Showgirls

(Paul Verhoeven, USA, 1995)

Introduction November 2024: There aren’t many of my past film reviews that I have actively chosen to omit from this site, but – for reasons outlined below – my initial 1995 piece on Showgirls, a film I now love, is among them. The following, metacritical “framing” of that review – which provides the gist of it – is an outtake from extensive writing-out work done for a long essay titled “Badness” for the book The Year’s Work in Showgirls Studies (Indiana University Press, 2023) edited by Melissa Hardie, Meaghan Morris & Kane Race. I heartily recommend this book to all genuine Showgirls fans!

Not Completely Conscious

In a Radio National (Australia) program of the early 1990s, I heard what struck me as a key moment of equivocation within the history of Cultural Studies as a field or discipline. It was an interview with Venezuelan-born theorist Celeste Olalquiaga, author of Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (1992) and The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (1998).

In her position as the academic expert on kitsch, Olalquiaga happily explained that there are three categories of people: those who live so completely within a kitschy world that they are blind to it; those who aware that their world is kitsch, but enjoy it all the same; and those who stand outside and analyse it as a cultural, historical and political phenomenon.

The interviewer then asked Olalquiaga an ingenious question: “So which group are you in?” Her somewhat uncertain answer arrived after a pregnant pause: “I am between groups two and three”. That equivocation was eloquent. She wanted, naturally enough, to appear intellectual, an authority, a specialist worthy of being consulted by the media. Yet she also did not want to seem too far removed from the experience of those savvy cultural consumers in the middle of her chart – which, she would rightly have assumed, was the self-proclaimed position of most of the radio audience listening to her that day.

So, not so totally inside the phenomenon of kitsch as to be blind to it, and not so totally outside it as to be an Olympian killjoy. It is a tricky, slippery place to inhabit as a critic or commentator.

Whether or not we can describe Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls as a piece of kitsch, there is no doubt that it provides the same kind of litmus test as Olalquiaga’s field of study – leading many of us to nervously categorise ourselves, before it, as one kind of viewer or another. Or maybe between several kinds!

Like virtually every commentator on Showgirls – for my own, initial review from 1995 will be brought to the bar as evidence in what follows – I have found myself tangled up in the ambiguities and confusions of the swiftly proliferating public discussion on it. Is Showgirls a bad film? How, in what way, on what levels? Is it intentionally a bad film – and therefore, maybe, not so bad? Did Verhoeven, on its release in 1995, consider it ironic, a savage parody, a film inside quotation marks (as it were)? Or is that more a result of a retrospective rewriting of the work and its (presumed) intentions?

Verhoeven’s current position on Showgirls – that it was fully intended, from the outset, as an ironic, deliberately trashy satire – was formulated sometime after its production and initial release. It seems to be underwritten by a certain, selective amnesia, and a recasting of the project’s initial intentions (a topic explored, with gruesome relish, by Jeffrey McHale’s 2019 documentary You Don’t Nomi).

This is, in fact, the classic case of a director “going with the flow” of a general, positive re-evaluation. Verhoeven, assuredly, was not the first and will not be the last filmmaker to assume this posture in public. If Douglas Sirk could do it – and how! – in the realm of the “woman’s weepie” of the old Hollywood days, why shouldn’t Verhoeven do it for the “garish showbiz” genre? (1)

Indeed, the comparative duo of Sirk and Verhoeven has often been called up by Showgirls specialists, including the Cahiers du cinéma crew that splashed a long, laudatory career-interview feature on the director as their cover story in October 2015. “Showgirls gives us the same sensation as certain of Sirk’s American films, such as Imitation of Life [1959]. They seemed like trifles, when they were actually violently political films”. (2) Note that violently!

However, Verhoeven wavers on even this point of retrospection. During an on-stage appearance in 2016 (glimpsed in McHale’s doco), he claimed to have been working in the tradition of German Expressionism (shades of Rudy Ray Moore’s self-description as a “ghetto expressionist”!); when the interviewer looks sceptical, he quickly, self-deprecatingly adds: “I invented it [i.e., this explanation] yesterday”. It’s a typical scene: a director who doesn’t want to seem (too) pretentious under the gaze of a large and merciless audience.

However, in that grand entretien chat with Cahiers tellingly titled “Irony is a Lost Art”, Verhoeven proudly cites Showgirls as a work that resulted from the same “magical” creative process as his RoboCop (1987) or Starship Troopers (1997) – the latter film being the one that redeemed him as a subversive satirist in the eyes of many fans. Even here, in the bosom of his fiercest champions, he finds himself equivocating: “I’d like to clarify something: when you make a film, you’re not completely conscious”. (3)

I do not altogether blame Verhoeven for this retroactive confusion or position-shifting. After all, is there any filmmaker in the world who wants to be saddled, for eternity, with the tag of having made a bad film – whether that signals some technical incompetence, miscasting of actors (the Elizabeth Berkley conundrum), “mixed messages”, “tonal problems”, or whatever?

In the hefty volume The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, David Andrews draws some significant and cautionary distinctions within the capacious genre known today among its connoisseurs as badfilm (a term, or methodological tool, I tend to dislike, for many reasons implied in the piece you’re now reading, and in my essay “Badness”). Andrews’ particular focus is on what he calls cult-art cinema – especially whenever talk of art implies an artist or auteur in basic (or highly sophisticated) control of the ship (i.e., the “at the end of the day, it’s still a Verhoeven film” line). In his discussion of terms and definitions, Andrews puts to one side “the kind of cult movie that results from the fetishisation of directorial incompetence”.

We must understand what we are doing when we call bad movies “auteur movies”. Auteurism implies control, purity and intentional aspiration […] but we can only rarely construct cult auteurism and the cult-art movie in terms of the bad movie, which is a pleasurable failure, a tour de force of ineptitude. […] The intentional camp irony [of certain films by Russ Meyer, John Waters, Anna Biller, etc.] indicates that we should not call them “bad” in any straightforward sense; rather, they seem rich in complex effects that their creators intended. Although we may be able to align such movies with the cult of pleasurable bad taste, we cannot align them with directorial ineptitude – for their directors found a way to do what they wanted to do within their particular constraints. But the more common kind of bad movie – where camp laughter seems to work against directors, not with them, and where the irony is a function of the viewers and their environment – does not exemplify the auteur ideal in any sense. (4)

As Andrews goes on to imply, perhaps no filmmaker in the world – unless they were in a particularly self-lacerating mood – would cop to being a failure or having done a bad job, certainly not an ongoing basis; both personal dignity and professional standing (i.e., the ability to get another job!) would tend to rule out this posture from the outset. Indeed we see, nowadays, many directors (including Australian Philippe Mora) twisting with understandable discomfort under the ambiguous shower of retrospective cult acclaim and fandom they are receiving in their advanced years.

Referring to figures including Ed Wood and Doris Wishman, Andrews sums up: “There is often little evidence beyond these directors’ embrace of what others have defined as their ‘trashy’ aesthetics to support the idea that they were trying to make pleasurably horrid movies”. Current directors who we might objectively label bad (or weak or incompetent – Jim Wynorski or David DeCoteau could be examples, although even they attract critical disputes) “rarely take any explicit pleasure in the bad cinematic qualities imparted by their own incompetence”. (5)

In fact, Verhoeven is in the same sticky position as many commentators on Showgirls: they don’t want to be caught in the public spotlight saying it’s entirely good, and they don’t be caught saying it’s entirely bad. It’s this same contortion that leads Adam Nayman, in a larger and more coherently argued fashion, to rhetorically move, in his 2014 book It Doesn’t Suck (ECW Press, 2018), between the extreme poles of “Showgirls is shit” to the other extreme pole of “Showgirls is a masterpiece” in order to arrive at the concept of a “masterpiece of shit”!

Or, as Nayman sums up his thesis in You Don’t Know Nomi: “You cannot give it its due by simply praising it or simply condemning it”, for “both these things are possible at once”. Which may well be true – ambivalence is a time-honoured and frequently productive critical stance – but it’s also, shall we say, still betraying of a certain anxiousness as to which public posture to strike. How different this is to the conclusion of Bill Routt’s 2001 piece on Edward D. Wood.

He made trash … but trash may only be a word for a kind of film that allows viewers no escape from the delirious materiality of language: no good stories, no soaring emotions, no art, no dreams, no safe self. Trash movies are ugly and dirty and messy: stupid, stupid, like plays by Alfred Jarry or paintings by Arshile Gorky. (6)

As a working critic in October 1995, I did not regard Showgirls as a masterpiece; far from it. I have testified, in my 1999 essay “The Offended Critic” (collected in Mysteries of Cinema), to the experience of a fateful TV broadcast (on a Greek island!) which later turned my head around in relation to this film. (7) That was a moment in which, quite simply, I felt myself to be a different person, watching a different film; in the scenaristic terms posed by Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden (2014), where the characters sit around and debate Verhoeven’s movie, I had metamorphosed from Cyril (epitome of that breed I dub Offended Critics) into Arnaud (“Showgirls, a masterpiece”).

Who can say why and how this happened, exactly? My angle of vision, my sensibility in the face of this film had mysteriously altered. It can happen often in life, if we stay open to the possibility of it happening. In 1995, however, I had to quickly process my impressions of the movie (after a single viewing at a media preview, as is normally the case in the practice of reviewing) into something like a definite journalistic opinion, an evaluation.

Not that my venue for this review was a tiny newspaper column demanding a snap, capsule judgement and a rating in stars, thumbs or Fantales wrappers; on the contrary, in the 15-minute slot I enjoyed for three consecutive years as sole contributor to “The Week in Film” on ABC Radio National between 1995 and 1997, I had a good deal of freedom to stretch out, entertain ambivalent feelings, sketch appropriate contexts and explore interpretive options. I composed, in fact, 1,200 words on Showgirls for my radio script of that week, which amounts to a short essay (and twice as long as most of the reviews for newspapers that I was writing in the same period).

A few years later, in a state of some embarrassment (because my opinion had altered so drastically), I buried the text in my personal archive, and have never allowed it to be distributed, reprinted, or processed (by me) for my website. That’s my very own cultural anxiousness at work, undoubtedly – not wanting my initial reaction to Showgirls to be mistaken by anyone, anywhere, as my only or final reaction. But I’ll say something about this text here and now.

What critical moves did I more-or-less spontaneously make in that 1995 piece, which later made me feel so ashamed of myself? My review begins with a confident assertion, but also a doubt about my ability to do justice to my own impression: “How can I even begin to describe the awfulness of the new Paul Verhoeven film, Showgirls?” Alongside Paul in Eden, I already believed that most other “critics were wrong to trash it” – at least in the automatic, unthinking, herd-mentality, ear-to-the-consensus-media-buzz type of way that was prevalent then, and even worse today in the culture of Twitter/X.

Strangely enough, the one sure thing that, in retrospect, I would have expected my 36-year-old self to say about Showgirls in 1995 – “It’s still Verhoeven, but not his best” (to again quote a character from Eden) – was an option I chose not to take … Probably because, while almost always considering Verhoeven to be a fine filmmaker, I’ve never much thought him in a rigidly auteurist way as an artist with fixed, recurring themes and/or a thoroughly recognisable signature style – which is very different from the position that both McHale and many of his expert witnesses take in You Don’t Nomi.

However, I was more than keen to separate the film, at the inception of its public life (within Australia, at least), from what I regarded as several distortions that were already rampant in the world’s media. So: is it a shockingly “explicit” film on the sexual level? Not really. Is it a prurient, sexist, male-gazey spectacle? No: “I feel that Verhoeven prides himself on the fact that, if he was going to show a lot of female nudity, he would show it in an almost matter-of-fact way: these women, after all are working girls, professionals, rehearsing, doing quick costume changes in the wings, bitching and nursing their kids – just like the teams of women you see in all those old showbiz musicals likes Dames (1934).” Or, I would add now, the dressing-room scenes of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/1978), a film I suspect Verhoeven knows well: a New York Lincoln Center retrospective described his early work Spetters [1980] as “playing as a biker exploitation film directed by Cassavetes”. (8)

What was my problem with Showgirls, then? Verhoeven’s part in the creative process seemed, to me, almost secondary, and I tried to separate him somewhat from responsibility for the finished product.

Verhoeven does what he can with this material – which is precious little, indeed. His essential contribution to the film is to plaster over the entire thing a style that Raymond Durgnat has called energy realism. You can recognise energy realism from this: a prowling camera that dives forward into a room, down this path and then another, flicking and darting left to right, as a gaggle of bodies enter and exit the frame in choreographed chaos. But this is less a fully developed style, finally, than an annoying visual mannerism, and you get pretty tired of it pretty fast in this case.

Rather, I blamed the problems I perceived on the script credit to Joe Eszterhas – not knowing, at the time, the fairly typical industrial situation that Verhoeven avowed later to Cahiers: “It was Eszterhas’ idea, but we worked together on the script”. (9) Authorship issues aside, I regarded this screenplay as nothing less than “the most transparently shoddy piece of work to make it to the big screen in a long time – and I emphasise the word transparent”. Why?

This is a script with very few plot moves or narrative ideas; these moves get repeated over and over again, and every time you see the clunking labour of the script as it sets these moves up and plays them out. The core of the film is this: we follow the innocent Nomi into the big, bad world of Las Vegas. She’s tough, she’s smart, she’s got moral integrity. Then, slowly but surely, she gets dragged into a mire of corruption and degradation. She starts to lose her integrity. Just when she’s about to slide down completely into the lowest depths of Hell, there is the script equivalent of an alarm bell ringing. Nomi suddenly sees something – or more often, hears something – that makes her suddenly wake up, shake herself, and walk away intact.

In a manner anticipating so many negative or parodic commentaries on the film, I continued along this path.

The thing that Nomi often hears which has this remarkable edifying effect on her is usually the heavy-handed repetition of a phrase that she has already heard. For instance, Nomi is propositioned by a sleazy Bangkok businessman, who plans to take her on a right ol’ night out. “You’ll like Caesar’s singing”, he says with heavy, absurd insistence. Now we cut to later in the movie, and Nomi is falling for the suave, number crunching, mobile-phoning yuppie, Zach (played rather embarrassingly by Kyle McLachlan). To her, he seems good and decent – and sexy, too. We in the audience have already been unsubtly tipped off that he’s a conniving sleazebag. But how will Nomi know it, before it’s too late? As Zach walks out of a room, he casually remarks, “You’ll like Caesar’s singing”. Suddenly we get a close-up of Nomi disturbed, pondering, ready now to grab her coat and angrily stride out the door. I couldn’t keep count of how many of these heavily telegraphed close-ups of a suddenly troubled Nomi appear in the course of the movie.

The core of my review constituted, roughly, an ideological critique.

That’s what Showgirls is, over and over: Nomi loses a little bit of her dignity, then she recovers it in spades; she behaves a little bit evil, then she becomes the flaming symbol of goodness. I don’t think I have ever seen a film that proposes such an absolutely dualistic distinction between evil corruption on the one hand, and moral decency on the other. On the bad side of that equation, the film racks up lesbianism, perversion, monetary greed, showbiz celebrity, deceit, careerist backstabbing, even a stray night of casual sex. On the good side, there’s love, friendship, independence and a fierce commitment to one’s art. All the bad things the film calls whoring. All the good things the film calls knowing yourself, loving yourself, sticking to your good moral principles. When big-budget American films start denouncing decadent-capitalist whoring, you know you’re in a high bullshit zone.

I once heard a definition of the film critic’s role that dismayed me greatly: sniffing out the bullshit – and doing so nobly, on behalf of the general public whom you could duly warn in advance, thus saving them having to spend their money and find out themselves. Thus, the Critic boldly and bravely stands vigilant between the audience and the bullshit! Alas, in the face of Showgirls I, too, became a ferocious, guard-dog sniffer. Which is a position not terribly far from Culture Cop. (And, by the way, I also didn’t at all account for the ultimate switcheroos in the moral calculus of Showgirls’ plot that complicate the Good/Bad binary.).

I claimed in ‘95 that Showgirls, pretending to be either raunchy or socially incisive (I couldn’t quite decide which), “peddles a more conservative moral sermon than almost any film I’ve seen lately”. It was, in short, a hypocritical film, showing one thing and saying another – and we shall return to the knotty significance of this word.

In this regard (as in several others), Showgirls marks, in retrospect, a crucial crossover point in the way that films are interpreted – and how those interpretations are shared among the members of various interested communities of viewers.

Over a long haul that began in the late 1960s in many parts of the world, the process of “reading films” evolved a method of ideological decipherment: spectators of many stripes became alert to the (mostly) hidden meanings and values buried within carefully contrived plots and illusory fictional worlds, behind the aesthetics of screen spectacle. My own initial response to Showgirls, as we have just seen, was highly negative: beyond sorting out the film’s respective portions of goodness and badness, I saw my role as exposing the obscurities of the film, and especially as uncovering its manifold confusions or mixed messages. There was a friction between what the film blared as its overt themes (“knowing yourself”, etc.) and its more genuinely conservative underpinning (as I interpreted it).

Little did I realise, however, that my own gesture of ideological critique, there and then in late 1995, was among the last gasps of this particular school or mode of critique.

Also since at least the 1960s (and indeed, going back two decades earlier to the work of Parker Tyler) there were always, simultaneously, methods of critique and/or appreciation available that offered alternatives to what became variously sedimented as ideological, sociological or socio-cultural readings of movies. But they were usually relegated to minority reports from subcultures. One of these alternative methods was what was known as camp, thanks to Susan Sontag and many other exegetes.

With the arrival of Showgirls, however, things quickly switched around. The camp enjoyment of the film – reclaiming and redeeming it, elevating it to the status of an enduring cult not long after its initial commercial failure – shot into the mainstream sphere, becoming almost the most natural and accepted way of receiving it. Verhoeven himself, as indicated, was happy to ride that bandwagon.

Although I, too, changed my line on Showgirls, I still had to residually wonder: was Verhoeven being a little bit of a hypocrite (or, at the very least, an opportunist) here, in relation to his own work? Film history is full of many cases of directors (including most of its greats, such as Fritz Lang) who disowned their own work at the moment of its commercial failure, but later happily re-owned it once the connoisseurs of global film culture elevated it to the status of respectability, coming to call at the auteur’s door. And those adoring critics came equipped with a redemptive method: what was called, for a time, two-tier reading.

Once, I laboured to explain to a room full of university students what this two-tier approach approach to filmmaking, and film interpretation, is (was) all about. Our example of the week was Imitation of Life – Sirk, once again, came in handy as a touchstone – but many other movies, past or present, could have served just as well. This film, I passionately argued, works on two tiers, communicates on two levels at once. The first tier is the one aimed at the (badly named) average or normal spectator, who comes to the cinema to consume a generic, entertainment in a populist idiom, with its formulaic emotions: melodrama, Western, action film, whatever. The film gives this viewer what he or she expects.

But then there is a second tier, less visible, more suggestive: it could be ironic, or critical, or satirical. This is where the auteur truly speaks, truly conveys a point-of-view on the story material and its conventional ideology. It is only, in a sense, the special, Chosen Spectator who can be hip to this tier. And that is why we were gathered in that classroom, to become those gifted spectators.

What I was saying, that day, was a partial rephrasing of the infamous “Category (e)” of film-types inventoried by the then-radicalised editors (Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni) of Cahiers du cinéma in their “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” editorial of October 1969: “Films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner. […] There is a noticeable gap, a dislocation, between the starting-point and the finished product”. (10) As we have seen, this is almost exactly the same line that a later Cahiers generation pushed à propos Verhoeven in 2015.

So, this is one definition of cinematic artistry, I told my class: for a director to seem to be saying one thing on the surface of the film, but to be really saying something else, as it were, “between the lines”. Was my little sermon underwritten, a little too evidently, by some nasty, class-bound distinction between “rube” audiences and sophisticated cinephiles? Whatever the case, before I could elaborate the theory any further, one very puzzled and disturbed student interrupted me. “But – saying one thing while you mean another thing – isn’t that the very definition of hypocrisy? And you’re proposing to us that being a hypocrite is a good thing?”

I fell silent for a moment, and then went on the attack, to save my wounded authority. “Of course I’m not advocating hypocrisy! It’s not the same thing at all! You think Sirk and Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Tourneur and Max Ophüls were a bunch of hypocrites?” It saved my arse on the day, but I have subsequently often returned, in my mind, to that apparently naïve but, in reality, profound objection.

I recall the day I took revenge on my students. They were discussing the wave of so-called “post September 11 blockbusters”: Cloverfield (2008), War of the Worlds (2005), and so on. They were full of love and admiration, in particular, for Steven Spielberg. Why? One of them zealously replied: “Because he shows us, in the corner of the headlong narrative, the pain of people dying, the total destruction of human society”. I had to laugh aloud: a fleeting, two-second shot of some extra who screams before he melts, and that amounts to a screen manifesto for Christian compassion? I had only one word for that … hypocrisy!

In a great, heretical moment of film criticism, Raymond Durgnat once debated William Paul in Film Comment about Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), a movie beloved of several generations of film lovers. (As of late 2024, I note the breathless citation of that film’s prize ditty, “My Rifle, My Pony and Me”, in not one but two remarkable new releases.) Showing Dude (Dean Martin) pour booze back into its bottle in that film is not a great moment of humanism, Durgnat argued; it’s slick, fake, evasive, a split-second manoeuvre that sidesteps and buries the real, obstinate, recalcitrant problems.

This is an unpopular opinion among cinephiles (especially the Hawksian ones), but Durgnat had a point worth considering: sometimes, indeed, artists are hypocrites, or at least their manufactured gestures (such as the staging and “manœuvring” of a scene) can give off a whiff of hypocrisy. (11)

This looming thematic of hypocrisy is heightened, in the case of Showgirls, by the coming into existence, two years later, of another Eszterhas script, this one with marked autobiographical undertones: the Canadian production Telling Lies in America (Guy Ferland, 1997), which explicitly targets corruption, cynicism and hypocrisy in the USA entertainment industry.

However, my chief interest is not in the inscrutable psyches or ever-changing public performances of filmmakers (or screenwriters); nor exactly in the debating-school, prevaricating rhetorical tactics of bickering critics (or professors). I am more interested in exploring that peculiar mid 1990s moment when what was once deemed hidden and perhaps even (because of its hidden nature) ideologically insidious in a film became, virtually overnight, the coin of the public realm, obvious and available to all to “play” with.

This transition had occurred, not in fact overnight, but steadily and stealthily, since a point in the late 1980s. I refer to the role of such popular, behind-the-scenes TV programs as Entertainment Tonight and its many spin-offs, making public and banal what had once been the esoteric, arcane knowledge contained in tell-all exposés of the entertainment industry. Exposés such as Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon book series that first appeared in France in the 1950s (an important forerunner of Showgirls, since it pedalled the Hollywood wisdom encapsulated so well by James Toback: “No one fucks for free”); and later the coffee-table publishing event Flesh and Fantasy (1979) by Penny Stallings and Howard Mandelbaum. A smarmy-smirky style of tell-all later became the default mode of cultural juggernauts including the websites TMZ (launched 2005) and VICE Media (which went bankrupt in 2023).

In fact, from my vantage point, this historic changeover in critical method or style is encapsulated in a single word, that became (and remains) massively popular at many levels of film culture: subtext. This word itself has been through a series of stark recodings in its passage from a tool in 20th century theatrical dramaturgy (where its meaning is quite local and specific, indicating what is unsaid but clearly indicated or suggested in the dialogue and actions of a scene) to 21^st century social media parlance, where “subtext” is spottable and celebrated as “allegory” or “metaphor” in every second mainstream horror movie (such as the horror cinema of Jordan Peele, Ari Aster and Jennifer Kent).

This species of subtext is no longer buried in the depths; it’s right there on the surface, acknowledged and shared by maker and target audience alike. In a former “regime” of criticism (as Jacques Rancière might diagnose it), it could be said that there were “classically” dramatic subtexts, usually intentional on the part of their makers; and there were ideological subtexts, perhaps less intentional or consciously grasped (by either producers or audiences).

Today, subtexts are everywhere. Often, indeed, they are stunningly literal, as in many movies and TV series depicting zombies, or the TV series version of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-2025). In fact, in relation to Showgirls, we reach a point where the horrendous David Schmader – who went from hosting “roast”-type, parodic, “annotated screening” events devoted to the film to providing its studio-approved DVD audio commentary (12) – can target the Spago restaurant scene between Nomi and Cristal (Gina Gershon) as “written by a brain-dead Harold Pinter, where the subtext is stunning until you realise there is no subtext”.

Subtext or no subtext, either way Showgirls loses: no film can beat that vicious double bind!


MORE Verhoeven: Elle

NOTES

1. There is a debate in film criticism and cinema scholarship over the discrepancies between what Sirk did as a director in Hollywood during the 1940s and ‘50s, and what he later claimed he meant by what he did. Sirk, it would seem, was more than happy (and intellectually able) to reinforce the reading that emerged during the 1970s of his work as critical, subversive, ironically trading in mere cliché and stereotype. A lucid and measured discussion of this thorny question (by someone who actually knew Sirk and interviewed him on several occasions) can be found in Tom Ryan, The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019). back

2. Jean-Sébastien Chauvin & Stéphane Delorme, “L’ironie est un art perdu: Entretien avec Paul Verhoeven”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 715 (October 2015), p. 12. back

3. Ibid. back

4. David Andrews, “Cult-Art Cinema: Defining Cult-Art Ambivalence” in Ernest Mathijs & Jamie Sexton (eds), The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (2020), p. 36. back

5. Ibid., p. 37. back

6. William D. Routt, “Bad for Good”, Intensities, no. 2 (2001). back

7. Adrian Martin, Mysteries of Cinema (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020), pp. 353-370. back

8. “Total Verhoeven: Spetters”. The same unsigned note describes this film as “something of a male-driven precursor to Showgirls”. back

9. “L’ironie est un art perdu”, p. 16. back

10. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni (trans. Susan Bennett), “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”, in Nick Browne (ed.), Cahiers du cinéma Volume 3: 1969-1972 – The Politics of Representation (Routledge, 1990), p. 62. back

11. Raymond Durgnat, “Durgnat vs. Paul”, Film Comment (March-April 1978), pp. 64-68. back

12. You can find on YouTube a chat between Schmader and the “MovieBitches” (Avaryl & Andrew, first names only), one of whom delightedly confesses: “I’ve never seen the film without your commentary until last night!” back

© Adrian Martin October 1995 / November 2020 / November 2024