Like all actors these days, Elizabeth Berkley is a student of the human condition, engaged in diligent research that might deepen her artistic understanding. And so when she won the role of the professional stripper Nomi in Showgirls, the big-budget “adults-only” movie that opened to much fanfare on Sept. 22, she friended professional strippers to plumb the depths of their lives, as method actors do. As she reports in recent interviews, she ” learned a lot from the women who take off their clothes for a living.”
At first blush the statement may seem odd, since it suggests that Elizabeth Berkley is a woman who doesn’t take her clothes off for a living, notwithstanding the two-hour movie currently in general release in which she does take her clothes off, repeatedly, and presumably not for free. Her stripper confidante are entitled to wonder: If Elizabeth Berkley doesn’t take her clothes off for a living, then who does?
But it is impolite to make this rather obvious point at this moment in the evolution of the American cinema. Miss Berkley is mainstream actress — former star of an unwatchable sitcom called Saved by the Bell. And Showgirls is a mainstream movie, produced by a major studio, MGM; written by a famous screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas; and filmed by a much-praised director, Paul Verhoeven. And if it happens to show large numbers of naked’ women engaged in sexual acts with’ the intention of arousing its audience, it’s not pornography, it’s . . . as I say, a mainstream movie produced by a major studio.
Showgirls tells the story of Miss Berkley’s Nomi, a down-on-her-luck dancer with tons of raw talent who comes to Las Vegas in hopes of making it big. The theme is something of a departure for Eszterhas, who was paid more than $ 2 million for his screenplay. While it’s true that he first found screen success as the writer of the early-80s hit Flashdance, which told the story of a down-on-her-luck dancer with tons of raw talent who comes to Pittsburgh in hopes of making it big, over the last several years he has concentrated on murder mysteries — Basic Instinct, Music Box, Jagged Edge, Sliver — in which a protagonist is at first suspected of having committed murder and (in a surprise twist) actually has! With Showgirls Eszterhas proves at last that he can do more than rewrite the same story, over and over. He can rewrite two stories over and over.
Showgirls embellishes and advances the earlier Flashdance formula. In Flashdance the girls danced in leotards and baggy sweaters; in $ IShowgirls they dance naked. The newer movie is darker, filmed in the half- light that forces critics to use words like demimonde and gritty. Shortly after hitchhiking into Vegas, Nomi finds work as a stripper in a cheesy, poorly lit strip club. How cheesy? Lucky customers with a spare $ 50 can get her to “lap-dance” — an innovation of the safe-sex era whose mechanics are irrelevant here. The movie depicts those mechanics in detail, to thunderous music, and Miss Berkley, ever the Stanislavskian, attacks her work with gusto, her back bent like a wishbone, her pneumatic lips parted in a come- hither from hell.
Despite these professional satisfactions, Nomi aches for a more legitimate venue for her dancing: a topless revue at an upscale hotel on the Strip. Through pluck and luck she wins a part. She thinks it’s going to be all glitter and colored lights. In fact it’s the same old gritty demimonde. There is some violence as the bad guys get their comeuppance, and the movie closes with Nomi hitching back out of town.
In the world of hard-core porn, I’m told, wily filmmakers stick to a formula: so many acts of fellatio and no more, so many minutes of cunnilingus, a set number of lesbian encounters, one incident of menage a trois — and presto: a regulation porno movie. As the first big-budget film to win both a NC-17 rating and a wide theatrical release, Showgirls may similarly serve as a template for its successors — if, as its distributors and producers hope, it encourages other mainstream filmmakers to be as bold as they.
In that case the formula, based on Showgirls, will be: 20 to 30 minutes of full frontal female nudity, two scenes of simulated heterosexual sex to the point of climax, one scene of overt lesbianism and one soulful lesbian French kiss (assuming the French approve), and several dozen uses of the word “fuck,” so long as it is spoken in husky tones by a pretty girl with pneumatic lips.
This sounds like a can’t-miss formula, but for the successful execution of bi g-budget porn, some negative rules apply as well. Showgirls does not, con trary to news reports, deal in “explicit” sex. There are no gross-out close- ups of the sex act; in the half-light no nodes glisten, no protuberances swell mysteriously. On the single occasion when Full frontal male nudity would seem called for, the camera cuts demurely to the actor’s sculpted torso. The overarching purpose of the movie is of course prurient, but its lack of success in this regard is reassuring. As you find your seat in the theater you needn’t worry that Pee Wee Herman sat there for the matinee.
The final negative rule is most important: The filmmakers must never admit what they’re up to. A few years ago, Eszterhas and Verhoeven were responsible for Basic Instinct, which was threatened with an NC-17 rating before it was trimmed to qualify for an “R.” This trine they and their bankrollers simply accepted the NC-17 rating without complaint — and with, most likely, a great deal of relief. The stricter rating not only guarantees publicity for an otherwise uninteresting movie but also casts Eszterhas find Verhoeven as pioneers on the frontier of free expression.
Thus do we have one of those strange disjunctions so common nowadays: a pair of filmmakers courageously challenging Victorian repression even as their movie, the raunchiest mainstream picture in history, opens on more than 1,000 screens nationwide.
Before its release the distributors worried loudly that their film would be stonewalled: theaters wouldn’t screen it, newspapers wouldn’t accept the ads, TV stations would decline to run its promos. One by one, of course, these barriers to art have come tumbling down. “We have dispelled the myth that you wouldn’t be able to advertise NC-17 movies,” an MGM executive announced triumphantly to U.S. News.
The problem is that even here, in our myth-dispelling age, as you dispel old myths you tend to generate new ones, to which the deluded cling just as ferociously. Eszterhas, for example, defends his work like so: “Showgirls is a morality tale. It is about a young woman who refused to be corrupted at the deepest part of her being. Tempted by a world of drugs, glitter and loveless sex, she turns physically and psychologically against the forces trying to corrupt her.”
Despite weighty evidence of their technical incompetence — the movie’s astounding implausibilities, its clunky shifts of mood, its confused timeline – – Eszterhas and Verhoeven drop tantalizing hints that they have admitted to themselves the depth of their cynicism.
When Nomi befriends an aspiring choreographer — a veteran of the Alvin Ailey dance troupe — he ridicules her desire to “move up” from the cheesy stripclub to the topless revue at the upscale hotel. At the strip club, he explains, “they want tits and ass and you have to give ’em tits and ass. There [at the hotel] they pretend to want something else — and you still have to give ’em tits and ass.”
“We’re whores,” a fellow dancer later tells a disbelieving Nomi. “We cash the check and show them what they want to see.” At such moments a viewer can’t help but wonder: Could it be that this is a knowing postmodern joke — a comment within the movie about the movie itself?.
Consider the scene, there in the darkened multiplexes of America, where moviegoers pay $ 6.50 to watch simulated sex while pretending they want to watch a film, which stars a pretty young woman bumping and grinding naked while pretending to be an actress playing a character, who was conceived by a famous screenwriter pretending to create a morality tale while writing a sanitized stroke movie. The potential for postmodern irony is dizzying.
Is it possible that with these lines of dialogue Eszterhas and Verhoeven are tweaking us all in a sophisticated, mischievous gag?
Nah.
By Andrew Ferguson
