“Cruelty” is the key word for me when considering Showgirls.
It’s cruel to its audience. Over and over, it sets up the viewer’s expectations based on tropes of the genre it’s mocking, and then either reverses itself or puts a nasty spin on the cliche. The key to watching the movie, as I’ve said before, is not to watch the movie, but to watch the relationship between the movie and its audience.
It’s cruel to its culture. The rags-to-riches star-is-born fantasy is compelling, enduring, beloved. It’s one of the core fantasies of our American worldview. Showgirls takes it apart, dissects it, studies it dispassionately, clinically, and reassembles its components into a monstrous caricature of the original, exposing the darkness that usually goes unrevealed and unremarked in the story. The mythology is distorted, inverted, and perverted; and yet its road map is still easily recognizable.
And, of course, it’s cruel to its actors, Elizabeth Berkeley chief among them. She gets a lot of shit for what she did in the movie, but it’s important to remember that the director has almost total control over performance in the editing room. For any given scene, depending on the director, there will be between twenty and a hundred versions of a line, a facial expression, or other moment (say, five to fifteen takes per setup, three to six setups or more per scene). Directors and editors usually attempt to serve the actor’s performance, but really, it’s a trivial matter to do the opposite, to selectively use takes to make an actor look like an ass. In other material, Berkeley has proven herself to be, while not brilliant, not untalented either; I suspect that Verhoeven misled and misused her without explaining his motives, directing her a certain way and choosing the worst takes as best for his purpose, thereby consciously destroying her career for the sake of a single film. She doesn’t deserve the criticism she’s received for her performance, and I cannot defend Verhoeven as an individual for doing this. (And it isn’t accidental, either. Note his habitual casting of second-tier actors, like Denise Richards and Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers and Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin in Hollow Man, in his later American films. The actually-good actors are typically reserved for other purposes, in supporting roles.)
But I do defend the film. It is a masterpiece of cruelty. It is cold, manipulative, and vicious, on virtually every level. Next to Showgirls, the grindhouse glee of such superficially sadistic exploiters as Rob Zombie come off as third-rate junior-high “Scared Straight” knockoffs. Verhoeven’s film is a brutal, merciless wolf in a stripper’s g-string. It is the blackest of black comedies, so dark it doesn’t even laugh at itself; even as it shakes its tits at you, it bares its fangs in a twisted, malevolent grin, and stares at your throat with predatory anticipation.
You are, of course, free to reject the movie on this basis. Its harshly patronizing view of the mainstream audience and culture, its pitiless mistreatment of its actors, and its wicked misanthropy are all, without question, extraordinarily unpleasant. When you get right down to it, when you clear away all the other distractions, the core motivation behind Showgirls is to squat over one of our most cherished fairy tales and take a straining, groaning shit right in the middle of it. If you elect to dismiss or detest the film for this, that is, of course, your right, and I cannot and will not argue with you about your choice.
If, however, you assert that the film is simply “bad,” or that its badness is the result of incompetence rather than calculation and design, then I will forcefully disagree.
Like it or don’t. But never pretend it’s something that it isn’t.