# What's the argument that Showgirls was a good movie?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [December 19, 2005, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238 "2005-12-19T02:14:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/1 "2005-12-19T02:14:13Z")
I’ve heard here and there that some people think Showgirls was a really good movie, and it just got a bad rep in the pre-buzz which ruined its reception upon release.
I’ve seen the movie. I saw it with nudity edited out by the painting on of fake underwear, and I don’t know if any scenes were edited out. But anyway, what I saw was unquestionably, definitely, no doubt about it, _bad_.
Is the idea supposed to be that somehow the movie is, on purpose, “so bad its good?”
Or what?
-FrL-
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### Author:  [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/2 "2005-12-19T02:21:02Z")
Paging lissener!
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### Author:  [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/3 "2005-12-19T02:30:39Z")
> [@Mr. Blue Sky](#):
>
> Paging lissener!
Please, no!
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### Author:  [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/4 "2005-12-19T02:32:25Z")
Just let it go. Turn your back, and walk away. It just isn’t the time. This is the holiday season. Think happy thoughts.
But. Just. Walk. Away.
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### Author:  [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/5 "2005-12-19T02:32:28Z")
> [@Qadgop the Mercotan](#):
>
> Please, no!
Please no x40!
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/6 "2005-12-19T02:39:27Z")
[Try these](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=248417&highlight=showgirls) [two threads](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=239050&highlight=showgirls') for some edification, if you must.
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### Author:  [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/7 "2005-12-19T02:40:41Z")
[Fixed second link](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=239050&highlight=showgirls)
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/8 "2005-12-19T02:45:35Z")
> [@Mr. Blue Sky](#):
>
> Paging lissener!
. . . or **Cervaise** , or **Interrobang!?** , or a growing number of “professional” film critics.
To be fair, the two threads linked are very old, and neither ended very well. There have been more recent–and less heated–discussions of this.
For now, here’s an [external link](http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=1171) that lays out the case pretty well.
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### Author:  [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/9 "2005-12-19T02:48:12Z")
> [@lissener](#):
>
> . . . or **Cervaise** , or **Interrobang!?** , or a growing number of “professional” film critics.
Sorry, I just automatically associate you with that film. No offense.
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### Author:  [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/10 "2005-12-19T02:51:17Z")
Is it a good movie? It has loads of boobies in it. I like boobies a lot. Seeing boobies makes me happy. [size=1]But not enough to make this a good film.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/11 "2005-12-19T02:54:00Z")
Here’s a capsule review that I published:
**_Showgirls_
dir: Paul Verhoeven
1995**
The time has come to reevaluate one of the most universally loathed films of the last decade. Showgirls is a wicked piece of satire that went over everyone’s head–including mine–on its first release in 1995. Being a committed Verhoeven fan, I went with higher expectations than the critical bandwagon had dictated. Nonetheless, I dutifully hated it. Cut to, five years later, and I come across a review in which the _Chicago Reader_’s Jonathan Rosenbaum refers to an article wherein noted French director Jacques Rivette “[defends] \*Showgirls \*as the best and most personal of Verhoeven’s American films.” Intrigued, I donned a fake mustache and rented it. I was stunned. Stunned I tell you. Five years’ perspective made this second viewing an entirely new experience. Yes, Elizabeth Berkeley is awful. But we don’t object when John Waters uses bad actors intentionally. Perhaps that’s because Waters is ultimately very affectionate toward his characters, while Verhoeven clearly hates just about everyone. It’s crucial to Verhoeven’s vision that Berkeley be unable to convince us of her character’s humanity, because Nomi (“no me”?) is inhuman. In a deeply subversive twist on the Hollywood cliche of the stagestruck ingenue’s rise to stardom, Nomi finally achieves her full potential when she stops pretending to be human and embraces her inner monster. At the end of Showgirls, I had a mental image of Nomi shedding her showgirl skin to reveal a hideous monster, and this was confirmed for me by the song that played over the closing credits: Siouxsie Sioux singing “I Need a New Skin.” Please, don’t wait for the French to point out our myopia once again: see and reevaluate Showgirls as film that perfectly fulfills its every intention, unpalatable as those intentions may ultimately be.
And here’s a bio of the director I wrote at about the same time:
**Paul Verhoeven**
Paul Verhoeven might the most controversial film director to achieve mainstream commercial success. Many serious critics consider him a dirty-minded hack; others, equally serious, would have you believe he’s the postmodern lovechild of Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan Swift. Count me among the latter.
Paul Verhoeven was born July 18, 1938, in Amsterdam. (His childhood memories of Nazi occupation inform his work on many different levels.) While earning a doctorate in mathematics and physics, he became interested in making films. His later work as a documentary filmmaker for the Marine Film Service of the Royal Dutch Navy provided him with opportunities to learn the craft of filmmaking. After a stint in Dutch television, he began directing feature films in 1973 with “Business Is Business,” an awkward sex comedy with a prostitute as protagonist. (He would rarely–though with a couple notable exceptions–stray far from such subject matter as his skills matured and his themes solidified.) Over the next 12 years, Verhoeven became the Netherlands’ most successful director with the critically and commercially successful films “Turkish Delight,” “Keetje Tippel,” “Soldier of Orange,” and “Spetters,” culminating with the explicitly Hitchcockian and feverishly stylish thriller “The Fourth Man,” which features a beautician named Delilah (get it?) who has a frightening flair with scissors. The international (read: American) success of this film put Hollywood onto him, and all of his subsequent features have been American productions with wildly variable critical and commercial reception.
Like Hitchcock, Sirk, and Fassbinder, most of Verhoeven’s films are about the power of female sexuality. And, also like them, he seems by turns–and sometimes concurrently–fascinated and appalled by this awesome power; many of his heroines are more like superhuman fertility goddesses than like real human women. Explicitly or not, the central image of much of Verhoeven’s work is the Freudian concept of the vagina dentata. This combined with the other pillar of Verhoeven’s artistic vision–an overwhelming misanthropy (see childhood, Nazi occupation)–serves to make much of Verhoeven’s work problematic for many viewers. Like Lars Von Trier, the most frequent target of Verhoeven’s viciously gleeful anger is the film audience itself, an approach which warms very few cockles. In “Flesh and Blood” (1985), an abducted medieval maiden siezes control of her rapist by pretending to enjoy it; in his homage to Hitchcock, 1992’s “Basic Instinct,” and in the 1995 vicious satire “Showgirls” (a highly controversial film which some critics, myself included, consider Verhoeven’s masterpiece and one of the most grossly underappreciated films of all time), Verhoeven’s mythology of the vagina dentata is fully–almost literally–realized, with two of the fatale-est femmes since “Diabolique” or “Mademoiselle.” (In “Basic Instinct,” Verhoeven pays sly tribute to Sirk by casting Dorothy Malone, Oscar winner for Sirk’s “Written on the Wind” and an obvious foremother to “Showgirls”’s Nomi Malone, as murderer-mentor to Sharon Stone.)
In his science fiction movies, the femme fatale tends to be less in evidence (though never completely absent), but Verhoeven’s guiding misanthropy remains in the forefront. “Robocop” (1987) is a satire of corporate greed (as is “Showgirls,” on one of its many levels); but it’s also a special-effects thrill ride with lots of explosions. “Total Recall” (1990) is probably his most straightforward blockbuster, but with a story taken from Phillip K. Dick Verhoeven still manages to ridicule the government. “Starship Troopers” (1997) is a twisted homage to Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and a vicious satire of jingoistic patriotism, but it’s also got some very cool giant bugs in it. “Hollow Man” (2000) is a meditation on voyeurism and personal responsibility, but it’s also a pretty cool special-effects vehicle about an invisible mad scientist.
Paul Verhoeven, by working well within the visual vocabulary of the Hollywood blockbuster but upending the audience’s expectations at every opportunity, is at the same time one of the most commercially polished and politcally (and sexually) subversive directors working today.
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### Author:  [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/12 "2005-12-19T03:40:50Z")
Showgirls had lots of tits and ass and sex and was funny on many levels (remember the dolphin thrash sex scene?). What’s not to like?
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### Author:  [@Kythereia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kythereia)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/13 "2005-12-19T04:15:18Z")
…
_peeks out from between fingers, hesitantly, :eek:_
…Oh, whew.
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### Author:  [@Omniscient](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omniscient)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 7:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/14 "2005-12-19T07:17:47Z")
OK, I hate doing this but I just have to comment.
**lissener** , you quoted yourself as saying that “_Showgirls_ is a wicked piece of satire that went over everyone’s head”. The same comment could easily be made regarding the similarly divisive _Starship Troopers_.
Now, if Verhoven is to be a heralded filmmaker shouldn’t his “satire” not go over the audience’s head? Especially apparently astute ones such as yourself and proclaimed Verhoven fanboys. To me it speaks as a pretty strong criticism to say that the directors message was lost on it’s audience. I can appreciate that you can alter your impression of a film once the director explains his goals or once upon repeated examination certain subtleties come to light, but is it not still a shortcoming of the film that such clarification and digging is needed? Thats not to say all films should beat you over the head with their message, but if it’s lost on most of your audience you didn’t really do your job.
The Verhoven admiration society borders on being apologetic at times, and could be compared to the fanboyism of Spielberg, Lucas and Jackson’s fanbase.
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### Author:  [@pool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pool)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/15 "2005-12-19T07:31:54Z")
Well you get to see Jessie naked so that may be a saving grace.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 9:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/16 "2005-12-19T09:27:21Z")
> [@Omniscient](#):
>
> . . . it speaks as a pretty strong criticism to say that the directors message was lost on it’s audience. . . .
The same was true of Hitchcock and Sirk, two acknowledged masters who were not well understood until their work had been digested for years.
The concept of an artist whose work isn’t understood until after his death is not a new one, so the rule you’re trying to formulate doesn’t really make much sense. You seem to be suggesting that an artist’s initial reception will always be the only valid one. Again, history suggests otherwise.
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### Author:  [@Elmer\_MuD\_PhuD](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_MuD_PhuD)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/17 "2005-12-19T12:11:55Z")
Boobies. That is all.
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### Author:  [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 12:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/18 "2005-12-19T12:26:53Z")
Long, long ago in a thread far, far away I posted this:
\*\*I remember the movie as utter rubbish but having discovered that this thread is not an April Fools joke I will make the effort to see it again. However I am mindful of Verhoeven’s own comments about the movie :
“It was more like ‘How can we be more outrageous than Basic Instinct?’, which was probably not the best motive to do a movie! Our glee in saying that now we were going to be so offensive that nobody could believe what we’re going to do - that was probably me pushing. And Eszterhas probably, because of the guy he is, was pushing me at the same time to do something which would be beyond boundaries, which he does a lot.”
Which makes me wonder whether the critics are seeing the emperor’s new movie.\*\*
Which I presume will remain just as unanswered by the proponents of this piece of garbage. Yes, I did watch it again.
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### Author:  [@Nametag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nametag)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/19 "2005-12-19T16:34:06Z")
> [@Omniscient](#):
>
> OK, I hate doing this but I just have to comment.
>
> **lissener** , you quoted yourself as saying that “_Showgirls_ is a wicked piece of satire that went over everyone’s head”. The same comment could easily be made regarding the similarly divisive _Starship Troopers_.
>
> Now, if Verhoven is to be a heralded filmmaker shouldn’t his “satire” not go over the audience’s head? Especially apparently astute ones such as yourself and proclaimed Verhoven fanboys. To me it speaks as a pretty strong criticism to say that the directors message was lost on it’s audience. I can appreciate that you can alter your impression of a film once the director explains his goals or once upon repeated examination certain subtleties come to light, but is it not still a shortcoming of the film that such clarification and digging is needed? Thats not to say all films should beat you over the head with their message, but if it’s lost on most of your audience you didn’t really do your job.
>
> The Verhoven admiration society borders on being apologetic at times, and could be compared to the fanboyism of Spielberg, Lucas and Jackson’s fanbase.
I’m not satisfied with **lissener** ’s reply to this, so I’ll make my own – I’m not a Verhoeven fan (to put it mildly), but I do see **lissener** ’s point.
Read this again:
> [@lissener](#):
>
> …the most frequent target of Verhoeven’s viciously gleeful anger is the film audience itself…
It’s obviously not Verhoeven’s intention that the audience “get” his movies. For the most part, it’s better that they don’t – only a few are required. You can see the same attitude in Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets.”
My problem with “Starship Troopers” is that it IS quite obvious that
> [@](#):
>
> “Starship Troopers” (1997) is a twisted homage to Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and a vicious satire of jingoistic patriotism
but also that Verhoeven’s intention was to do artistic violence to Heinlein’s philosophy and his adulatory fan base – such a director should never have been given this film.
Similarly, “Showgirls” can be judged a failure – not because the many-layered satire fell through, but because unlike “Troopers,” it didn’t connect with _any_ audience, which rather spoils the joke.
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### Author:  [@psiekier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psiekier)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2005, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-argument-that-showgirls-was-a-good-movie/336238/20 "2005-12-19T16:57:42Z")
> [@Frylock](#):
>
> I’ve heard here and there that some people think Showgirls was a really good movie, and it just got a bad rep in the pre-buzz which ruined its reception upon release.
>
> I’ve seen the movie. I saw it with nudity edited out by the painting on of fake underwear, and I don’t know if any scenes were edited out. But anyway, what I saw was unquestionably, definitely, no doubt about it, _bad_.
>
> Is the idea supposed to be that somehow the movie is, on purpose, “so bad its good?”
Philip Michaels had [this](http://www.philipmichaels.com/archives/000750.html) to say about it.
Me? I sat through _Striptease_ instead. How can you _not_ like a mainstream movie that features Pandora Peaks?
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