“I’ve been on the Razzle Dazzle for so long,” says Pamela Anderson’s Vegas showgirl Shelly. ‘Le Razzle Dazzle’ is a Paris Lido style revue – rhinestones, feathers, posing, and glitter G-strings. Part of the “naughty but nice” mild titillation showcase for beautiful women. Shelly could equally have said she’s been on the wrestling or boxing circuit for so long – Shelly has been clinging to nostalgia and the time her face graced the poster of a dinner and show burlesque cabaret. The kind of thing that was fading when she was in her prime and now is erased from Vegas itself beyond the cultural memory of casinos such as The Sands.
Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is less about the ageing out of women from entertainment than it is about the need to believe in mirages to survive mentally and financially. Shelly is facing the closure of the thirty-eight-year-old show that she has been involved with thirty years, going from primary dancer to chorus. She devoted herself to her ‘art’ – an art she views was never prurient. It was classy, it was classic, it was ‘French’. From the Ziegfield Follies to the Rockettes, from Broadway chorus lines and the Moulin Rouge, the number of young hopefuls embodying a version of idealised beauty is near endless. People remember Josephine Baker, Loïe Fuller, and Louise Brooks but they rarely recall their ends. “I’m just supposed to disappear,” Shelly cries in frustration and fury to Eddie (Dave Bautista) her long-time stage manager and the father of her mostly estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd). “I was seen, I was powerful.”
The news of the closure of the show comes at the same time she is reaching out to Hannah who is now twenty-two and about to graduate from college. Hannah stopped living with Shelly when she was a child and sees her adopted family as her only family. She wants to be a photographer which Shelly encourages, “Someone said being an artist is hard. Someone put that dumb sentence in your head? Hard. That’s the dumbest phrase anyone said to someone with a dream,” Shelly says about Hannah’s mother Lisa suggesting she go into a more financially stable career. Being an artist is worth it, it’s worth it all. Shelly must believe that she is an artist, a proper dancer, and it was worth it all because she put the show above raising her child in the ‘no shades of grey’ world of what women are supposed to do as mothers.
Shelly isn’t the only showgirl. Her far more cynical best friend and gambling addict, Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) went from the revue to cocktailing – covering the casino floor keeping gamblers well-oiled with alcohol in the permanent no time of neon lights. A young runaway, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) looks to Shelly for guidance and mothering. Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) is in her thirties and is already too old for most of the “young flesh” gigs going around Vegas. They’re showgirls at different ages and different levels of quiet desperation, but only Shelly believes in the ‘showgirl’ – believes in her power, dignity, and grace – because when she stops believing she must face a reality she knows is underpinning her life. She was exploited, she had limited choices, and in the end, limited talent.
Gia Coppola’s regular cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapawn shoots Las Vegas in a grainy haze. Hannah and Shelly wander around the city during the day looking at the monuments of a place that is a palimpsest. Coppola places the characters in a real and unreal Vegas – one that is a mystery they are trying to solve. Hannah needs to know if her mother’s choice to let her go to another family as a child was worth it. At the dying end of Le Razzle Dazzle, it can’t possibly be. It is cheap and tacky in her eyes. And perhaps it is as when Coppola shoots the final scene it’s the first time the audience ‘sees’ the show but the suggestion is that too is a fantasy. The reality is the audition Shelly gives for Jason Schwartzman’s unnamed director. The reality is where Shelly breaks and screams. The reality is Annette dancing on a podium on the slots floor to ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with no one looking at her. The reality is Jodie being afraid. The reality is Mary-Anne saying, “I do this for money.”
Pamela Anderson’s performance is undeniable and, in many ways, impossible to separate from Pamela Anderson the woman. No one cared about Pamela Anderson as an actor. Pamela Anderson was a high-cut red swimsuit and breasts. She was a leaked sex tape, a piece of titillation, a “lowest common denominator” sex symbol. Pamela is not Shelly – her life is and was very different, but Pamela is the perfect actor to play Shelly. With her breathy fragility, her anger, loss, confusion, and aching need to be forgiven.
The Last Showgirl isn’t a simple film about how the public crave youth and beauty. It isn’t even about the cost of being for a moment the version of it that people wanted. It’s a story about addiction. Shelly is addicted to a version of love crafted in rhinestones, sequins, and feathers. Eddie (Dave Bautista in amazing form) says to Shelly, “You were a legend.” Yet, Shelly is still alive – she’s been past-tense for so long that screaming that she exists, and she is beautiful at fifty-seven isn’t a reclamation of self, it’s fact. Maybe Shelly will build a life for herself beyond glitter and footlights where she can channel her love for Hannah as a mother, and perhaps she will stand with no regrets. Pamela Anderson makes you hope for Shelly outside the world of illusion.
Director: Gia Coppola
Cast: Pamela Anderson, Kiernan Shipka, Jamie Lee Curtis
Writer: Kate Gersten
Producers: Gia Coppola, Natalie Farrey, Robert Schwartzman
Music: Andrew Wyatt
Cinematography: Autumn Durald Arkapaw
Editors: Blair McClendon, Cam McLauchin
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