Over the years many films have been proclaimed as the worst in history. Some deservedly so, other wrongfully. And there have been films that were widely misunderstood. It can only be assumed that Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is one of the misunderstood specimen. Of course expectations are high when Verhoeven, director of milestones such as Robocop or Total Recall teams up with Joe Eszterhas again after Basic Instinct, then one of the best paid screenwriters. Whatever they had in mind when they were doing Showgirls is beside the point because defending this film as serious would definitely go too far, hence sound nothing but defensive. It is more conducive to consider a film its own entity as soon as it is finished, regardless of what the director or writer or producer or cinematograph had in mind. Therefore, to understand and actually enjoy Showgirls it has to be considered as satire and acknowledged that, skillfully or not, it portrays the death of the American West and the American Dream in unison.
Nomi Malone is the 90’s equivalent of a cowboy or cowgirl seeking luck elsewhere, getting into the car of an actual cowboy riding a steel horse that’s seen better days. Getting her point across and making sure that nobody’s taking advantage of her without at least paying her asking price is not a big deal to Nomi. She pulls a knife on the waster and he takes her to Las Vegas, promising that he can get her a job at a casino. As naive as Nomi is, reflecting the long-gone innocence of the American Dream, she enters the casino and tries her luck but when she returns to the parking lot she finds both the cowboy and the few belongings she had gone. Nomi standing at the parking lot, cursing and kicking at cars is an iconic scene. It sets the tone for what follows. If you want to stay alive in this Googie-style frontier town you better learn not to trust anyone. And to fight for the little you have.
She meets Molly, a seamstress working at the Stardust Casino, who has sympathy for Nomi and takes her in. They share a trailer, a first alarm signal indicating that the pretty world of show business may be accessible, yet profitable only for a chosen few, the bulk of the work being left to the postmodern equivalent of slaves. The only thing Nomi is good at, and the only thing that kept her alive, is dancing, or stripping. She works at the Cheetah’s Topless Club, finding co-workers that are likeable people and can relate to her situation, but also a boss who’s best shot at finding new talent is putting girls through the ultimate test: the casting couch. The audience is a bunch of cowboys and sleazy scumbags staring at the girls and sweating hard, unable to see human beings in them.
But this is not the worst treatment Nomi receives. Visiting Molly backstage at the Stardust, she meets the star of the show, Christal, who tells her she’s not a dancer but a prostitute. Prostitute is a key word here. Apparently, being a prostitute is the only thing Nomi loathes in full self-deception. When she goes to a night club to let off some steam, she meets James, a dancer and unsuccessful writer of shows making ends meet as bouncer. They get into a fight and James is fired but bails Nomi out of jail and is still rebuffed. Next to Mollie, he’s the only person throughout the movie treating Nomi like a human being, and at first serves as voice of reason. It is James coming to visit Nomi after Christal forced her to perform a lap dance for Zach Carey, a big gun at Stardust, for 500 bucks just to humiliate her and prove her point, who tells her what she does is prostitution but that there’s options. Blinded by the big and bright neon lights of Las Vegas, she rebuffs him again. What Nomi does during the lap dance proves that Showgirls is far from being an accurate depiction of the real world. It purposefully exaggerates what Nomi does. She moves up and down on Zach, far from being erotic, or even subtle. If anything, she resembles an animal, a predator stalking its prey. Essentially, it is hard to watch every time Nomi dances or tries to imitate what she thinks is sexy and erotic.
I’m Tony Moss. I produce this show. Some of you have probably heard that I’m a prick. I am a prick. I got one interest here, and that’s the show. I don’t care whether you live or die. I want to see you dance and I want to see you smile. I can’t use you if you can’t smile, I can’t use you if you can’t show, I can’t use you if you can’t sell.
Tony Moss
Imitation is all this take on Las Vegas is capable of, whether or not truthfully is beside the point. Nomi imitates the world of show business, alters it, processes it. She never knows that she’s not the cowgirl in this game, not even when she is invited to audition for the Stardust’s show “Goddess.” The girls have to dance and stand in line like horses at a fair being inspected by potential buyers. But instead of looking at their hoofs and teeth, casting director Tony Moss is looking for other assets. Of course it is impossible to send either of the girls home without humiliating them by uttering insults, cuffing them and delivering the most offensive “Ciao!” anyone’s ever said. This includes Nomi, who is probably hearing the word “prostitute” over and over again in her head, loses her temper and leaves. On her way out she runs into James, working at the Stardust’s valet parking, who’s trying to give her options and is fired again. He buys burgers and takes her to his home that is slightly better than what Nomi and Molly share, telling her about the show he’s writing for her but essentially, James is by no means any different from the people at the Stardust Casino. When she sees him again he’s playing the same game with a different girl but with a better outcome for himself. James is nothing but another fortune hunter and shouldn’t be mistaken for the noble gunslinger with a heart of gold.
Apparently Nomi has the “qualities” it takes to star in “Goddess” and is hired for the show. It is a successful show, yet nothing but a madhouse behind the curtain. And the show is just as overdone as Nomi’s performance as stripper. Verhoeven depicts the dancing scenes so explicitly they’re not erotic anymore but disgusting at best, reminiscent of the violence in his films Robocop, Flesh and Blood or Total Recall and definitely not admirable. It perfectly epitomizes a world that is pretty on the outside but rotten from within. Thinking that the time is ripe, Nomi is reaching for Christal’s crown. She’s pinching Zach from her and wins their cat fight by pushing Christal down the stairs during a performance. Nomi is made the star of the show and is boosted to instant fame, thinking she’s made it. What she never expect is that she has another thing coming.
Nomi and Molly reconcile after a fight even though Molly knows that Christal didn’t slip but was pushed by Nomi. Molly is invited to a party celebrating Nomi’s opening at the Stardust and they meet rock star Andrew Carver, another sleazy cowboy, who rapes Mollie together with his bodyguards. This only visualizes drastically what happens to all the women we see throughout the movie. Unlike men such as James, that have talent but lack qualities as much as “assets,” a certain upward mobility is possible for the young and the good-looking. But there’s a catch. In the end, they all sell their integrity. In the end, they all pay. In the end, they’re all reduced to being prostitutes. Just like the outlaw that knows neither moral nor mercy, they do what it takes to get paid. Nomi turns to Zach, thinking he can help Molly but she’s been too naive to look behind the pretty front. It turns out Zach knows everything about her past, how her father killed her mother, how she lived as a runaway prostitute, how she was arrested for drug possession and assault. There’s no need for a gunfight, not in a world like this. Zach is powerful enough to simply blackmail Nomi. But this doesn’t break her. It only changes her back.
Taking justice into her own hands Nomi visits Carver and beats him up, thus unmasking his masculinity as hoax and declaring the promise of the American West, the American Dream and the American Cowboy dead. Before she leaves for Los Angeles, Nomi apologizes both to Molly and Christal, finding redemption like the hero in many western movies. It is ironic how Verhoeven closes Nomi’s cycle of life when she hitchhikes and “by chance” gets into the car of the cowboy that stole her suitcase, forcefully demanding it back. When they pass a billboard announcing Nomi Malone as star of “Goddess” at the Stardust, she is back where she started, having obtained nothing more than she had at the beginning. At the same time, she didn’t lose anything that hadn’t been taken from her a long time ago. Going to Los Angeles, located farther out in the West but never part of the myth, only symbolizes the pursuit of something that is either long-gone or was never there to begin with and evokes comparisons with Don DeLillo’s debut novel Americana. The film ends here and even though Nomi isn’t much of a character we still wonder what she will do once she arrives at the Pacific down in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. We can only wonder whether she will sink or swim.