A new edition of the first book in the acclaimed Pop Classics series
The Worst. Movie. Ever. is a masterpiece. Seriously. Enough time has passed since Showgirls flopped spectacularly that it’s time for a good hard look back at the sequined spectacle. A salvage operation on a very public, very expensive train wreck, It Doesn’t Suck argues that Showgirls is much smarter and deeper than it is given credit for. In an accessible and entertaining voice, the book encourages a shift in critical perspective on Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, analyzing the film, its reception, and rehabilitation. This in-depth study of a much-reviled movie is a must-read for lovers and haters of the 1995 Razzie winner for Worst Picture.
This expanded edition includes an exclusive interview between the author and Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven, as well as a new preface.
A new edition of the first book in the acclaimed Pop Classics series
The Worst. Movie. Ever. is a masterpiece. Seriously. Enough time has passed since Showgirls flopped spectacularly that it’s time for a good hard look back at the sequined spectacle. A salvage operation on a very public, very expensive train wreck, It Doesn’t Suck argues that Showgirls is much smarter and deeper than it is given credit for. In an accessible and entertaining voice, the book encourages a shift in critical perspective on Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, analyzing the film, its reception, and rehabilitation. This in-depth study of a much-reviled movie is a must-read for lovers and haters of the 1995 Razzie winner for Worst Picture.
This expanded edition includes an exclusive interview between the author and Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven, as well as a new preface.
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Overview
A new edition of the first book in the acclaimed Pop Classics series
The Worst. Movie. Ever. is a masterpiece. Seriously. Enough time has passed since Showgirls flopped spectacularly that it’s time for a good hard look back at the sequined spectacle. A salvage operation on a very public, very expensive train wreck, It Doesn’t Suck argues that Showgirls is much smarter and deeper than it is given credit for. In an accessible and entertaining voice, the book encourages a shift in critical perspective on Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, analyzing the film, its reception, and rehabilitation. This in-depth study of a much-reviled movie is a must-read for lovers and haters of the 1995 Razzie winner for Worst Picture.
This expanded edition includes an exclusive interview between the author and Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven, as well as a new preface.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770905139 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Series: | Pop Classics , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Adam Nayman is a film critic and lecturer in Toronto. He is a contributing editor to Cinema Scope and writes regularly for Reverse Shot, Quill & Quire and The Ringer. He is one of the writers of the Viceland television series The Vice Guide to Film and has taught classes on film at the University of Toronto and Ryerson. He is the author of two books: Showgirls: It Doesn’t Suck and Ben Wheatley: Confusion and Carnage.
Adam Nayman is a film critic in Toronto for the Globe and Mail and The Grid and a contributing editor to Cinema Scope. He has written on film for the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, Film Comment, Cineaste, Montage, POV, Reverse Shot, The Walrus, Saturday Night, Little White Lies, and The Dissolve. He teaches film studies at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University and is a programmer for the Toronto Jewish Film Society. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Read an Excerpt
It Doesn't Suck.
Showgirls
By Adam Nayman
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Adam NaymanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-513-9
CHAPTER 1
"MASTERPIECE."
In August 2012, I went out for drinks in Toronto with Mia Hansen-Løve, a talented young French director whom I'd recently profiled for the Globe and Mail. I liked her movies, but I was most eager to meet her as a fellow film critic. Before becoming a director, Mia had written reviews for the legendary French publication Cahiers du Cinéma. This change in vocation placed her in a long national tradition of film critics turned filmmakers that stretched back to Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer in the 1950s, and more recently included her husband, the gifted writer-director Olivier Assayas.
I also knew that Mia was a fan of the films of Stanley Kubrick and had just cited Eyes Wide Shut (1999) on her ballot for the British film journal Sight & Sound's decennial poll of the greatest movies ever made. Because I had recently finished teaching an adult-education course on Kubrick's oeuvre, Eyes Wide Shut was on my mind even more than usual, and I thought that it'd be fun to talk about it with somebody who liked it as much as I did. (Actually, she liked it more than I did: the Kubrick movie I'd picked for my own Sight & Sound ballot was 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], a more conservative choice.)
We did end up talking about movies and comparing notes on our favorites. Eventually, the conversation settled on a film that we both admired very much: an epically scaled Hollywood production from the 1990s with fluid camerawork and a surreally rendered all-American location; an epic erotic comedy populated by an ensemble of leering, lecherous men and nubile naked women; a famous flop that generated plenty of idle gossip and dismissive giggles en route to being rediscovered as a modern classic. But that movie was not Eyes Wide Shut. Instead, I discovered that Mia was a great and devoted fan of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls (1995).
Imagine my delight at meeting a fellow traveler! Mia also told me that she'd included a scene about Showgirls in the screenplay for her next movie, Eden:
Arnaud's apartment. Int. Night
Scenes on a TV screen from the Paul Verhoeven movie Showgirls. Slumped on a couch or in an armchair: J-C, Guillaume and Anne-Claire, Cyril, Paul, Arnaud, and MIDORI, his new girlfriend. End credits. Arnaud gets up, finds the remote, and shuts off the DVD player.
ARNAUD
Showgirls. Masterpiece.
ANNE-CLAIRE
Junk!
CYRIL
I'd even say: trash.
ANNE-CLAIRE
Seriously the actress could be nominated for the worst actress of all time.
GUILLAUME
She got several Razzies.
MIDORI
What are Razzies?
GUILLAUME
Prizes for worst actress of the year. Oscars, but negative.
ARNAUD
I guess you're referring to her at times over-the-top performance.
GUILLAUME
That's putting it mildly.
ARNAUD
But it's on purpose! Verhoeven directs her like that to emphasize his take on things. He accentuates the monstrosity. He's targeting the vulgarity of the United States. This is the third time I've shown it to you and you still don't understand. It's pathetic!
J-C
Which is why I suggest we move on.
ANNE-CLAIRE
You take advantage of us each time. We're totally exhausted. You could show us any crap you want.
ARNAUD
But it's not crap. It's the masterpiece of the '90s.
PAUL
I'd take the middle road: it's not the piece of junk critics said it was when it came out. It's still Verhoeven, but not one of his better ones.
CYRIL
Pfff. The movie is a piece of shit. You're crazy.
(He stands up and goes for his cigarettes.)
In his essay "Beaver Las Vegas," critic I.Q. Hunter writes that "Paul Verhoeven's lap-dance musical Showgirls is that rare object in cultural life: a film universally derided as 'bad.' No one seems to like it. At a time of alleged cultural relativism and collapsing standards of aesthetic judgment, Showgirls has emerged as a welcome gold standard of poor taste and world-class incompetence." Hunter was writing in 2000, when most of the people who talked about Showgirls probably sounded like Cyril. Nearly 15 years later, there are more and more people who would side with Arnaud.
This swing makes Showgirls an even rarer bird than Hunter suggests. It is a film that, previously universally derided as "bad," is now widely suspected of being "good." (It even received a single, lonely vote on that aforementioned Sight & Sound poll, from Greek director David Panos, who slotted it alongside Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror [1975] and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil [1958].) Film canons are built and guarded as sturdily as fortresses, but intruders sometimes slip through the back door. Once a ratified anti-classic to rank with the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) or Valley of the Dolls (1967) on lists of the worst movies ever made, Showgirls has now become the beneficiary of shifting critical polarities, revered both at the "low" end of pop culture as a hardy cult favorite, and at the "high" end by academics as a critical fetish object. Its diverse defenders include feminist theorists, drag queens, old-school auteurists, and octogenarian superstars of the French New Wave, and there's nary an apologist among them — because, as Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw reminded us in Love Story, love means never having to say you're sorry.
The attitudes toward Showgirls may have changed, but the movie has not. It has not been re-edited into a "Director's Cut" like Blade Runner (1982) or Apocalypse Now (1979), to cite two examples of major (and majorly flawed) movies that have over the years required "rescuing" from their imperfect original incarnations. It has not been re-released on DVD with a bevy of additional scenes lifted from the cutting-room floor, which might have implicated studio tampering or an overzealous editor as the cause of the film's derided original version. It has been edited for television and home video, but only to trim the naughty bits: the film's stately parade of both scantily and entirely unclad young women had finally earned Verhoeven the verboten NC-17 rating he'd managed to avoid for his previous boundary-pushing hits RoboCop (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992).
Showgirls has the same running time now that it did when it premiered on September 22, 1995: it is 131 minutes long (including credits), which makes it shorter than an average Best Picture winner from the 1990s and longer than any of its fellow Razzie Award winners for Worst Picture except for The Postman (1997) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009). It is still organized as a guided tour of pre-millennial Las Vegas in the company of burger-scarfing exotic dancers, tyrannical choreographers, callow rock stars, and coke-snorting hotel executives. It still features a trick brassiere, several runaway chimpanzees, and a scene about the professional ethics of applying ice cubes to a dancer's nipples. And it still begins and ends with a young woman hitching a ride by the side of a crowded superhighway.
CHAPTER 2THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
When we first see Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) in Showgirls, she's thumbing a lift to Las Vegas. In the last scene of the movie, she's getting the hell out of town. The two scenes are mirror images of one another, and Showgirls as a whole is filled with mirrors. There are the deluxe models that dominate the lavish suites at the chic Stardust Hotel, providing a panoply of reflected perspectives on Nomi and her idol/mentor/rival Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon) as they stalk each other through their backstage power play cum seduction. There are the more functional row mirrors, adorned with tacked-up personal items and Polaroids of loved ones, that the secondary performers in the Stardust's various soft-core musical spectaculars use to apply make-up before and in between production numbers. There are the smaller, dirtier, dingier versions of the same at the more down-market flesh fair the Cheetah Club, these mirrors topped by a proprietary neon sign reading "Al's Girls" so that his employees can quite literally reflect on their job status as they prepare to shake their moneymakers at businessmen and tourists.
The importance of mirrors in Showgirls extends beyond the set decoration, however. Ideas of reflection and doubling are present at every level of the filmmaking. The first time that Nomi sees Cristal perform, she mirrors her gestures exactly from her spot on the balcony, as if indicating her desire to take the older woman's place. In another scene, Nomi and Cristal begin unconsciously imitating each other's hand movements as they talk over lunch at Spago. There are numerous scenes in which choreographers instruct dancers to follow their lead: the mantra of the Stardust's house choreographer Marty (Patrick Bristow) is "in sync!" which he bellows as he surveys the mechanized movements of his charges. Most of the female characters have two names: their given names and their more colorful stage monikers.
Even the film's two most infamously sleazy sequences are a matching set. In the first, Nomi delivers an extremely athletic lap dance at the Cheetah Club to Cristal's boyfriend (and the Stardust's entertainment director) Zack Carey (Kyle MacLachlan), who helplessly ejaculates in his pants and limps off into the night. Later on, Nomi repeats the dry-hump choreography almost exactly while actually having sex with Zack in his private outdoor swimming pool, underneath a fountain sculpted in the shape of a breaching dolphin.
Showgirls is rife with such two-for-one effects — it even pauses on two separate occasions to watch Nomi tuck into some fast-food French fries — and yet for many viewers, the film boils down to the clear binary opposition embodied by Cyril and Arnaud in Hansen-Løve's screenplay. Either Showgirls is a piece of shit — the received wisdom, and for a long time the majority view — or it's some sort of trashy masterpiece, which is the revisionist claim. Behind Door # 3, however, lies the tantalizing possibility that the movie might be both at the same time, a masterpiece that is somehow also a Piece of Shit. This third option is especially attractive to those who believe or condone the idea that something can be so bad that it's good — that it is possible to derive pleasure from an inept work of art not in spite of its shortcomings, but because of them.
This is the territory marked out by Susan Sontag in her landmark 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp,'" which sought to codify an amorphous and free-floating aesthetic sensibility and instead set off a half-century's worth of debate. "The ultimate camp statement," according to Sontag, is "it's good because it's awful." Coming at the end of a manifesto that already flies off in several different directions, this contradiction is a conceptual crevasse: a taxonomical space broad and deep and inviting enough to accommodate countless scores of movies, books, songs, and other misfit cultural objects seeking a cozy theoretical niche to call their own.
In their 2008 song "Singer-Songwriter," the Austin-based indie-rock band Okkervil River tunefully encapsulate this position in lead singer Will Sheff's contradictory account of a movie he'd seen with some friends. "This film we once saw was reviled for its flaws / But its flaws were what made us have fun," he sings against the sound of Charles Bissell's driving guitar, affirming the notion of time well wasted. The flawed, reviled movie in question is never named; for all we know, it might have been Showgirls, and Sheff's narrator might have seen it at exactly the sort of late-night séance arranged by Arnaud. Or perhaps it was at the behest of a less sympathetic host like Martin Codd, the New York City club promoter who told the New York Times in March 1996, "There can be nothing more hilarious than getting drunk and watching Showgirls." Codd tested out his assumption by holding screenings at his Hell's Kitchen apartment. The image that emerges from the Times story is that of a sadistic ceremony, a midnight movie mass where a guilty film is dragged out of the shadows and chained up center stage for all to see.
Is it really possible, though, to kill something that's already dead? Showgirls expired meekly at the box office. Its domestic theatrical gross of $35 million in its initial release was extremely disappointing in relation to its $40 million budget and to Verhoeven's previous American productions RoboCop, Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct, which had each been among the top earners of their respective years. Showgirls was also D.O.A. with critics, who saw a vulnerable target and did quick-hit executions of virtually everybody associated with the film. The most lethal bullets were reserved for Verhoeven, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, and star Elizabeth Berkley, who absorbed the fire like Sonny Corleone stopped at the tollbooth in The Godfather (1972) — although perhaps a more apt comparison would be Sofia Coppola in The Godfather: Part III (1990), who took the bullets meant for her father(s) onscreen and off. "She can't act, but watching her try to act, to do the things acting is rumored to consist of, is moving," wrote Anthony Lane in his typically glib evisceration of Showgirls in the New Yorker. 5 Compared to some other writers, he was being kind.
The definitive public eulogy was delivered by the Golden Raspberry Awards Foundation, which bestowed a record seven Razzies on the film, including Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Actress. Showing unprecedented chutzpah, Verhoeven bucked tradition by accepting his statuette in person. "When I was making movies in Holland, my films were judged by the critics as decadent, perverted, and sleazy," he joked. "So I moved to the United States. This was ten years ago. In the meantime, my movies are criticized as being decadent, perverted, and sleazy in this country." If the grieving period for the director was brief, it was non-existent for everyone else. Over the next few years, in a series of tell-all articles and books — most prominently Eszterhas's 2006 showbiz memoir The Devil's Guide to Hollywood — even members of the immediate family took their turn to speak ill of the deceased.
The continued abuse of a movie that had already been relegated to the slab could be taken as profaning a corpse. But it was on the midnight-movie circuit — a place where the occult is taken seriously and vampires and zombies feel at home — that Showgirls began its rise from the grave. Though few people wanted to see Showgirls when it was in theaters, on home video it became a curiosity, and then a minor group-viewing phenomenon. Starting in 1996, MGM graciously offered prints to repertory theaters, and then hired drag queens to attend the screenings and encourage audience participation.
Suddenly, Showgirls 'major reference point had shifted from Valley of the Dolls to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)."A performer named Winona, in a black vinyl miniskirt and bustier, passed out scripts that cued viewers ... when to shout along with the dopiest lines," reported theNew York Times. "The movie rolled, accompanied by non-stop shouted wisecracks. When Nomi threw a pile of French fries during a dramatic scene, a heckler yelled 'Overact, Nomi!'" MGM had allowed their intellectual property to be reduced to a punch line, but in the end, the studio laughed all the way to the bank. The various re-releases shored up Showgirls' box-office take until it became, with all revenue streams accounted for, one of the most profitable titles in the studio's back catalogue. To date, Showgirls has grossed more than $100 million. To quote the film's loquacious screenwriter: "Remember that chicken shit can turn into chicken liver."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from It Doesn't Suck. by Adam Nayman. Copyright © 2014 Adam Nayman. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- 1. “Masterpiece”
- 2. Through the Looking Glass
- 3. Getting Away with Murder
- 4. The Verhoeven Touch
- 5. “You Got a Name?”
- 6. “Ain’t Nobody Ever Been Nice to You?”
- 7. “She Can Dance, Can’t She?”
- 8. “Show Me Your Tits”
- 9. “If Somebody Gets in Your Way, Step On ’Em”
- 10. “We Just Want to Party, Baby”
- 11. “Goodbye, Darlin’”
- 12. “They Don’t Want to Fuck a Penny”
- 13. “It Doesn’t Suck”