John Lyttle on film

Showgirls (lap-dance shock horror flop!) really ought to be called Show and Tell Girls. Sure, it's explicit, but explicit in a way that's academic, as all things become academic if displayed too often or too knowingly or, conversely, too crudely. That includes full-frontal female nudity, even nudity presented with a pungent undertow of disgust that distinguishes it from other full-frontal female nudity that is, in the wild, wild west, simultaneously called upon to be everywhere and still a turn-on.

Now, the world knows that the director Paul Verhoeven and the scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas are rampant heterosexuals. So why is Showgirls (right) the first great anti-heterosexuality event of the Nineties, as well as a classic example of camp - or, more accurately, failed camp?

First things first: arguably, Showgirls's fixation on, and horror of, women's bodies isn't anti-heterosexual but deeply heterosexual. Underneath the cracked attempts at po-faced sophistication (the heroine is told to rub her nipples with ice, there's talk of periods, boob jobs and sex between - gasp - black and white) vagina denata lurks, teeth bared... along with everything else.

The film is honest, in spite of itself. Though peddling flesh, it's about fear, and trying to dispel that fear by making women's sexual power a commodity, something to be bought and sold. Verhoeven and Eszterhas think that's what they're exposing out in big, bad Vegas, but what they strip is themselves. That's why the picture is failed camp (trash, really) rather than camp. Camp requires consciousness. And empathy with either its subject or object. Showgirls has neither. It's just a masturbation fantasy for middle-aged Fiesta readers and moral idiots. Don't bother to bring tissues.