There always comes a time in an artist’s life—whatever kind of artist they might be—when they reach “a certain age,” look around and suddenly realize that the only people left pursuing said art are in their twenties. All the others they started out with, sooner or later, came to the realization that the “smarter,” “saner” (read: more money-yielding) move would be to abandon such foolish notions and get back on the “straight and narrow” path. But a true artist like Shelly Gardner (Pamela Anderson) could never dream of leaving behind all the glitz and glamor of the Las Vegas revue she’s been a part of for the past thirty years: Le Razzle Dazzle.
To those who still remember, it’s obvious that screenwriter Kate Gersten was inspired by the long-running Vegas show, Jubilee!, before it closed in 2016. Indeed, Gersten managed to see the last vestiges of that spectacle in 2013, after landing a writing gig for vocal impersonator Véronic DiCaire. When DiCaire ended up in Vegas with none other than Céline Dion producing the one-woman show, Gersten went to see the opening. The show, in fact, was booked for the Thursday, Friday and Saturday night slots during which Jubilee! ordinarily would have been performed. A reference to this kind of insidious takeover is made by The Last Showgirl’s most fresh-off-the-boat (at nineteen years old) showgirl, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), at a gathering that Shelly has at her house one afternoon. Among those invited are also fellow Le Razzle Dazzle showgirl (in the same-ish age bracket as Jodie), Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), Shelly’s best friend who works as a cocktail waitress during the morning and afternoon shifts at one of the casinos, and the producer of Le Razzle Dazzle, Eddie (Dave Bautista). The latter’s invitation to what Annette calls an “impromptu girls’ night” comes from Jodie, who admittedly views Eddie as her missing father figure and Shelly as her missing mother figure—even though Shelly and Mary-Anne adamantly decry such sentiments.
But, of course, Jodie isn’t wrong to assume a familial-like rapport with this group: her proverbial “chosen” family. Especially since, as the viewer will learn later in the movie, her mother shuns her entirely, refuses to speak to her because of her decision to flee to Vegas and join the “circus,” as it were. And, incidentally, it’s The Dirty Circus that starts to share the theater space with the ever-dwindling-in-crowd-numbers Le Razzle Dazzle. It is The Dirty Circus that alludes to DiCaire’s aforementioned show starting to take over key nights at Jubilee!’s theater. And when Eddie confesses to the trio of showgirls (Annette was already ousted from the show six years ago, and bitterly reminds Eddie of that fact, too) that they’re going to be shut down so that this new show can take over the space full-time, Jodie laments, “I knew when we started sharing our theater, when they started taking over our Thursday, Friday, Saturday shows, it was a bad sign.”
Recalling the moment that she first saw Jubilee! while in Vegas for this other show that was temporarily usurping it, Gersten remarked, “It was very old-fashioned, but it was a giant spectacle. There were eighty-five women on stage, forty-five people in the crew and, like, fifteen people in the audience. It was really kind of a sad scene…but I was so struck by the women in the show, and I just knew there was a story there.” And oh, how there is. A story that’s familiar not just to many women who “age out” of things, but to any artist who has ever chosen to stay the course with their art, only to find themselves standing totally alone onstage, if you will, with nothing to show for it, and no one behind them for backing support both literal and metaphorical.
But Shelly chose, with all her heart (and all her art), to commit her life to this “thing.” Even at the cost of having a “normal” relationship with her only daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who turns up toward the end of the movie’s first act. And who needs to be essentially summoned by her absentee mother in order for Shelly to spend time with her. Now age twenty and about to graduate, the awkwardness between mother and daughter is apparent as they share a drink together at Shelly’s house. Yet it’s clear that Shelly wants so badly to connect with Hannah, who appears far warier of that notion after feeling as though she was entirely abandoned during her childhood. Which isn’t untrue considering that, despite Shelly’s best efforts to care for her while sustaining her showgirl career, leaving her in the parking lot of the casino with a Gameboy as she went about the business of basking in the spotlight of a “nudie show” (Hannah’s demeaning words, of course) wasn’t enough. And this is how Hannah ended up in the care of her stepmom, Lisa. The woman who tells her that pursuing a “career” in the arts will make for a hard life.
When Hannah confesses this to Shelly upon visiting her a second time at her house to actually sit down and have dinner with her, Shelly insists that what’s harder than being an artist is working in an environment where you don’t really want to be—in a place that makes you miserable. Instead, she encourages Hannah to go for what she’s passionate about: photography. And no, that doesn’t mean “parlaying” this into something more “monetizable” like motherfucking graphic design (the field that Lisa suggests in lieu of photography). It means jumping, headfirst, into a life of uncertainty. A life that involves never knowing if it’s all going to be “worth it” in the end. Worth the sacrifices made—all while simultaneously refusing to compromise. To do this, as a woman, remains an especial act of boldness and defiance. Because you will always be told that you fucked up, that you shirked your “real” responsibilities (a.k.a. “minding” a husband and children). Just as Shelly is, especially by Hannah and even Eddie, who tells her she could have tried to get a more “normal” (that odious word again), “steady” job while raising her daughter, like working at a supermarket. But no, honestly—can you see someone like Shelly (a.k.a. Anderson) working at a supermarket? Fuck no.
As Shelly must remind her daughter as the film comes to a close, “Mothers aren’t saints or saviors. Just regular people doing the best they can with the tools they have.” And, usually, they don’t have many tools at all—and rarely the benefit of an equitable male partner. Unfortunately, Shelly is forced to call her entire life into question—all the choices she made leading up to now—when Le Razzle Dazzle comes to an end. Having never known another show, it serves as a rude awakening to have to audition for a skeevy director (played by none other than Gia Coppola’s cousin, Jason Schwartzman), who tells her, point-blank, that no one is interested in what she’s selling anymore. That she was only hired long ago because she was young and sexy, not because she was talented. “I’m fifty-seven years old and I’m beautiful!” Shelly screams back in rebellion (and yes, fifty-seven is Anderson’s real age, too).
In brutal, unvarnished moments like these, The Last Showgirl delves into the double standards that women are subjected when it comes to both how they look as they age and balancing their passions and talents with the rigors of motherhood. In addition, The Last Showgirl is also very much about the sadness of being married to the past. Of being unable to “move forward”—at least according to standards dictated by “current tastes.”
This becomes an increasing letdown for Shelly, as she falls prey, essentially, to the Susan Sontag aphorism: “I don’t consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.” And yet, Shelly can’t resist continuing to be dazzled by Le Razzle Dazzle, prattling on to Mary-Anne and Jodie about how their revue has roots in the Parisian Lido culture. Mary-Anne balks at her attempts to give a history lesson, telling her that no one knows what she’s talking about. But even so, Shelly can’t resist reminding her co-workers that Le Razzle Dazzle being the last of its kind is “what makes it so special, the fact that it’s the last one. It’s a show. With costumes, with sets.” Her reminiscences about the glory days of being a showgirl in an era when it was still respected, still glamorous even extends to mentioning that there was a time when showgirls were flown all over the world and photographed for ad campaigns because they were presented as “ambassadors” of Las Vegas and all the opulence it once represented. This before it devolved into the type of cheap and tawdry place that attracts the likes of Nomi Malone in Showgirls.
In truth, Shelly can’t bear to fully fathom how bad—how hyper-sexualized—onstage entertainment has gotten since the days when she first started out. This is why, when Jodie tells her and Mary-Anne that she’s already started auditioning for other shows like Hedonist’s Paradise, Shelly is disgusted by the title alone. She says that such titles are low-class. Mary-Anne asks her how Le Razzle Dazzle is any better as a name, to which Shelly insists it possesses the kind of old-world charm that’s missing from all the new shows that have found favor on the Strip. When Jodie then demonstrates the choreography she had to learn for the audition, Shelly is even more aghast and appalled, saying she could never do something like that. This is a woman, after all, who watches films like Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq and The Red Shoes (this latter classic speaking, once again, to Shelly’s nostalgia for the past, and the sense of glamor and class it had). Neither film choice is a coincidence, of course. Afternoon of a Faun explores the adversity endured by Tanaquil Le Clercq after contracting polio and having to give up her art (ballet), while The Red Shoes is all about a woman put to the test when it comes to choosing between her art (also ballet) or romantic love. The latter is especially resonant to Shelly, who has always chosen her art form over relationships, whether romantic or otherwise.
This is further proven when she tells Jodie that she was married once, long ago, when Le Razzle Dazzle was just starting out. Her husband soon after moved to New York, suggesting that Shelly move there too and get a job in a ballet or as a Rockette. Shelly went out there to audition, but decided she missed the unique spectacle of a Vegas show too much, and didn’t want to leave it behind. It was her first major example of being “selfish” a.k.a. choosing what she wanted to do with her life over what others thought she should do. Felt that she was “obligated” to do.
And even the younger women in the show still feel she should embody a “mother” type to them, regardless of whether or not Shelly actually wants to (and there are often times when she doesn’t—as brutally shown by one scene in particular when Jodie arrives unannounced on her doorstep looking for comfort). What’s more, ignoring the idea that she’s “mother age” is a key part of Shelly’s overall aura of denial about aging in general. This done so that, when the weight of her years finally hits her like a ton of bricks at the abovementioned audition, the effect is utterly gut-wrenching for both protagonist and viewer alike.
All the telltale signs of her “irrelevancy” were staring Shelly in the face, complete with Mary-Anne—no older than somewhere in her thirties—confessing to her and Jodie in the dressing room that she herself is already being told she’s “too old” for the shows she’s auditioning for, with producers and directors seeming to want to hire only girls who turned eighteen “yesterday.” But Shelly refuses to see herself as someone capable of being “put out to pasture.” Dancing—and Vegas—runs through her veins, and to be told she can’t be on a stage anymore is something too unbearable to even consider. As she proclaims to Eddie recalcitrantly in one of her most moving scenes, “I love the show. I love it. I feel so good about myself in the show. And you and Hannah and Mary-Anne can’t understand. The costumes, the sets… Being bathed in that light night after night feeling seen, feeling beautiful. That is powerful, and I can’t imagine my life without it.”
For Anderson to play this role adds an extra layer of depth to the idea that this was a woman who devoted her life to, for all intents and purposes, “cheesecake” fare. As Coppola herself put it when it came to casting Anderson, “When I saw Pamela’s documentary [Pamela, A Love Story], I noticed a lot of similarities with her character, Shelly. I saw two women who were always optimistic, no matter what life threw at them.” And life tends to throw quite a bit at women who challenge the societal expectations of them. Anderson has done that as much as Shelly, between refusing to be told that her final act was over once her sex tape was leaked or once she was no longer “Playboy hot” and, later, single-handedly promoting the idea of wearing no makeup/getting no plastic surgery to cover up her “old” face.
In other words, Anderson—the committed artist—is someone who would say exactly the same thing as Shelly in spite of everything: “You know what? I have no regrets.” Sounds a lot like what another woman, frequently dissected for being “too old” and still “deigning” to perform, once said when she was just thirty-six: “Absolutely no regrets.”
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