A Camp Sandwich on Wry

Since I’ve been thinking about camp so much since I started this blog, I would be remiss not to mark the occasion—I rewatched Showgirls (1995). I also read the 2003 critical roundtable on the film from Film Quarterly, which is a pretty great set of brief critical essays, centering on the epic failure of the mainstream critical establishment to see Paul Verhoeven’s infamous “bomb” as being anything more than a disaster. From the point of view of many film fans, both in academia and among the unwashed masses, Showgirls is so much more than a mere disaster.

Showgirls can’t easily be summed up; it requires experience and, almost certainly, multiple viewings. Even now, though I’ve seen it many times since it came out, if it’s been a while I tend to doubt my recollection. It can’t be as amazing as I remember it, I think. This is easy, too, because Showgirls is, first, very bad. It’s infamous for bad acting, bad writing, bad dancing—bad everything. That it’s shot and directed beautifully will sometimes be grudgingly admitted; other times the whole thing is described as trash, from conception to execution.

And trash it is, but (as put best in this quote that opens the Film Quarterly piece):

Showgirls is funny, stupid, dirty, and filled with cinematic clichés; in other words, perfect. Even better, the writer and director, no matter what they say today, don’t appear to be in on the joke…. Showgirls will hold up; it will be great trash forever. —John Waters

Actually, Paul Verhoeven might have been more in on the joke than Waters suspects, or perhaps not. It doesn’t matter much; the auteur’s intention is mostly beside the point. We have the movie we have, which is an exploitation movie with big-budget production values and impeccable craft, a delirious, blood-dripping satire that is not merely “campy” but camp wrapped in camp wrapped in camp that is fundamentally about camp. After all, one way of looking at camp is via its focus on performance—of gender, of social roles, of political ideology—and performance is central to Showgirls.

About Elizabeth Berkley’s ill-starred performance as Nomi Malone, Chon Noriega writes in the Film Quarterly roundtable,

What makes Showgirls unique as a satire is the way in which Verhoeven collapses the Lumière and Méliès traditions. The film has the strange sense of being an actualitié for Elizabeth Berkley’s performance.

This begins to get at the strange way Berkley’s performance works. It sticks out, like a stripped wire, and constantly surprises the viewer out of their badfilm shock-daze with its wildness and ungroundedness. The cautionary meta-narrative of a former child actress stretching her wings in a daring role is always close at hand (Berkley was—and is—one of the stars of Saved by the Bell), as is a frequent confusion about what is motivating her behavior or, for that matter, the people who try to help her. It’s interesting to think about how this connects to the satire—the “bad” performance is a constant reminder of the artifice depicted, the many artifices, throughout the film, and the theme of performance of the self.