The thing about Verhoeven (his American movies, at least; I’m not including the films he made in Europe in this generalization) is that he makes what you might call “parallel universe” movies.
Starship Troopers is the most obvious example. Everybody went to that expecting either (a) the typical summer shoot-em-up or (b) a faithful adaptation of the Heinlein novel. The film is neither, which is why so many people reacted negatively to it. The key to watching that movie is not to think of it as a satire of propaganda movies, necessarily; you should think of it as a propaganda movie. That is, don’t think of it as having been made by a liberal Dutch director in Hollywood; pretend that the film has fallen back to our universe from an alternate future in which the Soviets or the Nazis won and took over the world. To aid you in making this creative leap, imagine that the movie has been dubbed into English from the original Russian or German. Through this lens, the movie makes perfect sense, with its vacuous and ridiculously pretty actors, its dopey aw-shucks dialogue, the shallow rah-rah spirit, and everything else. In other words, Verhoeven isn’t commenting on the war mentality by standing outside of it and describing its horrors like a clinician, as in All Quiet on the Western Front or Stalingrad; he’s made a movie that explores the idea from the inside out, saying to the audience, “If we really went this way, this is what it would be like.” Now, you can argue that the film is a failure for a couple of reasons: First, no major critic “got” this when the movie was first released, which suggests that the message is muddled (though I’d disagree); and second, reversing and deliberately sabotaging Heinlein’s novel strikes a lot of people as being profoundly disrespectful (with which I cannot disagree).
I describe that at length to establish a baseline for looking at Showgirls, which operates on a similar level. However, it works much more subtly, because the setting seems to be recognizable as our own world. That’s a deliberate deception; basically, the movie sucks in its audience before shitting all over them. Or, well, to be more precise, not them as people, but rather their expectations as audience members.
The structure of Showgirls is based on the age-old “star is born” model; it’s a tossed salad of elements from Stage Door, All About Eve, and, of course, A Star is Born, among others. The general plot about a newcomer to entertainment rising to stardom has been a cliche since the 1930s, but we still see it today, stretching through Funny Girl and the remake of The Jazz Singer up to Glitter and 8 Mile (which at least did something interesting with it) and Chicago. There’s even a project in development at one of the studios in which A Star is Born will be explicitly remade for the umpteenth time, transplanted into hiphop.
It’s a popular, recurring story form because it’s so potent: We in the audience look up at the flickering silver screen and project our dreams of wealth and power and stardom into the beautiful actor or actress pretending to be a doe-eyed naïf; it’s an escapist fantasy that allows us to imagine that our own half-developed talent (childhood tap classes or piano lessons, or singing in the shower for grownups, or whatever) might be the ticket to fame and fortune if we only met the right mentor (and maybe fall in love in the process) or managed to be in the right place at the right time. (Eddie Izzard has a bit in his show Dress to Kill wherein he tells of sneaking onto studio lots as a kid and creeping around hoping some producer will notice him and cast him as the lead in a hypothetical project called The Creeping Kid.)
Showgirls takes this story form, and transplants it into the most foul and sleazy environment it can find that still has some of the trappings of showbiz glitz and glamour. Thus — and this is the subversive bit — it brings our associated fantasies along with it. We cannot help but identify with the rising newcomer, even though from almost the first frame the movie is telling us what an awful person she is; we feel bad when bad things happen to her, and we feel triumph when she gets her big break, but at the same time we feel deeply icky about it. If we don’t understand what the movie is doing and how it works, we may be repulsed by this conflict and reject the movie as a failure, which is how most people responded to it. I am arguing that the film does this on purpose; just like Starship Troopers, it says to the audience, “You find this fantasy appealing? Okay, but let’s look at it another way.” Most people don’t want their fantasies exploded, and the fact that Showgirls comes off as creepy-to-the-bone caused most folks to push it away, assuming (incorrectly, I assert) that this underlying moral contradiction is due to incompetence rather than by design.
Now let’s consider that design. First look at the characters; every single one is a stock type, right off the shelf of A Star is Born and All About Eve and Gold Diggers of Broadway and so on, plugged right into their expected place; a handful are two-dimensional, and most are fewer. The only difference between those “nice” pieces of froth from the 1930s and 1940s and Showgirls is that the characters get naked and say “fuck” a lot. The correlation is obvious in the performances, too. Look specifically at Kyle MacLachlan. He knows exactly what movie he’s in. Listen to the way his character speaks: a little fast, a little clipped, in a deliberate nod to the genre they’re exploring, sort of a low-key version of the same thing Jennifer Jason Leigh did in Hudsucker Proxy. (Sadly, MacLachlan can’t take credit for an interesting, intelligent performance; whenever people bring up Showgirls and say, “What were you thinking?” he has no choice but to laugh it off as a mistake and change the subject.) And he’s not the only one, and that’s not the only giveaway: There are shots, lines, and occasionally whole scenes that hearken directly back to the fantasy genre being dissected.
The real key performance, though, in my opinion, is that of Elizabeth Berkeley. It’s not a good performance, really, but I think that’s deliberate; unlike MacLachlan, I don’t think Berkeley has a clue what movie she’s in. Based on how fiercely she grabs hold of the role (despite her obvious dramatic limitations), and how seriously she obviously takes it, I think Verhoeven cruelly and consciously misled her. He has a habit of casting beautiful but vapid people, and using them as polished mannequins to undermine audience expectations; this is true in Starship Troopers, of course, and then he did much the same thing later in Hollow Man with Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin, two more thespians of questionable depth. The way he uses Berkeley in Showgirls, in my view, as viciously deceptive and unfair to the actress as it seems to be, is part and parcel with the film’s overall intent.
If you decide to get Showgirls and look at it again, I’m going to suggest a point of view that I think will help, along the lines of watching Starship Troopers as a dubbed bit of ineptitude from a semi-parallel future. Instead of watching Showgirls as an ordinary movie, step outside. Imagine yourself in the cinema projection booth, with the audience below you and the movie in front. Rather than just watching the movie, watch the relationship between the movie and the audience. As the movie plays out, look at how it introduces a familiar plot element that seems to tell the audience where it’s going, and then observe as the film quickly twists or undercuts that familiarity. Imagine how the average filmgoer, who is used to passively absorbing the average movie, with its graceless but unambiguous exposition and carefully telegraphed story points designed to lead the inattentive viewer by the hand through the plot, will perceive a given moment in the film and, without even really consciously realizing it, make certain assumptions about what the story is doing and where it’s going; and then watch as the film turns these unconscious assumptions back on the audience with a nearly accusatory tone.
Yes, it’s a fairly hostile film, with a very dark sense of twisted humor not just about the characters in the story but about the comfortable audience illusions it’s attacking. For that reason, even if you “get” it, you may not find it a particularly pleasant experience, because the whole thing, in many ways, is such a cruel joke. And in order to get the joke, you have to work pretty hard and make a big imaginative leap, and keep yourself from being sucked into the movie’s tricks and deceptions, and most people, understandably, don’t want to have to work that hard at what most people would call “merely” entertainment. From that perspective, then, Showgirls cannot be called a “good movie,” because you don’t just sit back and look at it. But it is, in my view, a great work of Art.
