"Sex, Violence, Showgirls, and The American Way" Transcript

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Apr 07, 2023 First published.

Dec 07, 2023 Privated post-callout.

Feb 26, 2024 Unprivated with apology 2, claiming no plagiarism.

May 8, 2024Channel deleted

Apr 08, 2023

Apr 11, 2023

Dec 03, 2023

Feb 27, 2024

As of Apr 07, 2023

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00:00 Introduction
4:58 The Bad Movies Club
12:44 Isn't It Iconic?
22:06 Please Sir, I Want Some Gore
31:01 Basic
37:32 Showtime!
38:23 "BAD"
46:03 Suspension of Disbelief
51:43 Re-Examination
56:35 Climax

As of Feb 26, 2024

Written by Nick Herrgott

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Tustin2121

This video had two versions posted, according to his patreon post on April 12th, 2023:

This is a VERY different version of the this video than the one that will go live on YouTube this weekend. It's, shall we say, our first R-rated video. The YouTube version is MUCH more tame, with a lot less footage from the movies discussed lol. Less swearing, less violence, fewer boobs. But hey! That's what Patreon exclusives are for :-p

This post contained a link to a vimeo upload which no longer exists. No wayback archives exist either.

The transcript will cover the YouTube version.

the rags to riches story is a classic narrative Trope that has captured the hearts of audiences for Generations one of the most enduring and popular variations of this tale is the story of a nobody becoming a star this narrative has been a staple of Hollywood movies for almost a century and it continues to resonate with audiences to this very day the earliest examples of this story in cinema can be traced back to the silent film era in 1927 Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer about a young man who defies his family's wishes and pursues a career in Show Business the film was a box office sensation and marked the emergence of sound in Hollywood movies throughout the 1930s and 40s Hollywood produced a string of films that featured the rags to riches narrative perhaps the most famous of these is a star is born which was first released in 1937 and has been remade multiple times since then starring the likes of Janet Gaynor Judy Garland Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga as Hollywood left the studio era behind in the 1970s we saw a shift towards gritty realistic dramas but the rags to Rich's narrative continued to be popular one notable example was the rocky series the films tell the story of Rocky Balboa a struggling boxer from Philadelphia who gets a shot at the heavyweight championship through hard work and determination Rocky becomes a hero to millions in the 1980s and 1990s Hollywood began to produce more movies that focused on individual achievement and the American dream with movies like 1983's Flash Dance about a young woman who dreams of becoming a professional dancer and 1990s pretty woman about a sex worker who's hired by a wealthy businessman who then Falls madly in love with her rags to Rich's storylines are important to people because they provide a message of Hope and inspiration emphasize the value of hard work and resilience and offer a form of escapism from the challenges of everyday life by depicting the Journey of a character who starts from humble beginnings and achieves great success these stories tap into some of the most fundamental desires and aspirations that people have and provide a powerful reminder that anything is possible with the right mindset and the right amount of effort and that's why we're going to explore the epitome of Rags to Riches American Dream filmmaking today with show Girls the first a word from our sponsor hellofresh are you sick of eating nothing but junk food in the occasional can of doggy Chow do you find cooking meals for yourself to be simply too overwhelming well hellofresh's pre-proportioned ingredients make it easy and cut down on your food waste by at least 23 percent compared to grocery shopping helping your wallet and the planet which is good because on average hello fresh meals have a 31 lower carbon footprint than the same meals made from Supermarket ingredients and no worries if you're not a pro in the kitchen I'm certainly not so hellofresh's foolproof recipes and pre-proportioned easy to prepare meals have saved me from becoming one of those guys who just orders in every night it's also been a lifesaver ever since my doctor put me on a borderline ketogenic diet because hellofresh has options to cover a range of dietary plans low carb low calorie and vegetarian they even have meals that are best for big families and special meals available that let you expand your palette by checking out food from across the globe and now is a great time to sign up for hellofresh because you can save a bunch just go to hellofresh.com and use the code James s50 for 50 off plus your first box ships for free yeah fifty percent off just by using the code James s50 that's j-a-m-e-s-s-50 at hellofresh.com I was kind of shocked by the discount I'm not gonna lie so put down that can of doggy chow and start eating like a goddess today [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you lights other lights there we go good evening girls and Bros and non-binary hoes and welcome to the main room of the Stardust Hotel and Casino my name is James and I'll be your MC for this evening of sexy scintillating ladies and Macho super jocks but before we get to tonight's entertainment I'd like to talk to you about these guys and gals in some detail so that you know what kind of a show you're in for starting with the famous ladies of the infamous film Showgirls make no mistake Showgirls is many people's favorite movie there are entire conventions dedicated to it with drag queens donning their feather boas and throwing on Southern Accents and flashing out tasseled nipples at the slightest provocation regardless of the fact that there are not in fact any tasseled nipples in Showgirls following the movie's release in box office bomb The Producers managed to turn a profit off of the cult fan base via home video Collector's Editions midnight screenings touring the cast for autographs and selling related merchandise the movie since it went to video and DVD has more than turned a profit and is now fondly compared to the worst of the worst bad movies like the room and troll 2. but with boobies when most people say they like show Girls they're usually quick to say that they like it ironically there are some people who do earnestly think that it's a good story with amazing performances but we're not going to talk about them there's also usually gay people in the mix who adore the amount of intended and unintended camp that exists in this film but most have again an ironic love of Showgirls they're drawn to the absurdism of it they watch it and they see a complete failure of Direction in every way they see Elizabeth Berkeley doing whatever it is that she's doing they see a gruesome carnivalesque car accident of everything in a movie that could go wrong going worse they see a failure to meet basic expectations so dire that you can't look away for these reasons we love show Girls we are drawn to this movie because of all these terrible elements it's hilarious to see such an egregious failure and make no mistake showgirls is bad like it's awful the acting ranges from nuanced to unhinged and in Gina gershon's case she dances on a thin line between the two of them the plot is Loosely strung together composed of essentially every single Trope found in A Star is Born movies everything is bombastic and dialed up to an 11 for the entire film there is no point of slowing down however in Vegas at a roulette table winning off of a hundred Reds in a row is just as improbable as losing to Black a hundred times but this movie pulls it off somehow hitting so many perfectly bombastic overuse boring and only in the movies plot tropes in perfect sequence can't just be a matter of some of the most competent and celebrated filmmakers of the time turning a blind eye to all of the other ridiculous things that for some reason landed on the screen surely someone in a suit and Ty would have looked at some of the pre-production rehearsals and said you know what maybe Paula Abdul can't dance even outside of how many people will behind the camera were seasoned Hollywood veterans after watching the movie itself enough times you begin to pick up on little patterns there's something about Showgirls that other bad movies just don't seem to have troll to the room and any number of Camp horror movies they tend to run out of steam about halfway to two-thirds in they're just not fun to watch anymore they draw from a certain number of tricks and sensibilities and after a while the audience gets diminishing returns okay cool Tommy Wiseau is doing Tommy Wiseau things just like he did those same things earlier in the movie it's actually incredibly difficult to deliberately create bad movies the examples we Elevate are accidents the room was intended to be a brilliant Masterpiece with a Madman with too much money at the helm Troll 2 was just uh a lot a lot of confusion because movies that try to be bad by parodying tropes in a genre usually run into the aforementioned problem where they run out of material before they've hit their feature length or they become predictable they conform to their own format a little too insecure to keep finding ways to flip the script it's why Monty Python movies still hold up comedically The Comedy troupe finds ways to keep you guessing until the very end they just keep throwing things at you you never have time to pay attention to something that's not funny on the flip side there is an abundance of movies that are technically perfect and I mean that from a technical standpoint they are perfect the cinematography gives depth the editing is tight they've got A-list actors giving the performances of their lives the script is dripping with pathos but for some reason they're just not engaging and you can watch Modern Spielberg with rose tinted glasses and you can find a great movie in there if you want but it doesn't capture the je ne sais quoi elements of how he just stopped making movies that are interesting to watch the difficult thing when debating lifelong Spielberg fans is that their idea of his modern works are so colored by his early career that they ignore the non-qualifiable elements of is this movie engaging because engaging isn't really anything that you can reduce to a matter of technique or a checklist of must-haves whether something is engaging or not is less a matter of technique and more a matter of artistic taste which is something that cannot be learned but can be fostered and can be lost the showgirls show Girls is definitely engaging if nothing else and unlike a slew of other Star Wars Christmas specials there's never really that point in Showgirls where it stops giving something new to the next scene it's closer in sensibilities to Rocky Horror which spits everything at you at such a dizzying pace that you don't even realize that the cast retires for the night has some sex and after Susan Sarandon distracts us with an acid trip sex scene for some reason we are gathered at a dinner table having like a four course dinner what's the matter Columbia it's not like you've never had meatloaf before but the argument here isn't that Showgirls is ironically fantastic I honestly have come to the belief the Showgirls is unironically a masterpiece of Cinema specifically because it's intended to be a showcase of Badness but in order to distinguish what I mean by an ironic appreciation of Showgirls we really need to sit down and talk about irony itself because in this post-jagged little pill Alanis Morissette world we live in irony has become one of the most overused and misunderstood words in all of the English language [Music] many people who say that something is ironic probably are referring to something that is coincidental or something that seems vaguely literary as it happens in real life this leads people to believe that irony has a fluid and interchangeable meaning which results in the word being thrown into random sentences to sound academic like an undergraduate who has to fill out a word count or a right-wing talk show or podcast host clearly though irony has an incredibly specific set of uses vaguely when something is ironic it means what happens occurs in spite of the events that were meant to lead to it an example of something ironic is actually a 1996 indie rock song deliberately outlining the number of fake ironies and then becoming so popular that it causes a shift in the cultural awareness of irony while fans of the song are entirely unaware that a song called ironic does not contain any actual ironies Alanis Morissette's song actually outlines a number of coincidences isn't it ironic that a song called ironic does not contain anything ironic the difference between irony and a coincidence is that a coincidence describes two instances which occur in spite of each other an irony to describes a single outcome that subverts preceding events or information irony cannot be coincidental as a matter of fact because the outcome happens specifically because of an effort taken to ensure it would not happen in order for more sets line it's like rain on your wedding day to be ironic you would have needed to plan your wedding in a part of the world with almost no precipitation in a time of the year where precipitation is additionally uncommon only for it to rain anyway while your hometown of Seattle Washington has a solid week of sunshine but this is only one kind of irony there are actually three different specific ways that irony can exist the first as demonstrated and most commonly misused is situational irony raining every day on your vacation only for the sun to shine the day that you leave is classic but this symbolism and foreshadowing are some of the oldest literary devices in history one of the greatest ironies in all of literature is Sophocles Oedipus tyrannus which many people know is the story of a guy who kills his dad to [ __ ] his mom popularized by by the pseudo-scientific and Incredibly skewed research of Sigmund Freud Sophocles told the story of Oedipus who in an unnecessarily complicated Cascade of time jumps and people stepping on stage and saying but wait you don't know the whole story Oedipus is the prince of Corinth who once asked the Oracle of Delphi who his birth parents were she replied that he would kill his father and marry his mother obviously put off by this thereafter he vows to never return to Corinth so he would not kill his father so he decides to travel to Thebes and gets in an argument with an anonymous wealthy man at a Crossroads a fight breaks out and Oedipus kills the other man he then instead marries jocosta the recently widowed queen of Thieves which seriously this is the guy who solved the riddle of the Sphinx and he can't figure out what happened to the recently murdered King of Thieves or that maybe if you're prophesied to sleep with your mother maybe avoid older women in general and the way we get around this plot hole is by Oedipus withholding information from the audience until the third act I don't know sounds like it needs to get workshopped a bit in spite of oedipus's inability to put two and two together we learned that he was adopted by the royal family of Corinth and was actually born to jocosta in Thebes and the man he killed at the crossroads which he was only traveling specifically because he was trying to escape his fate was actually his father the irony here is that oedipus's decision to avoid his fate is what led him to do exactly what the Oracle said he would do the additional layer of situational irony is that Freud named his Oedipus complex to describe a boy who wants to remove his father and sleep with his mother when the point of Oedipus is how desperately he didn't want to do this he wasn't weird meanwhile why does nobody give the Oracle of Delphi the credit she deserves [ __ ] given 10th dimensional Chess Championship semi-finalists here next year average anime teenage villain so yeah that was situational irony events influence and outcome though the outcome subverts the expectations the next most well-known instance of irony is dramatic irony dramatic irony is typically used in theater or more recently visual mediums like film and television this is where the audience is made aware of how the story is going to end before the Story begins which Oedipus tyrannus is another example of but this isn't to be confused with foreshadowing where within the literature itself there is an indication of what is to come foreshadowing occurs in a way where the characters hypothetically could be be made aware of future events with varying degrees of subtlety this doesn't always need to be a narrative prologue which directly tells the audience what's going to happen dramatic irony to use another Shakespearean example for which all of our high school teachers drilled into US is Romeo and Juliet which not only is probably one of his worst plays but evidenced by the fact that he thought so little of the play's contents that he opened it up with a prologue that literally tells the audience that they can leave if they want without missing much gone are the days when people watch TV and movies to actually watch them instead of just the one-time instant gratification serotonin Rush of gasping at the obvious interchangeable plot twists that you've seen in 20 other movies back in my day we used to have more reasons to watch movies than just to be surprised for two minutes no seriously spoiler culture has destroyed the use of dramatic irony you get people these days who refuse to watch movie trailers because they spoil the story let alone that the plot is only one component of any dramatic media the audience goes into the play aware that both Romeo and Juliet die before they even meet them likely because the first three acts are just so Piney that he needed some indication to let the audience know that it wasn't just romantic drivel it was romantic drivel with double suicide it was entirely constructed to project the message that young love is dumb how ironic is it that we consider it a great love story today dramatic irony doesn't need to be literary either James Cameron's Titanic is dramatically ironic because you literally walked into the theater knowing the ship's gonna sink you know what's going to happen the characters do not the third type of irony and one we don't usually acknowledge is irony is a verbal irony or more popularly known as satire this is where the phrasing in syntax used in a work do not align with the actual intentions of the author through the use of other literary devices often the carnivalesque or exaggeration the Creator's intent is made clear this is the case with Jonathan Swift's satirical essay a modest proposal in which he details a solution to the famine in Ireland where the government enacts emissive for the Irish to cannibalize their unwanted Catholic infants this wood he said solve three problems food shortage overpopulation and affording poor families a source of income by selling their babies to meat producers boom check check check but here's the thing Swift himself was Irish and in the language of English intellectual arguments of the day he dismisses other plausible easy solutions to famine and poverty in Ireland this is a satirical parody of the political and academic justifications of Cruelty instead he raises a claim so absurd that it seems completely unrealistic while highlighting the lengths that the English Parliament will go to instead of finding any other feasible solution to a food shortage a difficulty When approaching verbal irony or satire is the non-qualifiable element of taste as mentioned in other videos and will be mentioned again satire has a considerable risk of being too subtle and thus can be read as supporting the very thing that it intends to ridicule in which case I have an argument to say the Showgirls itself qualifies as verbal irony for reasons that I fully intend on explaining in gratuitous detail if it's true and the entire point of Showgirls is to make you see how bad it is then those who love Showgirls ironically for the entertainment value of seeing a terrible movie are actually appreciating Showgirls for the exact reason it was meant to be consumed so if you say you love show Girls ironically you're actually unironically conforming to the Cinematic experience that Paul verhoven wanted to give to you and to the rest of us who admire it unironically we're the actual ironic ones you know because that's how irony works satire things aren't what you would like expect them to be subverted and stuff yeah irony but it's quite a claim to take a movie that's bad and say that not only is it so bad that it's good but that it's a masterpiece because it's meant to be so bad that it can't not be good such a bold claim is going to require some very bold evidence [Music] before we talk about Showgirls itself we need to justify my claim about seasoned Hollywood veterans behind the camera because when it comes to well-respected directors it's not uncommon that they make a bad movie so in that case it usually is just boring or forgettable but if we look at Trends in Hollywood it's actually much less likely that an incredibly competent and well-paid team could fail to the point of making something that spectacularly bad then going out of one's way to make something that's spectacularly bad on purpose director Paul verhoven actually is responsible for several other films from the pre-millennial era of Hollywood which to this day continue to be held up and even turned into memes specifically I want to take a look at Basic Instinct Robocop and Starship Troopers and while Basic Instinct sets a strange gold bar for murder mystery cop dramas and is relevant to Showgirls specifically both Robocop and Starship Troopers established fairhoven as a master satirist in the case of Robocop and Troopers they ought to be used as examples of the use of framing devices to completely subvert the content of the film in either instance the scripts themselves are of very little substance aside from intending to be mass-market crowd-pleasing action movies however in this process verhoven completely subverts the written content and spoken word of his visual cues and getting especially specific performances from his actors in the case of a visual cue certain scenes or the entire film are established One Way permitting a sarcastic interpretation of the events in the instance of performances an actor May evoke certain references from their line delivery alone this is a specially important for Starship Troopers the plot of Starship Troopers is nothing special nothing you wouldn't get out of your average Army movie originally written as what was considered a coming-of-age novel by Robert a Heinlein while on one hand it was praised for its sequences of training and combat it was very divisive in nature heineland's very deliberate show of support for violent military campaigns was met with criticisms that echoed The public's fatigue of ongoing conflict in Vietnam that didn't seem to have a clear goal or end point the use of military and War in a coming-of-age novel is also a real wholesome boys becoming mankana story right the story is problematic and even at the time there were some raised eyebrows which in conjunction with the novel's politics about who is not worthy of being a citizen have left a relatively tarnished Legacy for the story heinlin himself was inspired to write this novel when in 1958 America announced a suspension of all nuclear arms testing he apparently felt that America faced too much of a threat to just be wide open like that what if a race of semi-sentient bug people were to attack how would America defend itself then so he wrote a book about it which in itself has a kind of Clueless Ridiculousness about it on one hand Heinlein wanted to write a book where the American I mean I mean human where the human way of life is under threat of annihilation by the Menace of sentient murderbugs on the other hand Heinlein really wanted to depict the kind of futuristic Utopia that he felt mankind would only attain through a fascist State he depicts our leaders as unilaterally virtuous and trustworthy furthermore the only citizens who have a right to vote or participate in Civic discussion are those who have worked within the government almost exclusively in the military so what happens when you give what is by almost all accounts a proto-fascist narrative that is so celebratory of the military that there's a strong case to describe it as a recruitment tool to a Dutch director who watched the Nazis take over his country you get a space Nazi recruitment film that's what you get as if the Aryan poster boy who goes through the trials of war and doubt to shut off the Flippin Boyhood to become a grizzled yet dazzlingly handsome leader among men was not convincing enough we get Neil Patrick Harris as a psychic officer and an SS Overcoat verhoven seems to take the recruitment meta text of the book and incorporate it into the text of his film where there are Fascist elements he draws inspiration from Lenny Riefenstahl but at the same time very subtly makes a mockery of these characters and their problems and when in doubt showcase an absurd number of shots of these space fascists dying in droves against these aliens because they don't have the power armor that they had in the book however there is an additional layer to this movie which is the opening and closing sequence the I'm doing my part too is a meme that sees frequent usage on the internet in conjunction with the closing sequence where the three primary characters basically look at the camera and say enlist today really work to frame this entire film as enlistment propaganda that would exist in a universe where humanity is embroiled in a conflict against giant murder bugs in space and really especially when it comes down to Johnny every area and over here he goes through the stages of a Whimsical desire to serve his country questioning and doubting his own leadership making trauma-bonded friends and learning the hard way how to make tough choices it really does establish a flattering expectation of armed services in conjunction with his two other high school friends who were also military bound we are shown that there are more ways than one to serve one's country I mean planet the overwhelming majority of satirical elements though are from visual cues and performances when it comes to the majority of Hollywood executives that's a little too subtle for them to pick up on with their little business degrees the film was marketed as a straightforward cut and dry Sci-Fi Action Movie trailers for the film make no attempt to display any kind of satirical intent this is something that was fairly common in many verhoven films particularly his action movies as Billy from their depictions in the trailers they can be sold as straightforward action movies but have a little bit more substance than other films in the same genre while Starship Troopers maybe verhoven's greatest example of scathingly sarcastic condemnation of his own source material RoboCop is his best example of genre criticism so unapparent that it can pass for the media it's actually trying to subvert again set in a science fiction Universe RoboCop is the kind of Bionic Man story that you would expect a cop is killed in the line of duty and after being reconstructed as a cyborg begins to get flashes of his old life and then goes on a Revenge Quest against the human people who killed him holy [ __ ] is that the dad from That 70s Show at a glance RoboCop seems to be your run-of-the-mill cop movie but he's a robot the city of Detroit is so crime ridden that officers can regularly expect their buddies to die in the line of duty being an officer is more about saying badass lines to the queer-coated bad guys and the corporate bad guys to whom they are secretly employed not to be confused with the corporate good guys who will benefit from having the icky corporate Executives unceremoniously removed on a level deeper the film is about excessive police violence officers are depicted treating their firearms like toys and take apparent Delight in opportunities to use them police officers put themselves in situations where they need to use Force instead of say due process and investigation when police officers die the force uses this as justification for requiring greater armaments leading to the bad guys acquiring more Firepower for themselves on a deeper level the film speaks as a cautionary tale of the kind of world this police state arms race will generate spliced in between the narrative are a number of newsreels where anchors give a brief synopsis of the state of the world functionally these newsreels give the audience an idea of how the public reacts to police crime and the introduction of the first cybernetic officer both Robocop and Starship Troopers demonstrate Paul verhoven's ability to create a narrative which can deceive audiences and producers into believing a film project is one thing when it's actually another in spite of his satirical Tendencies verhoven does manage to pull off serious fiction very well working on projects that earned him a heap of Hollywood cred namely his other titso cocaine snorting bisexual demonizing wacky waving inflatable tube orgasming psychological Thriller Basic Instinct which bears and outstanding connection to show Girls from what I can gather Showgirls was intended to recreate the magic of Basic Instinct but bigger Basic Instinct was small in scope a psychological ROM through sex and conflicts of interest in the police force which was a big hit and even though Studios may have thought it was because the audience got a front row view of Sharon Stone snatch iconic the film itself was an engaging and methodical case study in gaslighting the audience the key here was engaging performances from everyone involved Beyond sharing verhoven is the director of these films also have the same writer Joe esterhaus being able to navigate the twists and turns in this whodunis when the who is abundantly clear and yet even the audience begins to doubt themselves takes a strong narrative Direction this movie made an absurd amount of money especially for a hard R rating and surely not all of that could be credited to the sex in order to really sell the story to the audience everyone else needs to be on top of their game estherhas also wrote the script for Flashdance which helped cement him is Hollywood's naked lady go-to guy the surge in popularity of high-profile erotic Thrillers was drawing the eye of upper level Hollywood Executives and they wanted to take the Acclaim of Basic Instinct and push it even further the primary draw to Basic Instinct may have been the strongly provocative sex scenes but the real dramatic pull was the chemistry between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone who plays Catherine tremel is an heiress and an author involved in a gruesome murder as the victim's girlfriend one of her novels also depicts the murder scene in perfect detail right down to the ice pick she also has other novels depicting murders that she is linked to while it seems that Catherine is the obvious suspect she has everyone wrapped around her finger through the process of seduction even the audience questions whether she actually did it or not we may be inclined to wonder how a writer could go from Basic Instinct to show Girls however to be honest there was a lot about Basic Instinct which from a writing perspective would be red flags things there seem to just happen which are nonsensical except to fit certain dramatic beats namely the dramatic relationship between Douglas's homicide detective Nick Curran and police psychologist Dr Beth Garner after Corrine was put under investigation for shooting two tourists he had to undergo therapy sessions with Garner where they also began seeing each other romantically even while Curran was still her patient which is an ethical cluster and while the film makes no attempt to flatter the sfpd there is a certain suspension of disbelief needed to take this seriously especially as it's made clear that the other officers gossip that kurin only started dating Dr Garner to get off the hook there are also a few other minor plot holes or dropped beats the kind that exists in almost every movie that you don't pay attention to however as I said about suspension of disbelief the audience remains engaged regardless because the performances of the actors are selling you a world in which this chain of events is possible we can dismiss the breaches of Ethics as a self-aware criticism of corruption in the police force we can dismiss the dropped beats as an additional layer of doubt that the audience is meant to Come Away with provided the talent in front of the camera with the chemistry between Stone and Douglas especially shortcomings in the material can be excused because you are so engaged in what the film is doing well that you don't notice when it's not Landing verhoven's initial cut would have actually gotten Basic Instinct in NC-17 rating the release cut was about 45 seconds shorter and swapped out different shots to obscure the explicit elements no doubt this was at the Studio's insistence but the seed was planted if it was okay to make an NC-17 movie how much more could a studio get away with showing all they needed was one genuinely great NC-17 film to open the floodgates which brings us to Showgirls there's a movie that's creating quite a buzz in Hollywood these days not only because of its racy content but also because its director is hoping it will receive the very rating that usually means box office death NC-17 so there was a lot riding on the idea of the film that would become show girls even if the script didn't exist yet and as it so happened esterhaus pitched the idea of a Las Vegas story about the corruption of Fame to Paul verhoven and wrote it down on a napkin the idea of the duo behind Basic Instinct collaborating on this project was something everyone in Hollywood wanted in on every major Studio made bids on Esther haas's pitch resulting in an idea that went to auction and landed a 2 million dollar advance in the early 90s when the film went into production he was paid another 1.7 million dollars for the finished script MGM wanted to recreate the magic of Basic Instinct and they were pulling out all the stops and so it is in spite of being surrounded by some of the most renowned character actors of the day that Elizabeth Berkeley was doing this and Elizabeth Berkeley is no Sharon Stone with no Sharon Stone and so the audience has no reason to take for granted that any of the weird elements of Showgirls are happening on purpose instead it's all part of the hurricane of pure chaos that occupies the majority of screen time in Showgirls and so all the little questions and doubts bubble up to the surface and instead of suspending your disbelief you openly wonder if this is a strip club or a drag bar is it camp is it drama is a cringe is it gritty is a glamor even if Aster Hoss's script itself is lacking it's one thing to say that verhoven made a dog and pony show of Badness a project he was signed on to that had no hope of being good so he steered the ship into hurricane Nomi in the hopes that it would find a cult audience so it's another thing entirely to argue that verhoven specifically opted for the depictions that he did to deliberately make a mockery of the entire genre of rising star narratives through a lens so subtle that it was mistaken for the trash it was entirely meant to satirize which provided verhoven's affinity for satire I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility but Showgirls is an entirely different Beast so really the next question we need to ask ourselves is what the [ __ ] is going on in this movie [Music] even if it's good for being bad you don't make something this good without knowing what you're doing as a filmmaker you know it's a long path from conception to release to be good at your job you need to know how to identify the Stepping Stones you should avoid they're usually wobbly with bad writing acting or even editing you want to stick to the solid stones to make your job as easy as possible so what happens if you choose to step on all the wobbly ones on purpose before we begin to look at Showgirls as a master class in meta textual satire there are cues to examine that indicate that even if trying to make a mockery verhoven can't help himself but use exemplary cinematic technique [Music] [Music] I don't want to miscommunicate even if it is a case study of Badness it's intended to be a collection of the worst possible non-qualifiable narrative decisions Showgirls from a structural point of view is a big hot mess first you start with a plot that really isn't anything special a normal girl gets swept up into a life of Fame and stardom by nothing but her own grit and raw talent the quintessential American Underdog though she learns that Life in the Fast Lane comes with its set of drawbacks haunted by an examination of who she has become to succeed in this lifestyle she steps away from the spotlight she fought so hard to achieve realizing that the real spotlight where the people she met along the way such and such Etc nonsense coupled with several love triangles a tempestuous love-hate rivalry and an inevitable departure from this lifestyle this movie is basically every other movie like it but it's the fact that stuffed into the plot is every other movie like it this movie is the most movie that it could possibly be within the first seven minutes there is hitchhiking a switchblade attempted vehicular manslaughter references to gambling addiction vomiting attempted suicide and eluded lesbian undertones and the movie doesn't really slow down from there it systematically goes around and hits every single Mark that a dramatic film could hit this results in a plot that has about two dozen things in it that don't really need to be there it's a situation like Tommy with sews the room where things seem to just happen because these are things that happen in dramatic movies so it should go into this dramatic movie I got the results of the test back I definitely have breast cancer so it's really hard to synopsisize Showgirls for its elements of Badness because there are many sequences that seem to be from many different sub-genres of rising star movies on one hand it wants to draw from the starving artist who's persevering on Talent alone on the other hand it's telling a story about the exploitation of women in entertainment it's also telling a story about navigating the politics of the entertainment industry and it's telling a story about the consequences of stardom burlesque Black Swan Hustlers any number of the stars-born movies they're only trying to tell one of those stories there are also sequences that just don't make any sense the recurring theme of food is strange even though she's managed to be an incredibly successful crowd pleaser at the Cheetah club Nomi is now relegated to a diet of brown rice and vegetables this apparently culminates later on in the film with Nomi reflecting on her life while gazing over the Vegas strip eating a hamburger it seems that under the pressure she has broken from her diet to afford herself a small pleasure which would be very impactful if it wasn't for the fact that not only do we never see her ingest brown rice and or vegetables but we do see her eating junk food regularly including a hamburger outside of looking pretty this scene offers nothing to the development of the character there's also the weirdness in which esterhaus has these people talking about brown rice and vegetables like it's nutrient paste do you like brown rice and vegetables yeah you do worse than dog food and food in general I've had dog food you have doggy Chow John I used to love doggie Chow I love doggy Joe avoid this sign up for hellofresh and especially given that the entire top-down decision making behind the movie was about tits I'm especially confused about the depiction of nipples the missiles first of all is it normal for girls to apply lipstick to their nipples is that a thing do straight guys want that what what what's going on here but primarily the display of bear boobies is so gratuitous it Ventures into complete desensitization again this is a movie about topless girls in a Las Vegas show boobs being nothing special is probably par for the course however this ends up being another indication that Esther Haas doesn't know what he's talking about topless shows in Las Vegas to my knowledge according to one Elvira do not happen like this yes there were topless shows in Vegas but nipples were covered with pasties or tassels so that's a thing and second the girls were rarely exploited to this degree at least not professionally okay show me your tits this scene itself is a bit wonky because there's a huge deal made about Nomi exposing herself like this even though it's nothing we've already seen at least once in the last 30 minutes the more impactful thing to do would be to have know me never really take off her top in the early part of the movie even at the strip club however because she wants this part so badly she's willing to begin making compromises but because not one scene earlier we saw Nomi give it topless gyroscopic lap dance when the audition scene hits not only are Nomi's boobs nothing we haven't seen before but her reaction doesn't fit someone who has been stripping to pay rent since she stepped foot in Vegas according to interviews with Vegas showgirls the topless part of auditions was done very impersonally the dancer would have a topless Polaroid taken which would be shown to the director later the photo would likely be taken by another woman I can't speak to the casting procedures of every director in Vegas but esterhaus seems to treat it like the worst person is the common element this movie is about the exploitation of women in professional spaces and we will twist the plot's arm to make it happen God damn it you can tell that Esther Haas was at the very least thinking of the themes he was trying to present here because even after her tantrum Nomi gets the part and on her first performance she opts to apply ice to her nipples herself signifying that she's being corrupted by the drive to compete in this atmosphere not that someone passed the third row would be able to see how hard her nipples are but you know symbolism the sexual themes themselves are a lot and common celebrations of Showgirls Focus around several famous sex scenes where Elizabeth Berkeley demonstrates her core strength the sex is quick wild and demonstrates a Fantastical ease at which women can reach convulsing orgasm while riding a man's abdomen for those who have seen Basic Instinct one may say that this is just how Paul verhoven thinks sex happens however the sex and Basic Instincts served a methodical purpose sex in the opening scene features a woman rhythmically arriving a soon to be ice-picked man every subsequent instance of sex in the movie going forward becomes a little bit more unhinged in the final sequence Catherine tremel is rigid robotic and not at all sexy my take on this is that it's meant to be read that she loses a bit of her Humanity as we get to the core of who she really is the sex and showgirls at least doesn't seem to be as nuanced it's kind of just wacky definitely worth a watch content warning of course because there is an completely out of nowhere sexual assault which I would say even provided an artistic reading of show Girls shouldn't be there actress Gina Rivera did not need to be put through that but if the movie is this much of a train wreck why would I ever assume that there was anything more to it [Music] foreign [Music] the first real indication I noticed of Showgirls demonstrating that it knows what it's doing came towards the end of the second act rising star Naomi Malone has just sabotaged the show's star Crystal Connors and taken her role as the star of this world-renowned show goddess while being celebrated by the Press Nomi poses beside the power players of the casino chest bear this is an almost identical Recreation of an earlier scene with Crystal Connors the primary difference aside from know me being in her Shadow is that Crystal conceals herself in a massive fur coach the connections between the two scenes function on multiple levels having moved up from her Vegas Origins as a dancer in a strip club Nomi longs to be part of The Prestige of proper performance dancing Crystal spends the entire movie trying to convince her that at their core there really isn't any difference between topless dancing at this casino and topless dancing at the Cheetah club Nomi resents Crystal for these little reminders and fully chooses to believe that she has left behind her old salacious life for greener pastures Crystal cynically entertains no Illusions know me by contrast is open and exposed to the glittering fantasy of Las Vegas she is so enchanted by the lights and the glamor that she is vulnerable to the darker reality of the industry even as Crystal does what she can to disenchant Nomi to the underbelly of it so now that we have this one very visceral instance of symbolism what do we do with it we can either discount it as an accident or a coincidence or we can examine valhoven's film library and give him the benefit of the doubt if this one instance holds heavy symbology what else in the movie is symbolic if we examine Crystal as a proper literary foil to know me rather than just a Trope there's a bit of a rabbit hole that we can go down Crystal urges Nomi to understand that there are more similarities between them than differences Crystal still Likens herself to a kind of sex worker but Nomi does not find this similarity flattering what seems to be the story's apparent villain trying to get a rise out of the protagonist is actually an indication that Crystal sees right through her the only difference between them it seems is that Crystal is honest about her former identity whereas Nomi keeps paulianne Costello hidden from everyone when Nomi does get a role in the chorus she seems to feel like she's moved up in the world and no longer has to exploit herself for survival this is of course not the case I mean really the script doesn't handle this with a whole lot of subtlety hard sells subtext the girls it seems are regularly brought in to entertain potential businessmen to facilitate Partnerships with the casino meanwhile at the cheetah there are very clear very specific rules about interactions with John's 50 books a pop you take them in the back touch and go they touch they go you can touch them they cannot touch you there are no such rules at the Stardust the girls are exploited and pitted against each other they are shopped around for sex and they use sex to advance their positions there's even an argument to be made that claims that the cheetah is a safer more wholesome atmosphere than the Stardust which may not be an approximation to reality but it fuels the point the film is trying to make it also helps that as Nomi enters the chorus of goddess there are numerous ways that the dancers are subtextually dehumanized through a number of comparisons to animals primarily there's I still love doggie Chow coupled with the addition of a set of chimpanzees the administration considers managing the girls to be the same as managing The Chimps what they say or want doesn't really matter so long as they dance even the show within the show goddess mirrors the film itself while we never see the show start to finish nor do we even see all of its numbers the audience has evidence of four maybe five sets we know the introduction is the volcano setting iconic and we know that the finale ends with Crystal being lifted from the stage we see the industrial setting where Nomi pushes Crystal down a flight of stairs and based on costume changes backstage we know that after the opening number we go into a beat address sequence that thanks to a boat show we can link to one of the most played songs in the movie between the beaded dress and the industrial set there may be another fifth number for which we hear the music in the audition choreography but not for sure the assumed plot of goddess in sequence opens with men and women in chaos and conflict the goddess's arrival ushers in an era of passion and sensuality as the archetype of sexuality and Womanhood in stark contrast to Our abrahamic Roots we can't say what the next two numbers are about but when we next pick up with the industrial scene women and The Feminine archetype of the Goddess are held prisoner and exploited by the men on stage in turn the women are in conflict with each other we move into the presumably final sequence of the show where there is once again unity in order and the goddess transcends the world in the same way that Nomi Malone transcends Las Vegas when she decides that the casino industry is a bit too skeezy for her granted the play within a play a literary device is crude but serviceable it indicates that those creating this film are thinking about their own content [Music] be fair some of this may be to Esther haas's credit it seems he had clear intent but just got kind of very mixed up in all of the pesky minutia of the you know being a human being thing I've heard rumors that he had a clause in his contract that no changes to the script could be made after his final draft which is never the case in Hollywood the director almost always rewrites a script or has it Rewritten to match their own style however estherhas and verhoven were friends so there may have been a significant amount of input that verhoven had in its development without asking verhoven I can't really know for certain but provided that there is some very deliberate methodology incorporated into the visuals of this film what happens if we give it the benefit of the doubt and say that this was all deliberate at the same time if we take into consideration what expectations were coming down from Studio heads at MGM what do we get we get a movie that does exactly what the studio wanted it to everything not because the filmmakers didn't know how to restrain themselves but because they were deliberately trying to conform to the level of ridiculousness that this film was expected to be it's like that episode from The Simpsons when Homer designs his own car each little part is kind of a cool idea on its own but assemble everything together and if you just get a monstrosity because the point of Showgirls isn't about the corruptive power of Fame it's not about the sexual exploitation of women in the entertainment industry the point of show Girls is to point out that this movie is a monstrosity because all of these things in Showgirls are things that in other movies are celebrated just like know me the audience is suspended into believing that these kinds of Underdog Fame narratives are possible how many girls in America set out to Las Vegas hoping to be seen by the right person how many of them never get out of the cheetah Showgirls is holding a mirror up in front of that expectation it's as ridiculous as these sex scenes just like women having orgasms in behoven films the cell is the dream the Khan is believing that it could really happen that way Showgirls is like its content it only really works if we live in a fantasy world where rules don't matter the dancing the glamor even Nomi's insane wild sex moves they all benefit a fantasy of what it could be like people praising Nomi for her incredible dancing skills a fantasy a stripper reaching climax while giving a lap dance a fantasy the sexual fantasies seemed to fit a masculine perspective the fame and fortune fantasies seem to speak to the dreams and Ambitions of young women the whole thing suggests that Vegas or the idea of Vegas is a fantasy all while the film makes a scathing criticism of Las Vegas itself for all that Nomi holds up Vegas entertainment has the Pinnacle of prestige and dance valhoven takes every opportunity to Lampoon Las Vegas itself from the comedic acts of the drag-esque performances at the cheetah to Nomi's Premier performance as goddess being heralded by a singing man in a toga at the famous Caesar's Palace even something as nonsensical as Nomi's mispronunciation of Versace as Versace while this textually shows the audience that even if Nomi dresses herself up that she doesn't actually have any class if we take into consideration that this is a movie made by Europeans it says something else all these high-rolling Americans making fun of Nomi for pronouncing Versace wrong seem to be clueless that this Italian surname is pronounced Versace they are mocking her for saying it wrong and correcting her with a different mispronunciation for all the Vegas props itself up as a high society just like Nomi slipping on a dress she bought with a 500 lap dance Vegas doesn't have a lick of class itself there's a tacky greasy cringy film over everything in this town in the movie fake pyramids fake breasts fake values this world that know me prizes so desperately is the equivalent of a cardboard cutout of success and validation even the down to earth artist dancer who promotes real values is fake the only thing that's real is fakeness something that Crystal is nonchalantly trying to communicate the film lies to your face when its characters remark that know me is a good dancer the film lies to you when it tells you that female orgasms can happen instantaneously and the film seems to be pointing out that any other time you see this stuff in any other movie it's just as much of a lie thank you [Music] foreign [Music] for Showgirls is accomplishing exactly what I would argue the filmmakers want to communicate maybe there was once an intention to make this an earnestly good movie and the pieces are all there maybe dial back the clown car of a script to focus on the beats that support the underlying themes without obfuscating them my deepest reading of Showgirls is that it functions as a warning verhoven longed to validate the NC-17 rating because of the way the American NC-17 rating was widely applied to European films that were otherwise celebrated and popular the open displays of sexual themes in cinema was and remains fairly common in Europe verhoven expressed frustration that when these films went for an American release they would be stamped with an NC-17 rating and they would tank at the box office an NC-17 is like taking a hit out on a movie in America this is speculation on my part but when verhoven finally had a studio stamp of approval to make an NC-17 Hollywood feature his tune may have changed perhaps validating the NC-17 rating would have just resulted in studio heads throwing tits in a movie and not for any artistic reason just for shock factor and instead of deliberately sabotaging the project verhoven crafted the kind of film that would eventually be the outcome of letting Hollywood Executives notoriously know very little about Cinema or film Theory play with tits perhaps you realize that America wouldn't adopt more European values instead would be more like Las Vegas Nomi's Exodus from Nevada on the road to Los Angeles was heralding a warning to Hollywood that upon the conditional validation of NC-17 sexuality one could expect many movies to become more like Showgirls instead of say angli's lust caution and that perhaps Americans simply do not have the same values when it comes to sex or sexuality as Europeans when as a society did we become so confused about the difference between sex acts and sexuality to the point where even an object which is tangentially related to a symbol of sexuality is seen more or less as the same as promiscuity itself during the 2016 presidential run husband of presidential candidate Pete butterjas chaston canceled a scheduled campaign stop in a gay bar because there was a poll on the stage a poll which well used for many things one of which being the traditional dance form in India and China can be used for sexual titillation many in the queer community at large saw this as a slap in the face from a man whose claim to fame was the first openly gay man to run for president and an ill Omen of how he would observe queer issues from the Oval Office but the question to me wasn't why Buddha judge specifically would reject an instance of queer sexuality but why is it expected of American political representatives to detest sexuality in general the more we reject instances of sex and sexuality the more we treat sex as this naughty taboo thing where the slightest mention of human sexuality something that is pivotally fundamental to the species is risque but we can't ever not think about sex as a society because looming over this sexist dirty mindset is the fact that we are all aware that every person in this Society exists as a result of sex the movie The Showgirls was meant to be can never exist in Hollywood because the second you want to develop an artistic project about sex sex is all it's ever going to be about sex becomes a gimmick sex becomes a spectacle a selling point sex becomes a statement a shock an exploitation but one thing that sex can never be seen as is normal I can see a very problematic state of human existence arising from a mindset where the action dependent on our survival is seen as abnormal because if sex itself is abnormal sexuality and any opinion you may have about sex is abnormal too even an unwillingness to have sex is seen as abnormal because people believe that in spite of society's condemnation of it that you still should want to do it anyway and it's weird if you don't it's a very sad state of America when a film about the exploitation of sex is decried as one of the worst movies of all time whereas when the same director made RoboCop featuring gratuitous violence and the plot of which is just about as nonsensical it is held up as an action masterpiece violence is okay sex is not we need to begin reevaluating our widespread stigmatization of sex because even as the NC-17 rating remains a death knell for Hollywood movies some of the most significant television series that have been made between now and the release of Showgirls would have gotten that rating without hesitation Game of Thrones sex in the city Queer as Folk we clearly are comfortable enough with sex to be open to its depiction in the comfort of our own homes but we still like to pretend like it doesn't exist when we're anywhere else a world where Showgirls exists is a world where America can find dignity and sex a culture that is embarrassed by sex cannot take it seriously because nobody is going to know how to bring it up in polite Society think about that the next time you shame someone for posting a thirst trap on Instagram or get embarrassed because your friends started in only fans we're never going to be able to use art to celebrate sex if we use sex to shame other people so if you find yourself in the habit of shaming others for their sexual practices or even micromanaging what ought to qualify as normal sex take a moment to stop and remind yourself that it's you it's your fault it's your fault that we have showgirls thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you

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