Do you know the 1995 movie Showgirls?

If not – or you need a refresher – below is the film’s basic story via GIFs:

Nomi Malone, the film’s protagonist, hitch hikes to Las Vegas:

There she pursues a career in dance starting at a strip club:

Then, through connections Nomi makes at the strip club, she lands an audition to dance in a large scale glitzy topless show at a fancy casino:

The star of this show is Crystal Connors. She and Nomi become fast frenemies:

After several shady incidents around the show and revelations of its toxic culture, Nomi pushes Crystal down the stairs when exiting the stage:

With Crystal now injured and unable to perform, Nomi soon becomes the show’s new star:

However, due to more terrible occurrences, Nomi, after having worked her way to the summit of her dream, abandons the show and hitch hikes out of Vegas:

Directed by Paul Verhoeven and with a screenplay by Joe Eszterhas, the film is excessive and both wallows and revels in its excessiveness. From a $40,000,000.00 budget, the largest financing at that time for a NC17 picture, to violence, blunt raunchy dialogue and explicit sexual depictions and images, Showgirls is relentless in its in your faceness and fully earns its adult rating.

When released, critics attacked it. Roger Ebert dubbed it “a waste.” Audiences didn’t know what to make of it and were rather repulsed by it. Its box office was not bofo. The film even won the 1995 Razzie for Worst Picture. Today, however, similar to the afterlife of films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Showgirls has undergone a redemption and holds considerable status as a cult classic. 

Jeffrey McHale’s 2019 “cine-essay” You Don’t Nomi offers a multifaceted exploration of how Showgirls passed from trashy trash to treasure. The film is looked at as a  “stealth masterpiece” and a work that “we’re not done with.” Showgirls’ transubstantiation is also considered through critic Adam Nayman’s book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, that argues the film is concurrently a piece of shit and a masterpiece – a masterpiece of shit, and film historian Jeffrey Sconce’s unnervingly revelatory evaluation of the film in journal’s including Film Quarterly. 

To further prove how “not done” we are with this near thirty year old once trash heaped film, You Don’t Nomi also rightly pays attention to past live stage treatments of this cautionary showbiz erotic epic. These include drag performer Peaches Christ’s wild midnight screenings and live scene stagings where purchase of a large popcorn entitled you to a free lap dance from a ribald drag queen to Bob and Tolby McSmith’s Showgirls! The Musical that played East and West Coast stages. 

Now Marlène Baladana and Jonathan Drillet’s Showgirl makes its North American premiere on the NYU Skirball stage and furthers Showgirls meta-afterlife. For NYC audiences this two handed techno riff  might bring to mind and is in the tradition of late night pop culture and gender critique performance works by groups like The Blacklips Performance Cult at spaces like the Pyramid Club or PS 122.

Enjoy this new take and years from now when you think of Showgirl or Showgirls – and you will – be kind. Perhaps then you will start to know me, and yourself.

Joe E. Jeffreys teaches theatre history, dramatic literature and LGBTQ+ studies courses in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Drama and Kanbar Institute of Film & Television  Undergraduate Film and Television departments.