Maybe we have different standards of what brilliance is. I found the satire in Robocop and Starship Troopers to be around the level of what I’d get from Saturday Night Live. It was satire and it was funny but it was also pretty obvious. It makes it impossible to believe that Verhoeven is capable of the kind of deadpan satire you’re claiming for him. Verhoeven is the kind of filmmaker who will nudge you in the ribs and say “Did you see the joke I did there?” Saying somebody doesn’t “get” Paul Verhoeven is like saying somebody doesn’t get Chuck Lorre.
Especially when the satire present in RoboCop basically boils down to “He’s Jesus!” and “Violence is awesome… I mean horrifying!” I guess you could also stick “Rich guys are tools!” in there. You get 'em Paul! No one has ever been that insightful.
That said, I think Starship Troopers’ over-the-topness is pretty great.
I was thinking more about the commercials. It’s hard to watch these and come away with the impression that Verhoeven is a subtle satirist.
“Subtle satire” is what you claim when you produce a pile of shit of a movie and people call you on it.
The question is why did it do bad box office.
There are plenty of “bad” movies that do good box office and plenty of ‘good’ movies that do bad box office. Gattaca, most people say it’s a great film. (stinker at the box office) Even the people who went to see Transformers say it’s bad but it still makes tons of money.
So whether or not the film is ‘bad’ is separate from why it did bad business.
For what ever reasons, Showgirls didn’t find it’s audience. Maybe there isn’t an audience for it, Maybe bad marketing is to blame.
I think there is no audience for it. It’s not a DVD treasure. People are never like, “here is a good movie that you missed, Showgirls!”
Yes, but asserting that Showgirls isn’t a satire is to believe that Verhoevan tried to make a sexy exploitation movie, and failed utterly.
Showgirls isn’t just unsexy, it’s aggressively unsexy, it’s unsexy on every level. I agree it ain’t subtle. It oozes contempt for the main character, strippers in general, people who want to see strippers, people who go to movies about strippers, people who go to see movies, and humanity in general. Every single character in Showgirls is loathsome, with the possible exception of Gina Gershon.
Verhoevan is a competent director. If he wants to make an action movie, he can make an action movie. If he wants to make a cheesy erotic thriller, he can make a cheesy erotic thriller. If he wanted to make a movie about strippers, and how fun it is to watch strippers being all sexy with the sex, he could have done that competently. It wouldn’t have been a great movie, but it would have been a movie that people would have gone to and thought, “Well, it wasn’t a great movie, but there sure were a lot of strippers, so whatever.”
But Showgirls is so aggressively unsexy that it has to be on purpose. Yes, Showgirls is a fiasco, and being a satire doesn’t make it enjoyable to watch. So if your definition of a “good movie” is a movie you’re glad you watched, Showgirls isn’t a good movie. If you watched Showgirls hoping to see a movie about chicks who get naked a lot, then you’re right to be outraged at the movie you actually got. It is legitimately terrible as a movie, and the satire isn’t exactly subtle either. The message of the movie is that strippers are horrible people, and people who watch strippers–and that’s you, audience of this movie–are horrible people. That’s not exactly a deep philosophical point. It’s more of a guy who thinks he’s better than you making a movie about how much better he is than you.
But on the other hand, Verhoevan can’t quite let himself off the hook, can he? You can’t, you really can’t, make a competent action movie or erotic thriller unless you can appreciate such a thing yourself. You can’t really hate something unless you also love it.
That’s easily explained by the kiss of death MPAA rating: NC-17. Let’s put it this way: Showgirls is far and away the highest grossing NC-17 film of all time, almost double second place. No deeper investigation is needed.
If it was released today with an R rating (I suspect whatever made it NC-17 in the first place would be barely notable now), would it be as successful as, say, 9 ½ Weeks?
I doubt it. 9½ Weeks was an honest attempt to make an erotic movie. Showgirls wasn’t.
Plus the media ecosystem for seeing naked chicks is completely different here in 2014 than it was in 1995.
To which I respond: Russ Meyer.
Meyer made a string of schlocky sexploitation movies like Mudhoney and Vixen and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. And these movies became cult hits.
So a studio decided to give Meyer money to make a real movie. The expectation was the Meyer would make a masterpiece. Instead he made Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Which he then followed with The Seven Minutes in order to show his first big flop hadn’t been a fluke.
It turned out that it was a lack of talent that had been holding Meyer back not a lack of money. Meyer had been making cheap exploitation movies because that was the only kind of movie he was capable of making. When he tried to make something else, all he was able to do was make an over-priced exploitation movie.
And that’s where I put Verhoeven. He’s competent up to a certain level. He can make a decent action thriller. But when he tried to make a serious drama, he exceeded his limitations. If he had made a stripper-themed remake of Ocean’s Eleven instead of a stripper-themed remake of All About Eve, he probably would have succeeded.
Actually, Nomi’s Eleven might be a really cool movie.
“Honey, lose the mask, no one will be looking at our faces.”
Not really. The short version is that people are terrible people.
Verhoeven was a child in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. He grew up watching his neighbors turn each other in to the Gestapo over a loaf of bread; people willing to destroy each other–and ultimately themselves–just to survive. The world of Showgirls is a microcosm for our world, in which life is war, and the only way to survive is to sacrifice your humanity. He could have made the same movie about auto mechanics–which, admittedly, might have been sexier. In fact, he did make the same movie about a 19th Century Dutch girl, Keetje Tippel, forced into prostitution to feed her family. And again in 2006 (Black Book) about a Jewish woman who bleaches her hair–all of it–in order to go undercover (and under the covers) to spy for the Dutch Resistance during WWII. Not to mention 1985’s Flesh and Blood, where Jennifer Jason Leigh pretends to fall in love with her rapist in order to gain his trust and, ultimately, destroy him.