Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 erotic drama Showgirls is a salient depiction of how American success is constructed through . A critical and commercial bomb at the time of release, it has undergone something of a critical reassessment in recent years, upon the release of Adam Nayman’s 2014 book-length analysis It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, as well as Jeffrey McHale’s 2019 documentary You Don’t Nomi. Unfairly relegated to ‘camp classic’ status, Showgirls deserves recognition as a stylised, albeit serious work on what French New Wave director Jacques Rivette called ‘surviving in a world populated by assholes’. In its narrative architecture, Showgirls is a riff on Hollywood success narratives such as All About Eve, as well as echoing the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Nomi Malone, an impulsive, naive dancer, hitchhikes to Las Vegas, with big dreams of dancing as a showgirl in the Stardust Hotel. To climb the showbiz ladder, she must work her way up from being a stripper at The Cheetah, a sleazy, if unpretentious establishment, to her dream of a starring role in Goddess, the Stardust’s nightly revue. Along her journey, she must battle with abusive pimps, the lecherous yuppie stage manager Zack, and the manipulative incumbent star of Goddess, Cristal Connors, Nomi’s nemesis and suggested love interest. Nomi eventually gains her starring role by pushing Cristal down the stairs, yet the gang rape of her best friend by industry figureheads, and Zack’s revelation of Nomi as a former drug addicted, violent prostitute Pollyanna causes her to quit the show. She leaves in search of new adventures in Los Angeles.
Although slowly becoming recognised as a serious work, even apologists of the film identify the pool scene, in which Nomi has bizarre, dramatic sex with Zack, the entertainment director, as worthy of derision, and Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote ‘when Showgirls finds Nomi in Zack's pool, splashing and thrashing in laughably fake ecstasy, the setting is as meaningful as the sex.’ Maslin’s words ‘laughably fake’ ring true, yet fail to consider the potential for this to be an intentional, effective stylistic choice. Within the narrative, the scene holds considerable significance, not merely as pulpy fan service, but as a culmination of meticulous construction on the part of Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas, its screenwriter. As such, I shall start with a study on the swimming pool itself, then move on to discuss how the swimming pool interrelates with stardom. Whilst I acknowledge that the scene is short in length, I argue its stylised depiction of pools reflects deeply on ideas of American imperialism, heterotopias and sexual performance.
The characterisation of Zack, a manipulative hotel boss is exemplified through a critical analysis of his pool. The pool’s design and its simultaneous luxury and kitsch can be read as synecdochal with Verhoeven’s views of American identity. The pool itself is an infinity pool (see fig. X, 1:21:00), pools with no defined border, with excess water spilling over the edge and pumped back into the pool. Infinity pools are appropriate symbols of excess, literally possessing more water than the pool is able to hold. Moreover, the design of infinity pools was intended to create an appearance of limitlessness, with the negative edge often meeting the sky or the sea. James Belbourgo writes infinity pools thus ‘seek to shimmer away the very boundary between earth and heaven’. The merging of horizons both real and imagined allows a more critical reading, in which Zack’s material fixtures position him as continuing the frontiersman spirit of his founding fathers. Yet, in contrast to more benevolent figures such as Neddy, Verhoeven outwardly identifies Zack’s possessions as material evidence of his ambitious, vain character.
Yet whilst Zack’s pool may be architecturally indicative of the limitless American horizon, its visual design speaks to the more outwardly materialist legacies of American imperialism. The pool shows considerable design influence from Tiki culture, with its jade-coloured water, the fountains fashioned like dolphins, and the neon palm trees coexisting with the real plant (fig. X, 1:21:26). These elements covertly demonstrate tensions within Americana aesthetics. The palm tree flourishes are lifted from Tiki culture, whose ideological foundation is an imaginative misreading of Pacific Islander culture. Sven A. Kirsten defines Tiki pool culture as ‘a clutter, a dense jungle comprised of different artifacts and materials from exotic cultures, the jetsam and flotsam of the Seven Seas’. As such, Tiki aesthetics are unrepresentative of any real Pacific culture, and instead offer an imagined paradise from an American perspective, including ‘exotic’ imagery of tropical flowers, rare animals and torches. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its ideological construction of an unreal paradise, water remains the most significant Tiki signifier, often collected in indoor pools or ‘lagoons’. As with his infinity pool, the legacy of manifest destiny can be read in the pool’s simulated representation of the exotic other, in which the limitless American horizon extends outwards to the Pacific.
Poolside decoration of this sort is inextricably associated with kitsch: the pink flamingo, perhaps the defining object of poolside bad taste, was described by its creator Donald Featherstone as ‘tropical elegance in a box for less than $10. Before that, only the wealthy could afford to have bad taste.’ Zack’s Tiki pool not merely aligns him with a legacy of appropriation and imperialism, but also demonstrates the tawdriness underpinning said legacy. To quote Delbourgo once more, ‘The dalliance [of poolside kitsch] between the pellucid and the lurid, the vulgar and the godlike, turned suburbanites into bronzed Poseidons, at least for a while’, and Zack is unignorably posited as the latter. The ability for poolside kitsch to afford its users the impression of continued American dominion remains true even for Zack, who is already wealthy and successful. Verhoeven uses these appropriated features to establish how someone as deceitful and conniving as Zack is not only able to succeed, his success is validated by the lavish, ugly capital he owns. In a retrospective interview, Verhoeven identified the excess of the pool to be an intentional decision, commenting:
‘When Nomi goes to the swimming pool, the background with these fluorescent palm trees is completely over the top!...Even the amount of naked bodies on screen is “too much.”