RJ:
http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/s/showgirls_vip.shtml
A preponderance of the criticism heaped on Showgirls on its release was piled on ingénue Elizabeth Berkley in the lead role as dancer Nomi Malone, with reviews scorching the ex-"Saved By the Bell" actress for her lack of acting chops. In retrospect, this is both unfair and completely off-the-mark. The rock-stupid symbolism of her name aside, Nomi is a brilliantly realized character and Berkley's casting was an act of genius. No, she isn't a world-class actress, but she is a competent one, at least by weekly TV standards. But she was utterly out of her league in this movie, jumping from second-banana status on a mediocre teen sitcom to carrying an entire, big-budget Hollywood film on her slender back — which made her not unlike Nomi, who hitchhikes to Las Vegas without any clue of how she'll make it big as a dancer, then finds herself thrust headlong into the back-stabbing, nasty world of big-time Vegas stage productions.
That Berkley was given the role, rather than a name actress with box-office clout, was no accident — like Nomi, Berkley was hungry and willing to do anything asked of her on this film, no matter how degrading, to grasp a little stardom. Her passion as an actress to prove herself through complete personal debasement — from the cheesy, unsexy, exploitive choreography, to her underwear-free costumes and creepy sex scenes — gives her performance a freakish resonance and provides a level of entertainment almost completely separate from the film itself. In his famous deconstruction of Showgirls for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane nailed it when he wrote, "She can't act, but the sight of her trying to act, doing the sorts of things that acting is rumored to consist of, struck me as a far nobler struggle than the boring old I-know-I-can-make-it endeavors of her fictional character."
That Berkley also appears to have been kept out of the loop regarding Showgirls' satirical bent seems quite deliberate — witness the unfortunate Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards in Starship Troopers, who fell victim to Verhoeven's directorial technique of letting some actors in on the joke (in Troopers it was Neil Patrick Harris; here, it's the deliciously smarmy Gershon and MacLachlan) while keeping other actors in the dark to make them look especially earnest and vapid. In Showgirls, that trick served the film beautifully — but it also had the side effect of utterly derailing Berkley's fledgling career when she was torn asunder by critics.
* * *
Part of the reason that audiences may have responded so negatively to Showgirls is that they simply didn't have the reference points to make sense of it. This reviewer, for example, absolutely despised the film on first viewing, thinking it vile, ugly, and just plain badly written. The characters' behaviors often make no sense, and the dialogue frequently strays so far afield from either logic or even normal human speech that it's awe-inspiring — that defining moment, for example, when Nomi and the show's diva, Crystal (Gershon) bond by disclosing that they both like the taste of dog food, or this exchange between the show's stage manager and director:
Marty: Tony, she's all pelvic thrust. She prowls … she's got it.
Tony: I wonder how she got it.
Marty: Well, she certainly didn't learn it.
Tony: She learned it, all right. But they don't teach it in any class.
Part of the problem may lie in that Showgirls is an homage to/amalgam of several classic film genres — the '30s backstage musical, the '60s sexploitation film, and the '90s sexy-lesbians-are-hot-and-scary genre pioneered by Eszterhas — as well as being a satire that's played completely straight. Sold to the public on its release as a sexy flick about topless dancers, audiences were totally unprepared for what they got — an exercise in subversive excess that makes violence sexy and sexuality violent, works overtime to make its non-stop T&A abhorrently non-erotic, and turns the traditional wide-eyed heroine into a frenzied sociopath in need of Thorazine.
