It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls

By Adam Nayman

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781770905139

Adam Nayman

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.

Book preview

Copyright

Preface to the Second Edition

You need to be careful, said the voice on the telephone. Because it belonged to my mom, I listened. I had called her one afternoon in October of 2012 to tell her I’d secured my first book contract: I was going to write about Showgirls.

Showgirls: a movie so lurid that the Motion Picture Association of America branded it with an NC-17 — the ratings board equivalent of a scarlet letter — and supposedly so laughable that film critics wore out their thesauruses looking for synonyms for terrible. The film bombed at the box office, swept the Razzie Awards, and waylaid the career of its leading lady almost before it began. As a 14-year-old in 1995, I’d snuck into a screening in Toronto, hoping to get a glimpse of something forbidden; I left the movie thinking it was actually pretty good and funny on purpose, rather than by accident as the newspaper critics kept insisting.

Over the next 20 years, as I became a newspaper critic myself, I slowly discovered that I wasn’t alone: that in every corner of film culture, from academia down to the midnight-movie circuit, there were Showgirls fans determined to shine its tarnished reputation. It Doesn’t Suck was my own attempt at a spit-polish even as I tried to acknowledge that the movie was fundamentally unclean. Its griminess doesn’t come out in the wash, and nor should it — as if a movie about Las Vegas directed by Paul Verhoeven would be anything but filthy. But there’s a fine line between appreciating tastelessness and practicing it, and when I sat down to start writing, my enthusiasm — both for Showgirls and my own good fortune in getting to write at length about it — was tempered by a caution that was only in part self-serving (and only sort of because I tend to listen to my mom).

Five years later, I can’t say that writing, promoting, and reflecting upon the topic of Showgirls as a misunderstood masterpiece has necessarily deepened my appreciation or affection for the movie itself, but that may also be because I’ve never really needed my mind changed about what the film is doing. For all the tools in Showgirls’ artistic arsenal (an armoire stocked with designer blunt implements — spiked Louboutins and Versace nunchucks) a subtle touch is not one of them. In a way, the excessively nasty tone of Showgirls’ reviews (however cluelessly articulated by dog-piling newspaper critics looking for an easy target) is commensurate with the overscaled mania of the movie itself: make an extreme movie and get an extreme response.

And yet this logic doesn’t hold — or maybe just doesn’t seem fair — when it comes to Elizabeth Berkley’s acting. Verhoeven’s track record helming science-fiction blockbusters insulated his reputation and set him up to release Starship Troopers two years after Showgirls flopped. Meanwhile, Berkley became a lightning rod for not only criticism, but also overt scorn and derision. She was the public face of a Hollywood debacle. And, in a film that’s subtly sarcastic around the edges — the Verhoeven Touch, as I refer to it — the actress’s apparently earnest, body-and-soul-baring fervor stands out. It’s uncomfortable to watch an actress being serious when everyone else in front of or behind the camera seems to be in on some larger joke.

I’ve always thought that it’s the contrast between Berkley’s seriousness and Verhoeven’s mischievousness that gives Showgirls some of its strange power. And considering that the film’s subject is a business where women allow their images to be manipulated by men, I’ve always found Berkley’s performance moving rather than merely ridiculous. This is not to say that I confuse the actress with her character: I’m not envisioning an ELIZABETH BERKLEY IS NOMI MALONE billboard on the roadside of my mind’s eye. But if, as both Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas insist, their film was meant as a critique rather than a celebration of commodified female exploitation, then the fact that Berkley’s career was all but destroyed in the aftermath seems to vindicate them even as it brings them to the edge of villainy. Surely this point could have been made with less collateral damage.

Because It Doesn’t Suck was published in 2014, it did not include an account of the June 2015 screening of Showgirls held in a cemetery in Los Angeles as part of Cinespia’s Hollywood Forever series — an event that attracted some 4,000 people, including Berkley herself. Speaking to the assembled crowd (and receiving a hero’s welcome as she took the stage) Berkley took the occasion to make peace publically with Nomi’s legacy — an unexpected development considering her past reluctance to go on the record about Showgirls. I had the most extraordinary experience making the film, she began, which is why when [it] came out, it was more painful than anything you can imagine. From there, she shifted into affirmational mode. Whether this film has been your guilty pleasure, she said, whether you have played Pin the Pasties on the Showgirl, or whether Nomi’s own plight and her fight and struggle has become your own anthem in your life, I hope that it’s brought you comfort, I hope that it’s brought you joy, I hope that you have made incredible memories with your friends watching it cozy on your couch.

Berkley seemed to be speaking from the heart, and her participation the next year in a Saved by the Bell reunion skit on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show (which alluded to the film in a throwaway line of dialogue about Jessie Spano becoming a stripper) hinted at skeletons exhumed from a walk-in closet. But hearing Nomi Malone herself waxing nostalgic and even affectionate about Showgirls signified something beyond her real-life alter ego’s catharsis; it seemed to be the last word on the film’s reclamation. Read Berkley’s remarks carefully (as carefully as they must have been prepared, though her delivery made it sound like she was speaking from the heart) and they betray an awareness of all the different ways the movie has been redeemed: not just as guilty pleasure but also as a home-video hit, a communal viewing experience, and maybe even as a work of surprising emotional and thematic dimension. We don’t live in the past, she added. 1995 was such a different time, where taking risks like that were not embraced. They were laughed at.

Here, Berkley could be writing her own preface to my book, which is intended as much as a reckoning with how time and the cultural shifts that go with it can alter our perspective on artworks as some fan-ish close-reading of a movie whose charms don’t lie between the lines, but rather in the exclamation points at the ends of them. (I say more about this in the pages to follow, but if there’s a funnier delivery in film history than Robert Davi’s Al Torres congratulating Nomi on her upward mobility by saying wistfully, It must be strange not having people come on you, I haven’t come across it.) One of the recurring questions that I was asked while doing press for It Doesn’t Suck was whether or not I thought that praising Showgirls was part of a larger cultural trend of elevating trash, and if I was being opportunistic rather than rigorous. I usually answered by saying that it was (and I was), with the caveat that, in this case, it took the passing of two decades for the movie to become, if not fully respectable or reputable, then at least arguably so.

This is a very different circumstance from the present moment of social-media driven hype and anti-hype, in which films are adjudged failures months before their release and then reclaimed as misunderstood by the end of opening weekend. I remember talking with a friend after a press screening of Ridley Scott’s misbegotten 2013 thriller The Counselor (a movie that features a sex scene at least as absurd as Nomi and Zack’s dolphin-act in the pool). She knew that I was working on a book about Showgirls at the time and said, as we left the theater, "In 20 years, a younger version of you is going to be releasing a book about this." (I think she was being generous: we won’t have to wait that long).

I’ve tried the thought experiment where Showgirls is released in the age of Twitter and Instagram, not that it doesn’t already have a presence on these platforms in the form of myriad and glorious GIFs, many of which flash across my feed on a daily basis. And, of course, it doesn’t work. For one thing, imagining a world where Showgirls didn’t exist in 1995 is for me — and probably many others — impossible. For another, a big-budget, fully nude melodrama of this sort would never be made today (although I suppose there is the old time-travel paradox that if Showgirls hadn’t crashed and burned in 1995 and created untold panic in Hollywood over the financial risks of sex-filled studio films, maybe somebody would be dumb enough to try the same thing today . . .). What’s more interesting, at least for me, is to think about what it meant to be a defender of the film when it actually came out, before the emissaries of camp and cult and so-bad-it’s-good enfolded the movie in a warm, fetishistic embrace.

What liking Showgirls in 1995 meant for me was tied to the fact that I was a 14-year-old boy. Which is to say, right in the sweet spot of the movie’s intended demographic (and about 20 years too young to be writing about it in a newspaper, where I’d surely have given it more than the zero stars afforded by the Globe and Mail). The same passage of time that has let so many people experience (or re-experience) Showgirls in the way described by Berkley affects me as well, of course. If I really do remember liking the film for reasons other than its luridness — if that enlightened, wise-teenager response isn’t just a conveniently fabricated memory — then is this book a way to enshrine that adolescent impulse? Or am I just trying to skillfully distance myself from the primal scene? I guess at this point it doesn’t matter. The book exists, it’s been read and reviewed, and also judged by Verhoeven himself, whose remarks on it will remain private but didn’t hurt my feelings as much as many of the film’s reviews hurt his.

In November 2015, Paul Verhoeven and I introduced Showgirls together at a screening at the Key West Film Festival in a small, packed hall filled with film critics on the lower level and (if memory serves) a group of drag queens and a liquored-up bachelorette party in the mezzanine. It was the first of several conversations we’ve had about Showgirls since the book was published, one of which is included in this special expanded edition. Both onstage in Florida and over the phone last fall, Verhoeven suggested that Showgirls’ resurrection has on some level been cathartic, but also that he sort of saw it coming — which is, of course, exactly what any fan would hope or want him to say. I’m grateful to Paul Verhoeven for his candid, contradictory reflections on Showgirls, then and now; I hope that the critical project of this book is complemented and not compromised by his participation after the fact.

Key West was the perfect place for a Showgirls-themed weekend: it’s a

Reviews for It Doesn’t Suck

[katsmiao · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

i liked this book, but I also liked the movie.
And it didn't really matter to me that it won a ton of razzies. I thought it was an entertaining movie that showed the difficult and often seedy life of showgirls.
So the book didn't change my mind about the movie, but it gave me an interesting new perspective and included many thoughtful and thought-provoking insights