I still don’t entirely understand the brief teenage phase I had in the mid-1990s, seeking out things I considered outright bad as entertainment. It lasted six to nine months, around the time I was gearing up to take my driver’s test. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was hiding from.
This period of time, circa 1996, was a great run for pop culture with a noticeable edge: How weird can you go? People were shocked by Dennis Rodman; Kool Keith put out an album about a time traveling gynecologist; Blind Melon’s “Bee Girl” was a meme before we knew what that was; you could turn on MTV and see Björk’s psychedelic take on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” in a video directed by Michel Gondry. What a time to be alive, truly.
I wanted to be weird. Or at least I wanted people to think I was peculiar, because of the things I read, the music I listened to, the topics I talked about. I was a teen actively trying to be out of step with other people my age, whether it was by dyeing my hair a different color every other month or wearing a leisure suit I found at a thrift store to class just for the hell of it. There wasn’t much method to my dumbness.
Besides MTV and the occasional issues of Spin or Sassy, finding that culture came in drips and drops. Occasional visits to the Borders bookstore in the mall allowed me to look at issues of Punk Planet or Adbusters. Hanging out in the grocery store parking lot with older kids, looking for perfect curbs to skate, led to introductions to music from Mobb Deep and Operation Ivy. I took what I could get — it just had to be the opposite of what everybody else my age enjoyed.
I was a teenage snob. As I’ve gotten older, I realize this was a defense mechanism, a way to find myself while feeling like I was different. I wanted to be my own person, but I didn’t have much, so what I did have, I held sacred. If you didn’t understand or appreciate the things I found pleasure in — well, I didn’t have time for you.
So when a friend announced we were going to watch Showgirls at his house a few weeks after it made its debut on premium cable, I was ecstatic. We thought it would be hilarious if three teenage boys spent a Saturday night on a couch in a basement in Long Grove, Illinois, watching a movie that was currently in the zeitgeist as being one of the worst of all time. Showgirls was an “instant camp classic,” as Janet Maslin put it in her September 1995 New York Times review, an article I definitely did not read at the time. Instead I relied on what I’d heard about the film: that it was terrible, it starred the good girl from Saved by the Bell, and there was lots and lots of nudity.
From what I recall, the basic premise is this: Nomi Malone is a small-town stripper who wants to make it to the big leagues in Las Vegas. She’s a drifter who we can tell right away has a rough past that she’s looking to put as far behind her as possible. But Showgirls is also a gritty satire of the fame machine. How far would you go? Would being famous make you happy? Yes, there’s enough nudity and sex that the film was given an NC-17 rating, but Elizabeth Berkley, along with Gina Gershon, who plays Nomi’s antagonist, Cristal Connors, give great performances. Nomi and Cristal aren’t bad people; they do what they have to do to survive.
Even as we laughed and screamed from the couch at the overwrought dialogue and the Vegas-style wriggling and writhing, I found myself enjoying the movie, especially when Nomi, in her tasseled black leather jacket, pulls a switchblade on a guy. “She’s tough and cool,” I thought. But I could also tell that she probably never made a good decision in her life. When you’re a teenager, that’s both admirable and relatable; you make a lot of mistakes out of youthful ignorance.
I also enjoyed the story and spectacle of Showgirls: people in a seedy place, working in a seedy business, doing seedy things because they were all out of options. Written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven, the film came out three years after the pair had a hit with Basic Instinct. “The best erotic thrillers often have not only calculating, glamorous female protagonists but also the guiding hand of an auteur,” wrote Abbey Bender in her Washington Post article about the golden age of erotic thrillers. Showgirls has those elements, but it does a better job of making Nomi a sympathetic figure, not simply a femme fatale, like Sharon Stone’s character in Basic Instinct, or a jilted lover, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
But I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I just knew I liked the movie everybody said was trash.