Moviegoers Shed Different Lights on ‘Showgirls’ : Filmmakers Tap Into What the Audiences Need

Kenneth Turan’s witty pan of the Paul Verhoeven film “Showgirls,” while articulate and accurate in most respects, fails to acknowledge several succinct qualities of the film itself, and also how pleasurable of a movie-going experience the film actually is. The latter failure of course is understandable, since Turan saw the film in pre-release, not at the 7:30 showing on the opening Friday night at the Mann Chinese Theatre (which I attended). But the former suggests an essential misapprehension of the effect of the film (and perhaps striptease shows themselves) on men and women today.

At 10 minutes before show time, the ticket line on Hollywood Boulevard stretched well down the block. The audience was young and hip, the same twenty- and thirtysomethings who thronged to “Pulp Fiction” and made that movie a success. There was an excitement in the air not unlike that before a musician walks on stage at a rock concert.

With all the hype and those (semi) seductive billboards plastered around the city, this was a movie one wanted to see right away, not two weeks late when the heat on it would no-doubt die. This was an event one wanted to be part of and one could feel the curiosity in the line and inside the theater as we all waited for the previews to finally end.

Why the curiosity? Surely not screenwriter Joe Ezsterhas and surely not director Verhoeven. Most likely not even the movie itself. But sex . Pure and simple sex and sexual explicitness. The NC-17 rating had done it. The audience was promised something it hadn’t seen in a mainstream movie before.

That was the lure, the reason for the high energy. What we shared as movie-goers was an eager expectation to stare at the forbidden. Together, not in private.

And it all made sense--even before the hideously acted opening scene flashed before our eyes: In a culture of AIDS, of restraint, of “Just Say No” slogans, of political correctness, of politicians ranting about the need to somehow insert “family values” into every piece of art, the movie-goers who attended “Showgirls” were by their purchase of a ticket protesting against all they were being told not to do and see.

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At first the audience was just stunned. How could anything be this bad? The acting, the sets, the dialogue, the music. How was it possible? But soon they caught on. Whether intended by the movie’s producing team or not (one may never know this) “Showgirls” was quietly becoming a campy cult classic. What Turan labeled “oafishness” and chastised as misogyny was just plain fun--fun in this case meaning laughing “at” rather than “with” the film.

The movie was far too insipid to be demeaning to women. Its soft-core scenes, especially the lap dance sequence, in which Elizabeth Berkley’s gyrations are so over-the-top, had men and women in the audience roaring and calling back at the screen. Other moments, such as when Gina Gershon (who plays Crystal with charming pizazz), takes cocaine, had some audience members yelling “No!” and “It’s a trap!” and “Don’t do it!”

A highlight in the theater came 15 or so minutes before the film’s end. A group of about 10 people stood up and dared to walk out. They instantly received a round of applause. At which point they bowed and departed, and the audience’s eyes returned to the melodramatic closing, which solidifies the film’s place in the campy camp. It reverberates as dumber than dumb.

“Showgirls” is not a message film or an insightful portrait of “venal Vegas,” as Turan correctly observes. It is a silly piece of filmmaking that achieves a kind of life beyond the film precisely because it taps into the needs of a voyeuristic society. And like some pornography and many strip-show acts, its ultimate effect is healthy, not culturally destructive: It succeeds in proving that nudity, and (attempted) titillation is better displayed than repressed.