You Don’t Know Showgirls

by Dov Kornits

“I came to Showgirls late,” says filmmaker Jeffrey McHale. “I watched it with a friend after talking with him about having never seen it. He was amazed that I had taken that long to see it. So, we sat down, watched it and my mind was blown. In the first six minutes I was like, ‘is this the movie? Is it going to be like this for the next 2 hours?’”

McHale was working as an editor, and a few years later he made a mash up of Black Swan and Showgirls. “At that time Black Swan hadn’t come out yet, and I thought it would be a fun experience as an editor, it’s a great little challenge. I thought of the idea and thankfully no one beat me to it. I like to say that was the first iteration of what You Don’t Nomi is now. It was my first step into Showgirls territory.”

Nine years later, McHale has taken the mash up to another level with a feature length deep dive into Showgirls. If you’re not familiar with deep dives, think Room 237, which micro analysed aspects of Kubrick’s The Shining, or Alexandre O. Philippe’s 78/52, which dissected Hitchcock’s Psycho shower scene.

That’s not such bad company for cult Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s (Robocop, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Starship Troopers) 1995 film that was unanimously derided critically (apart from FilmInk, we’re proud to say!) upon its theatrical release.

“Everyone’s aware of American blockbusters, and people like to look at Showgirls like an outlier,” says McHale. “Some people like to say that it doesn’t fit into the rest of Verhoeven’s filmography. And I like to think that Showgirls is Verhoeven at his purest. Before I started this project, I hadn’t seen his earlier European films [Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange, Spetters, The 4th Man]. When I did watch them, my mind was blown as far as all of the little ways that the films are connected through themes and motifs. I thought that interconnecting the film visually would be the perfect way to illustrate things.”

With You Don’t Nomi, McHale subtly, and often seamlessly, cuts in footage from Verhoeven’s filmography into scenes from Showgirls to illustrate his point. The film contains no talking heads, instead cutting together existing footage and laying down voiceovers from various champions and dissenters of Showgirls.

“I wanted to look at it critically, and that was actually one of the hardest parts – finding critics who had written about it at the time negatively to be a part of the movie, because they still didn’t want to be a part of anything to do with Showgirls. Thankfully, I found one,” laughs McHale.

Along with the one brave critic, McHale features drag queens who host a regular, outlandishly interactive Showgirls screenings and an actress who has created a stage version of the film.

“It was embraced by people that it wasn’t intended for at all,” says McHale. “‘You don’t want it? We’ll have it.’ We’ll make it a fabric of our DNA and our culture’. I think it’s a beautiful thing.”

McHale never reached out the filmmakers or cast themselves to be involved with his film, with his reasoning cemented when he was at a Los Angeles cemetery outdoor screening of the film. “Elizabeth Berkley was there introducing the film. Never in my wildest dreams would I ever think that I would see Elizabeth Berkley introducing Showgirls! When she came out, that’s the closest I’ve been to a spiritual experience, because you could feel the whole crowd’s wave of excitement that she was there.”

According to McHale, Showgirls’ cult will continue to grow over the years, which is more that you can say for most Hollywood blockbusters.

“When you watch Showgirls, it’s so hard to pinpoint what the intent was because it’s like nothing you have ever seen. You can watch TV and movies and go with the flow, but with Showgirls you’re always wondering, ‘what was going on behind the scenes?’ So that was my urge, to try to figure that out. When I started watching it, reading about it and speaking to some of the contributors in my film, I found I was less concerned about how it was made, and more about how we experience it and how it has evolved, and how our relationship with the film is constantly changing. I don’t think that it’s a film that we’re done with. In 10 years, you could make another film about our relationship with the film… though I won’t be doing that!”

You Don’t Nomi screens at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, December 9 – 20, 2020