databank said:

TrivialPursuit said:

Good points. EB was dropped by her agent, etc., after the hullabaloo around the film. The makers of Striptease worked hard to distance themselves from Showgirls in theme and tried to market it differently.

I think the lesson is often missed in cases like this. The lesson isn't that the film is about strippers or dancers or Vegas acts. The lesson is that men and society at large are still trying to control women's bodies. There are more laws and restrictions against women's bodies than men's, by 100:1. Women are taught that their bodies are equally desirable and controllable. "You can be sexy, but only when we say so and how we say so." Add to that the U.S.'s penchant for ignoring sexuality in general or trying to politicize it, and it was doomed from the start, despite the script or acting. Same with Demi's film. But still, to get a film made like that in the mid-90s was a feat.

Both films were panned in Europe, too. Striptease, however, from what I recall, was truly terrible, at least that was my impression back then but it was 22 years ago...

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Showgirls on the other hand was clearly misunderstood: people assumed from the begining it was a mere exploitation film and refused to see any more to it than that. I know George Romero's "dead" series, as well as the first Evil Dead and most horror classics such as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre are often misunderstood like that by some casual viewers, who expect a dumb horror film and fail to see anything else in those masterworks.

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But like some said above, Showgirls has been rediscovered and is now enjoying a much more positive reception. Sometimes it takes a while. I guess in the mid 90's we'd been through so many "sexploitation thrillers" that critics and audience alike were just suspiscious towards any film that was marketed as such, and unfortunately Showgirls was marketed as such, not at all as an arthouse drama. I myself was extremely surprised at how smart it was when I first saw it in the theatre: I had loved Basic Instincts but the marketing of Showgirls hadn't given me high hopes.

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Showgirls is a moral tale first and foremost. It's about ambition, greed, lust, power, fame and how far one is willing to compromise their principles to enjoy the glamorous life (or the illusion of it). Particularly remarkable is that this Las Vegas world, despite all the money, is depicted as being, in fact, quite cheap: it's not Hollywood and its stars and studio moguls, it's not the MTV Music Awards world of pop stars and producers, it's not even Broadway because it's not even arts: in the end it's just strip-tease bars, only some are more expensive than others. Nothing very exciting about it. And yet, this cheap version of fame and wealth is enough to drive some people crazy.

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Another film from that same time that was highly misunderstood was Waterworld: for some reason people seemed to expect something deep à la Blade Runner and said it was just dumb action, but at the end of the day it was a comic bookish, cartoonish, pulp, postapocalyptic epic in the vein of Mad Max 2, highly enjoyable as long as you accepted not to take it too seriously.

I think, possibly the reason why Showgirls was lambasted is because most already were aware that Vegas was/is not "artistic" performing - that it was just sex being sold to men. So, then it became just an average film without much discovery of anything new - ie: just actors getting paid to demonstrate, via a bad script, what we already knew about Vegas. Just a thought...