Recently the L.A. Times posted a fascinating
interview with a 72-year-old writer and entrepreneur named Pamela Redmond. As a
novice stage performer, trying to find the right format for a solo recounting
of her own eventful life, Redmond has devised something called Old Woman
Naked. In it, she narrates her own life story, while gradually removing her
clothing, stripping down (as it were) to the bare essentials. Why this? As she
told the Times, “I wanted to show
people what an older woman’s body actually looked like, Young women take their
clothes off all the time, they’re scantily dressed onstage or using their body
and their sexuality as part of their art. But older women—it’s just not seen.
Or it’s seen as ugly. I knew right away: this is intrinsically different and
kind of radical.”
Redmond’s quote hit me hard because I had just watched the
notorious 1995 film, Showgirls. Written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by
Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven, the duo who had previously collaborated on the
erotic megahit Basic Instinct, Showgirls became famous for the
amount of money it lost and the number of Golden Raspberry Awards it collected.
Its big (for its time) budget and its NC-17 rating garnered Showgirls a
great deal of attention. Unfortunately, it was almost universally hated. Today,
however, viewers who watch it on video can decide for themselves if it has a
redeeming sense of humor and if it can be taken not as a serious drama but
rather as a satire of showbiz aspirations. For a growing number of fans, it’s
now considered a cult classic.
Personally, I found it all a bit dull. True, moving this
tale of a young woman with stars in her eyes to Las Vegas gave the filmmakers a
chance to put their own offbeat spin on the usual story of showbiz aspirations.
Las Vegas is definitely an eye-catching place to film a movie, and we all savor
sagas in which an attractive protagonist claws her way to the top. Because of the Las Vegas setting, the plot
features dancer Nomi Malone’s ascent from a strip club—and semi-brothel—called Cheetah’s
to the mainstage of the Stardust Hotel, where she finds a spot in a production
featuring a live volcano and lots of bare breasts.
Does this sound erotic? It is, for a moment or two. As
Pamela Redmond so rightly noted, in the Stardust’s “Goddess” revue, taut bodies
and explosive sexuality are being used as a form of art. The women onstage (not
to mention the young men who scramble all over them) are beautiful to look at.
And these people REALLY can dance. Part of the problem is that the many dance
routines we see in the film start to look pretty much the same, whether they
take place at a tawdry strip club, in a lavish hotel showroom, or in more
private surroundings. Everyone seems to be sexually in heat, and more and more
(especially in the film’s one actual sex scene) the emotions struck me as
totally bogus.
The headliner in Showgirls is Elizabeth Berkeley, a
one-time child actor who was reportedly asked to give an over-the-top
performance. To her credit, she’s a dynamic character—sometimes surly to the
point of viciousness, sometimes girlishly overjoyed by small successes. Naturally,
she’s got some secret traumas to get past, though we only learn about them late
in the game. Her older (and not necessarily wiser) rival is Gina Gershon, whom
I always find worth watching. Wholesome-looking Kyle MacLachlan is around too.
Needless to say, he’s as warped as everyone else.
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