You do not know the difference between fascism and a meritocracy if you think Heinlein’s book is the former
I’m not sure it’s fair to describe his fictional society as the latter, either. For two years’ service, one gets the vote… and I think that was it. No additional special privileges, certainly not in proportion to one’s personal merits.
Pretty much. Rico’s father looks down on the military. He is not a full citizen. But he is a wealthy and successful man. The society in ST is about as far from fascism as you can get on several levels.
It’s reminiscent of the bits of Antiquity in Greece in various places and Rome at various times. Or a kind of broadened feudalism where military service is exchanged for a vote over the whole nation instead of land rights. It also reminds me of some hunter-gatherer societies where a boy becomes a man and where being a man means both participating in warfare and also being allowed in the big hut when collective decisions are being made.
I’m not sure it would be stable in a information-heavy capitalist Gesellschaft like there is in ST. But it’s neither fascist nor meritocratic.
It’s been a long time since I watched it. What was bado about the nudity and sex scenes? There is the dolphin episode in the pool, yes. There is the rape. There is plenty of non-rapey, non-dolphin-like nudity though. How did boobs fail to function?
“Everybody got AIDS an’ shit!”
“It must be weird not having people come on you.”
Joe Eszterhas has to bear some of the responsibility for this crapfest. The script was wooden and clunky.
Showgirls also suffered from bad timing. By 1995, internet porn and the video market had largely killed off porn theaters, since men could see plenty of nekkid girls at home without the embarrassment of going to a theater and asking for a ticket from a box office clerk who could see their faces.
Why would a guy pay top dollar at a multiplex to watch what he could see at home for free?
What? By 1995, home Internet access was barely a blip on the radar. And if you had it, you were surfing at 14K speeds. Though you’re right, that probably is why Showgirls was a much bigger hit on video than in the theaters.
AOL had over 2¼ million subscribers and you’re forgetting BBSs.
Even as an abysmal bomb, Showgirls sold almost 5 million tickets. If you add in every AOL user who presumably didn’t buy a ticket because they had 14K porn, you’re still looking at a movie that was less popular than Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, Judge Dredd, and Free Willy 2.
It was rated NC-17 and those movies rarely do well.
Add to that, according to a news report I saw at the time, a lot of theaters decided to more strictly enforce the rating for this movie than usual and card everyone, making it harder for the underage “LOL lets look at Jesse from saved by the bell’s titties” crowd to get in, making ticket sales even lower.
Finally, it was a pretty awful movie. If it had been good, word of mouth could have helped counter the first two problems, but a movie that shitty wasn’t going to do well no matter how it was rated.
Showgirls is a masterpiece of subversive satire. Its main difficulties are twofold: First, it takes as its target the audience itself; it invites the audience to hate itself for its own moral corruption. Not an audience-friendly approach. Second, it pulls a bait and switch. As a device to lure the audience to its own shellacking, Verhoeven begins the movie as a classic 42nd Street-style “I want to be a STAR!” Hollywood fable. Then it switches to a campy bitchfest à la All About Eve. It’s no longer about the starry-eyed dream of stardom; it’s about the moral corruption. Then it switches once again–and this is the film’s real intention–to a hyperviolent rape-revenge movie akin to I Spit on Your Grave or Thriller: A Cruel Picture. It’s kind of a Hansel and Gretel setup: the outside of the cabin is an inviting vision of candy and sexytime. But once you’re inside you discover it’s a chamber of horrors. Of course audiences would, like Hansel and Gretel, want to run for the exits.
If your intention is for your audience to hate your work of art, and you succeed in that intention, it does not imply that your work of art was anything but terrible.
Or it isn’t.
All the evidence is that Showgirls isn’t a satire of bad movies. It is instead an example of bad movies.
I feel you’re giving Verhoeven too much credit. I’ve watched most of his movies, including his early European ones. He doesn’t have the kind of depth you’re attributing to him. Even when he makes a good movie, it’s pretty straight-forward. And when he tries for satire, which he did at points in Robocop and Starship Troopers, it’s not subtle. There’s nothing to suggest he would care to or be capable of the kind of meta-satire you’re suggesting.
It was Verhoeven and it was crap. No amount of revisionist claptrap will ever counter that fact.
Perhaps if the lead didn’t have the face of a lizard and/or looked better naked…
On the contrary: the brilliance of the satire in Robocop and Starship Troopers offers plenty of evidence that Verhoeven is more than capable of such skilled satire. But that’s not even the point. That’s like saying that Lumet’s skill at taut courtroom drama is “proof” that Murder on the Orient Express couldn’t possibly be a big fluffy Old-Hollywood entertainment. Verhoeven did some brillian satires (as already noted) and some powerful non-satires (Keetje Tippel, Spetters, Soldier of Orange, Black Book). Each movie stands on its own.
Frankly I didn’t “get” Showgirls the first time I saw it. I thought it was horrid dreck. But then I saw it again 5 years later and for some reason it gelled on second viewing.
Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark had similar intentions, and even employed similar devices; it’s possibly even more audience-unfriendly than Showgirls. Does that make it a terrible movie?
Meh, “satire” is an easy label to affix, since it could apply to anything the claimant wants.
For what it’s worth, Showgirls didn’t make me hate myself or analyze myself or look inside myself or even touch myself much. Aside from being a little surprised to see Alan Rachins in a non-L.A. Law role, I was kind of unaffected.
No, the fact that it’s a terrible movie makes it a terrible movie.
The guy seen her as a groupie and him and his friends raped her… yes she was willing to have sex with HIM but not the others…