Taken

Filled with the concussive editing and sterile hyperstylization that is typical of contemporary action films, director Pierre Morel’s Taken is a brisk, relentless, and entirely generic thriller that passes by so quickly one can easily miss its many flaws. Liam Neeson lends some gravitas to a great deal of horseshit in the role of Bryan, a former government agent whose 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped in Paris. Naturally, he does precisely what any sensible father-slash-retired-secret-agent would do—he flies to France and proceeds to beat and/or kill every person even remotely related to the crime (he also leaves a swath of unaided victims who lack their own ass-kicking covert op daddies to rescue them). And while dad is busy torturing suspects with jumper cables, daughter is swallowed up into a sex-slave ring run by Albanians, her virginity menaced by—wait for it—an Arab sheikh. With a harem. Oh, those dirty, nasty brown-skinned Others!

Revenge excuses all manner of violence, and the film's xenophobic tone lends a bitter taste to what would otherwise be a merely bland tale of redemption for a failed father. Ironically, the mysterious government job that kept Bryan apart from his daughter when she was growing up and led to the dissolution of his marriage has also given him the skills necessary to become the implacable superdad that the film venerates. The moral of the story: “Daddy’s too busy to play now sweetie, but you’ll thank me later when you’re older.” The film is a validation for manipulative and emotionally distant fathers everywhere, with Bryan’s patriarchal failings magically transformed (okay, not magic, just lots of fast cutting and people being shot in the head) into parental fitness.

Incidentally, the film makes an excellent Father’s Day gift.

Under Capricorn

Under Capricorn has always had a tough time finding a place in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not fitting in with the psychological thrillers or high-spirited adventures for which he is best known. Even Rope—his 1948 murder drama employing a comparable long-take style of filming—has been granted more attention as a “problem picture,” while most people prefer to politely overlook the supposed failure of Under Capricorn.

To be fair, Under Capricorn is actually an easy film to pass by based on description alone. A period romance set in 1830s Australia as directed by Alfred Hitchcock: was anyone clamoring for this? As subject matter, this is pretty suspect terrain for any director (19th century Australia hardly seems ripe for weepy dramas filled with flouncy dresses and embroidered hankies and all that), but for someone as acidic as Hitchcock a disastrous outcome seems a foregone conclusion.

But the lure of this film proved too much for me and I had to give in, regardless of the dubious concept and seemingly ill-conceived marriage of subject and director (but then again, ill-conceived marriages are Hitchcock’s normal terrain, aren’t they?). Luckily, the film can be downloaded from Archive.org’s mammoth collection of public domain films, and in a decent quality version no less (although you can watch it in streaming video at the bottom of this post, I recommend downloading the 1.3 gigabyte MP4 file, which is of a higher quality). No harm in trying something for free, right?

As I discovered, Under Capricorn is far better than its reputation would lead one to believe. Even if it doesn’t possess the queasy, obsessive power of something like Vertigo, the film is so masterfully conceived and executed that it stands with the best of Hitchcock’s work. The genteel tone of the film at first feels peculiar for a director so fond of the perverse and violent in human nature, but there is a powerful tale of poisoned passion buried within the restrained romantic anguish. The pitfalls of marriage are a running theme that reoccurs throughout Hitchcock’s films—sometimes as the main subject, and sometimes as a side gag, but almost always present in some form. Under Capricorn proves to be one of his definitive depictions of marital hell.

The film begins with Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), cousin to the newly appointed governor of the colony, landing in Australia in the hopes of making some sort of fortune for himself. Opportunity comes in the form of Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten), a local landowner and man of wealth who approaches Adare with a business proposition. Flusky invites the newcomer to a dinner party at his mansion, and a rather tense evening ensues: the wives of all of the other guests are conspicuously absent, as is Lady Henrietta, Flusky’s own wife, until she suddenly appears, drunk and confused and in bare feet.

Having known Henrietta when he was a child, Adare is distressed by the current state of the woman: an alcoholic mess hiding from the world in Flusky’s mansion. Adare—with the consent of Flusky—begins the difficult process of restoring her self-confidence. And as the enthusiastic Adare brings Henrietta back to life, Flusky watches anxiously, at first with hope for his wife’s recovery and then with jealousy as he sees her grow closer to the charming young man.

However, the relationship between Flusky and his wife is more complicated than just another aging marriage on the rocks. Flusky is a former stable boy who eloped with the aristocratic Henrietta back in Ireland; he was convicted of murdering her brother and has spent the years since his release cultivating a life as a respectable, wealthy citizen. This is a marriage built on sudden passion and death, and the pair are linked in a complicity far stronger—albeit more painful—than anything Adare can offer to Henrietta. The couple remains dedicated to each other, and yet, under the burden of the past, they find themselves unable to love each other even as they acknowledge that they cannot live apart. The same love that nourishes poisons as well.

This sounds rather harrowing, but the cobbled-together colonial gentility of the film’s atmosphere forces restraint upon the extreme emotions running through the story. Hitchcock’s depiction of these characters is carefully observed and humane as he ruefully addresses their plight without condescension or moralizing. Telling the story primarily through a series of carefully constructed, elegant long takes, Hitchcock achieves something quite moving—even lyrical—out of the sex-death perversity that runs through so much of his work.

As I watched the film, I thought back to Rope quite often. Made in 1949, Under Capricorn is very much an extension of the methods employed in the earlier film, but with greater refinement and intelligence. Rope is largely a gimmick—a fun and often intriguing one, but a gimmick all the same. The conceit was to make a film in a single shot, even though less than 10 minutes of film could be contained on a single reel. In order to accommodate his desire to make the film at least appear that it was done in a single take, Hitchcock engaged in some elaborate staging tricks that allowed him to switch the film mid-scene unnoticed. Unfortunately, this required many awkward close-ups of people’s backs and other distracting attempts to blank out the image and allow for the reels to be changed. The technique constantly calls attention to itself and never really meshes with the material as a result. Rope is a marvel of staging and timing, but Hitchcock is too pre-occupied with playing games to pay much attention to the particulars of the story.

By contrast, Under Capricorn is a work of nuance and maturity. Hitchcock discards the vain conceit of the single-take film, but he retains the intricate staging and lengthy shots he had mastered in Rope, making the earlier film seem now like a warm-up for this more judicious and thoughtful follow-up. Instead of serving as a distracting, self-conscious experiment in style, the long takes of this film elegantly draw out the emotional tensions between the characters.

In one particularly fine scene, Charles is taking down a message from Henrietta to include in a letter to his sister Diana. Henrietta stands over him and dictates a letter that explains how much she appreciates everything Charles has done for her; the moment glows with warmth and mutual feeling. The camera drifts away from the pair and slowly pans over the empty room as Henrietta’s voice continues to speak softly, a lulling music for this serene image. The searching eye of the camera finally settles on Sam, back turned, walking away down the hall.

There’s a kind of suspense here, albeit not the type Hitchcock fans are typically accustomed to expecting of the master. The pan over the empty room builds up a sense of peace that is broken by the sight of Sam walking away, and that disruption in the mood creates a subtle yet ominous chill in the midst of this delicate moment. In a single visually eloquent shot, Hitchcock uses physical space and camera movement to convey Sam’s increasing emotional isolation.

The easiest dismissal of this film is that it is “talky,” an argument which might make sense when coming from a blind person, but which otherwise I have little patience for. Listen less and watch more. If the film seems too windy to you, then put it on mute, because you’re missing the point. The talk is purely illustrative. As is the case with many a great film, the dialogue elaborates the story without being absolutely essential to the telling. All of the real action in this film occurs on the visual level, and even if you never heard a word spoken, the basic emotional truth would still come through loud and clear.

The quiet elegance of the letter scene is typical of Under Capricorn, which prizes small gestures and glances and the expressive capabilities of staging and camera movement. The film cultivates a tone of ominous tranquility, which is perfect for relaying this tale of murderous, torrid passion entering the late stages of its decay. One could possibly mistake this entropy for a sort of peace—but only if you don’t look too closely.

Timecrimes

Timecrimes begins in a state of tranquil domesticity, soon to be disturbed: middle-aged Hector sits on his lawn chair, staring into the distance with binoculars to pass the time while his wife heads out grocery shopping. This peaceful scene is upended by the sight of a beautiful young woman taking off her shirt, which lures the curious Hector into the woods. From there, everything falls apart quickly: the woman, now completely naked, lies unconscious or dead, and a man swathed in pink bandages attacks Hector with a pair of scissors.

After a frantic chase in the woods, Hector seeks refuge in a nearby house where—keep in mind, this is a B-movie and we’ll have to forgive a few contrivances for the sake of our fun—a scientist is working on a time machine. Unaware of what he is stepping into, Hector hides in the machine and is transported back in time one hour, where his desire to restore his life to normal forces him into a series of increasingly brutal acts that threaten to destroy any hope of returning to his life as it was. But does he have a choice? Is it all simply fate, or is the man’s hapless slide into violence a sign of this paunchy, placid husband’s own hidden dark nature?

The pleasure of watching such a curious pretzel-plot unravel is often the main reward of these sorts of mind-fucks, and Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo throws in a few horror-movie style jolts for good measure (Mr. Crazy Pink Bandage Man initially seems to have wandered in off the set of a nearby cheap slasher flick). The film is compelling from end to end, but the twisting plot suggests a moral weight the film isn’t strong enough to carry. At its most unsettling, the film shows Hector stage-managing the events surrounding his entrance into the time machine, creating new tragedies as he attempts to reverse old ones. There are a lot of ways to look at what happens here—the dangers of voyeurism, the folly of fighting fate, the violence buried in mundane lives—but none are completely satisfying, and all of these ideas find only tentative realization in the film itself.

Granted, there’s a fair amount of enjoyment to be found in the way the film replays the baffling events in the woods from new angles, each time unveiling a new layer to Hector’s complicity in his own fate. It’s a clever structure, but Vigalondo is ultimately disinterested in teasing out the nuances of his premise or exploring the mysteries of these characters, preferring to play with this rather elaborate toy he has found instead of figuring out what makes it run. Which is really a shame when you consider the intriguing marital anxiety underlining the action: Hector only falls into this horrible trap after following the young woman into the woods, and then spends the rest of the film imperiling both the woman and his own wife in an attempt to put his life back in order. Is this all just the self-fulfilling prophecy of masculine guilt run amuck? The somewhat dissatisfying ending overlooks a lot of these thornier moral issues, but it leaves us with a parody of the connubial bliss of the film's beginning, suggesting the crimes which this stability is built upon.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

A conventional film about an unconventional man, Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson plays like a greatest hits package—it’s everything you would expect of a film about Thompson, with most of the attention focused on his well-documented creative peak in the 1960s and early ‘70s. And while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with crafting an introductory documentary on a subject, when a two-hour feature film can’t even match the depth and insight of a Wikipedia entry, I think it’s fair to say someone’s time has been wasted.

One would think Thompson is an ideal documentary subject. Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the man already knows some of the most outrageous and fascinating anecdotes that litter his life story, and the film dutifully trots out these requisite highlights—talking football with Richard Nixon, running for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, the drugged-up road trip with Oscar Acosta that inspired Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Gibney enlivens the film where he can with some nice archival footage and intriguing home videos, and the sometimes-surprising range of interview subjects reflects the disparate circles Thompson ran in during the course of his journalistic career. Sonny Barger, Jimmy Carter, and Pat Buchanan all make appearances to reminisce (sometimes critically) about the man and his writing.

As Gibney shuffles through these colourful stories from Thompson’s heyday, he is mostly intent on just hitting his marks. He accepts the basic narrative of Thompson’s life—that the man created a new style of journalism, succumbed to the pressures of drugs, booze, and fame, and slowly faded into irrelevance—without really caring to interrogate any of its details. Thus, we get Tom Wolfe lauding Thompson’s gonzo journalism, but very little consideration of the concept beyond generic praise. Does gonzo exist beyond Thompson? What made it such a significant innovation in the first place, and did it actually have a lasting effect on journalism? Was it just a cultural dead-end, resulting in a singular body of work but otherwise unfeasible as a method for others? With “gonzo” getting first mention in the title, you would think the film might actually show a bit of curiosity here.

There’s introductory and then there’s just plain shallow. Gibney’s film takes a rather superficial interest in Thompson and the tone often lapses into reductive glibness, relying on techniques so banal they verge on ridiculous. When Sandi, Thompson’s first wife, talks about a party at Ken Kesey’s compound notable for the presence of both the Hell’s Angels and LSD, Gibney sets the mood by blaring fuzzed-out guitar jams on the soundtrack and flashing stock psychedelic imagery of film negatives and lava-lamp globs.

Aside from being glaringly ugly, this sort of technique also seems a little obtuse and insensitive considering Thompson’s harrowing description of a woman involved in a gangbang with the bikers at that same party. Later, when one of Thompson’s editors from Rolling Stone comments on the pioneering way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas explored the darker, more uncontrolled aspects of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it only highlights the infantile nature of the film’s own sniggering approach to the topic.

Such cheekiness aside, Gibney’s film is almost too reverent to Thompson. The man’s flaws are acknowledged and then discreetly passed by—every opportunity to complicate Thompson as a subject is ignored for the safe path of the well-worn story of his life. When Juan, Hunter’s son, speaks of wishing his father had been around more as a child, the film ignores the possibility of exploring the effects of fame on his family and lets the remark drop without comment. The creatively fallow 1980s and ‘90s are all but ignored, barely acknowledging Thompson’s life between the late 1970s and his suicide in 2005. There are few details of his youth or pre-fame days (an early run-in with the law is one of the few things Gibney feels worthy of mention). Is it too much to ask for a bit of spade work on these neglected areas, if only to create a richer and more subtly shaded portrait of the film’s subject?

In a BBC documentary following Thompson and cartoonist cohort Ralph Steadman to Las Vegas (which Gibney excerpts here; the entire documentary is found on Criterion’s DVD of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Thompson laments the pressure to live up to his myth, complaining that when he appears in public he no longer knows if they expect Thompson or Duke, his fictionalized wild-man persona. The BBC interviewer points out that the personal impression of Thompson largely matches up to the public profile—a charge that makes Thompson livid, even though he seems unable to refute it. Made in 1978, the BBC documentary shows Thompson already beginning to realize the pitfalls of his celebrity status; sadly, Gibney’s documentary eagerly and uncritically jumps into that same hole.

It’s the myth of the liberated man—the wild, outrageous rebel who can do any drug, hold enough booze for ten men, and shout the truths everyone knows but lacks the courage to even whisper in private. It’s the Edge he describes in Hell’s Angels, a place where limits are tested and greatness is revealed. And in Gibney’s film—scored, unsurprisingly, with all your favourite hits of the 1960s and ‘70s, including Dylan, the Stones, and CCR—it's the source of one giant boomer nostalgia trip for a lost era of rebellion and freedom.

“[T]hey are acting out the day-dreams of millions of losers who don’t wear any defiant insignia and who don’t know how to be outlaws,” Thompson wrote of the Hell’s Angels, unwittingly creating an epitaph for his own career at the same time. His greatest writing still carries an acid wit and stinging candor, but the main attraction now is his personality—his dissent commodified, his caustic observations about American life packaged as the amusing but harmless outbursts of a drugged-out, boozed-up walking party of a man. Gibney does make a creditable attempt to bring the writing (or at least some of it) back into the spotlight, but he finally settles for perpetuating the same worn-out myths. There’s something seductive in that personality—so many people readily identify with Thompson's defiance of social constraints in pursuit of his own particular dream of freedom. In Hell’s Angels, Thompson referred to this kind of identification as “psychic masturbation”—a term which quite eloquently summarizes the chief appeal of Gonzo.

The Necessities of Life

The initial scenes of The Necessities of Life paint a troubling picture of cultural dislocation. In 1952, Tiivii, an Inuk on Baffin Island, takes his family to a visiting medical ship. Told that he is ill with tuberculosis and cannot leave the ship with the rest of his family, the man is ripped from his home in an instant. Three months later, Tiivii reaches the sanatorium in Quebec City that will become his home for possibly years—or the rest of his life should the disease overtake him. Somewhat ominously, a painter is working on a mural of the Virgin Mary as Tiivii enters the hospital. He looks at it blankly as he walks by, not quite comprehending this strange, new environment.

Unable to speak French, the isolated Tiivii struggles with life in the sanatorium. He spends his time drawing animals, unable to communicate with the other patients or staff. In his loneliness and frustration, as well as fear at the thought of spending years in the hospital away from his family, he runs away one cold night and hides out in an empty shack. Too ill to escape very far, he is eventually discovered and brought back, but he refuses to eat—not out of protest, but simply because he no longer has the will to carry on living in such complete isolation and with so little hope of ever seeing his family again.

Notably, the filmmakers (director Benoit Pilon and writer Bernard Emond) refuse to cast anyone as villains in this situation. In a nuanced and moving performance by Natar Ungalaaq (most famous for his eponymous role in Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner), Tiivii is a desperately lonely figure but also a proud one, ambivalent about the foreign culture he treats with a mixture of wariness and bemusement. The staff and patients at the hospital occasionally betray their own discomfort around a completely alien culture, but the film never slips into broad caricatures of callous bigots. That sort of shorthand characterization is a handy tool for creating some quick drama and buying some sympathy for the protagonist, but it also undermines any serious attempt to deal with cultural conflict.

The closest the film comes to this pitfall is with the obese man who sleeps opposite Tiivii. With a smug smile and mocking demeanor, the man seems the perfect image of a bully, but the film’s approach to the character typifies its thoughtfully empathetic tone: his late-night escape on a drunken bender inspires Tiivii’s similarly self-destructive escape, just as the man’s late-night lonely crying jag echoes Tiivii’s tears in the cabin. Like Tiivii, the man is just another poor soul far away from home and suffering for it, and the film allows this character’s plight to enrich our understanding of the Inuit man’s own sorrow.

There is perhaps no cure for this despair of dislocation, but Carole, the nurse responsible for Tiivii’s welfare, at least manages to pull Tiivii out of his suicide spiral by providing another Inuk patient for companionship—an orphaned boy named Kaki. At this crucial juncture, the film’s tone shifts and its world begins to soften and grow more hospitable. By contrast, early scenes of Tiivii in the sanitarium are almost stultifying in their loneliness and encroaching gloom as the man gets sicker and sicker, slowly relinquishing his grip on life.

But in the presence of Kaki, Tiivii steadily brightens. He becomes more vibrant, showing signs of improving health and making connections with other patients. In what could be considered a quintessentially Quebecois theme, culture and language are seen as necessities of life, and assimilation a kind of death. The process of passing on his culture becomes Tiivii’s way of bringing himself back into the world of the living, and he sees it as Kaki’s only hope for survival as well.

The man is determined to bring the boy—who has spent much of his life away from his people—back into the world of Inuit culture. He carves, explains how to hunt, and tells stories—beautiful, haunting folk tales about boys playing games with demons and invisible men murdered by their wives. Contrasted with the pale, listless Tiivii of the earlier scenes, the lively Tiivii of these storytelling sessions quite vividly illustrates the film’s theme of culture as lifeblood. Not only does Tiivii’s native culture bring him back from the dead, but it also breathes life into this generous and humane film.

Revengers Tragedy

No gods, no masters, and so no budget—Alex Cox does Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth century play on the cheap, moving its bloody tale of intrigues in an Italian court to a decaying futuristic Britain. The plot of this flawed but funny anarchist farce is too labyrinthine to summarize, but once the knives come out and the poison starts pouring everything simplifies rather quickly. The important thing is that Cox nails the core of the story, even though the early scenes do drag and he fumbles with some of the finer points of his adaptation—details of the dystopian setting are underdeveloped, and the skimpiness of the futuristic trimmings begs the question of why they were even necessary in the first place. Were modern times simply not grimy enough for this cutthroat tale? But Cox is attuned to the subversive (if not downright seditious) possibilities of Middleton’s play, turning its parade of deposed dukes into a vituperative satire of a corrupt ruling class seeking power as its own end. Vindici, the titular tragic revenger, best summarizes this political philosophy when he says, “Great men were gods if beggars could not kill them.” By these terms, the film is rapturously godless.

Showgirls

The phrase “bad movie” entices me, much like how a piece of shit entices a fly. But it isn’t the allure of awfulness that draws me closer—it is the near limitless possibilities contained behind that ambiguous word, “bad.” When someone dismisses a movie as bad, the judgment seems categorically objective: the movie is an irredeemable failure, absolutely beyond redemption.

But in reality, bad movies are often quite interesting, even rewarding and sometimes well-made cinema. The badness that has incited the audience is often not a matter of technique or style, but morality—the film is bad in the sense that it is perceived as evil, an affront to the viewer’s values. And that brings us to Showgirls, as confident and complete an assault on good taste as has ever come out of the self-deluding whorehouse that is Hollywood.

The plot plays out like a diseased, degenerate version of All About Eve: a desperate young star sets her sights on fame at any cost, moving from naïve innocent to jaded star, only to discover that the climb to fame is merely prelude to a precipitous fall. Except whereas All About Eve focused on the more respectable world of theatre and was thus rewarded with a bucket of Oscars, Showgirls employs a more sordid Las Vegas world as vehicle for its satire on Hollywood and thus earned a comparable assortment of Razzies for its impudence.

Which is unfortunate, because the film possesses a caustic honesty more potent than any tasteful (i.e., neutered), Oscar-winning satire. The film pulses with contempt—for Hollywood and for its audience. A glancing familiarity with the film’s reputation might make it seem like cheap titillation dressed up in big-studio gloss, but sex has rarely seemed so ugly and joyless as it does in this movie, which only shows the act as a means of transaction for money or power. This is brutal subject matter, but I find it hard not to be a little taken by the audacity of director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.

That’s not to say this is an easy film to appreciate, and Elizabeth Berkley’s lead performance might be the biggest stumbling block in this regard. She plays Nomi, the seemingly innocent young wannabe who comes to Las Vegas dreaming of becoming a star but reduced to stripping at a place called Cheetah’s. As the result of a particularly fiery lap dance with Zach, entertainment director at the Stardust (played with an expertly deadpan sleaziness by Kyle MacLachlan), she gets an audition. Cristal, the star of the show (Gina Gershon, who is so commanding at times she threatens to crack open her tight-lipped smile and swallow Berkley whole), takes an interest in the budding starlet and develops a love-hate relationship tinged with lesbian innuendo, which progresses through a series of incomplete seductions and backstabs until Nomi realizes her only chance to become star of the show is to, um, push Cristal down a flight of stairs.

As a character, Nomi can be difficult to take with her lack of anything that might be considered an inner life. This isn't to say she doesn't have secrets (she hides a past as a prostitute that she spends much of the film denying) or a personality of sorts, but she seems capable of only expressing herself through exaggerated gestures, as opposed to inflections of speech or expression: this is not a quiet performance. For an extreme example of this tendency, just look at an early scene between Nomi and her roommate Molly—the only way Nomi seems capable of expressing anger and frustration is by violently (and somewhat comically) stabbing her straw into her soda and then spilling French fries all over the table.

Of course, as a hooker-turned-stripper-turned-showgirl, carnality is Nomi’s key asset, and Berkley obliges by physically throwing herself into the role with all the conviction of someone hurling herself off a cliff. The suicide metaphor is deliberate; Berkley herself might beg to differ, but her career came to this film to die. If the intention of the film is to show how the entertainment industry uses women as if they were interchangeable slabs of meat, then the collapse of Berkley’s career after this film seems to prove its point. This is one of the most troubling things about the entire film: if Berkley had gone on to a successful career, the film might have simply become an inconsequential footnote to a larger story instead of the climax. For Showgirls to succeed, its star had to fail.

More bluntly put, Verhoeven is implicated, and I think he likes it. This may be a satire of the way Hollywood exploits women, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get a discreet, academic dissertation on the subject. Verhoeven rejects any possibility of tastefully telling this story and instead plays up the crassness of the tale; scenes like the over-the-top sex scene in the pool feel like a mockery of the audience’s craving for a little bit of titillation.

Verhoeven meets depravity with depravity, not trusting to any notions of art. For those looking to defend him as an artist, Verhoeven offers the ambivalent subplot of James, a dancer who takes an interest in Nomi. The man is convinced of her talent, even if she lacks knowledge or training, and he tries to convince her to perform in a number he has created specifically for her. She refuses, but he forges ahead and debuts the act at a small club where it is quickly booed off stage. “Bring out the real dancers!” someone shouts. The boorish audience is portrayed with some contempt, but the film also has a disingenuous air of “Well, what did you expect?” After all, given the choice between actual strippers and an arty simulation of same, is it any surprise what most people choose?

But it’s only in the third act that the film really goes after the audience. Those who have been chuckling along derisively at the film will have to contend with the rape of Molly, a spectacularly ugly scene by any standard, which disturbs any attempts to treat the whole film as a glib joke (incidentally, those Showgirls drinking games don’t seem to acknowledge the scene, but I like to imagine it provokes an awkward, guilty silence when it comes up). In a film in which the audience has essentially been egging on the sexual exploitation of the actresses for its own gratification, this rape is Verhoeven’s biggest attack on viewers—he takes the desires of the audience to their greatest extreme and visualizes them, if only to throw those desires back in our faces.

For final proof of this, just consider the scene where Nomi—remade as a fierce avenging angel—seduces Molly’s attacker and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of him. The camera constantly shifts to his perspective, uncomfortably aligning the audience’s viewpoint with that of a rapist and in the process equating the violation of voyeurism with the violation of rape (one could easily milk an entire graduate thesis out of this, assuming it already hasn’t been done). Conceptually, this is almost too obvious, but at this point criticizing the film for a lack of subtlety would be absurd.

(This perspective shot also calls to mind Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, another striking film about a reformed prostitute who enters a strange town, suffers at the hands of its residents, and then leaves after having proven herself superior to the amoral hypocrites running the place. That film begins with an incredible scene of prostitute beating up her pimp, which Fuller films from the pimp’s perspective as the prostitute whacks the side of the camera with her purse. As an assault on the audience, this is comparable to Showgirls, even though Fuller’s overarching vision is ultimately more empathetic than Verhoeven’s scabrous cynicism.)

Nomi’s revenge against the rapist is the sort of victory that seems empowering on the surface, but offers little real change or improvement in this vile system. In fact, she ends right where she began, hitching a ride out of town, heading towards Los Angeles where a larger, crueler whorehouse awaits her. Nomi’s actions start to seem more like futile retaliation against a system stacked against her—cathartic, but of no real consequence.

Is there any hope in the midst of such bleakness? Is Verhoeven nothing more than an embittered misanthrope, taking out his disillusionment with Hollywood upon the docile, unsuspecting audience, which all too readily falls into his trap? "We all gotta be a prostitute sometimes" might be the best summary of the film's worldview, which essentially says that all entertainers, itself included, are whores, and by implication, we the audience are johns. In such a vision, the only character growth possible becomes the self-awareness of acknowledging one’s own debased position in this system. Or perhaps, more optimistically, to simply reject this system entirely—a possibility not entertained by any characters in the film, although I like to think it is at least open to the rest of us.

A film this odious can only be reckoned with in one of two ways. The first approach is to embrace the film as pure camp pleasure, celebrating its every exaggeration and absurdity as signs of intentions gone awry—“a seriousness that fails,” as Susan Sontag writes in “Notes on ‘Camp’”. This approach essentially dismisses everything caustic and upsetting in the film as accidents caused by filmmakers too inept to actually mean any harm. Given the rather deliberate offensiveness of much of the film, it is a generously forgiving audience that can approach Showgirls on these terms—camp is also a “love for human nature,” according to Sontag—but it also takes a bit of willful blindness to not be bothered when someone spits in your face.

Treating the film as a so-bad-it’s-good spectacle might be worth a few laughs, but it’s also a shield from the more unsettling spectacle of Hollywood as a rumbling volcano requiring a steady stream of nubile, scantily clad (but not necessarily virgin) sacrifices. By now we’ve long since reached the point at which everything subversive about the film has been co-opted by the marketplace—which in this case means the release of a special edition DVD including drinking game, shot glasses, and two stripper tassels to pin on a nude poster of Berkley.

No, I prefer a second approach to Showgirls, which is to assume Verhoeven and Eszterhas are making a very deliberate film, no matter how vile and ridiculous it might seem. And I mean it—those drinking games might leave you buzzed, but treating this film as a sincere response to modern culture will have you reeling for days. Even when the dialogue seems offensive and stupid, take it as intentionally offensive and stupid, including that infamously inane dialogue between Nomi and Cristal about how nice it is to have nice tits.

Tempting though it may be to assume that this is merely erotic dialogue gone astray, recall that the bulk of the audience has come to the film expecting to ogle those very same tits. The crass yet banal dialogue makes a mockery of the audience’s own lechery by voicing the very thoughts running through our heads and rendering these thoughts loathsome and insipid. Understandably, audiences don’t much appreciate this treatment, but to suggest this is a failing of the film itself misses the point. Oh, poor monster—why hate the mirror?