Doc Watch: You Don't Nomi (2019)

Watched:  03/29/2022

Format:  Amazon Streaming

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jeffrey McHale

After watching and podcasting Showgirls, I believe Justin (and then Paul) suggested I watch the documentary You Don't Nomi (2019) a sort of retrospective investigating how we can view the 1995 film, seen as a catastrophe at the time of release but which has been reconsidered as a camp classic in the intervening years.  The doc features multiple reviewers, entertainers and others engaging with the film.  No small amount of the original film is seen as the movie leverages the idea of fair-use in investigating and transforming the source material - and so too does it liberally borrow from other films by Paul Verhoeven.  

In many ways, it's like a bit of film school packed into a tidy 1:38 or whatever it was.  Opinions are applied as fact, schools of thought as dogma.  But almost no one speaking is in total agreement.  We look at what else Verhoeven has done, we look for things he returns to, what his films say on certain topics (women!  violence!  seeeeeeeexxxx!) and try to draw conclusions.  And with Verhoeven, the answer is often that, no, he's not making a mistake or doing something goofy, he meant something specific and it wasn't there to make you feel better or confirm your biases.  All of which, were I to watch Showgirls sober, would definitely make me re-evaluate the film.  

Part of what's fascinating is that the doc - which never shows the interviewees as talking heads, it just uses voiceover - let's people bring their POV and let's people have conflicting takes.  Because that's the thesis of the doc:  Showgirls is a mess/ it's a secret masterpiece/ it's a secret masterpiece of mess.  It can be all of these things.  Because you may hate what it's doing, but what it's doing is not, technically, badly done.  It lets some people go off like film school students trying to write a paper about motifs (and they're not wrong) and then have someone else roll their eyes at the motifs.  It lets people make blanket statements about how "this is clearly misogynistic" and in the next beat let someone explain very specifically how the movie is empowering.  All while you watch a clip of Elizabeth Berkley chowing on a huge hamburger.

The movie has been translated into late-night movie spectaculars with skits and whatnot.  There's an off-off Broadway musical.  It's been embraced as a camp favorite and a topic of academic discussion.  

The movie absolutely *does* deserve some sort of reconsideration, which is something I was struggling with through the lens of booze that you heard reflected in the podcast.  If nothing else, simply dismissing it as "bad" is missing what happens when you say "well, Verhoeven and Eszterhas surely had something in mind".  Then you get to start figuring out what they were trying to do or say, and why it did or did not work.  And I think a lot of why the movie was considered not to work when it first appeared is that it has so little kind to say in a movie that doesn't signal that it isn't an Oscar-bait downbeat film (see: Leaving Las Vegas), but may ultimately have more to say in the bigger picture than other films.  It sure LOOKS like someone is supposed to be having fun watching this movie.  But, ultimately, what is the answer to the riddle of that Sphinx outside the Luxor?

Just last week after posting our PodCast, I told Jamie "I would do Showgirls over and over and over as a podcast, because I think you can talk about this movie endlessly".  And that's not a joke.  I think if you engage with it, accept that it features sex and is not porn, features ample nudity and is knowingly exploitative of both film and audience, if you don't stop short at "it has those things and is therefore bad for people and therefore a bad movie" - a line of thinking I'm not certain Verhoeven is capable of - then I think you can start have a conversation.  And this film has already done a massive amount of heavy lifting for that convo.