Showgirls was bad: to begin with.
While absorbing any piece of art is always an individual experience, and the way we regard it is deeply personal. It’s hard to say that a film is truly bad just because you don’t enjoy, although if it’s out of focus or truly ineptly made that’s a line crossed. But, once in a while, a film comes along that is so catastrophically incoherent, so tonally clumsy, that so deeply fails to achieve whatever it was it was aiming for, so that’s why I’m comfortable calling Showgirls is a bad film. It’s the nadir of coked-out high concept 90s cinema, with scripting bad boy Joe Eszterhas and cool kid director Paul Verhoeven letting former TV star Elizabeth Berkley slide face-first down the pole into the floor in search of a mature role. It turned a profit, but mainly from car-crash viewings, and a chance to catch some celebrity T&A. Careers were derailed, and the erotic thriller that was supposed to turn Hollywood on its ear became the stuff of Razzies legend.
That doesn’t mean there is nothing interesting about it. For me, it’s how it revealed the shortcomings of its creators. Everyone realized that Eszterhas wrote sleaze. Verhoeven, coming off the blockbuster trifecta of RoboCop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, started to loose his sheen as the European enfant terrible, and began to look more and more like Lars von Trier (at his most misanthropic) had somehow managed to sneak into the studio system. He’d already been pretty much kicked out of Dutch cinema, mainly because his satires were obnoxious and obvious, and American audiences and studios were starting to see those same flaws.
Often the discussion about a film is more interesting and worthwhile than the film itself, and that’s why You Don’t Nomi exists. First-time director Jeffrey McHale posits a basic theory from the get-go: that there’s an argument that Showgirls is a masterpiece, and there are unseen, ethereal voices drifting over footage that that back that idea up. That pretension is gorgeously undercut by former San Francisco Examiner critic Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, who savagely attacks its entry-level symbolism (mirrors, she murmurs in disbelief, that’s all you’ve got?). She represents the second, and more common belief, that it’s a piece of shit, empty-headed and pompously executed. Did Verhoeven really think he was delivering some grand insight, telling America that Las Vegas is a city built on sin? That’s your grand revelation.
McHale’s theory is that Showgirls really a masterpiece of shit, that the merit comes from appreciation of its badness. It’s earned its position as a piece of accidental camp (ignoring Verhoeven’s later and easily debunked ideas that he was having a joke), but even then that’s not enough to make an audience waste 131 minutes of its time. What’s fascinating here is the community around this horrible film, who come at it with the firm belief that they get something from it. Sometimes, it’s not even the film itself: it’s the theatrical version, which is more a spoof than a recreation, which lives in a liminal space that depends on the failures of the film to be its own success.
Love or hate Showgirls, no one is going change their mind after You Don’t Nomi. If it manages anything, it re-enforces the “piece of shit” argument, dismantles many of the defenses, and will increase the sympathy for Berkley, whose career has been defined by the pole-licking scene here and the infamous “I’m so excited” caffeine pills meltdown in Saved by the Bell. That those two moments have now become interchangeable shows how films have lives beyond themselves – even if the film is bad.
Not that these are original thoughts. Films about films are a whole subgenre, and there’s an enormous thematic crossover with the upcoming Hail to the Deadites about Evil Dead Fans, or Memory: The Origins of Alien, or The Impact & Legacy of Jaws or Best Worst Movie, or dozens more. McHale definitely creates an exploration of a cultural – or at least cult – phenomenon that feels like a full-fledged documentary rather than an extended DVD extra. It may not have the car-crash allure of Showgirls, but it’s definitely good.
You Don’t Nomi is available in DVD and VOD now.
This article appears in August 21 • 2020.
