_Showgirls_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs "What are these, watermelons?'' "Stop! I have my period!'' "I have a problem with pussy.'' "Must be weird not having anybody come on you.'' Joe Eszterhas got paid how much for this? Unfortunately, the dialogue in _Showgirls_, the latest collaboration of Eszterhas, director Paul Verhoeven, and producer Mario (_Rambo_) Kassar, is the least offensive of the film's cheese factors. At least these and other howlers allow for some somewhat astonished laughter. The rest of it - for instance, plot, characters, point - is more difficult to, uh, swallow. Set in in a version of Las Vegas that looks strangely souped up, it's got an immediate purchase on Tackiness as Religious Endeavor. I thought for a moment, as the first camera swung past Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley in her "feature film debut,'' for whatever that's worth) to show the I-15 sign to Vegas behind her hysterically made-up face, the movie was an over-the-top riff on tabloid movie-making, some kind of parodic, fuck-you answer to all self-styled watchdogs of morality who, in their spare time, pay big money to see topless dancers and experience the thrill of... *lapdances*. The thing is considerably less clever than that. It's more like an endurance test (it's two hours and ten minutes that feel more like four hours). Nomi is a good girl who wants to be a dancer. She has aspirations, ideals, visions of romance. The movie, however, seems profoundly, even hyperbolically cynical: it can't take Nomi seriously, but it pretends as if you do. It's as if you're watching Ann-Margret topless, some weird hybrid of fifties morality piled on top of seventies tits and ass and nineties kickboxing (yes, Nomi has many skills). I started imagining the plot as a long string of exclamation points: Nomi has her suitcase stolen as soon as she arrives in Vegas! She's so upset! She finds work as a trashy pole-dancer! Her best friend Molly (Gina Ravera) is gang-raped by a famous long-haired singer! Nomi gets her big chance when she sleeps with the Stardust Hotel's entertainment director Zach (Kyle MacLachlan)! She lapdances with James, an earnest choreographer who once danced with Alvin Ailey (Glenn Plummer)! (That he danced with Ailey seems to be someone's translation of black integrity.) She flirts with the Stardust's star, lascivious white lesbian Crystal (Gina Gershon, imitating Ava Gardner as a Texan)! Her make-up is always perfect! None of it makes much sense. I kept waiting for the plot to kick in, say, a murder mystery or some other complication. But no. Nomi's moral education is the movie's relentless focus, and she's such a non-character, so wifty and dull, that eventually you realize that waiting for something to develop is useless. (Though, now that I think about it, if RuPaul had played Nomi, the sense-making possibilities would have multiplied exponentially.) It's worth noting that our heroine's ethical development (and, I suppose, its foundation) lies in the fact that the only person she *does* have sex with is not the lesbian or the black man, but the fellow that most resembles a straight white male (that would be Zach, though MacLachlan's portrayal, complete with hokey bangs falling Veronica-Lake-like over his eye, raises some questions as to what this might mean: he's so patently corrupt that her affection for him really only underlines her naivete). No surprise then that the studio has opted to capitalize on the NC-17 rating ("Leave your inhibitions at the door''). The television trailers have been underlining the visible sex as if it is in itself a substantial come-on, as if it's something that you would trust Verhoeven and Eszterhas to show you (and the sex, or more precisely, the naked female body count, is less scurrilous than it is tiresome: boys! get over it). The most troubling abuse of a woman's body is Molly's rape, a violent scene intercut with Nomi's shining success at a post-show party. The rape serves as a visceral motivation for Nomi's kick-ass vengeance; suffice to say that her capacity for self-consciousness or intellectual thought is somewhere in the bag-of-hammers range. Molly, then , plays the familiar role of the "black buddy'' in this film; she's a costume designer rather than a dancer (honorable rather than cheap), the character whose conscience and major bruising finally illustrate to the protagonist that there's a "right thing" to be done. The trailer also asserts some rudimentary, rile-you-up oppositions: this is the movie "they'' don't want you to see. The press pass for _Showgirls_ stated that our IDs would be checked at the door. They weren't. I'm assuming that the warning had to do with legalities, that theaters can't show NC-17 movies without such a written notice. Still, it got me thinking. What's at stake in this kind of policing? Who is being protected, and from what or whom? You might spend a moment wondering what inspired the rating. Breasts? Upright nipples? A same sex kiss? Women licking poles? Aren't these fairly mundane images by now? Then again, who knows or cares what drives the MPAA board? Eszterhas appeared recently on television exhorting underagers to use fake IDs to get in to theaters. Because "they'' don't want "you'' to see it, the campaign claims, you should see it, to ensure "your" rights. But to what? Censorship and free speech are hot issues these days, what with cyberporn and Calvin Klein and the FBI and Senator Exon looking to "crack down" on designated offenders, and it's hardly news that a controversial rating can be a draw, but after all is said and done, this controversy is an exceptionally empty one, so crass and stale as a ploy that it might only work in the black-and-white moral schematic that this film depicts. While hypocrisy is rather a norm, this is probably the most flagrant irony in _Showgirls_, that it takes some variant of a high road, condeming commercial shoddiness while making use of it in the most trivial and pedestrian ways. That's what seems "offensive,'' not the glossy sex or even the sheer numbers of breast and crotch shots, but the movie's unbelievably limited view of what it would seem to be showing you. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.