Gabriel Milner
I. Manifest Destiny, Redux
II. Endnotes
III. About Gabriel
Manifest Destiny, Redux: Showgirls and the American Genesis
There is something stirringly patriotic in the way Nomi Malone gyrates. Here’s what I like: She throws her entire body into it—so much so that a choreographer instructs her to “learn to hold some in”—and seems on the verge of self-inflicted whiplash and in the end seems invigorated—nourished—by it. Whether it be in a Las Vegas cabaret, in a mentor/lover’s studio apartment, in the champagne room of a gentleman’s club, or in the gilt-edged swimming pool under suggestive water jets and the smog-shrouded heavens, Nomi moves with all the desperation and impassioned struggle of an eel, flopping out its life on the deck of a fishing boat. And it is precisely in this crude, aggressive action that the heroine of Showgirls (1), Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 ode to sexual and material excess in a desert oasis, taps not only into slavering men’s wallets, but also into a collective American mythopoesis. A celebration, that is, of the mover west, the crash crop planter, the river forger, the rail layer: The unreflective and purely physical performer. Which is all to say, Nomi gets the job done. Consistent in motive, forthright in ambition, unwavering in pursuit, she is a pragmatist of the most effecting order. Namely, that unique brand of doer we once called Pioneer.
Pragmatism, of course, is hardly fodder for romantic nostalgia, let alone a national myth-consciousness. Yet it is precisely this quality—the capacity, indeed the alacrity, to do what is required from one moment to the next—that has proved the lodestar of the American Genesis. We may fancy the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation as our moral and spiritual ancestors, their City Upon a Hill our birthright. Yet for all its significance as a tale of liberation and rectitude, grand ambition and industry, the story of William Bradford and his New England congregation is ultimately one of moral obstinacy and built-in obsolescence. Indeed, while his shining City and its isolated, Edenic Hill proves a nice enough vision, in reality it resulted in little more than stodgy, prude Puritans, denouncing material surplus and left tilling a rocky Massachusetts soil for a meager corn harvest. Self-imposed isolation reigned; exile was the apex of punishment. Our true cultural forebear, the avatar of American development and growth, seems instead to be embodied in that other pre-colonial archetype: Captain John Smith. For it was Smith, along with his fellow Jamestownians in present day Virginia, who proved the template for an unflinching, jingoistic American “success story.” Theirs is the history of truculent, industrious, unreflective, expansionist adventurers, adrift in a new world with nothing to lose. They were, for the most part, young single men, poor enough to see hope in an unknown wilderness. Their mantra, as it were, was articulated by Smith himself when he averred, “all you expect from thence must be by labour.”(2) And exile—the means and space to set out into the fertile wilds—was their reward.
Nomi, wandering a desert and bereft of relations, adapts this fable to a contemporary landscape where hard work and individualism—and amorality—is the best way to make it. Her labor, of course, is sex. Every item she acquires in the film comes directly from how well she exploits it. And she does it well, as though her entire presence was formed to this end. She is, from the beginning, a hard-talking, leather-clad juggernaut, who will thrust her way through most of the film’s 130+ minutes: With the lever of a slot machine, with a bottle of ketchup at a truck stop, with her knee to the groin of a well-meaning but over-sexed lover/mentor, with her genitals in a most hearty and effective lap dance. Her actions, that is, all exist within this same crude, violent, and overwhelming rubric of getting results. Indeed, her desires—whether for ketchup-saturated fries or to get a client to ejaculate in his pants—preclude any suavity or grace.
Which is why Showgirls is such a potent fable of the roots of American success and industry. Verhoeven, known for a body of work so ostensibly shallow and gratuitous that it must be parodic or at least allegorical (3), has continued his tradition of films relying more on metanarrative than cinematic finesse. Tellingly, then, there are no Quixotic ambitions and moral evolutions for Nomi. Instead, she gets the job done: and woe to anyone in her path. For this reason the film’s plot is relatively unburdened by dramatic development or emotional quagmire, and is, ultimately, quite simple. It goes something like this: Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) is a chip-on-her-shoulder drifter, thumbing her way from “back East” with the avowed desire to become a dancer in Las Vegas. This is how we find her in the opening credits. Displaying a (or so they say) remarkable and innate dancing ability, she quickly distinguishes herself among her colleagues. All of which, of course, sets her on a picaresque adventure into the seedy and gaudy depths of Vegas show business, where she encounters a variety of archetypal, crudely-drawn characters: seedy hoteliers, philandering playboys (Kyle Maclachlan’s Zack), showgirls at the apex of their careers (Gina Gershon’s Crystal Connors), matronly masters of ceremony, altruistic choreographers (Glenn Plumber’s James), sisterly roommates (Gina Ravera’s Molly). Among this cast of characters, Nomi manipulates her way to the upper echelons of the nightclub circuit (in all manner of actions, from sexual favors to pushing a rival down the stairs), though never acquiescing to its demands. She achieves her avowed purpose, even seeing her name and likeness immortalized on a highway billboard, under the title “Goddess.” And it is not for nothing that a nightclub owner pays Nomi the ultimate compliment when he tells her, “You are the show.” For indeed, spectacle and performance reign supreme. And then—just because —she moves on. The last shot is of Nomi back on the road, heading towards a road sign for Los Angeles.
Yet the film’s details seem incidental to Showgirl’s metanarrative. Namely, How does one get what one wants? Our heroine is too motivated towards stardom, too explosive and dynamic a personality, to be sidetracked by dramatic encounter or plagued by doubt or guilt. Even when her feelings are hurt she does not slink into a corner or retreat into her inner landscape and take stock. Instead, she lashes out with slaps or projectiles. In this way, Verhoeven’s effort transcends its location to create a more generalized fable of growth, expansion, and accomplishment that only minimally relies on specifics. To this end, Nomi’s character is perfectly suited to the film’s essence, divested with a true Everyperson quality. Explicitly, she is a mobile, rootless character: the film opens with her thumbing her way along a highway strip; her biography is vague and marked by restlessness (she hails, by her own admission, from “different places back East,” she attests to not having “any family,” and at one point goes so far as to tell a character, “You and me—we ain’t got no ties”); she doesn’t even know her Social Security number; and when she reaches her aim near the film’s conclusion, her impulse is to move ever westward, speaking powerfully to an inner and inexorable dynamism. Implicitly, as well, this rootless quality persists, establishing Nomi as compulsively mobile and rootless, even within her own psyche: Nomi likes her cars driven fast; she subsists on fast food; she lives in an Airstream trailer.
In this way Verhoeven’s protagonist manifests an all-consuming dynamism that takes its cue from pragmatism, action, and need. And it is no small accomplishment that in whoring herself out to the Vegas network of hoteliers, nightclub owners, and choreographers, there is scant opportunity to view her as fallen. Rather, she began at the bottom. Indeed, what little we learn of her past is a laundry-list of criminal offenses (“soliciting, crack-cocaine, assault with a deadly weapon”) rattled off by an L.V.P.D. officer to whom she turns when her roommate is raped by a pop star. Equally as telling is her justification for this sordid biography. Her unflinching, unthinking response is truly Showgirls’ litany: “I did what I had to do.” Like Captain Smith’s crew of young, single, downtrodden men, Nomi Malone can only add to her standing through what she accumulates. There is not that same pain of loss we discern in Bradford’s record, Of Plymouth Plantation, when he laments, near his chronicle’s end, “And other[s] still, as they conceived themselves straightened or to want accommodation, broke away under one pretense or another, thinking their own conceived necessity and the example of others a warrant sufficient for them.” (4) Showgirls inverts that paradigm, making of necessity and dynamism a virtue, or at least a lifestyle.
Las Vegas, too, proves an apt locus, situating the action within a cityscape of tangible and superficial excess. Crudely cobbled-together images from past lives and cultures are repackages to fit an immediate, plastic mold and gluttonously consumed. In this setting we find a true multiverse, a true nexus where time and space mingle. And it is to great effect that the director frames shots of Nomi eating a cheeseburger under a fiberglass reconstruction of the Sphinx. Both products are equally as packaged and cheap, ready for mass and immediate consumption, and divorced from any greater tradition than capitalist excess and expediency. The same might be said of the tackily-dressed tourists and gamblers, walking promenades meant to evoke Paris or Venice, or the guests at the Coliseum Hotel: We see these recognizable places, hear their familiar names, and yet, in their new location, can only appreciate them within a paradigm of conspicuous consumption. And what an easy appreciation it is: They are never divested with a foreignness or anachronism. There is little effort (physically and intellectually) to witnessing what were once marvels of technological, political, and/or cultural evolution. Instead, they are here, in America’s backyard, as accessible and solicitous as a buffet table. We are gorged, as it were, on eye candy, in a process of blind, reckless expansion. Like a Jamestownian’s tobacco crop, quick and easy, Vegas landmarks evoke a sense of unchecked surplus gain.
All of which makes Showgirls an incredibly easy film to watch: Attractive, wealthy people who aren’t burdened with emotional crises, playing out their titillating lives in a familiar, but (apparently, as history textbooks and travel documentaries tell us) significant landmarks. This, I imagine, is how Jamestown would have looked, given the desert instead of Virginia, fiberglass instead of tobacco, venture instead of adventures capitalism. And as the film closes, with Nomi hitching her way to Los Angeles, I couldn’t suppress a malicious excitement at the prospect that, when she can’t go any further west, Nomi Malone will have to change direction. And somewhere along the way, she will have to confront her past.
1. Verhoeven, Paul. "Showgirls." United Artist. 1995.
2. Captain John Smith, Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings, edited and with an introduction by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 261.
3. Starship Troopers, for instance, holds up when analyzed as a parable of the rise of National Socialism, and not merely an absurd filmic adaptation of a successful video game.
4. Re: Prosperity in Plymouth: "For now as their stocks increased and the increase vendible, there was no longer any holding them together, but now they must of necessity go to their great lots. . . . And other still, as they conceived themselves straitened or to want accommodation, broke away under one pretence or other, thinking their own conceived necessity and the example of others a warrant sufficient for them. And this I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the church's of God there, and will provoke the Lord's displeasure against them" (pp. 281, 283). William Bradford. "Of Plymouth
Plantation: 1620-1647." Edited and with an introduction by Francis Murphy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. (1856)
Gabriel Milner received his BA from Vassar College. He lives in Seattle.