You Love to See It: Showgirls (Patreon)

There’s nothing quite like Elizabeth Berkley’s performance as Nomi Malone, a human tsunami of desire, anger, mental illness, and almost primal stubborn independence. As the heroine of Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s cult classic Showgirls she’s half Gandolfini, stormy emotions and powerful but fragile confidence, and half feral cat, though both comparisons distract from the uniqueness of Berkley’s screen presence, which can shift from hypnotically magnetic to viscerally repellent in the blink of an eye. She changes affects as easily as clothes, but never without a total, almost childish sincerity. Her long limbs and slender frame have grace in them, but more often she picks and jerks and thrusts, every motion reactive and flailing. 

Nomi’s relationships are volatile, and Berkley captures the white heat of black-and-white emotional reasoning, or “splitting”, with complete confidence. One moment she turns on her roommate and confidante like a wounded animal, the next she’s sweet and mild as cream. There’s no dissonance between the two states, only the sharp affective divide of some flavor of personality or bipolar disorder, a creative choice some critics saw as “overacting” and “histrionics.” That undeniable but never clinically or directly investigated crackle of traumatized unwellness is part of what puts Berkley in a class all her own, and Eszterhas’s propulsive script gives her ample room to explore that seething, barely-contained dysfunction without ever delving into trite therapeutics. 

It’s impossible to talk about Berkley’s performance without mentioning Gina Gershon’s as Cristal Connors, an older dancer whose place in the Vegas spotlight Nomi both covets and fears. The chemistry between the two women is seemingly bottomless, Cristal’s polished, unmoving self-control absorbing Nomi’s directionless energy with hardly a ripple, her every smooth evasion making the younger woman more and more erratic and infuriated. But when Gershon finally shows the uncertain hurt and need beneath that cool facade, Berkeley meets it with the instant gentleness that only mirroring a loved one’s emotions can really produce, giving herself completely into a moment of intimacy as painfully honest as any kiss has ever been on film. That Berkley can live so completely and with such raw honesty in any given moment is something few actors have ever touched.