In an interview with Rolling Stone 20 years after making Showgirls, director Paul Verhoeven spoke in its defense. “I always felt that it was what you might call a hyperbolic approach to filmmaking. Yes, it was over the top. And that was on purpose,” he said (italics his own). “It’s probably the most elegant movie I’ve ever done.”
Showgirls was a particularly extravagant bomb, given its pedigree as a $45 million studio movie from the director and screenwriting team who’d just delivered the hit erotic thriller Basic Instinct. Elizabeth Berkley, fresh off Saved by the Bell fame, stars as aspiring stripper Nomi Malone, who thrashes through Vegas like Jessie Spano on so many caffeine pills but with fewer inhibitions. She finds an idol-cum-rival in Gina Gershon’s star dancer Cristal (named after the Champagne), fervently bangs their boss (played by Kyle MacLachlan), achieves stardom in a nudie revue, and eventually hitches her way back out of town.
On its release in 1995, Showgirls was notoriously savaged by critics and withered at the box office. “To take Showgirls that seriously (as either trash-art or appalling pornography) wouldn't be worth the exertion,” wrote The Washington Post at the time. Many who continue to debate its merits and the enduring fascination it holds would disagree. Fans wasted little time reclaiming the movie as a camp favorite, relishing its over-the-top drama and flashy sizzle. In the case of San Francisco drag legend Peaches Christ, it only took three years; she began hosting interactive screenings back in 1998 that became a midnight mainstay. Showgirls became a queer touchstone for a generation hungry for its own Mommie Dearest or Valley of the Dolls, movies about women striving for fame and weathering its perils.
Others have reevaluted the film under a different light. In a book aptly titled It Doesn’t Suck, film critic and University of Toronto professor Adam Nayman argues that Verhoeven deliberately crafted Showgirls as an outrageous satire. You Don’t Nomi, a documentary that premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, features Nayman among others attempting to put their fingers on the truth of Verhoeven’s intentions and the various ways in which the film can be considered a kind of deliberate mess. (A second documentary about the movie’s making and reception, with Verhoeven’s full support, is also in production.) In 2003 Film Quarterly published a roundtable of essays by no less than seven academics approaching the film from various critical angles.
Is Showgirls a spectacularly pure example of camp? Can something still be considered camp even if we grant that it was actually intended as “elegant” satire? Some critics aren’t so sure. Haley Mlotek, who also appears in You Don’t Nomi, writes, “the fact that Verhoeven made Showgirls specifically to be satire seems more forgivable now, even if that excludes the film from being labeled pure camp.” Camp can be a slippery designation, but as the sensibility was defined by Susan Sontag in her landmark 1964 essay and has been explored by others since, Showgirls is a near-perfect vehicle through which to understand camp in all its contradictions. Here are six reasons Showgirls is camp as hell.
Because camp embraces double meanings.
Sontag calls pure examples of camp “unintentional.” “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much,’” she writes. Godfather of camp John Waters considers Showgirls a pure camp specimen in this sense. As he writes in a brief epigraph to Film Quarterly’s roundtable, “Showgirls is funny, stupid, dirty, and filled with cinematic cliches; in other words, perfect. Even better, the writer and director, no matter what they say today, don’t appear to be in on the joke.”
Camp has evolved to more often embrace the opposite idea — that being in on the joke is an essential element of camp. Think of drag queens, for example, who send up gender conventions with knowing and often cunning winks. But whether Verhoeven knew he was making a trash masterpiece is actually irrelevant; the movie can be considered camp either way. “Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken,” Sontag writes. “It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.” There are arguments to be made about the movie’s critique of American capitalism and taste for excess; it can also be considered the sum of its flashing lights, iced nipples, and gaudy manicures.
Because its eroticism goes beyond over the top.
From riding her boss’ groin like a bronco (in and out of his pool) to tongue kissing a hospitalized Cristal after shoving her down the stairs (!), Nomi expresses her sexuality in energetic extremes. Showgirls is an NC-17 film that’s brazenly explicit without being sexy, or “pornographic mayonnaise,” in the words of USC film professor Akira Mizuta Lippit. “The obscene nature of the film emerges precisely from the grotesque hybrid of pornography and hokum,” he writes.
Sontag identifies “a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms” as part of camp taste. Nomi’s personal mannerisms — flipping a tray of fries, beating up a car door, storming out of every room — are as vigorous and overstated as the thrust of her hips, whether in the air at rehearsal or during underwater coitus. She is more an embodiment of extremes, sexual and otherwise, than a fully realized person. “Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence — a person being one, very intense thing,” Sontag writes. Nomi is nothing if not that.
Because of its multiple queer readings.
Though Showgirls’ suggestion of a twisted romance between Nomi and Cristal may have been more queer-baiting than anything else, the movie’s popularity among queer audiences is undeniable. Perhaps it’s because, in Sontag’s opinion, “homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard — and the most articulate audience — of Camp.”
Aside from sparks between the two rivals, there’s a way to read Nomi and her journey through the film as a familiar queer narrative. As them. contributor Matt Baume suggests in You Don’t Nomi, she arrives in Vegas to reinvent herself and escape her past, starved for sexual attention — aspects of experience many LGBTQ+ people can relate to. Nomi pieces together a chosen family, and when one of her own is horribly violated, she kicks the perpetrator’s ass. It’s a revenge fantasy that, however hollow or implausible, may feel familiar to queer audiences.
Because it’s been reclaimed.
Delayed appreciation is another major hallmark of camp. “The process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment — or arouses a necessary sympathy” for art to be regarded as camp, Sontag writes. “What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.” That has certainly been true of the cult resurrection of Showgirls.
A musical parody called Showgirls! The Musical! played off-Broadway in 2013. The film’s 20th anniversary sparked a renewed crop of think pieces and was accompanied by a 4K restoration and theatrical re-release in France. Showgirls has also become MGM’s highest-grossing DVD of all time.
Because fans genuinely love it.
Elizabeth Berkley addressed an outdoor screening for 4000 fans in L.A. in 2015, calling the event “20 years in the making.” Berkley told the cheering crowd, “I really do want you to know this movie is something I love, but I love it because you love it, too.” Though the actress was also open about how difficult the movie’s poor reception had been for her, it’s clear she’s been able to appreciate the myriad routes fans have taken back to the movie. “I hope when you eat your french fries, you go crazy like Nomi,” Berkley said. She was speaking to a legion of real fans, both in the audience that evening and around the world, who’ve embraced the movie for exactly what it is.
“Camp taste is a kind of love,” Sontag writes. “People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as ‘a camp,’ they're enjoying it.”
Because Gina Gershon knew it all along.
“I thought Showgirls was going to be a very dark, intense movie,” Gershon told The Daily Beast in 2013. “When I got to the set, I felt, wow, this is not what I was expecting. It’s like you’re going to see a Wagner orchestra and it’s a Britney Spears concert.” Gershon, who went on to memorably star as Donatella Versace in a Lifetime movie, and recently appeared as Melania Trump on The Good Fight, has turned sly camp into a flourishing career. “I thought I was maybe in a different movie than everyone else,” she continued. “I thought, okay, this is going to be really funny! So I just had fun with it.”
Originally Posted by mae
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