“Showgirls,” a $40 million film about top-less dancers in Las Vegas, will be the first mainstream commercial movie to take an NC-17 rating into wide release. After a blizzard of prerelease publicity, it will open this Friday on more than 1,300 screens: fewer than “Batman Forever,” but about the same as “Clockers.” With its inflammatory subject matter, the film arrives with heavy promotional foreplay and two burning questions: how hot is it and how bad is it. To get theaters to take it, the studio has offered to pay for added security to keep minors out. Eszterhas and Verhoeven last teamed on 1992’s “Basic Instinct,” which the director begrudgingly re-edited nine times to get an R rating; “Show-girls” was NC-17 from the start. “The idea,” Verhoeven told NEWSWEEK, “is that as an adult filmmaker you would talk to adults. If we have reasonable success, the people at the studios may think, ‘OK, we can make NC-17 films.’ The freedom that will be obtained will be beneficial to the directors and ultimately to the public.” This is just in case you thought the idea was to show 131 minutes of actresses with no clothes on and make a lot of money in the process.
The story follows the rise of Nomi (named after Eszterhas’s wife), an ambitious young showgirl with a mind for Machiavellian-ism and a bud for sin. Berkley, best known for her role in the lite TV sitcom “Saved by the Bell,” comes armed with a switchblade and the most meager of acting and dancing skills. She is a bundle of raw hostility and overdrawn lip liner. She hitchhikes to Las Vegas to become a showgirl-the “legitimate” kind, who dance topless in elaborate revues at the big casinos–only to become a lap dancer, grinding naked in men’s laps in a sleazy strip club. The framework is tested Hollywood formula: girl comes to the big town with high hopes and discovers the price of success. When she finally crawls and claws her way to the big show, Nomi learns–hello!that shaking one’s naked body for tourists is a mean and exploitative business.
Eszterhas earned $2 million for his script. Sifting through the self-actualization bromides and gratuitous gross-outs, you have to wonder why. Neither he nor Verhoeven is known for his delicate taste, but surely these men know rotten corn when they step in it. On her way into Vegas, Nomi tells the pick-up-truck driver that even though she won’t gamble, “I’m going to win.” When she hitches out of town at the end, she tells the driver-incredibly, the same man–that she came out on top. What did you win, he asks. “Me.”
For all its sex and nudity, “Showgirls” is for the most part fiercely unerotic. There is a good, probing movie to be made out of this legitimately fascinating mi-lieu–Atom Egoyan’s poetic 1994 “Exotica” used the strip dance as an elaborate metaphor-or an hone st bad turn-on. “Showgirls” is neither. As in “Basic Instinct,” the sex and the dancing are all fueled by hostility rather than pleasure. Libido is reduced to an element of warfare. The film’s one seemingly honest seduction ends in a brutal gang rape. Eszterhas defends the scene. “[The lap dancers] live and work in an atmosphere that is charged with a kind of sexual violence . . . What you get coming out of [the men’s] eyes is hostility. That’s one of the reasons the rape is significant in terms of depicting that world.” On screen, though, the rape plays as gratuitous,an offensive way to make an easy point.
In a political season when conservatives and centrists have found mileage in attacking Hollywood’s morals, “Showgirls” is unabashedly prurient. That is its selling point. Perhaps it is a first volley of defiance: next year Demi Moore stars as a dancer in “Striptease.” Or perhaps Hollywood just loves an easy PR blitz and a cheap come-on. Predictably, weeks before “Showgirls” ’s release, the usual suspects weighed in, promoting the movie even as they often damned it. Religious groups denounced it as pornography. TV news programs and print magazines, including women’s magazines, jumped on it as a nifty excuse to run pictures of underdressed women. A few theater chains refused to run it. NBC rejected ads for it, but allowed its 215 affiliates to decide for themselves (ABC, CBS and Fox are all running the ads, though not before 10 p.m.). Last week United Artists stoked the flames higher by distributing 250,000 free, sexually explicit eight-minute teasers to video and music stores.
At the same time, some in the company seemed uneasy with the quality of the film. One United Artists executive last week sought to distance the studio from the movie, saying it had bought “Showgirls” in advance as part of a “cluster” of prospective films from the virtually bankrupt Carolco, and that it had no control over what actually got made. “A lot of people have felt [disappointed],” the executive told NEWSWEEK. “It’s not a picture that we made. We had a film delivered to us . . . It’s about agendas. God knows what theirs [Verhoeven and Eszterhas’s] is. Is it about breaking rules? I don’t know.”
Will it work? The film is probably review proof. Cinematic values, after all, aren’t its calling card. One buyer for a major theater chain found the movie objectionable; “All the guys who saw this movie were disappointed [with the sex]. I thought a lot of the film was unnecessary. The rape scene was brutal. It’s not a good film. These guys wanted shock value. That may give it commercial value. But this isn’t art. It’s like they thought of everything that could possibly be offensive and put it in there.” Needless to say, the buyer bought the movie. Offered as a blow for artistic and sexual liberation, “Showgirls,” if it succeeds, will really be a triumph of Hollywood cynicism. And there’s nothing titillating about that.
Well before anybody had actually seen it, ‘Showgirls’ was hyped, denounced and luridly speculated about. And none of the talk was an accident.
