does not judge, but instead observes how this world functions and derails in an exhausting frenzy, which aesthetically resembles a dream of a Berlusconian orgy; he listens to its hollow sound and how it loses itself in a grimy desert of lost dreams.