Hal Kitchen
However you judge it, thirty plus years is a very long career for a dancer. It’s not something you can do forever, but it’s the kind of vocation you draw your sense of worth from. The longer you do it, the harder it will be to give it up. In The Last Showgirl, Shelley (Pamela Anderson) is 57 and she’s been dancing at the Razzle Dazzle revue in Vegas since 1987. In an era where burlesque is either subversive and playful or XXX-rated, the Razzle Dazzle is the Strip’s last holdout of sequinned bikinis and feather boas. With the dated aesthetics no longer pulling in crowds, the show is slated for closure. Younger or more talented and diversified dancers like Jodie (a devastatingly little supporting performance by Kiernan Skipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) will find other opportunities, as will stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), but for Shelley, the Razzle Dazzle is all she knows and all she’s ever been qualified for. All that is waiting for her is a moribund relationship with Hannah (Billie Lourd), a daughter she hardly knows, and an endless, never-to-retire grind waiting tables like her best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Shelley has never before had reason to regret her choices, she loves being a showgirl, beautifying herself and being admired. She is proud of the Razzle Dazzle, which is as she calls it: “a spectacle with dancing nudes but it’s certainly not a nudie show.” However, as her daughter retorts; “[was] this […] worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood?!” Shelley considers herself above sex work, but the line between a lap dance and her tacky revue isn’t as great as she thinks it is. And most lap dancers earn more.
Shelley is a little delusional about her line of work and desperately needs a reality check, but that doesn’t mean she deserves to get one. No more than Jodie, a nineteen year old runaway with the strange idea that the troupe should be a second family to one another, does. Her naivety is amusing, but tragic and instructive too. These ladies would all be better off if she were more right, but Shelley’s a mother to no one, not even her own daughter. Some time twenty or so years ago, she decided to be a showgirl instead. Perhaps she could’ve been both, but she made her choice as to which was more important to her and now is slowly realizing the cost of her choice.
One of last year’s biggest success stories came from a ’90s sex symbol’s conflicted reflections on her past of objectifying performances. It’s unlikely that The Last Showgirl will see a similar level of commercial success to The Substance, though it lacks that film’s gross-out extreme cinema appeal and sees older women’s bodies not as grotesque and frightful but as they are: the corporeal form in which a person resides on Earth. Not something to be gazed at, groomed and detested but a vessel, a shell. The vehicle our souls drive around in. The fact that women’s value is tied so directly to their youth is a mistake we are collectively making as a culture and it’s one that like The Substance‘s Elizabeth Sparkle, Shelley has bought into and is feeling her loss of capital. Like Elizabeth, she needs to learn that as long as she looks for happiness in the adulation of strangers, she’ll only ever be buying herself more time, and what scope she has for happiness in the future is narrowing the longer she clings to the happiness of her past. Her great failing is not that she’s aged, but that she cannot admit she spent her life chasing an empty dream.
Anderson made headlines during the film’s awards run by appearing on the red carpet without makeup, and why not, as that’s how she’s routinely seen onscreen in The Last Showgirl. The quote-unquote “bravery” of her performance is bolstered by such off-screen appearances. The reality that The Last Showgirl portrays is just another performance yes, but Anderson’s putting her own reality on the line too. The 57 year old has taken the opportunity to do what her character can’t, live authentically and as the film goes on Anderson’s unaffected ditziness gives way to rage and regret. Shelley fell for a con and can’t get back what she lost. As Shelley berates a crass casting director, you feel five decades of objectification tumbling out of her. It’s an excellent performance. As I write this she’s just been nominated for a Golden Globe and I’m sure we’ll hear more.
The Last Showgirl is the creation of director Gia Coppola, niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis, and all considered, despite its indie aesthetics—some of which I question like the excessively soft focus leaving the corners of the frame an almost perpetual blur—The Last Showgirl was incubated from within the heart of the film industry. Just as Anderson and Curtis have personal experience being one-time sex symbols, so Billie Lourd does of being the daughter of one, as she does here in the role of Hannah, Shelley’s daughter. Few stars aged as gracefully and fearlessly as Carrie Fisher did, so I’m sure the disappointment Lourd projects for her onscreen mother came harder than it might have, as she embodies a younger generation, dispirited to find sexism alive and well, their mothers having made such a show of casting it off decades earlier. Halfway through the film we see Hannah go to see the show that’s replacing Shelley’s revue, an adult circus cabaret with an explicit confrontational feminist subtext, a necessary reminder that sexually provocative entertainments need not be vapid pleas for heterosexual attention.
Like all things, performances are a contested ground for women. Many might struggle to see how dressing in sequins and skipping about a stage could ever feel empowering, but we come from a culture that privileges and celebrates displays of femininity and sexuality and so yes, performing them on your own terms, within your comfort zone and to your own financial benefit feels wonderful. It’s a crime such joy is a monopoly for the young, and it’s in expressing that euphoria that The Last Showgirl earns its stakes. It would all feel for nothing if we didn’t understand what it was that called Shelley back to the stage night after night, but we do. The film’s greatest scene, its grandstanding centerpiece, demonstrates that. Set to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, Jamie-Lee Curtis’s cocktail waitress Annette commandeers a podium at her casino, and for a song’s duration, she can lose herself in the dance and become the showgirl, the sensation, the woman who got us all hot and bothered in True Lies and Trading Places once again, to herself at least. The loneliness of that moment, of admiring yourself only when no one is watching, will haunt you.
