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The Film Society of Lincoln Center is in the middle of their Paul Verhoeven retrospective right now and last night they screened his 1995 trashterpiece Showgirls with the director there alongside actress Gina Gershon... in other words, momma I'm home. These are the only folks who can get my tits poppin' right!
They were both totally game to talk up the film - mostly they talked about the critical reaction (that's a nice word for apocalypse) to the movie and what a joke it became; Gershon said people who liked the film - of which there are many of us! - would come up to her and whisper it as if they were terrified someone else would hear.
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I thought the most interesting part of the talk (and I didn't take notes because I'm sure the fine folks at FSLC will have video of the event up soon enough since they rock) was Verhoeven talking about how he even at the time he side-eyed MGM's ad-campaign for the film, which sold the film as The Most Erotic Film Ever (that's the original trailer above and they don't say precisely that but it is implied)- the word Verhoeven described the film as was "anti-erotic" and my god, yes, that is exactly the word.
Right before Showgirls they also screened Verhoeven's 1973 film Turkish Delight (starring Rutger Hauer and Monique van de Ven as a sex-mad duo) and the two movies made for interesting companion pieces - I think the earlier film proves that Verhoeven's always been working on a higher register than most filmmakers, and it re-framed Showgirls as less hysterical and more purposeful. Turkish Delight is a manic pixie dream girl movie dialed up to fifteen with every body fluid and sex organ front and center, but coming from a much less cynical place than Showgirls was - it was filmed, as Verhoeven said in the Q&A, right smack-dab in the middle of the sexual revolution in Holland when Free Love reigned, and it's relentless (somewhat exhaustingly so) in its European Sexcapade Shenanigans.
Anyone seen it?
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