Her voice is not the attribute for which Pamela Anderson has ever been most known, but it’s the best thing about The Last Showgirl: high and homely, cutesy, singsongy and often dramatic, with a Marilyn breathiness in moments of intimacy and a forced formality when nervous, and occasionally pushed to a point of squeaky desperation, it’s a voice of incongruous innocence — incongruous for a 57-year-old single mom, and incongruous for a dancer in a Vegas nudie show who steps on stage every night in a feathered headdress and see-through bra.
Like the naturalistic flipside to this year’s The Substance, The Last Showgirl follows a woman in late middle age who is cast out of her glamour profession for the crime of aging; even more acutely than The Substance’s Demi Moore, Anderson, the wet-dream fantasy of the pneumatic ’90s, is a walking ledger of sexual currency. She plays Shelley, the longest-tenured cast member of the notionally Parisian-inspired Le Razzle Dazzle, the kind of show where rhinestones and crystal beads are supposed to signify class, like the “Goddess” revue in Verhoeven’s Showgirls.
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Of course, that was a long time ago. (The Last Showgirl is set in the present day, but Shelley still makes calls from a landline and gets paid in paper checks; neither she nor her younger castmates self-promote on social media, and the script periodically conflates “30 years ago” and “the 1980s.”) These days, Shelley keeps ripping the fabric of her costume’s wings on a stage door’s handle as she hustles backstage for a quick change; this bird doesn’t soar quite so high as she used to.
As the film begins, the stage manager (Dave Bautista, a quiet guy in loud shirts) gives the dancers their two weeks’ notice; Razzle Dazzle will be replaced by an adult circus (rather than the celebrity concert residencies that increasingly dominate a modern Vegas approaching four-quadrant appeal). What follows is a lot of stock-taking, and the indignity of cattle-call auditions. She’d retire, but she loves to dance, and anyway, none of the girls in the Razzle Dazzle have a “501k” [sic], in the words of Shelley’s best friend (Jamie Lee Curtis), a cocktail waitress in dyed red hair and control-top hose, who still has poker chips stuffed down her cleavage as a tip.
In his new book On the Edge, the statistician and pundit Nate Silver takes the measure of a United States where gambling and gamification is becoming something like a national pastime: not just seen in the expanded legality of sports betting, but in day trading, crypto, home flipping. Las Vegas is something like the speculation capital of the world, and it’s also a town whose main industry is the hospitality industry, which is to say it runs on the labor of a precarious class of service employees, working physically demanding, low-paying jobs with no safety net and little process of advancement. Sprung up in the middle of the desert, Vegas is something like a capitalist mirage.
“I’ve been on the Razzle Dazzle for so long,” Shelley says at an audition for a new show, a wistful wonderment in Anderson’s voice. She is both a seller of the fantasy of Vegas, and one of its best customers, a commoditised body who’s given her life to an ersatz dream of showbiz. She practices her audition number in a ballet dancer’s leotard, though that’s not what she’ll be wearing onstage. The film’s title card appears against a backdrop of costume jewellery, like in Sirk’s Imitation of Life.
Like Imitation of Life, The Last Showgirl treats high-gloss femininity as a form of false consciousness, an ideal imposed upon women that ends up alienating them from each other, particularly mothers from their daughters. Shelley is semi-estranged from her daughter (Billie Lourd), who spent much of her childhood playing Game Boy in a parked car while her mother danced. Another, more obvious comparison here is The Wrestler, a masc version of the deteriorating-showbiz-body-drama-with-metatextual-star-casting template. (The screenplay of The Last Showgirl is by TV scribe Kate Gersten, whose husband, Matthew Shire, is the son of Francis Ford Coppola’s sister Talia Shire. The film’s opening credits are in a dusky pink straight out of the palette of Gia Coppola’s aunt Sofia, a filmmaker who also knows from razzle dazzle.)
If the mother-daughter stuff is derivative, it’s not manipulative; shot in grainy, sun-saturated handheld, with lens flare blowing out the sandy desert hues, it’s dreamy and low-key to a fault, even when the old showgirls dance to Bonnie Tyler and Pat Benatar. The twice-daily performances of Le Razzle Dazzle anchor the film, but Coppola keeps her camera almost entirely backstage. Teasing out her long blonde hair and pounding her face into shape with powder puffs and brushes, she transforms from a sweet, squinty working woman into a vision of desirability who still looks like Pamela Anderson — beauty as just another day at the office.
