I am, without doubt, late to the party; but I couldn’t pass up the first regular episode of Nathaniel R‘s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” series, in which he invites anyone with the will to pick their favorite image from a movie he preselected. Today’s – make that yesterday’s – candidate: Paul Verhoeven’s amazing camp masterpiece Showgirls.
How to pick just one image from a movie as chockablock full of brilliantly mad conceits and wretched excess as this one? In the end, I went with one that isn’t necessarily a particularly colorful or well-framed image, but seems to me to an appropriate encapsulation of the bent energy that makes the film such a gas.
Two horrible people fucking in a pool in Vegas – what screams “ludicrous hedonism” more than that? And not just normal-people fucking, but the most enthusiastically gymnastic fucking in any movie I can immediately recall having seen. Nothing sums up the Showgirls experience to me as does observing that Elizabeth Berkley is, by all available evidence, humping Kyle MacLachlan’s solar plexus.