

The 1995 flop-turned-cult classic Showgirls is pedestrian trash. No, it’s outrageous at every turn, an endless fountain of creativity. It’s misogyny in motion, a two-hour-eight-minute montage of exploitation masquerading as a gritty expose of American culture. No, it’s a cathartic fairytale of overcoming the pitfalls of capitalism by clawing your way to the top (courtesy of nails you filed and intricately painted yourself). It was the vehicle for one of the most embarrassingly over-the-top performances by a lead actor in the history of cinema. No, Elizabeth Berkley’s indefatigable turn as stripper-turned… high-end stripper is a force of nature, like little we’d seen before and nothing since. It’s a drama. No, it’s a comedy. It’s a piece of shit. No, it’s a masterpiece. No, it’s a masterpiece of shit.
The panoply of opinions that have kept Paul Verhoeven’s once-notorious bomb in the ether—repeatedly viewed, endlessly debated, sometimes satirized—is captured in the feature-length documentary You Don’t Nomi, which will have its world premiere Saturday as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. Almost as entertaining as Showgirls itself, You Don’t Nomi is a clips-and-commentary essay in the style of the 2013 doc about The Shining, Room 237. Over copious Showgirls footage, we only hear the voices of an arsenal of commentators, which include cultural critics like Adam Nayman (It Doesn’t Suck) and friend of Jezebel Haley Mlotek, April Kidwell (who played Nomi in the uproarious Off Broadway production Showgirls the Musical), and Peaches Christ, the drag queen responsible for assembling the cult of Showgirls in San Francisco.
There is no one definitive read on Showgirls—and that is in fact key to its enduring appeal.
Rounding out the loose narrative are some archival interviews that help shed light on what the hell everyone was thinking when they made it, as well as some postmortem interviews in which the cast and Verhoeven reconcile their intentions with the audience reactions (including, most poignantly, Berkley’s eventual embrace of a project that derailed her career and traumatized her for years).
And it was assembled on the laptop of its director/producer/editor Jeffrey McHale, who’s edited shows for Al Jazeera and Fox, and worked on You Don’t Nomi in his spare time from his kitchen table. (He started conceiving the doc in 2016, conducted interviews for about six or seven months starting at the end of the year and then spent about a year and a half editing it.) The micro-budgeted result has the rapid-fire associating feel of a polished supercut, the unfussy insight of the very best film criticism, and the open mind to understand that there is no one definitive read on Showgirls—and that is in fact key to its enduring appeal.
McHale stopped by Jezebel’s office on Thursday to discuss his feature film debut. Below is an edited and condensed transcript of our chat.
JEZEBEL: What is it about Showgirls that lends itself to this kind of long-form exploration?
JEFFREY MCHALE: Initially, the response that it got. If you have something that was rejected so violently from critics and audiences, that in itself deserves examination. It’s the audience that takes it to where we’re at now. Because the cult fandom kept this thing alive, it allowed critics to start reevaluating it. Haley [Mlotek], our contributor, says, “We’re still talking about it because we’re not done with it.” It’s not a movie you can watch once and discard, like many good films.
Philosophically, your movie accounts for a panoply opinions, suggesting there is no one definitive read on Showgirls, nor one neat and tidy explanation for its appeal.
That was really important to me, at the beginning: We hear critical voices. Those opinions are valid, too. I approach it as a fan, but we’re not going to gush over this for 90 minutes. There are things that happen in the film that should be looked at critically, but there is a kind of gray area that it fits perfectly in.