Sale of Two Titties

For mature sexuality, the period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s was a golden age in American movies. By 1978, the shattering of cinematic taboos that began in the underground films of the 1960s had carried over into mainstream movies, and the display of nude bodies and naked emotions were as much a part of the moviegoing experience as raw language or gritty violence. Sure, there was the predictable slew of tittery drive-in movies (or mainstream derivations like Porky’s) that exploited the new frankness. But there were also serious dramas like Kramer vs. Kramer and Coming Home, along with cheerfully raunchy comedies like and Slap Shot, that presented open sexuality and enjoyment of life’s visceral pleasures as a healthy part of adulthood. For a time, an R rating on a movie was a small affirmation of the “mature” lives of moviegoers.

Those public affirmations came to an end in the mid-1980s with the rise of the VCR and cable television, both of which allowed the average citizen to stay home and receive in private the kind of cheap thrills that the cinema used to provide. While violence and profanity soared to new heights, sex on the screen became consigned to clichéd love scenes; and when nudity and sex did play a larger role in a movie, it was usually in kinky peep shows like , Crimes of Passion. The honest exploration of sexuality as a normal part of the rhythm of life died in Hollywood. According to recent mainstream American movies, our sex lives revolve mainly around hookers and cutlery.

Nobody understands this unimaginative world of cinemalust better than screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven, whose collaboration on produced arguably the ultimate degradation of human sexuality—a muddleheaded mystery story juiced up with vulgar dialogue, violent copulation, and human bodies observed with a pornophile’s indifferent leer. Some of ’s critic-apologists excused Verhoeven (the skilled satirist who made The 4th Man and Robocop), claiming that the Dutch director’s riffs on Hitchcockian hyperbole were high camp. But not even camp enthusiasts could explain away Eszterhas’ unnecessarily ridiculous script, with its imbecilic lapses in logic and infantile sexism.

I wonder if those same critic-apologists will defend Showgirls, the latest Verhoeven-Eszterhas collaboration. Once again, Eszterhas takes a lazy, exploitative look at sex—he uses 1995 nudity and coarseness to spice up a dreary 1935 backstage melodrama—and once again Verhoeven aims for campy black comedy. But Showgirls isn’t a well suited vehicle for Verhoeven’s acidic temperament. He swipes the innocuous clichés of old musicals and sours them with his bile. Dance sequences and misanthropy, in this case, don’t mix.

Showgirls stars Elizabeth Berkley (from TV’s Saved By the Bell) as Nomi, a drifter with a shady past who becomes a stripper when she is stranded in Las Vegas. Through her kindly roommate, she meets Cristal Connors (played by Gina Gershon), the well-known star of a big-time topless revue. Soon, Nomi is working as a chorus girl in Cristal’s aerobics-in-hell extravaganza, where she sets her eye on both the diva’s starring role and her wheeler-dealer boyfriend (Kyle MacLachlan). Nomi has talent (as far as we know—people keep telling her “you can dance,” although all we see her do is bump and grind vigorously), but her ambition and apparent naïveté thrust her toward the catty, back-stabbing side of show business. But no matter how far her character sinks, and how many times she writhes around unclothed onstage, she’s shocked—by what producers and businessmen ask her to do.

As Nomi, Berkley gets ample opportunities to take off her clothes and to execute her one acting move—a sort of petulant head jerk followed closely by a rush out of the room. Both Eszterhas and Verhoeven treat Berkley cruelly, exploiting her inexperience as a film actress. Eszterhas writes Nomi as an impulsive bubblehead, and Verhoeven encourages Berkley to play her with a grating brattiness, as if she were still on television in a very special Saved By the Bell. Her journey through the underbelly of showbiz is repetitive, and her responses are consistently annoying. The combination of an unlikable character in a predictable scenario creates a discomfort that no amount of nudity or over-the-top style can bury.

The fault for Showgirls’ overwhelming ordinariness can be laid at the pen of Joe Eszterhas, whose knack for spinning tawdry inanities into gold dates back to Flashdance. The film could’ve explored some interesting areas. Strip clubs have become a small phenomenon in American popular culture, providing a communal experience of open sexuality with a cruel edge of cold mercantilism. The transactory nature and fake friendliness of the strip-club environment has to affect the customers and the performers, particularly in Las Vegas, where entertainment itself has been distilled to its essence—instant gratification and relentless glitz.

Unfortunately, Eszterhas hasn’t the insight or the gift to explore this in depth. His script is relentless glitz personified. Every scene revolves around grudges and manipulation, in a heartless world where women take off their clothes as a way of staving off the inevitable lure of prostitution.