7 / 10
I’ve seen Showgirls three times. It’s a very good film. The catch is that you have to watch it in the right context. Read as a Verhoeven satire of the American Dream, the film makes sense. Read as the erotic drama its marketing promised, it looks like the worst movie ever made. Most 1995 critics chose the second reading. They were wrong, and the critical reappraisal that started with Jacques Rivette in 1998 and culminated in Adam Nayman’s book and Jeffrey McHale’s documentary has done the work of correcting the record.
The 7 accounts honestly for execution problems that remain even when the satirical reading lands. The Eszterhas screenplay produces lines no actor could deliver naturally. The pacing drifts in the middle hour. Kyle MacLachlan is miscast. Those failures are real. They don’t invalidate the film. They’re the price of a project this ambitious attempting something this difficult, with a director who has never signaled his satire and rarely been initially understood for it.
The Critical Reappraisal Started With Rivette
When Showgirls opened in fall 1995, the reception was unanimous and brutal. Rotten Tomatoes shows a 24% critic score and a 3.8 average. The Washington Post called Berkley “a tarty blonde with the brains of an appliance bulb.” Gene Siskel said “she’s not sexy.” The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane wrote that “Berkley’s acting début is a joy, if you can call it acting: she jumps up and down a lot to indicate excitement.” Roger Ebert gave it 2 of 4 stars and wrote “it’s trash, yes, but not boring,” which was as charitable as the film got. The Razzies awarded it Worst Picture of the Decade.
Then in 1998, Jacques Rivette, one of the founding figures of the French New Wave, gave an interview praising the film at length. The quote is worth reproducing because it kicked off everything that followed: “It’s Verhoeven’s best American film and his most personal. In Starship Troopers, he uses various effects to help everything go down smoothly, but he’s totally exposed in Showgirls. It’s the American film that’s closest to his Dutch work. It has great sincerity, and the script is very honest, guileless. And that actress is amazing. Like every Verhoeven film, it’s very unpleasant: it’s about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that’s his philosophy. Of all the recent American films that were set in Las Vegas, Showgirls was the only one that was real.”
That reading, Showgirls as serious Verhoeven rather than failed eroticism, opened the door to everything that came after. Adam Nayman’s 2014 book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls extended the argument across 150 pages, demonstrating that the film’s excess is thematic rather than accidental. The 2019 documentary You Don’t Nomi gathered the various rehabilitation arguments (Schmader’s “poignant comedy,” Nayman’s “masterpiece of shit,” the queer community embrace, the academic reclamation) into a 90-minute case study in how critical reception evolves. The documentary holds a 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. Twenty-five years after Showgirls was the worst movie ever made, the documentary about reconsidering it was an indie hit.
Verhoeven himself, in interviews at the time of release, predicted the film might take fifteen years to be understood. He was off by ten.
What Verhoeven Was Actually Doing
The reading that makes Showgirls coherent, and that the original critics almost universally missed, places it in the same satirical lane as the rest of Verhoeven’s American work. RoboCop is a corporate satire dressed as an action film. Total Recall is a meditation on identity disguised as a Schwarzenegger vehicle. Starship Troopers is a fascist propaganda film that critics initially took for a fascist propaganda film. The Verhoeven pattern is consistent. He makes films that look like exactly the thing they’re satirizing, with no signaling apparatus to tell the audience which mode they’re in.
This is a calculated risk that fails as often as it succeeds. With Starship Troopers, critics in 1997 wrote outraged reviews about the film’s apparent endorsement of militarism, missing entirely that Verhoeven, a Dutch teenager during the Nazi occupation, had made a film about how seductive fascist aesthetics actually are. The film has since been rehabilitated as one of the smartest political satires of the 1990s. The reception cycle is the same one Showgirls went through, compressed.
Showgirls is Verhoeven applying that approach to the American Dream specifically, in its most Vegas-specific form. The film looks at meritocracy, female competition, the relationship between sex and money, and the price of ambition, and refuses to give the audience a way out. Nomi Malone wants to be a star. The film grants her the wish and shows exactly what the wish costs and what it requires her to become. Nayman’s central argument is that “Showgirls is a coherent statement, and its excess, its ridiculousness, and its tastelessness aren’t arbitrary, but thematic.” The film is making an argument by being the thing it’s critiquing. The Atlantic, reviewing Nayman’s book, summarized this position about as cleanly as anyone has.
For Writers
The Verhoeven approach to satire is genuinely difficult and almost always misread on first contact. The risk is that you make the thing you’re satirizing and your audience receives it as endorsement. The reward is that when it works, the satire is more devastating because it doesn’t let the audience off the hook with comfortable distance. If you choose this approach, accept that some readers will not catch the irony. The cost of the technique is the audience that takes the work straight. The benefit is the audience that doesn’t get to feel superior to the material. They have to inhabit it before they can criticize it.
What Berkley Is Actually Doing
Nomi Malone is a damaged woman. Elizabeth Berkley plays that well, which is what the film requires. The critical consensus in 1995 was that she could not act. Anthony Lane’s “jumps up and down to indicate excitement” line landed because it described something true. Her acting choices are loud, hyperactive, and rarely calibrated to the moment around her. The conventional reading is that this is bad performance.
The accurate reading is that Nomi is a character with no idle setting. She is always at full intensity because that’s how she has survived to this point in her life. Her hair-trigger anger, her exaggerated reactions, her physical alertness: Berkley plays them as constants because the character cannot afford to relax. She is performing someone who cannot stop performing, who has been on guard for so long that the guard is now permanent. The damage is the role. Berkley inhabits the damage completely, which is harder than playing a settled character and easier to mistake for incompetence than to recognize as commitment.
Owen Gleiberman in Variety, reviewing You Don’t Nomi, put it directly: “She’s been born into a world of predators, and she’s not going to take it anymore. Nomi draws a hard line between showing her body and engaging in sex work, even though the Vegas world keeps saying, ‘Come on, it’s the same thing.'” That hard line, drawn by someone who has been crossed by every other line in her life, is what makes Nomi a person rather than a function. Berkley plays the line as absolute because that’s how Nomi has to feel it. A more measured performance would not have the same character. It would have a different one.
Gina Gershon Got It
If Berkley’s performance gets credit for committing fully to a damaged woman, Gina Gershon’s Cristal Connors gets credit for understanding the satirical register completely. Gershon plays Cristal as a woman who has already arrived where Nomi is trying to go, and who understands the cost of arrival in ways Nomi cannot yet imagine. She is predatory and protective at the same time, exploitative and oddly tender, fully aware that the system she has mastered will eventually discard her. The performance is camp without ever tipping into self-parody, knowing without ever winking. Gershon understood she was in a Verhoeven satire and played the role accordingly.
The famous dog food scene, where Nomi and Cristal bond over having both eaten Doggie Chow as kids, is the most-mocked scene in the film and one of the most analytically interesting. Cineaste Magazine, summarizing Nayman, noted that Verhoeven “purposefully breaks the grammar of conventional film continuity to create the effect that each woman is talking to herself.” The scene reads as failed seduction or accidental absurdity on first viewing. On rewatch, with the satirical lens engaged, it reads as two women using the same shared trauma to perform intimacy neither one fully feels. It’s a precise piece of craft demonstrating that everything in this world is transaction, including the moments that look like genuine connection.
For Writers
When you have an ensemble in a tonally complicated piece, the actors who understand the register matter more than the actors who fit conventional definitions of good acting. Gershon’s Cristal works because she understood she was in a satire. Berkley’s Nomi works because she committed completely to playing a damaged woman, which is what the role required regardless of register. Different performance choices serving the same film. When you write characters operating at different levels of self-awareness, the character who doesn’t know they’re in a satire is often more useful than the one who does. Their straightforwardness is what makes the surrounding irony land.
The Dance Sequences
The element of the film that the original critics almost uniformly acknowledged as accomplished is the choreography and staging of the dance sequences. Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, one of the few positive 1995 reviews, wrote that “what matters much more than the story or the Spicy Stuff is the dancing, the show-biz dancing. It’s electric. Exciting.” The Goddess showstopper sequences are technically impressive in ways that have nothing to do with the surrounding plot.
What Verhoeven and choreographer Marguerite Pomerhn-Derricks understood is that the Vegas show is itself the film’s central thesis delivered visually rather than dialogically. The Goddess number is gaudy, expensive, sexually charged, and emptily glamorous. It is also exactly the kind of spectacle the Vegas economy generates: massive surface, no center, designed to extract money from audiences willing to pretend that what they’re watching is meaningful. Verhoeven shoots the numbers admiringly because the surface is impressive, and ironically because the surface is all there is. The same technique he uses for the film’s nudity, straightforward and excessive simultaneously, applies to the dance sequences. They are exactly what they appear to be and exactly the critique of what they appear to be.
The Molly Sequence
The film’s most morally complicated passage is the assault on Molly (Gina Ravera) by Andrew Carver (William Shockley) and Nomi’s subsequent revenge. This is the sequence where defenders of the film have the hardest argument to make, and where critics who reject the film have their strongest case. The assault is graphic. It is filmed in ways that have provoked legitimate criticism for decades. The aftermath, with Nomi tracking Carver down and physically destroying him, is the closest the film gets to conventional catharsis.
The defensible reading is that the Molly sequence is where the film stops pretending that the Vegas economy is a game with rules. Every prior scene operates inside an exploitation system that the characters have agreed to participate in. The Molly assault is what happens when someone outside that system, with Molly being a seamstress rather than a performer, deliberately maintaining a distance from the world Nomi has entered, gets pulled into it by association. The film is arguing, more or less explicitly, that proximity to this world is dangerous regardless of consent. Molly’s punishment for trying to remain adjacent is the most devastating possible outcome the system can deliver.
The execution remains uncomfortable. Even granting the thematic argument, the staging of the assault crosses into territory that the film’s defenders generally acknowledge as a problem. You Don’t Nomi addresses this directly, including criticism of Verhoeven’s predatory behavior on set, which has been documented and discussed. The reappraisal tradition is not interested in whitewashing the failures. The argument is that the film is doing something serious in a register that occasionally fails its own intentions, not that everything in it works.
What Still Doesn’t Work
Honesty requires naming the failures even inside a defense.
The Eszterhas screenplay produces specific dialogue exchanges that no satirical intent fully redeems. “I’m erect, why aren’t you” is not a line that earns its place inside the larger argument. The flat awkwardness of certain expository scenes, with Nomi explaining her past to Cristal or Zack delivering bromides about ambition, reads as bad writing rather than deliberate flattening. Eszterhas wrote the film during his divorce and later acknowledged that the work from that period lacked the warmth of his subsequent screenplays. That assessment is correct.
The pacing in the middle hour drifts. The film could lose fifteen minutes from its 131-minute runtime without losing any of its argument. Several scenes exist to provide visual content rather than narrative function, and the film’s willingness to indulge those scenes weakens the satirical reading because they look like the indulgence the satire is supposed to be critiquing rather than the critique itself.
Kyle MacLachlan as Zack Carey is miscast. MacLachlan is a brilliant actor in registers that require ambivalence and ambiguity, with Dale Cooper, Paul Atreides, and the various damaged men in Lynch’s filmography as the evidence. Zack requires a different kind of presence: a man whose mediocrity is invisible to himself. MacLachlan plays mediocrity as ambivalence, which is not the same thing. The performance is too thoughtful for the character it serves.
The Verdict
Showgirls is a very good film when you watch it in context. The Rivette reading, that this is Verhoeven’s most exposed American film, is correct. The Nayman reading, that the excess is thematic rather than accidental, is correct. Nomi is a damaged woman and Berkley plays that well. The dance sequences are accomplished work on their own terms. Gershon’s Cristal is one of the most undervalued supporting performances of the 1990s. The film makes its argument about the American Dream by becoming the thing it’s critiquing, which is the Verhoeven method and which always carries the risk of being mistaken for the thing rather than recognized as the critique.
The 7 accounts for the failures that remain. The Eszterhas dialogue is uneven. The pacing drifts. MacLachlan is miscast. The Molly sequence is staged in ways that even defenders acknowledge as a problem. None of those failures invalidate the achievement. They’re the price of attempting something this difficult with this director’s signature approach.
Three viewings is the honest metric. I’ve seen it three times. I’ll watch it again. The first viewing produces the experience the original critics had, which is astonishment at the audacity and confusion about whether anyone involved knew what they were doing. The second viewing rewards the Verhoeven-as-satirist reading. The third viewing shows what the satirical reading misses: the actual humanity in Gershon’s performance, the actual horror in the Molly sequence, the actual sadness in the Vegas economy the film documents. Each viewing reveals what the previous viewing was missing. That’s the test of a film that rewards attention rather than just providing it.
If you’ve only seen it once and decided it was the worst movie ever made, watch it again. Watch it knowing Verhoeven made RoboCop and Starship Troopers and that he never signals his satire. Watch it knowing Nomi is a damaged woman and that Berkley is playing her damage rather than failing at conventional acting. The film holds up to that kind of attention. Films that earn that kind of return on investment are rare regardless of where they sit on the consensus rankings.
For a deeper analysis of Verhoeven’s satirical method across his American films, see Adam Nayman’s It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls and Jeffrey McHale’s documentary You Don’t Nomi. Both are essential companions to the film and to the broader question of how critical consensus forms and how it sometimes gets things badly wrong.
FAQ
Is Showgirls actually a good movie or are people just being contrarian?
It’s a serious Verhoeven film and it’s good when read on its own terms. The reappraisal isn’t contrarian. It’s the position that arrived after critics took time to consider what Verhoeven was actually attempting rather than what they expected. The original 1995 reviews evaluated it as a failed erotic drama. The film is not a failed erotic drama. It’s a satire of the American Dream in its Vegas-specific form, with several genuinely accomplished elements and a handful of execution failures that remain even after the satirical reading lands.
What should I read or watch alongside it?
Adam Nayman’s book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls is the essential critical text. It’s short, well-argued, and includes an interview with Verhoeven in the expanded edition. Jeffrey McHale’s 2019 documentary You Don’t Nomi is the best gathering of the various rehabilitation arguments in one place. Watch the documentary after you’ve seen Showgirls twice. It won’t change your mind on first viewing but it gives the second viewing a framework that’s hard to assemble alone.
Why did Verhoeven’s career survive this and Berkley’s didn’t?
Director credit and star credit operate by different rules in Hollywood. Verhoeven had RoboCop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct already on his record. Showgirls was a deviation in a body of work the industry respected. Berkley had Saved By the Bell. Showgirls was meant to be her career-establishing performance. When it failed, the industry concluded the failure was hers rather than the project’s, which was unfair but predictable. She has worked steadily since, but the trajectory the film was supposed to launch never materialized. Verhoeven made Starship Troopers two years later and was eventually rehabilitated. Berkley got the failure that stuck.
Is the dance sequence stuff actually any good?
Yes, technically. Marguerite Pomerhn-Derricks’s choreography and the staging of the Goddess showstoppers are accomplished work even if you reject every other element of the film. Stanley Kauffmann, one of the few positive critics in 1995, identified this specifically. The choreography survives the film’s reputation because it’s good independently of whatever you think about the surrounding narrative.
How does it fit alongside Hardcore and Vice Squad?
All three films use the sex industry as setting for different argumentative purposes. Hardcore is Schrader’s autobiographical character study about Calvinist certainty meeting its limits. Vice Squad is Sherman’s compressed action thriller using the milieu as documentary backdrop. Showgirls is Verhoeven’s satire of the American Dream using the showgirl ascent as Trojan horse. They make an instructive triple feature precisely because the same setting serves three completely different artistic agendas. Watching them in sequence makes the genre visible as a tradition rather than as a category.