#camp classics

Proudly sporting the otherwise box-office-neutering NC17 rating, Showgirls was marketed as a serious adult drama about ambition and the price of success. It was not received as such, instead met with huge amounts of ridicule by audiences and critics alike. Pick a Letterboxd review at random, and you get, for example, “Beautiful direction, so if you put it on mute, it’d probably be great. But nearly every actor is sorely miscast and the script is the hottest garbage.”

Poor Berkley received a lot of the blame, and although she continued to work, the venomous (and often misogynistic) critiques hindered her career as a big-screen leading lady.

Then something funny happened—the film was re-evaluated as a camp classic, driven largely by the queer community, who embraced its over-the-top ridiculousness. The cult has grown considerably over the years, expanding into midnight screenings and even live stage adaptations. Subsequent DVD releases have leaned into the perception by offering commentary tracks that acknowledge the movie’s glorious failings.

Showgirls’ continued presence in the culture has even seen it experience something of an artistic redemption. Its perception is now well beyond that of being simply a camp classic that is so fun because it’s so bad—it’s a genuine cultural touchstone that tells us a lot about how audiences judge films featuring overt sexuality. Indeed, among the many ironies associated with the film is that it was partially designed to highlight American sexual hypocrisy, then failed spectacularly in a manner that effectively highlighted American sexual hypocrisy.

Kyle MacLachlan and Elizabeth Berkley in ‘Showgirls’.

A brief survey of Letterboxd reviews finds plenty of fans. In a half-star review alongside the exhortation to “please for the love of God watch Showgirls”, Letterboxd member Jesse writes: “There shouldn’t be any shame in liking something you know is bad, I don’t have to try and re-codify Showgirls as a secretly good classic just because of how amazing it is. It truly deserves its cult following.” Jesse makes particular mention of the infamous swimming pool sequence, a scene “so unsexy… that it achieves camp euphoria, a pure moment of enlightened cheese that needs to be seen to be believed”.

“‘So bad it’s good’ it may be for some but I happen to be among the camp that thinks Showgirls is genuine good: a misunderstood work brimming with brilliance,” writes Jaime Rebenal, while Matt Lynch argues that it’s often mistaken for “a satire of American greed and attendant dreams of stardom, when its true target is the apparatus that sells those dreams to an endlessly returning audience of narcissistic suckers.”

Or, as Joe puts it, “The Rosetta Stone for understanding this entire movie (if not life itself) is the shot of Elizabeth Berkley angrily slamming a ketchup bottle on the table and causing a bright red stream of ketchup to come flying out.”

Jeffrey McHale’s ridiculously entertaining new documentary You Don’t Nomi looks at the cult of Showgirls from a multitude of angles, including the evolving critical and cultural perception of the film, how Verhoeven’s characterization of his intentions have changed over the years, the significance of the film within the LGBTQIA+ community, and how Berkley eventually emerged from the whole affair as something of a hero.

McHale makes fantastic use of footage from Verhoeven’s killer filmography to emphasize his points, alongside interviews with a variety of cultural critics. He tells the story of April Kidwell, the writer, producer and star of I, Nomi, a one-woman musical comedy about the life of Nomi Malone before and after her adventures in Showgirls. Kidwell is a fascinating presence in the film, and not just because she also played Nomi in the stage show Showgirls: The Musical! and Berkley’s character in the Saved By The Bell-inspired Bayside: The Musical!.

The twentieth-anniversary ‘Showgirls’ screening at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

The documentary features illuminating footage from the twentieth-anniversary screening of Showgirls at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, an event that Berkley attended, where she received a rapturous response from the thousands of fans present.

McHale attended that screening, and told Letterboxd that that’s where his deeper interest in the film was properly sparked.

Jeffrey McHale: I had seen it already, ten years prior to that, but that was the first time I saw it with an audience. I think that was, officially, the largest screening of Showgirls that has happened. There were 4,000 people there. I’m not from LA, but I’ve lived in LA for the last eight years, and I’ve gone to a couple of those Hollywood Forever screenings and I don’t think anyone in our group anticipated Elizabeth Berkley showing up. It felt epic. It was a historic moment in the afterlife of Showgirls.

I didn’t walk away [from that screening] thinking ‘I should make a documentary’, but I was mostly interested in kind of finding out more. You’re always curious if you can figure anything out about the intentions or what the filmmakers had in mind, so that’s what inspired me to start consuming everything that had been written about Showgirls. I read the Adam Layman book, the book of poems, [lots of] articles, and I was just scouring the internet for reviews. And what I found was this wide range of really interesting opinions, theories and people’s relationships with the film. Everything was just so different. You set out looking for answers, and it’s not about getting the answer for it, it’s about this ever-evolving relationship that we have with this piece of art.

At what point did you come to realize the degree to which the queer community had embraced this film? As a gay man myself, it feels like it’s part of the fabric of our culture, ’90s culture. The poet Jeffrey Conway, when I interviewed him, he said it perfectly: it’s just like in your DNA, you know? It appeals to the queer culture community, you cannot explain it but you’re just kind of drawn to it. I thought that was an interesting way of describing the experience of watching something like that.

This film appears to only be widening the cult of Showgirls. It’s been a really fun project, and I’ve been blown away by the response it’s getting. I didn’t really know what the end result would be when I started. I knew that whatever you make, there will be a very vocal and excited and enthusiastic fan base. I’ve been very surprised by the broad appeal. These are people who have never seen Showgirls and are really drawn to it, and find the message and the story, the culture, and the way that we consume media, the way that we critically talk about things. It’s been a wild ride.

The twentieth-anniversary ‘Showgirls’ screening at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

You point out the hypocrisy of how audiences are willing to see Verhoeven’s films as satirical when it comes to the violence (as with Robocop and Starship Troopers), but when it comes to the sex, the audience gets prudish. Paul and Joe talked about that on a lot of their press junket interviews: America’s fine with the violence and the violence gets you rated PG13, but then you have something as human as sex, then that’s shunned and discouraged. It was interesting going back and just looking at the way in which Elizabeth was criticized. And the way that Paul was criticized. Just the way she was ripped apart for her physical features and all that, it was disgusting. I think we’ve evolved a little bit further in that sense. I don’t think that you’d see a Gene Siskel review, the way that he describes her face, those details, like comparing which one was hotter, it was like: this is what we’re reviewing? Actresses’ physical attributes? It was disgusting. I think we’ve gotten better in that sense.

How did you encounter April Kidwell? She brought a lot to the film. She was one of the later additions to the project, after we’d started reaching out to people. I knew that she was in the musical. Then I found out that she had also done Saved By The Bell. It was really interesting that she played two Elizabeth Berkley characters, to get her opinion on it. From the very first phone call, she was just so open. I was blown away by her story and how vulnerable she was, just putting herself out there. She’s been very open about her experience and the way that it was therapeutic for her. She’s the heart and soul of Nomi. She’s somebody who went through something awful, disgusting, terrible, and now she’s found power and strength, within—specifically—the character. The act of performing Nomi on stage was therapeutic for her. It was an experience that no other person I spoke with had. She’s amazing.

Gina Gershon in ’Showgirls’.

I loved how you used footage from the other Verhoeven films to provide additional commentary. How did you come to adopt that filmmaking strategy? When I went in, I didn’t how much of that would play into the narrative. I wasn’t familiar with his earlier work. But when I started to go back and watched all of his Dutch films, I was surprised by how all the dots, everything just felt like it was connecting. All these motifs and scenes and shots. And how repetitively these things popped up. So I wanted a visual way, to kind of make it a subplot, where the characters were interacting with Showgirls, where their experience paralleled the contributors, so that was a way to visually tie it back to the argument that people like to think Showgirls sits by itself outside of all of Paul’s other films, like Starship Troopers, Robocop and Total Recall, but tying it into the argument that it’s Verhoeven at his purest, [which is what] I like to think of Showgirls as.

I’m a huge Verhoeven nut and I’d always been disturbed by the dog food subplot in Spetters [in which a takeout van sells croquettes made with jelly-meat], but I had never drawn the connection to Showgirls [in which Cristal and Nomi bond over both having once been so poor that they had to survive on dog food]. I’d also never noticed how much vomiting is a recurring motif for him. Yeah! Women vomiting! It was always women that were throwing up, which is just bizarre. The doggy chow thing I thought was interesting because [initially] I felt like ‘oh this is a Joe Eszterhas bit’, something from his script that’s just bizarre and weird, but then when I saw that thread from Spetters, it was just like ‘oh my god, you’ve done the whole eating doggy chow thing before’.

I’ve always been interested in Verhoeven’s evolving description of the film himself; how he has recast history a bit to say he was in on the joke, but the funniest thing I thought he ever said about it was that he regretted not putting a serial killer plot in Showgirls, because that would’ve distracted the Americans. Had you heard that? I have yes. I think Adam Layman mentioned that. [Verhoeven]’s like: “Basic Instinct was enough of a thriller that people could watch it.” That was something I’d heard a couple of times before. I think he’d actually been considering it, like a death or a murder or something.

Thanks for making your list of Campy Sequels To Watch After Showgirls. Talk us through them. What did you make of Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven? I’ve only seen clips. It’s a film that might be better in small doses, not one whole thing, because I think it’s, like, two and half hours long. I think it took me a couple of viewings to get through the whole thing. But it’s interesting because [filmmaker] Rena Riffel plays Penny/Hope in Showgirls. She wrote it, directed it and starred in it, and it follows her character playing off Nomi’s leaving Vegas to go to Hollywood. [Riffel] was in Mulholland Drive, so part of me thinks she was trying to do a David Lynch thing. Or a John Waters thing. She’s definitely very aware of the afterlife and the over-the-top campiness of it. So there’s all these little Easter eggs where she’s drawing comparisons to Showgirls. But it’s super low budget, and she kind of embraces that. I would recommend it to hard core fans of Showgirls; it’s definitely not a movie for everybody.

‘Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven’, featuring writer-director Rena Riffel (right) as Penny.

Grease 2 ‘Cool Rider’—amazing. Christmas-tree dress. I like that the gender roles were flipped. And it’s a fun movie. It’s a fun movie that I always enjoyed as kid.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch That was another one that I saw late. And I mean, the musical number, Hulk Hogan, just knowing that the director went all out and didn’t hold anything back. I mean—Vegetable Gremlin? There are just so many things it in that are bizarre, and it didn’t follow the traditional 80s/90s sequel formula.

Beyond The Valley of the Dolls Yeah. You know that Roger Ebert wrote that, right? That’s another one that’s probably closer to Showgirls 2 in the Russ Meyer aesthetic of it. But these are all films that had similar [critical trajectories]—it was panned when it came out but got [a] second life. I mean not to the scale that Showgirls has, but I think people revisit it and embrace it for what it

Magic Mike XXL It feels like they’re more in on the joke, and I kind of found it more enjoyable than the first one, just because it didn’t seem like it was taking itself so seriously. And Jada Pinkett Smith is kind of playing the Matthew McConaughey role. It’s The Big Chill meets Chippendales. And as far as the dance numbers go, it feels a lot campier and they’re a little bit more aware of what’s happening. Not as much as like a failed-seriousness kind of camp, but there’s something going on there.

Final question. Showgirls: good or bad? I call it a masterpiece of shit.