'Showgirls' Is Absurd, Problematic, and Famously Bad. 25 Years Later It's a Hate-Watch Classic.
Those of us fortunate enough not to have suffered the worst tragedies of the Covid-19 pandemic still have to deal with the psychological fallout of months of living in a country in crisis. I’m grinding my teeth, losing sleep due to anxiety, and having trouble keeping my focus—and I’m far from alone. That has troubling implications for our emotional and physical wellbeing, but let’s hone in on possibly the least important side effect of all: My concentration is shot, and it’s making it harder for me to watch movies.
It’s particularly challenging when I’m watching great movies and TV shows. There are truly amazing films that slap you across the face with action and entertainment throughout their runtime, but most ask a little more of audiences, demanding rapt attention before storylines kick into high gear. I also feel like I owe good movies a level of engagement worthy of the artistry put into the film. Luckily, I’ve found a solution to the problem: Watching bad movies. You don’t owe it to The Wrong Missy to stay off your phone. You don’t even have to finish watching Bedazzled, just stick around for half an hour or so and you’ve got the gist. Bad movies are the perfect crisis entertainment, and one of the legends of the genre is celebrating its anniversary. Showgirls is 25 years old, and it remains the acrylic diamond in the Party City tiara that is the bad movie canon.
If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, Showgirls is one of history’s most infamous cinematic bombs. It was director Paul Verhoeven’s follow up to Basic Instinct, one of the highest-grossing films of 1992, and seemed poised to be another successful erotic drama. Saved By the Bell’s Elizabeth Berkley starred as tough-yet-naive dancer Nomi Malone, who sets out to make it on the mean streets of Las Vegas. The movie was not only critically panned, but thanks in part to its rare NC-17 rating, tanked at the box office. But over the years, it’s gained cult status, become a DVD hit, and has earned sincere praise from some critics as a deeply misunderstood satire.
Filmmaker Jeffrey McHale created an entire documentary devoted to the film with last year’s You Don’t Nomi, which fans of all things glittery and goofy can find streaming on demand. From the first time he watched Showgirls, McHale knew he was in for something new. “It was just one of those things where as soon as it started, my mind was blown,” he says. “I just had never seen anything like that before in a movie—bad in a way that was just so unique, special and exciting that your heart starts racing.”
From the second Showgirls begins, it’s clear that this movie isn’t like any other. Nomi hitches a ride into Vegas, is robbed, wins big on the slot machines, gets into a fight with a stranger who subsequently invites her to be her roommate, then runs into the street and narrowly avoids being hit by a car. And that’s all within the first eight minutes.
And while Showgirls has plenty of famously awful moments—even if you haven’t seen the film, you might recognize “Ver-say-ce,” or that spinal-cord defying pool sex scene—it’s not been overmilked despite its iconic status. Showgirls possess a ridiculousness without bottom, and if you think you have absorbed all its wackiness through osmosis, know this: You haven’t. There are moments too bizarre to be effectively memed, as when we watch Nomi and her rival Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon, without a doubt the best part of the film) sit down to a meal and bond over their shared love of eating dog food.
The film has even found sincere fans in critics like Adam Nayman, who’s featured in You Don’t Nomi, and who’s argued that audiences used to cinematic naturalism have missed Showgirls’ satire. Whether you see it as being so-bad-it’s-good or so-good-it’s-misunderstood (I'm team "it's just bad"), Showgirls delivers an unceasing array of absurdity. It also doesn’t make the demands of viewers that your standard good film might. Look at your phone, take a bathroom break, generally indulge pandemic-induced lack of focus, and Showgirls still works as a series of loosely tied scenes of madness.
Some of film's questionable elements—strange writing choices, stranger acting choices, general improbability—are all in good, campy fun, but others are more serious. Throughout the film, Nomi lives in a world where Black people meet her and instantly abandon their own best interest to serve her whims. It’s also a world of catty, irrational, nearly constantly naked, and disposable women. Near the end of the movie, Nomi’s talented and endlessly generous friend Molly is beaten and gang-raped. The brutal treatment of the movie’s sole major Black female character is a culmination of its racism and misogyny.
Better films have been rendered nearly unwatchable by similar problems. John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles, which is by many measures a far more successful movie than Showgirls, is one I’m unlikely ever to want to view again given its hideous racism and treatment of sexual assault. In the context of a film otherwise funny and filled with insight about adolescence, the racism and clear misogyny feel somehow more painful. Molly Ringwald wrote in a New Yorker article examining the sexism of the films she made with Hughes that it’s hard for her “to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.”
There’s nothing similarly hard to understand about Showgirls, an entire film made up of blind spots. Showgirls is a trainwreck in every regard, including its abuse of women and its Black characters. In You Don't Nomi, writer David Schmader explains that he skips over the truly inexcusable rape scene at screenings of the film that he hosts—a technique I've deployed when I've wanted to take in the movie and yet avoid some of its most noxious elements. It's been years since I first watched Showgirls, and I'm still troubled by its racism and violence towards women. But I also find its sloppy, ridiculous bigotry somehow less upsetting than the otherwise artful classic films that pause to take direct aim at women and people of color.
But in this lonely time, Showgirls can offer a bittersweet reminder of the kind of communities that can spring up around cult movies. There have been Showgirls midnight screenings, and a Showgirls musical. In time, the movie became particularly beloved within the LGBTQ community.
“Anytime there was a Showgirls screening, that space was ultimately queer,” says McHale. “People knew the types of people that were going to be there. You were with like-minded folk, you could holler at the screen. It was just a way to kind of have a communal experience that I don't think most people have when they go to the movies.”
The film’s second life as a cult classic has even helped soothe the pain of the person who was perhaps the most publicly injured by its initial failure. Elizabeth Berkley was widely mocked after the film’s debut, dropped by her agent, and eventually escaped to Europe.
“1995 was such a different time, where taking risks like that were not embraced,” Berkley told the crowd at a 2015 screening. “They were laughed at. They were shamed publicly. To be a young girl in the center of that was something that was quite difficult. But I found my own resilience and my power and my confidence—not only through what I had to find out, but because of you guys.”
These days, most of us would be happy to safely have any kind of communal movie theater experience. But fans of Showgirls have created a special world of re-enactments, sing-alongs, amateur theater, and companionship, a world where no art is beyond redemption and all that glitters just might be gold. That world is out of reach right now, but watching the movie offers a welcome reminder of it.
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