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THE COLLECTION / 1995
For the curious 131 min · US NC-17

Showgirls (1995)

A bad movie. A cult object. A significant reason for caution.

Directed by Paul Verhoeven · 131 minutes · US: NC-17

In 1996, Paul Verhoeven did something almost nobody in Hollywood was willing to do: he showed up at the Golden Raspberry Awards to collect his trophy in person.

Showgirls had just received thirteen Razzie nominations and won seven awards, more than any film had won at the time. Verhoeven took Worst Director and became the first person in the ceremony's history to actually turn up and accept one.2 Bill Cosby had been handed his on The Late Show eight years earlier, which doesn't really count.

Which is about the most Paul Verhoeven response imaginable. The man made RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers. He has never once been embarrassed on his own behalf.

Thirty years on, Showgirls is still a bad movie according to a lot of people. It is also a cult object, a midnight-movie staple, the subject of a documentary, and — thanks to a 4K restoration and a collector's box that sold out on pre-order — a genuinely desirable physical-media release.9 So what happened? Did everybody misunderstand it, or is it one of the most entertaining disasters a major studio ever paid for?

Both, honestly. Showgirls earns its place here because it's a fascinating wreck with two or three real virtues inside it.

Before you watch

Showgirls contains extensive nudity, explicit sexual situations, degrading language, and abusive workplace relationships. It also includes a disturbing sexual-assault sequence involving multiple perpetrators. Although the movie is frequently played for laughs, this sequence is not. The film also contains strong violence, a reference to suicide, and flashing lights that may affect photosensitive viewers.7

Specific content details (contains spoilers)
  • Two brief fistfights, a fall down a staircase, and a man kicked repeatedly in the face until he bleeds.

What it is

Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) hitchhikes into Las Vegas with a suitcase and a conviction that she is a dancer. Within minutes a truck driver robs her. Within an hour she's stripping at the Cheetah Club. Within a week she's been noticed by Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon), the reigning star of the Stardust's topless revue Goddess — noticed, specifically, in the way Cristal notices things, which is to say with her eyes and then with her hands.

Cristal and her boyfriend Zack (Kyle MacLachlan), the hotel's entertainment director, come to the Cheetah and buy a lap dance. It is Cristal's way of demonstrating that Nomi's job is prostitution with better lighting. Nomi, who spends the film insisting "I'm a dancer," does not take this well.

What follows is All About Eve with friction burn: a scramble up a very short ladder, past a lot of women who are all equally replaceable.

How it got made

Verhoeven had wanted to make a big MGM musical. Eszterhas, on holiday in Maui, suggested Las Vegas. Eszterhas was advanced $2 million and picked up another $1.7 million when the studio greenlit the picture, and the two of them interviewed more than 200 Vegas strippers, folding pieces of their lives into the script.1 Eszterhas was, at that moment, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood.3

Casting was a cattle call. Pamela Anderson, Drew Barrymore, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez and Charlize Theron were all considered for Nomi before Verhoeven settled on Berkley because she was, in his words, the only actress who combined the three things he needed: acting, dancing, and willingness to go full-frontal. Madonna and Sharon Stone were floated for Cristal before Gershon got it.1

Here's the part worth pausing on. The standard telling of this production includes the detail that Verhoeven deferred 70% of his $6 million fee to secure creative control — it's in the Wikipedia entry, and it's been repeated for years. Asked about it directly by The New Yorker in 2021, Verhoeven said: "No, that's nonsense." He explained that he'd simply avoided asking for a huge salary because of complications left over from an earlier, abandoned production.13

Which is a useful reminder that a production anecdote can circulate for three decades before anybody checks it with the person who was standing there.

It was the first NC-17 film given a genuine wide release by a major studio, and the rating poisoned the marketing.1 ABC, CBS and Fox wouldn't run ads before 10pm; many NBC affiliates wouldn't run them at all. Two Southern chains, Texas' Cinemark and Georgia's Carmike, simply refused to screen it. MGM leaned on the controversy with the tagline "leave your inhibitions at the door," bought Times Square billboards, and mailed out 300,000 preview tapes of footage too explicit for the trailer.

It opened at number two behind Seven with $8.1 million across 1,388 screens, dropped 60% in week two, and finished its domestic run at $20.4 million against a $45 million budget.8 Then it made over $100 million in home video and rentals, which is where the actual business was.1

Eszterhas, for his part, took out a full-page Variety ad insisting the film was a morality tale. Nobody was buying it.

What genuinely works

Gina Gershon, full stop.

Cristal is the only performance in the film operating on a consistent, deliberate register. She plays a woman who has already won, already knows what it cost, and is watching the clock run down. She's venomous, bored, maternal, and visibly turned on by her own replacement — often within the same line reading. Her delivery of "there's always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you" is the best thing in the movie and arguably the thesis of Verhoeven's entire filmography.

The look is better than its reputation too. Jost Vacano shoots the Stardust as aggressively beige, carpeted, fluorescent — not fantasy Vegas but payroll Vegas. The Goddess numbers are staged with real revue competence, right down to the star entrance from a fake volcano. Verhoeven has never been embarrassed by bodies, and he films them like architecture.

And the film has an actual idea. Nomi's war isn't with Cristal, it's with the word "whore." Cristal wields it like a scalpel.4 Nomi flinches every time. The engine of the film is her refusal to accept that dancing and selling are the same act — and her slow, ugly discovery that they might be.

What doesn't

Berkley is both the problem and the point. She's a trained dancer and an untrained movie star, and Verhoeven — a director of surfaces, not of actors — let her run at a pitch most filmmakers would have dialled back. She bites her nails, snarls, and flings herself at scenes like a stunt coordinator. Sometimes it's electric. Often it's a woman performing intensity rather than feeling it.

Verhoeven has since owned this. "Good or not good, I was the one who asked her to exaggerate everything," he said in 2015.1 A decade later he added: "If somebody has to be blamed, it should be me. I asked Elizabeth to do all that."1

The film is also badly shaped. It runs 131 minutes and feels longer. Characters arrive, humiliate Nomi, and evaporate — the club owner Al Torres, the producer Tony Moss, the immortal Henrietta "Bazoom." Whole subplots (Nomi's thing with the bouncer-choreographer James, played with real warmth by Glenn Plummer) get picked up and dropped without rhythm. And the tonal whiplash is genuinely destabilising: the film will cut from sincere backstage drama to a woman getting motorboated by a chorus line with no gear change whatsoever.

Then there's the pool scene. Shot over several days in unheated water, it features Berkley and MacLachlan thrashing at cross-purposes like two seals in a washing machine. MacLachlan, fresh off Twin Peaks, is stranded — a smooth operator in a film that keeps treating him as furniture.

Why it lasted

Contemporary reception was merciless. Kenneth Turan wrote that the film "has somehow managed to make extensive nudity exquisitely boring."10 Janet Maslin called it an instant camp classic.1 Roger Ebert gave it two stars, dismissed the script as "juvenile" and "masturbatory," and then conceded the things that turned out to matter: "the production values are first-rate, and the lead performance by newcomer Elizabeth Berkley has a fierce energy that's always interesting." His verdict — "It's trash, yes, but not boring" — has aged better than almost anything else written about it that week.6

Berkley was dropped by her agent. Other agents wouldn't take her calls. Kyle MacLachlan watched the premiere and thought: "This is horrible. Horrible!... it's inadvertently funny."1

Then the reappraisal started. Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman, Jim Jarmusch, Adam McKay and Jacques Rivette have all defended it as deliberate satire.1 A documentary, You Don't Nomi (2019), anatomised the way critics talked about it. David Schmader built a career on a live commentary track. Verhoeven, who accepted the cult status with "it's like a resurrection after the crucifixion," now gets the last word: in 2025 he said Hollywood "turned their backs on her" and took the blame himself.1

In 2023, Vinegar Syndrome gave it a three-disc 4K UHD release, newly restored from an existing director-approved studio master and loaded with interviews and essays. The deluxe box sold out.9 Not bad for a film that won Worst Picture.

Verdict

For the curious.

I remember having a pretty good time with Showgirls when I first saw it years ago. The acting is ridiculous, the dancing is outrageous, and practically everybody behaves like they've never had a normal conversation in their lives. It's the kind of excess that can make a mediocre movie surprisingly entertaining.

And then the sexual-assault scene happens.

Suddenly, the whole thing feels different. What had been an over-the-top, occasionally hilarious melodrama takes a genuinely disturbing turn. Sexual violence isn't something I can casually shrug off as another ridiculous plot development, and I'm not convinced the movie handles it with the seriousness it deserves.

There's still plenty about Showgirls worth discussing. It's a fascinating Hollywood failure with an unusual afterlife, some memorable performances, and more ambition than its reputation suggests. But that doesn't automatically make it something I'd recommend for a fun movie night.

There's an interesting movie buried in this mess, but there's also a pretty significant reason to approach it with caution.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the plot details and ending

The staircase isn't ambiguous

One thing worth getting straight, because it's often described as a mystery: Nomi deliberately pushes Cristal down the stairs. The film shows us. Molly sees it. Nomi lies about it, and another dancer — one Nomi had previously covered for — backs the lie up.45

What's ambiguous is the morality, not the event. Cristal is furious that Zack slept with Nomi and threatens to walk, which kills Nomi's understudy slot. Nomi responds by shoving her down a flight of steps hard enough to break her hip. Cristal ends up with a large legal settlement and a replacement in the starring role.

And then Cristal forgives her, more or less, and strongly implies she pulled a similarly ruthless stunt to get her own first starring role.12 Showgirls isn't asking whether Nomi was right. It's asking whether the ladder is the ladder.

Where the film suddenly stops being funny

For most of its runtime, Showgirls exists in a universe where everybody is trying to sleep with somebody, humiliate somebody, or steal somebody's job. It's ridiculous. Sometimes on purpose.

Then there's Molly.

Played by Gina Ravera with more unforced decency than the rest of the cast combined, Molly is the one person in Vegas who helps Nomi for no reason. She gives her a place to live. She takes her backstage. She is, functionally, the film's conscience.

At Nomi's opening-night party, Molly meets her idol, the rock star Andrew Carver. He and two bodyguards beat and rape her in a hotel room.47 The shift is brutal: the movie that gave us the world's most absurd pool sex is suddenly handling something genuinely horrific, and it does so quietly.

Here's the thing worth flagging: the film does not abandon the aftermath. What it does is more interesting and more uncomfortable. Zack's instinct is to protect a valuable celebrity rather than pursue justice — he offers Molly hush money. When Nomi reaches for the phone to call the police anyway, Zack stops her with two words: her real name. Turns out he's been digging into her past, and he's perfectly willing to use what he found to keep her quiet.45

So Nomi does what the system won't. She goes to Carver's hotel room, strips as if she's there for sex, then pulls a switchblade and beats him half to death with her boots while he screams. Then she goes to the hospital and tells a semi-conscious Molly that she did it.45

Eszterhas later called the rape scene "a god-awful mistake."111 He's half right. It's jarringly placed, and it's doing an enormous amount of thematic labour in about four minutes. But the argument the film is making is coherent: an industry that treats women as inventory will not police itself, and the only justice available is the kind you administer yourself with a knife and a pair of boots.

You can also argue the film is using a woman's assault as a convenient switch to flip its protagonist into moral clarity. Both readings hold. That tension is the most interesting thing in the movie and almost nobody talks about it.

Leaving Las Vegas isn't a victory

By the end, Nomi has everything she wanted. She's a headliner. She's famous. She got past the woman standing in her way by pushing her.

And she's miserable.

She goes to Cristal's hospital room to apologise. Cristal — flush with settlement money, philosophical, faintly amused — forgives her and tells her how she got her own first break. Nomi says she's leaving. Cristal asks whether she's going to come over and give her a big kiss. She does.4

Then Nomi hitchhikes out of Vegas toward Los Angeles — and the truck that picks her up is driven by the same man who robbed her in the opening scene. This time she pulls the switchblade and makes him give her suitcase back.15

It's not a redemption arc. Nomi hasn't become a better person; she's just stopped confusing success with getting what she wanted. For a film with this much nudity, shouting and aggressively strange dancing, that's a surprisingly adult place to land.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, Showgirls ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  2. Wikipedia, Golden Raspberry Awards ↩

  3. Wikipedia, Joe Eszterhas ↩

  4. Filmsite, Showgirls scene-by-scene synopsis ↩↩↩↩↩↩

  5. IMDb, Showgirls synopsis ↩↩↩↩

  6. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 22 September 1995 ↩

  7. BBFC classification record ↩↩

  8. Box Office Mojo ↩

  9. Vinegar Syndrome, Showgirls 4K UHD ↩↩

  10. Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times, 22 September 1995 ↩

  11. Washington Post, 25 October 1997 ↩

  12. Springfield! Springfield! transcript ↩

  13. The New Yorker, Paul Verhoeven Wants to Keep Things Light and Playful, 2021 ↩