Film strips

Interview, May, 1995 by Graham Fuller

It would have been unthinkable a few years ago for the New York Times Sunday "Arts & Leisure" section to lead with a huge color still of a beautiful young blond woman wearing a low-cut thong, fishnet tights, a skimpy top showing most of one breast and all of her midriff - and with her teeth bared in a near-orgasmic expression. But this was precisely the photo, of actress Elizabeth Berkley, that ran with the February 12 Times' production story on the movie Showgirls. Berkley's outstretched hand, not the one that has snaked behind her back to end up splayed on her hip, seems to jab out of the newsprint - in a taunt or in supplication? It's not clear. What's undeniable, though, is the fierce sexual glory of the image and the fact that the Times had no compunction about showing it, although the Old Grey Lady may balk at advertising the movie when MGM/UA releases it in the fall, if, as seems likely, it gets an NC-17 rating.

Showgirls is the latest collaboration between director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. It's an All About Eve-like story of an unsophisticated eighteen-year-old, Nomi (Berkley), who arrives in Las Vegas and quickly graduates from a sleazy lap-dancing joint to a glitzy topless show, where she soon supplants its star (Gina Gershon), who got her the gig in the first place, and seduces the boss (Kyle MacLachlan), the star's lover, before her past catches up with her. Eszterhas's script, like those for the Sharon Stone vehicles Basic Instinct, which Verhoeven also directed, and Sliver, is a middlebrow, middle-aged heterosexual man's idea of titillation. Its vulgarity is not in the frankness of its sexual display - the movie, nicknamed Fleshdance after the Eszterhas-co-scripted Flashdance, will teem with bare breasts - but in its nonsatirical appreciation of Vegas's ultimate tawdriness and in its largely uncritical take on sex and money as bedfellows.

Whether it turns out to be good, bad, or indifferent, a serious, sexy film for discerning adults or pseudo-soft-core trash, Showgirls is a movie of and for the moment. It's the first studio production to take as its subject the altered sex industry of the '90s. AIDS (as acknowledged by Eszterhas in his script) is one reason why lap dancing, table dancing, and phone sex have burgeoned in our culture recently (and why cybersex will). They are all varieties of safe sex, of course, but they are also anesthetics that alienate the emotions. They have emerged alongside increasingly specialized and fetishistic forms of pornography that can be bought from any newsstand vendor, but which weren't available over the counter or outside porn emporiums until the '80s. All this new porn (perhaps all porn) is postmodern - even lap dancing, in which topless strippers, like Nomi, squirm on a fully clothed customer's lap until he comes, is not sex itself but sex once-removed from its primal sources.

Accordingly, as viewers of Showgirls' keynote lap-dancing scene, we wild be voyeurs of a simulacrum of sex. (Even the fake orgasms will be fake.) The movie will serve up a few scenes of "the real thing": Berkley with MacLachlan, Berkley with Gershon. The script, though, promises not a sex film but a film about the class system in the striptease industry and about the promise of sex that exists in striptease, the promise that's never kept. Given the cold attention to brutality in Verhoeven's earlier American films, there's every likelihood that Showgirls' set pieces, of which there are many, will be as sheeny and expensive as a Hustler centerfold, or as icily untouchable as that Times shot of Ms. Berkley.

In preproduction this spring is the Castle Rock Entertainment film of Carl Hiaasen's comic crime thriller, Strip Tease, a story of political corruption set in Florida. Demi Moore is reportedly being paid $12 million to play the stripper, Erin, who reluctantly becomes a table dancer. At the beginning of the novel, Erin is a performer at the lowly Eager Beaver who complains about the crudeness of the club's name: "It gives the impression we're a bunch of whores, which we're not." And this is Nomi addressing her benefactress in the Showgirls script: "Maybe you're a whore, Cristal, but I'm not."

These remarks by Erin and Nomi - who, indeed, may not be whores but are acutely aware that other people think they might as well be - underline not only the career distinction between the ecdysiast's art and fucking for money (as a practitioner of frottage, Nomi walks a fine line between the two) but also the moral distinction, which prompts all sorts of thorny political questions. Who is most likely to be most offended by this "I'm not a whore" defensiveness? Prostitutes, pro-legalization feminists, antipornography feminists, or the religious right, who, in all probability, will jump-start a bandwagon of disapproval for what it perceives to be Hollywood's new sexual liberalism? Are Erin and Nomi reactionary be cause they think prostitutes - fellow sex workers - are contemptible, or are they simply mouthpieces for their male creators' unresolved fantasies about "whores"? Are they free spirits because they strip in public, or are they low-level commodities? It's on such niceties that the world is turning these days.