The “horrible” movie Kyle MacLachlan wants to delete from history: “It just gets worse”
Unfortunately, not every movie turns out to be a worthwhile endeavour.
Some actors take it in their stride when one of their movies flops, even when it stings and causes a shockwave of embarrassment, and Kyle MacLachlan couldn’t hide his disappointment when this happened to him in the 1990s, but he realised that there was little he could really do about the rather dire situation he found himself in.
I mean, what can you do when you star in a movie that turns out to be awful… I guess all you can do is hope that it morphs into a cult classic, misunderstood and torn apart upon release, only to be appreciated from a different perspective years later, and that’s what happened to Showgirls, which MacLachlan certainly sees as somewhat of a stain on his filmography.
Robocop director Paul Verhoeven brought this tale of an ambitious showgirl to the big screen in 1995, with plenty of nudity and outrageous sex scenes to boot. MacLachlan’s character, Zack, who works at the Stardust Casino and dates Cristal, a topless dancer, even engages in some questionable swimming pool sex with Elizabeth Berkley’s Nomi, flopping about like a toaster has been dropped in the water. It’s diabolical.
The movie was panned by critics, but in recent years, many viewers have praised it for being an unexpectedly campy work of cinema. John Waters, king of Camp, explained in Film Quarterly, “Showgirls is funny, stupid, dirty, and filled with cinematic clichés; in other words, perfect. Even better, the writer and director, no matter what they say today, don’t appear to be in on the joke.”
Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas seemed more preoccupied with showing extremely sexualised images of women’s naked bodies rather than telling a proper story with substance, and when MacLachlan realised that he was part of a movie that was basically just a cinematic excuse for porn, he couldn’t help but feel incredibly disappointed. Clearly, the Twin Peaks actor didn’t intend to be part of something so bad, and he wasn’t ready to face the backlash. He’d already been in Dune.
“It was about to premiere, I hadn’t seen it yet, and I wanted to. So I went to see it and… I was absolutely gobsmacked. I said, ‘This is horrible. Horrible!’ And it’s a very slow, sinking feeling when you’re watching the movie, and the first scene comes out, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a really bad scene.’ But you say, ‘Well, that’s OK, the next one’ll be better.’ And you somehow try to convince yourself that it’s going to get better… and it just gets worse,” he told AV Club.
MacLachlan was embarrassed, and he admitted to “distanc[ing] myself from the movie,” when it became clear that no one thought this to be a worthy piece of cinema to be attached to. Now, though, he has acknowledged that Showgirls has taken on a new lease of life – you can even watch it on BFI Player alongside movies by the likes of Michael Haneke and Mike Leigh – labelled by many to be an underrated masterpiece.
MacLachlan isn’t totally convinced, though. “It was just… maybe the wrong material with the wrong director and the wrong cast,” he concluded.
