Different Places

Nomi Malone, the heroine of Paul Verhoeven's masterfully campy Showgirls, is a recovering prostitute looking for home in glitzy Las Vegas. Her years on the streets have left their mark. She's a stray dog who's been whipped so often that she no longer has the good sense to stay away from trouble. When danger rears its head she lunges, teeth (and switch-blade, and acrylic nails) flashing without thinking twice. And even then she comes slinking back, ass wiggling, smile as wide as Nevada, trying to make her abusers love her.

Nomi Malone is not a human. Neither our writer, our director nor Elizabeth Berkeley herself bring a single drop of humanity to this role. Nomi Malone is an animal, caged and furious. No, even that's not quite right. She's an elemental spirit, fire leaping from her eyes as she flings a plate of french fries with all the fury of Medea slaying her children.

She arrives in Las Vegas, a place that has no use for humanity, as evidenced by the brutality inflicted on Nomi's roommate, a seamstress who is the film's only good character. Here, she rises to power the old-fashioned way. She fucks, fights and sabotages her way from doing lap dances at the Cheetah to erupting from a plaster volcano wearing nothing but some sequins and a g-string. Along the way she eats some quesadillas and infamously buys an ugly, slutty "Ver-sayse" dress. Then she eats some chips.

The climax of Nomi's rapid rise to success is, of course, the moment she erupts from that volcano while a voice intones, "Nomi Malone is Goddess!" Please pay close attention, friends. She is not a goddess who slithers out of the sea, or flies to Earth on angel's wings. Nomi Malone explodes out of the very bowels of the Earth. It's the old elemental fury again. Nomi was born to be Goddess.

But Nomi Malone was born Polly Ann Costello. This, of course, gives us what passes for a witty joke in Eszterhas's typewriter, when the show's director says Nomi looks like "Pollyanna." We'll forget for a moment that the joke isn't funny and that Nomi looks like, well, a stripper and not Pollyanna, because the name change is more significant than one stupid joke.

Remember RoboCop? In this earlier masterpiece, Verhoeven explores the exisential problem of Being in the form of a cyborg cop. Gunned down in the line of duty, our hero is transformed into a ruthless, mindless creature driven only to enforce the law. But something deep in him, the last twitching remnants of organic matter, rebel. Memories of his former life begin to emerge. The soul cannot be killed even by positronic brains and pistol holsters embedded in one's thigh. Being the best cop he can be requires RoboCop to give up his natural human existence, something he can never entirely do.

The persistence of memory, eternal recurrence, and identity form the backdrop for several great Verhoeven films (the other that comes to mind is, of course, Total Recall.) And while Verhoeven has certainly made better films than Showgirls, it is no less interested in these profound existential ideas. Polly Ann Costello leaves her life behind and becomes Nomi Malone, transforming from a whore into a whore who dances just as Alex Murphy dies and is transformed from a cop into a cop with a really cool computerized visor.

In the end, Nomi Malone exacts ferocious revenge in the film's most spectacular scene, in which her spastic dancing mutates into spastic karate in high heels. Then she flees, back to where she started, pulling her blade on unsuspecting truck drivers on the interstate. Nomi Malone has to travel all the way to the volcanos of Las Vegas to learn what we always knew: a goddess can't be contained on stage. A streetwalking shit-kicker can't be tamed like Eliza Doolittle. Nomi's too big for Vegas. So it's back the streets, the only place that knows what to do with her fury.

And in so many ways, this is the story of Showgirls itself. A film too big to be contained on a the big screen, it has become an object of obsession on the small screen. We huddle around our TV's to laugh and mock and quote and salivate, hearts thumping in time to Nomi's dolphinfucking, worshipping this most alluring, powerful and dangerous of godesses.

It's as true now as it was then. Nomi Malone is Goddess!

[An entry in the Showgirls Blog Orgy. Check out: Ben, Tim and Girish. And: David, Flickhead, Long Pauses, Zach and Brian . . . running log of futue posts will probably be at Girish's blog, so keep your eyes out!]