Hollywood and Vile
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Movies Hollywood and Vile By Andrew Ferguson Like all actors these days, Elizabeth Berkley is a student of the human condition, engaged in diligent research that might deepen her artistic...
...We cash the check and show them what they want to see...
...Thus do we have one of those strange disjunctions so common nowadays: a pair of filmmakers courageously challenging Victorian repression even as their movie, the raunchiest mainstream picture in history, opens on more than 1,000 screens nationwide...
...Lucky customers with a spare $50 can get her to "lapdance"-an innovation of the safe-sex era whose mechanics are irrelevant here...
...We have dispelled the myth that you wouldn't be able to advertise NC-17 movies," an MGM executive announced triumphantly to U.S...
...There [at the hotel] they pretend to want some-thing else-and you still have to give 'em tits and ass...
...The final negative rule is most important: The filmmakers must never admit what they're up to...
...This time they and their bankrollers simply accepted the NC-17 rating without complaint-and with, most likely, a great deal of relief...
...When Nomi befriends an aspiring choreographer-a veteran of the Alvin Ailey dance troupe!-he ridicules her desire to "move up" from the cheesy stripclub to the topless revue at the upscale hotel...
...On the single occasion when full frontal male nudity would seem called for, the camera cuts demurely to the actor's sculpted torso...
...Is it possible that with these lines of dialogue Eszterhas and Verhoeven are tweaking us all in a sophisticated, mischievous gag...
...It is about a young woman who refused to be corrupted at the deepest part of her being...
...At first blush the statement may seem odd, since it suggests that Elizabeth Berkley is a woman who doesn't take her clothes off for a living, notwithstanding the two-hour movie currently in general release in which she does take her clothes off, repeatedly, and presumably not for free...
...The movie depicts those mechanics in detail, to thunderous music, and Miss Berkley, ever the Stanislavskian, attacks her work with gusto, her back bent like a wishbone, her pneumatic lips parted in a come-hither from hell...
...Through pluck and luck she wins a part...
...As she reports in recent interviews, she "learned a lot from the women who take off their clothes for a living...
...In the world of hard-core porn, I'm told, wily filmmakers stick to a formula: so many acts of fellatio and no more, so many minutes of cunnilingus, a set number of lesbian encounters, one incident of m?nage ? trois-and presto: a regulation porno movie...
...This sounds like a can't-miss formula, but for the successful execution of big-budget porn, some negative rules apply as well...
...in the half-light no nodes glisten, no protuberances swell mysteriously...
...As the first big-budget film to win both a NC-17 rating and a wide theatrical release, Showgirls may similarly serve as a template for its successors-if, as its distributors and producers hope, it encourages other mainstream filmmakers to be as bold as they...
...In fact it's the same old gritty demimonde...
...Despite weighty evidence of their technical incompetence-the movie's astounding im-plausibilities, its clunky shifts of mood, its confused timeline-Eszterhas and Verhoeven drop tantalizing hints that they have admitted to themselves the depth of their cynicism...
...Eszterhas, for example, defends his work like so: "Showgirls is a morality tale...
...A few years ago, Eszterhas and Verho-even were responsible for Basic Instinct, which was threatened with an NC-17 rating before it was trimmed to qualify for an "R...
...He can rewrite two stories over and over...
...Consider the scene, there in the darkened multiplexes of America, where moviegoers pay $6.50 to watch simulated sex while pretending they want to watch a film, which stars a pretty young woman bumping and grinding naked while pretending to be an actress playing a character, who was conceived by a famous screenwriter pretending to create a morality tale while writing a sanitized stroke movie...
...Showgirls embellishes and advances the earlier Flashdance formula...
...There is some violence as the bad guys get their comeuppance, and the movie closes with Nomi hitching back out of town...
...Shortly after hitchhiking into Vegas, Nomi finds work as a stripper in a cheesy, poorly lit strip club...
...Nah...
...There are no gross-out close-ups of the sex act...
...But it is impolite to make this rather obvious point at this moment in the evolution of the American cinema...
...The newer movie is darker, filmed in the half-light that forces critics to use words like demimonde and gritty...
...Showgirls tells the story of Miss Berkley's Nomi, a down-on-her-luck dancer with tons of raw talent who comes to Las Vegas in hopes of making it big...
...The overarching purpose of the movie is of course prurient, but its lack of success in this regard is reassuring...
...Before its release the distributors worried loudly that their film would be stonewalled: theaters wouldn't screen it, newspapers wouldn't accept the ads, TV stations would decline to run its promos...
...In Flashdance the girls danced in leotards and baggy sweaters...
...While it's true that he first found screen success as the writer of the early-80s hit Flash-dance, which told the story of a down-on-her-luck dancer with tons of raw talent who comes to Pittsburgh in hopes of making it big, over the last several years he has concentrated on murder mysteries-Basic Instinct, Music Box, Jagged Edge, Sliver-in which a protagonist is at first suspected of having committed murder and (in a surprise twist) actually has...
...and filmed by a much-praised director, Paul Verhoeven...
...Miss Berkley is a mainstream actress-former star of an unwatchable sitcom called Saved by the Bell...
...At the strip club, he explains, "they want tits and ass and you have to give 'em tits and ass...
...Her stripper confidantes are entitled to wonder: If Elizabeth Berkley doesn't take her clothes off for a living, then who does...
...At such moments a viewer can't help but wonder: Could it be that this is a knowing postmodern joke-a comment within the movie about the movie itself...
...Tempted by a world of drugs, glitter and loveless sex, she turns physically and psychologically against the forces trying to corrupt her...
...The potential for postmodern irony is dizzying...
...News...
...We're whores," a fellow dancer later tells a disbelieving Nomi...
...22, she befriended professional strippers to plumb the depths of their lives, as method actors do...
...And Showgirls is a mainstream movie, produced by a major studio, MGM...
...And if it happens to show large numbers of naked women engaged in sexual acts with the intention of arousing its audience, it's not pornography, it's . . . as I say, a mainstream movie produced by a major studio...
...The theme is something of a departure for Eszterhas, who was paid more than $2 million for his screenplay...
...The problem is that even here, in our myth-dispelling age, as you dispel old myths you tend to generate new ones, to which the deluded cling just as ferociously...
...Movies Hollywood and Vile By Andrew Ferguson Like all actors these days, Elizabeth Berkley is a student of the human condition, engaged in diligent research that might deepen her artistic understanding...
...How cheesy...
...in Showgirls they dance naked...
...Despite these professional satisfactions, Nomi aches for a more legitimate venue for her dancing: a topless revue at an upscale hotel on the Strip...
...written by a famous screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas...
...With Showgirls Eszterhas proves at last that he can do more than rewrite the same story, over and over...
...And so when she won the role of the professional stripper Nomi in Showgirls, the big-budget "adults-only" movie that opened to much fanfare on Sept...
...The stricter rating not only guarantees publicity for an otherwise uninteresting movie but also casts Eszterhas and Verhoeven as pioneers on the frontier of free expression...
...She thinks it's going to be all glitter and colored lights...
...Showgirls does not, contrary to news reports, deal in "explicit" sex...
...In that case the formula, based on Showgirls, will be: 20 to 30 minutes of full frontal female nudity, two scenes of simulated heterosexual sex to the point of climax, one scene of overt lesbianism and one soulful lesbian French kiss (assuming the French approve), and several dozen uses of the word "fuck," so long as it is spoken in husky tones by a pretty girl with pneumatic lips...
...As you find your seat in the theater you needn't worry that Pee Wee Herman sat there for the matinee...
...One by one, of course, these barriers to art have come tumbling down...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 3
