This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

NOTHING MORE TO SEE: THE ROLE OF SHOWGIRLS
IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EROTIC FEMALE NUDE

presented by

Michelle Veenstra

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

 

M-A- degree in _E_gl__§h__n i

42%?

‘

Major professor

Date WY

0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN Box to remove this checkout from your record.
To AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/01 cJCIRC/DateDuepes-p. 15

NOTHING MORE TO SEE: THE ROLE OF SHOWGIRLS
IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EROTIC FEMALE NUDE

By

Michelle Veenstra

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT

NOTHING MORE TO SEE: THE ROLE OF SHO WGIRLS
IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EROTIC FEMALE NUDE

By

Michelle Veenstra

In the 1995 film Showgirls, which tells the story of a young woman who travels to
Las Vegas to be an erotic dancer, director Paul Verhoeven offers an in-depth examination
not just of Vegas strip shows but of the role of female nudity in Hollywood cinema as a
signifier of erotic desire and revelation. By focusing so persistently on the undressed
female body and the assumption of its erotic power as a contrast to dominant male power,
Verhoeven’s film reveals that nudity is not inherently erotic or seductive, but is instead a
man-made construction. Contextualized with a brief historical discussion of the nude as a
figure in Western art and culture, his revelation of the artificiality of nudity helps hasten
the destruction of the nude as both a symbol and state of erotic power in contemporary

American culture.

The 1995 film Showgirls tells the story of Nomi, a young woman who travels to
Las Vegas to be a dancer. She begins at a seedy strip club and works her way up to
become the star performer of the topless casino dance show “Goddess,” a position she
achieves from both her relationship with and her deliberate sabotage of Cristal, the
previous lead dancer, and from her sexual relationship with Zack, the Entertainment
Director. Once her name is in lights, she realizes the inherent corruption of Vegas shows
and leaves the city of sin to hit the road again, this time headed for Hollywood. This
story of one woman’s attempt to empower herself by controlling and profiting from the
performed revelation of her body, illustrated with abundant footage of topless and naked
women, examines the treatment of female nudity both in Vegas shows and, by
comparison, in the film itself. It also explores the relationship between this nudity and
the elite collection of powerful men who, always at a profit, produce, manage, and direct
the various shows of bodily display. i

In one scene of this film, Cristal (still the lead performer at this time) tries to
restart her relationship with Nomi over lunch, acting as mentor by giving advice and
describing her own humble beginnings as a Showgirl. Not always the woman she is now,
“Cristal” has renamed herself after the glamorous champagne she consumes, leaving
behind her previous identity as a normal woman who had a boring name, mousy brown
hair and small breasts. This transformation is possible because, as she says with a wry
smile, “It’s amazing what some paint and a surgeon can do.” Her confessional statement
apparently reveals the artificiality of her constantly displayed body and her borrowed,
pseudonymed persona. On one level her comment refers not just to her own fake nudity

but to that of all the other numerous female bodies that have been painted, altered and

displayed thus far in the film. But on another level, Cristal’s comment is itself a partial
lie because Gina Gershon, the actress who plays the character of Cristal, displays real,
unaltered breasts, raising a disparity between the claim of having a constructed body and
the reality of her unenhanced breasts. This interpretation of the naked female body,
whether surgically enhanced or not, as a man-made construction (so to speak), occurs
more than halfway through the film and solidifies the conclusion that the visually-satiated
viewer has been formulating all along: although the many nude female bodies may have
been titillating at first, they quickly degraded into something so contrived that they are
finally a laughable sight completely devoid of any power to evoke desire.

This image of nudity as an unappealing, false construction helps to explain the
financial failure that Showgirls experienced at the box office in 1995, a failure due in
large part to its advertised claim to be an erotic thriller more intense than Basic Instinct,
the previous fihn by director-writer team Paul Verhoeven and Joe Ezsterhas. This hype
was epitomized in the marketing slogan, “last time they took you to the edge; this time,
they’re taking you all the way.” As it turns out, however, taking the audience “all the
way” resulted in revealing too much, leaving nothing to be desired visually or narratively
and producing only a profound sense of disappointment. Instead of creating erotic bodies
or a titillating narrative, Showgirls focuses obsessively on the basic component of
sexuality and narrative -— the revealed body - and quickly strips nudity itself of any of the
eroticism, desire, or power that it once held. Situated at a time when the prevalence of
naked flesh is becoming an increasingly inherent aspect of mass culture, Showgirls raises
many questions about the assumed traits of nudity and the relationship between female

bodies and male power. Perhaps the most pointed of these questions is whether nudity,

especially female nudity, still has any ability to function as a position of alternative,
' seductive power when it is so frequently exposed for observation and dissection.

Before discussing the cultural significance of nudity in both Western society and
American film, it is important to define this concept. From a linguistic perspective, the
term nudity itself requires clarification since it is often used interchangeably with
nakedness. While nakedness is generally related to a natural state of bareness, nudity
amplifies and contextualizes such nakedness as an erotic state that is frequently the
subject of artistic rendering. Hence, strip clubs advertise nude women and classical
sculptures depict nudes and not nakeds; but one is naked when showering alone at home
or when unexpectedly caught and seen without clothing. The nude body retains a
culturally-determined layer over the naked flesh that can not be stripped away and so
creates a constant desire for further disclosure from the viewer. It is inherently linked to
the idea of revelation, desire, and thus power through its ability to either satisfy or
frustrate the viewer’s desire, or perhaps to do both at the same time. This link to
revelation establishes nudity as a key tool in narrative, since it signifies the entire process
of creating desire, prolonging desire, and finally revealing just enough to satisfy that
desire without showing everything.

Evaluating the history of the nude as an artistic subject, Kenneth Clark introduces
his comprehensive work on the subject by pointing out that the fabrication of the nude
began in the fiflh century when the Greeks “invented” the nude as an art form. (4) Clark
offers that, “It is widely supposed that the naked human body is in itself an object upon
which the eye dwells with pleasure and which we are glad to see depicted.” (5) But, he

argues, the truth is that the naked body holds no such natural charm. “In our Diogenes

search for physical beauty our instinctive desire is not to imitate but to perfect,” (12) a
search that results in a constructed image of beauty that reflects and heightens the desire
for something beyond nature. Clark does well to emphasize the distinction between the
naked body and its idealized form as a nude, and goes on to examine a variety of
approaches to the human body. But his analysis, while thorough, is biased in its ahnost
complete refusal to discuss gender despite the clear differences of perspective toward the
male and the female nudes throughout the more than 1500 years of art history he has
researched.

Briefly addressing the topic at one point, he offers one explanation for the change
from male to female nudes that begins in the 17th-century and has continued to the
present, admitting that other factors may be involved. Clark argues that the slow
reduction in male subjects is no doubt “connected with a declining interest in anatomy
(for the écorché is always male) and so is part of that prolonged episode in the history of
art in which the intellectual analysis of parts dissolves before a sensuous perception of
totalitites.” (356) Without fully acknowledging that he is viewing female and male
nudes differently, Clark reveals a distinction between the two based on erotic power. The
male nude, from the works of ancient Greece through the Renaissance, is the product of
an intellectual curiousity about the body’s construction and the desire to perfect that
image, reflecting the aspiration to improve one’s own physicality. In a word, it is
utilitarian. The female nude, however, is a study that abandons details and reflects the
inherently sensuous qualities of the appealing feminine form. The desire to represent and
view the female body is not educational but pleasurable, and a temptation that it is

difficult to resist.

The depiction of the female form is further eroticized as a signifier of the desire
for revelation, the need to see this sensuous naked flesh that is hidden beneath clothing or
other veils. Mario Perniola posits that it is precisely the state of transit, a movement from
clothing to nudity, that imbues the body with a quality that makes the viewer yearn for a
glimpse of more flesh. In his essay “Between Clothing and Nudity,” Perniola examines
several Renaissance art works that depict figures caught at an ephemeral moment at
which the covering over the flesh is fluttering or slipping away, or in which the veiling
material merely serves to contrast with and accentuate the skin underneath or adjacent to
it. This transitional stage —— frozen in time and captured in art — imbues the naked body
with an erotic quality by maintaining the desire to see more of what has begun to be
revealed. While Perniola examines numerous pieces of art that display this trend, he does
not acknowledge that, save for two crucifixion images, all of these eroticized works focus
on women subjects, an omission that, like Clark’s defensive explanation above, reveals
the naturalized assrunption of the female nude in art.

Perniola’s emphasis on the inherent link between transition and the eroticized
naked body indicates the seductive quality of nudity as a position defined by constant
change; it can only be achieved by movement fiom one position (clothed) to another
(unclothed). The “stark naked” body contains little erotic power because it is an absolute
and offers no possibility of being anything other than undressed. While Clark sees
female nudes as static and sensuous, Perniola’s nudes are erotic because they highlight
the layers necessary for the creation of nudity and suggest the possibility of removing all

those layers until the bare body has displayed all of its secrets. This promise of firture

revelation creates and captures the viewer’s desire, thus establishing nudity as an
enigmatic, powerful state of corporeality.

The ultimate performance of the eroticization of the naked body is found in
striptease. Although generally viewed as a narrative performance based on desire (the
desire to see flesh), striptease is in fact a process that creates desire as a product of the act
of unveiling. As Roland Barthes argues in his essay on the subject, “Striptease — at least
Parisian striptease —- is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very
moment she is stripped naked.” (84) Thus striptease depends on the addition of props
and ritual actions that signal to the audience, both visually and narratively, that the final
product of the striptease, the nude body, is an erotic, sexual object of desire. This
meaning is possible only because the nakedness of the stripper is contrasted with the
clothing and other accoutrements used by the stripper in a predictable process of
unveiling. A

The narrative of unveiling is a crucial component of all narratives since it
firnctions to draw the reader or viewer in to a performance that, hopefully, will produce
something for the hungry audience. Yet these narratives are only successful in procuring
an audience as long as the desire for further revelation is maintained. Once the mystery
is solved, there is little motivation to continue following the story, a problem exemplified
in hard-core pomography’s graphic display of sexuality and nudity that leaves nothing to
be discovered. In these films, the general lack of plot is clearly linked to the lack of
clothing and the abundance of revealed, naked bodies. Although not classified as hard
core, Showgirls follows this trope of visual bodily excess, while the plot suffers under the

burden of working against the desexualized, unrevealing bodies that thwart its progress.

No longer able to hint at future revelation, these bodies, devoid of erotic power, are no
longer nudes.

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault draws a clear relationship between
bodies and the dominant forces of power. His theory imagines an ever-proliferating
network of power created through a variety of discourses that, while by nature
oppositional, exist and function simultaneously, constantly creating more power and
more relationships. (44-45) Since Foucault’s definition of power derives from his
conception of a socially regulated sexuality, he also views power as working on and
through bodies or presences, and specifically the surfaces of these bodies. “The power
which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its
eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, drarnatizing troubled moments.” (44) The
body then constitutes a point of contact for power, a visible site where boundaries are
established and violated, where power itself can be made visible. Bodies provide a
location for the challenge from and response to power, and the naked body provides a
blank slate on which to inscribe any number of power relationships.

While Foucault focuses specifically on the necessity of bodies to speak their
deviant sexuality in confessionals and other dialogues with a dominant, normalizing
power, his focus on the “electrif[ied] surfaces” indicates that the flesh itself becomes
eroticized due to its connection with power. The nude body becomes connected with
sexual practices and other activities that are forbidden, and consequently comes to signify
desire and thus to acquire erotic power over those who view it. Thus the nude wields a
different kind of power — desire — to which even the forces that created it are subject.

Assuming, as Foucault does, that this creation of the erotic nude has occurred within the

boundaries of a heterosexual patriarchy, the erotic power is thus identified as typically
female/ feminine or homosexual. This view of gender, nudity, and power is evident in our
earlier discussion of Western art in which the erotic nude is already assumed to be
female, whether in the plastic arts or in the living performance of striptease. This
feminine erotic power of the nude, therefore, is both dependent on the dominant
patriarchy that gives it the power to signify forbidden desire and is capable of seducing
and subverting this power by revealing its flawed assumptions (of natural sexuality or
gender roles, for instance).

The use of the female in this manner, as a seductive threat to established power,
can be found as a key component of narrative due to its ability to act as a subtle,
progressive force within the larger narrative. The visual nature of cinematic narrative
provides a useful illustration of the interplay between male and female power while
revealing the tendency to combine feminine erotic power and nudity, often assuming that
they both work in the same way. Director Paul Verhoeven, with his visually dynamic
(and often excessive) style, highlights the relationship between narrative assumptions and
visual signifiers. This aspect is especially notable in his American films, which also rely
on the connection between female seduction and male figures of patriarchal power.

Although his first films,1 made in the Netherlands, contain darkly realistic
portrayals of interpersonal relationships and of his home country’s social problems, his
American productions show a shift in his film-making technique to cater to an audience

that is looking primarily for visual entertainment and dynamic action. Starting with

Robocop in 1987, Verhoeven established a directorial style of visual excess and action-
packed plots. These traits continued in his other works, as he directed Total Recall
(1990), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995), Starship Troopers (1997), and most
recently Hollow Man (2000).

The plots of many of his films employ female characters who act as lures to
progress the narrative, seeming to lead the main (typically male) characters in one
direction or towards one answer then revealing themselves (as the end points of the plot)
to be something else. The women in Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls in
particular represent this erotic power of desire and revelation, and their bodies as sexual
objects (whether naked or not) are crucial to this representation. By examining these
three films in chronological sequence, a trend emerges that suggests Verhoeven was
exploring this use of the erotic female as a component of filrnic narrative, gradually
progressing toward a more explicit depiction of this erotic power via the nude female
body. Since he returns to his earlier genre of action-adventure films after his work on
Showgirls, it is evident that this film marks a point at which the relationship between
erotic female power and nudity has been fully exploited and offers no further revelation
of meaning.

While Verhoeven’s representation of female bodies reflects the clear relationship
between bodies and power depicted by Foucault, it also explores the possibilities of a
specifically female power that functions differently than the firmly entrenched patriarchy.

Jean Baudrillard argues that this feminine power is that of seduction, a powerful force

1 Turkish Delight (1973), Spetters (1980), and The Fourth Man (1983)

that operates on the strength of uncertainty and the distance between signifier and
signified. Characterized by its ability to reverse or disrupt oppositional structures such as
feminine/masculine or powerful/powerless, seduction “must be interpreted in the terms of
play, challenges, duels, the strategy of appearances.” (7) Seduction plays with the nature
of signs, mocking the inability of any signifier to represent definitively a single meaning,
and so can be clearly demonstrated through the surfaces of bodies.

For Baudrillard, nudity is not a stable position to be manipulated by power.
While his understanding of nudity seems to acknowledge the inevitable use of the body
by power, this relationship provides a structure in which nudity can play without
reaffirming or being defined by power. Unlike Foucault, who imagines that power uses
bodies based on their internal attributes (evoking from them confessions of sexuality or
gender identity), Baudrillard focuses on the surface of the naked body as an unlimited
signifier that can not be dominated by power. “Nudity will never abolish seduction, for it
immediately becomes something else, the hysterical enticements of a different game, one
that goes beyond it. There is no degree zero, no objective reference, no point of
neutrality, but always and again, stakes.” (43) Despite its appearance to the contrary,
nudity is not a neutral “degree zero” of the body but a signifier of endless signification.
As a superficial representation of the body, which is a location at which power is
enforced, nudity provides a site of play and seduction where stability or neutrality is
assumed. In this manner, the female nude retains her erotic power despite (and because
of) the efforts of various patriarchal establishments to limit such power.

Verhoeven’s cinematic exploration of this relationship between male power and

feminine seduction tests Baudrillard’s assumption that nudity can in fact always remain a

10

seductive force. The films Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls progress from
depicting women as seductive but mostly veiled bodies to increasingly associating that
seduction with their nudity. By exploring the inner workings of female strip shows and
constantly displaying female nudity in Showgirls, Verhoeven attempts to equate
seduction with nudity and reveals that Baudrillard’s model may be flawed. Baudrillard
seems to forget that, as Foucault and the art historians mentioned above clearly
established, the eroticism of nudity (and therefore its seductive power) is in fact a layer
of signification that has been constructed by the dominant, patriarchal power system to
cover the naked body.

In Total Recall, Doug Quaid, the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is
seduced simultaneously by two women who pull him towards two alternative identities
and realities. On Earth, he is seduced by his “wife” (Lori, played by Sharon Stone) to
accept one reality in which he is a construction worker, an identity that has been
fabricated for him and implanted by Rekall, Inc. In his dreams, he is seduced by a
mysterious brunette (Melina, played by Rachel Ticotin) who ultimately leads him to
return to Mars, where he not only finds Melina to be real but also indirectly recovers part
of his former, original identity as a government operative. Both women represent
different realities for Quaid and for the viewer, a dichotomy of representation emphasized
by their physical differences as blonde and brunette. In addition to this personal
seduction, the key location of the film is the Martian brothel/bar Last Resort, where
women prostitutes of all sorts (mutants, dwarfs, etc.) provide a cover for the real function
of the bar - gateway to Kuato, the leader of the Martian underground resistance

movement. At the Last Resort, the prostitutes seduce characters and viewers towards

11

accepting the surface reality of the bar by emphasizing appearances, particularly that of
their bodies which are in various states of nudity. This deceptive action is exemplified by
the three-breasted woman who constantly shows her unusual chest in an effort to snag
prospective customers and convince them of the superficial function of the bar.

Verhoeven’s use of the unveiled female body as a seductive tool is fairly limited
in this film, focusing instead on the promise of further revelation. Throughout the film,
women seduce by offering an image that ultimately turns out to be the first step toward
achieving something more significant. At the end of the film, Quaid is clearly the hero,
having created a breathable, oxygen-rich atmosphere for Mars and gotten the girl of his
dreams, yet none of his adventure would have occurred if he had not originally sought to
find this woman whose image seduced his subconscious. In fact, at the end of the film,
Quaid remains in doubt as to whether he has finally found his real identity or if it is all
“just a dream.” He, like the viewer, remains caught by the strength of seduction, unable
to tell if the events and people in his life are indeed what they seem to be. Despite his
obvious physical strength, his power remains inferior to the feminine seduction of the
narrative and of his girlfriend, who does not show distress about his fear that this
narrative is all a dream but urges him instead to kiss her before he wakes up. The final
shot of the film enhances Quaid’s weakness and the uncertainty of this reality by panning
back from the kiss between Quaid and Melina to reveal the backdrop of a huge,
intimidating and artificial-looking Martian landscape.

In Basic Instinct, the element of female seduction becomes the basis of the plot,
relying frequently on scenes that offer glimpses and calculated revelations of the

seductive female flesh to emphasize the eroticism and danger of women’s sexuality and

12

bodies. As in Total Recall, there remains some ambiguity about the true identity or
function of the seductive female characters despite the increased scrutiny of their nudity.
Contrary to some expectations, in fact, the prevalence of female flesh heightened the
erotic element of the film and helped make it a smash success at the box office. The
main character of Basic Instinct is Detective Nick Curran, a police officer investigating
the violent murder of a former musician who has been killed precisely in the manner
described in a book recently written by his current lover, Catherine Tramell. Due to this
connection, Catherine seems the clearest suspect, but she denies having any involvement
and maintains an attitude of confidence that is difficult to interpret as either irmocence or
guilt. While Nick and the viewer assume throughout much of the film that Catherine, the
sexy blonde seductress who flouts her (bi)sexuality and her nakedness, is the author of
her crimes in both fiction and reality, she is eventually proven innocent. On the contrary,
Curran’s ex-girlfriend, psychologist Dr. Beth Garner, seems to represent the mentally
stable woman but turns out to be the obsessed copy cat murderer who mimics the
fictional crimes depicted by Catherine.

The infamous scene of this film, in which Catherine uncrosses her legs to reveal a
short but unhindered look at her bare crotch during her police interrogation, provides the
ultimate example of the seductive power of her character and her nakedness. Prior to
bringing Catherine to the police station, Nick postulates that she will not resist the
questioning, stating, “I don’t think she’s going to hide at all.” Catherine herself confirms
this in the interrogation room by repeating, “I have nothing to hide.” This sense of hiding
versus revelation takes on greater significance when she clearly chooses to expose her

genitalia to the five male police officers who are interrogating and observing her. By

13

hiding nothing, both physically and verbally (she answers all their questions and takes a
polygraph test she suggested), Catherine demonstrates her innocence, her “lack” of
ability to deceive the clever men who are in charge while simultaneously revealing
herself as a distinct threat to their power because she is so easily able to evoke desire.

Her candidness is unnerving because neither Nick nor the viewer knows how to
decipher it, even at the end of the film when Beth Garner is proven guilty of the murders.
As with Total Recall, the final scene functions as a seductive one that prohibits a sense of
closure or certainty. Catherine and Nick enact a sex scene that is similar to the beginning
sex/murder scene, in which Catherine, like the naked blonde of the first scene, sits on top
of the man and reaches back with her hand, as if to grasp something, as they both climax.
While the first scene shows the woman reaching for an ice pick with which she
repeatedly stabs her victim/sexual partner, Catherine remains empty-handed. In
afterglow, she and Nick exchange some banter about living happily ever after together,
and Catherine reaches under the bed as the music swells to a tense crescendo; but she
again comes up empty-handed. They kiss passionately as the scene fades to black. But
then the scene fades in again from black and pans from the couple, still feverishly kissing
on the bed, down to the ice pick on the floor underneath the bed, the constant threat
behind Catherine’s peculiar sexuality. The scene fades to black a final time.

Again the film ends with a passionate kiss between the lead male and female
characters meant to signify a happy ending and a sense of stability, but some ambiguity
remains about the true identity of the woman. While Detective Curran has solved the
case and thus has a justifiable claim to be the hero of the film, his power is questionable

in the light of Catherine’s seductive and erotic powers. In addition to her control over

14

Nick’s life as a potential murderer, she controls Nick’s career, having provided the trail
of clues that led Nick to discover Beth as the murderer. Yet Nick cannot resist her body,
her sexuality, her nudity that he glimpsed so many times, both before they began their
sexual relationship and afterwards. Seeming to hide nothing under constant scrutiny and
interrogation, her nude body conceals all her secrets from him because he chooses to
view it as indicative of her honesty and realness. Her clear revelation of lack is
ultimately her most erotically powerfirl move since she does in fact have something to
hide and keeps it hidden throughout the film. Her nudity is the sign of her irrefutable
inscrutability and thus of her permanent threat to Nick’s masculine power. (The ice pick
is merely a secondary, explicitly phallic threat.)

In both Total Recall and Basic Instinct, the story ends with uncertainty that is
clearly linked to the main female characters. The seductive threat remains as the male
protagonists, ostensibly having achieved or reclaimed positions of clear power, are
unaware of their true relationship to their female partners. By equating Catherine’s erotic
power with her nudity, Basic Instinct lived up to its billing as an erotic thriller, leaving
the audience only partially satisfied and largely suspicious that, despite the amount of
flesh displayed, there is something left to be revealed about this woman. Satisfied by the
great success of this film, Verhoeven and Joe Ezsterhas agreed to collaborate on another
project that would, as Basic Instinct did for Total Recall, take the erotic element of
female nudity to an even more prominent position. To achieve this goal, Showgirls
featured an altered narrative structure in which the lead character is a woman instead of a
man, hoping to promote the erotic power of the woman to a position that would allow

still greater scrutiny.

15

As the narrative of Nomi’s relatively quick rise to fame in the world of Vegas
shows, Showgirls seems to depict the story of a woman who has empowered herself by
choosing to profit from the display of her nudity. She has made a place, a name for
herself on the stage. She has power, she is the “goddess” of Las Vegas. However, this
narrative is not the true message of the film as received by the audience. The erotic
power of the female body is no longer in the background as an accent to the stable,
dominant patriarchy. The roles are reversed, and men now occupy the margins, sitting
securely in their offices where all the important decisions are made, while women are
brought to the forefront and forced to reveal the secret power of their erotic, nude bodies.
Upon examination, this power dissolves (or migrates elsewhere) since nudity is not
synonymous with the naked body but is an invisible layer of signification. Instead of
allowing the constant display of nudity to retain its reference to something else,
Showgirls forces nudity to signify itself and thus renders the women on screen truly
naked and erotically unappealing.

One example of this stripping of nudity occurs when Tony Moss walks down the
line of three hopeful Showgirls (including Nomi) and states, “Show me your tits.” In
answer to their questioning looks, Moss declares, “I’ve got a topless show,” explaining
that his interest in their chests is not one of sexual desire but of functionality; seeing and
judging “tits” is simply part of his job. The women comply and remove their tops, but
there is little erotic appeal to this revelation for two reasons. First, the viewer has already
seen plenty of breasts in the film and become somewhat bored with the spectacle.
Second, the contextualized significance of the bare-chestedness of the women as a

fundamental part of show business equates the display with only what is clearly visible,

16

the naked female anatomy. These women are not truly nude since their bodies refer to
nothing other than their corporeality.

Viewers and critics alike blasted Showgirls precisely for its inability to provide
any erotic appeal in its plot or its depiction of female bodies. On its release in 1995,
Showgirls met with numerous critiques, mostly centering around its general failure to
fulfill any of the viewing audience’s expectations. While part of this reaction was due
simply to the film’s bad acting, weak dialogue and overabundance of female nudity, the
disappointment was also heightened by the enormous amount of publicity MGM/UA
launched before the film’s release in order to pique the interest of an audience who might
have reservations about seeing an NC-l 7 rated film in the theatre. To overcome the
stigma attached to the rating that had recently replaced the daunting X rating, the studio
saturated the market with advertising for the film.2 While some of this advertising
material included explicit representations of the film’s sex and nudity, a large portion of
it downplayed this graphic content to reach a wider audience. Hence, when viewers
finally saw the movie, they often saw both much more and much less than they
anticipated. As Verhoeven himself admitted, “The trouble was, audiences went looking
for thrills and emerged unaroused and that made them hate the film.” (quoted in Sandler

83)

2 Among other marketing strategies, MGM/UA convinced theatre owners to show the movie by wooing
them with an eight-minute trailer to emphasize the film’s respectability and sex appeal; it created
multiple versions of the trailer to be shown for audiences of all ages in theatres and procured late-night
airtime for the trailer on three of the major network TV stations; it offered a more explicit eight-minute
trailer for rental in major video retail stores; it secured newspaper ads by keeping the art suggestively
sexual, proving wrong those who thought that major newspapers would not run ads for NC-l7 films;
and it created a popular website with “nude photos, a dialogue simulator with the performers, and a link
to the Playboy Website.” (Sandler 78-82)

17

Linda R. Williams, in a review in Sight and Sound, criticized the film precisely
for its complete lack of seduction, dismissing it for its inability to titillate its viewers with
either sexual or narrative longing. Arguing that “revelation of the unknown is one of the
spurs of narrative, of suspense, of sex,” Williams concludes that Showgirls fails because
“nothing is hidden and there is nothing to find: there is never an unknown to be
revealed.” (30) By clearly depicting the multiple sexual relationships, the various levels
of manipulation, and the exploitation of women’s naked bodies, the fihn removes the
possibility of any ambiguity about the nature of the characters or of Vegas show business.
Prompted by the ubiquitous advertising material to expect more depth than what the
various preview glimpses had afforded, many viewers were quickly disappointed to
discover that there truly was little more to be revealed of anything - narratively or
physically. Full female nudity appeared on screen 20 minutes into the fihn and never
seemed to go away, allowing the focus on bodily surfaces often to take precedence over
narrative.

It seems that Williams’ critique, while clearly justified in her claim that neither
the female viewer nor the male viewer walks away from the movie satisfied, points to a
significant success of the film. By de-eroticizing the nude body, specifically that of
Elizabeth Berkley/Nomi, this film performed a feat that feminists have been attempting
for years: to reveal the ways in which female nudity is constructed to be used by the
established power hierarchy of patriarchy and capitalism. Williams confirms this result
by arguing that the nudity in the film is “gratuitous” and “serves no purpose, least of all
arousal.” (30) While Verhoeven attempts to capture a behind the scenes look at the life

of a Showgirl by displaying the glamour and the torridness of a business based on the

18

spectacle of sex, his product delivers something even better: a clear look at the spectacle
of female flesh in Hollywood cinema. While less explicit movies, such as his earlier
films Total Recall and Basic Instinct, still generally include and ofien largely depend on
the image of woman as a desirable object whose secret or skin is somehow revealed to
the viewer, this depiction is rarely the basis of the entire plot. By bringing such a
depiction to the forefront of the film, Verhoeven confronts the viewer with a narrative
that is nothing other than the revealed woman as object of desire. The failure of this film
to arouse thus highlights that there is nothing about the female body that is naturally
desirable or satisfying to the viewer; bodies function as sex objects only when arranged
in a narrative that imparts such significance to them. Somewhat surprisingly,
Verhoeven’s Showgirls are all stark naked.

While mainstream audiences largely rejected the film —— it ended up grossing just
over $20 million in the US, half of its production cost (Sandler 82) — its success at
treating nudity as nakedness appealed to those who enjoyed mocking the failure of classic
Hollywood tropes. Various customer reviews at Amazon.com include the following
statements: “It wasn't erotic...it was hilarious!” (anonymous reviewer) “There was a ‘
constant display of breasts It got to a point where it wasn't even sexy anymore, just
kind of funny.” (Brandon S.) These reviews indicate the success of this film at exposing
naked bodies as not inherently arousing, and highlight the odd appeal the film holds for
alternative audiences. Similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), midnight
showings of Showgirls that included audience participation and costumed drag

performers attracted a following in New York and Los Angeles in 1996. (Sandler 85)

19

Despite this cult following, the economic failure of Showgirls established a
precedent for the marketing and release of subsequent films with similar sexual content.
Released in 1996, less than a year after the box-office bombing of Showgirls, Striptease
followed a markedly different approach to sell its story of a working mother who strips to
support herself while trying to win custody of her daughter. Shying away from
explicitness, the film featured no sex or full nudity, securing a safe R rating. While the
poster for Striptease shared something with that of Showgirls (both featured the lead
female character firlly undressed but without revealing any critical areas), the marketing
scheme emphasized the dark humor of the story instead of the stripping, “[t]o make sure
consumers don’t dismiss it as Showgirls 11.” (Miller 18) In Striptease, female nudity was
contextualized again in a safe, comedic narrative of a woman who fights against the
patriarchal establishment by working within it as a stripper. However, despite this altered
tactical approach toward the stripper narrative, Striptease-likewise bombed at the box
office, grossing $32.8 million domestically, a figure not even three times that of Moore’s
exorbitant $12 million salary. The similar plots — both women strip to get power of a sort
— resulted in similarly mocking reactions as well. Audiences hated it, but this time
instead of laughing at the gratuitous nudity, many viewers felt that Demi Moore’s nudity
was the only worthwhile part of the fihn. No longer made so explicit, the nude female
figure propelled Striptease to retain somewhat more erotic appeal than Showgirls
precisely because the nudity was a secondary focus. But the commercial failure of
Striptease indicates the difficulty of reestablishing the nude as an erotic object of desire

once it has been revealed as a manipulated construction of nakedness.

20

Verhoeven’s film has created a narrative of the way in which female nakedness is
transformed, at the hands of men, into erotic nudity. By so doing, he has destroyed the
power of the nude by making it explicit and revealing that the lust for nudity is a
constructed desire forced upon the viewer by a handful of men who sit back and cash in
on the production and sale of nudity. Not only that, but the bodies themselves are
presented as artificial creations that require paint and decoration before becoming nudes.
The failure of Striptease and other subsequent “erotic” R-rated films indicates that
Verhoeven’s film signals a change in the interpretation of nudity. Unable to see it as a
natural signifier of erotic desire, viewers are forced to look elsewhere for narrative and
visual titillation. Desperate to find a substitute, mass media has included an increasing
number of male nudes as seductive objects. This trend begins in Basic Instinct, when
Michael Douglas’s display of full rear nudity created a stir from both women and men
viewers. Yet male nudity does not carry the same significations in a culture that is still
mostly patriarchal. Images of men created by (heterosexual) men naturally cannot create
any desire, since these depictions more likely mimic the nudes of ancient Greece
discussed by Kenneth Clark. Instead of treating the male body as a sensuous form, male
image-makers depict it as an idealized version of their own bodies. Thus positive
depictions of male nudes, usually not fully displayed, still signify physical strength,
exemplified by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s image, while other male nudes are humorous, a
treatment illustrated by the close-up of Tom Greene’s butt in Road Trip, or utilitarian, as
in various non-erotic shower scenes.

The destruction of the erotic female nude, and the failure of the male nude to

replace it as a signifier of desire, leaves a gaping hole in the semiotic structure of

21

American culture. If even female bodies are seen as constructions, either through actual
physical enhancement or as cultural creations, we are faced with a loss of the ability to
represent desire and an increasing sense of artificiality about any kind of revelation.
Perhaps the prevalence of so many “reality shows” in contemporary television is one
answer to this loss of illusions, and the hope that there is still something real to be
discovered underneath the veil of representation if only we look hard enough. But even
so, Verheoven’s experimental and successful denuding of nudity leaves a sense of
uncertainty that any further examination of “reality” can truly restore the fundamental

component of desire to American culture.

22

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Striptease.” Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Perf. Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George
Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehom. Carolco Home Video, 1992.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Brandon S. Untitled online review of Showgirls. 5 February 2002. Arnazoncom.
< http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/video/6303913881/
customer-reviews/>

Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality; Volume I : An introduction. New York:
Vintage Books, 1990.

Miller, Cyndee. “Audience Supposed to Laugh When Demi Strips.” Marketing News
July 1, 1996: 18.

Perniola, Mario. “Between Clothing and Nudity.” Trans. Roger Friedman. Zone:
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two. Ed. Michael F eher. New
York: Urzone, 1989.

Sandler, Kevin S. “The Naked Truth: Showgirls and the Fate of the X/NC-17 Rating,”
Cinema Journal 40.3 (2001): 69-93.

Showgirls. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Perf. Elizabeth Berkley, Gina Gershon, Kyle
MacLachlan, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi. MGM/UA, 1995.

Total Recall. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Perf. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone.
Artisan, 1990.

Williams, Linda Ruth. “Nothing to Find.” Sight and Sound 6.1 (Jan. 1996): 28-30.

23

G

rrtrrrrrrrrrrtljjrl‘rr