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The Last Showgirl Spotlights a World of Shallow Glamour and a Melancholy Mind

When you’ve been doing something so long, you have to derive meaning from it. You have to justify it to yourself, to prove its work is worthwhile, that you are worthwhile. That it hasn’t all been a waste. Pamela Anderson’s Shelly Gardner has to believe that her Las Vegas showgirl revue Le Razzle Dazzle, that she has been a part of for thirty years, is meaningful -that it is part of a rich entertainment tradition going back to Parisian cabarets and the international image of American glamour. Because if it doesn’t hold that significance, what has been the point of her life in it?
The Last Showgirl, directed by Gia Coppola from a script by Kate Gersten, is about these often necessary realities we concoct for ourselves as well as what it is to be an aging woman in an entertainment industry driven by sex appeal. The two intertwine viscerally when it comes to Shelly who, already struggling with a distant relationship with her daughter borne in large part out of her commitment to this job, is thrown into a crisis of purpose, of livelihood and even identity, when the decision is made to close the show due to declining public interest. Le Razzle Dazzle has been virtually all she has known her whole career, she loves it; and unlike her younger colleagues to whom she’s been something of a mother hen, at fifty-seven she has few new opportunities available in the business.
Pamela Anderson is perfectly cast and instantly empathetic in this movie, and it’s very clear to see why. Though there are significant differences in the routes of their careers and personal lives, there is a kinship between actor and character here impossible to ignore. A woman principally valued for her beauty when she was young, loved by audiences and institutions, but underwritten and disrespected by so many as well -viewed as a ditz or a sexpot for her work and persona, and exploited in part as a result. A woman who culture has been broadly unfair to. It’s as true of Shelly as it is of Pamela, who has barely acted in the years leading up to The Last Showgirl and has never gotten to play a character so serious and with as much depth. It should also be noted that in spite of the movie being about showgirls, this is one of her least sexualized characters. And in some ways, it is the typical de-glamourized star routine, but there’s no Hollywood cynicism in it -perhaps because, as per Coppola tradition, the film is independently produced (through Utopia, the company of Coppola’s second-cousin Robert Schwartzman). It is a stunning performance informed by some truth, but likewise an invention -a particular mindset and emotional vulnerability that Anderson displays with deftness. Shelly's story and her identity are deeply resonant, as are both her interior and external conflicts about her passion, dedication, and image.
Frequently, Coppola contrasts her against younger women in her life and their perceptions of her and her values. Kiernan Shipka's Jodie greatly admires her and has some of the same idealism, but more naivety, and in one crucial scene finds that Shelly can't be for her all that she wants her to. Another showgirl Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) sees Le Razzle Dazzle as simply a job that she has no emotional attachment to beyond the pay-cheque. Most starkly though is Shelly's daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), whose almost total disrespect and fairly well-earned resentment towards her mother's job is the biggest chasm in their relationship, a relationship that Shelly is entirely desperate to salvage.
While it may not be clear entirely how Coppola perceives showgirl work -she uses ellipsis to conceal the revue itself until the very last performance, but she has almost a reverence for its lifers, like Shelly, like the stoic producer Eddie (Dave Bautista), and like Shelly’s best friend and former showgirl Annette -a striking Jamie Lee Curtis. In their contained world they have found purpose and value, and its with a melancholy lens that we see it inapplicable elsewhere -Eddie has virtually no other skills, though he is lucky to be able to stay on in his role through the next occupants of their stage. But Annette has been working as a waitress at a casino, which neither gives her the stability nor respect she could live off of before. And of course in the image-economy of Vegas, she as an older woman frequently finds herself prioritized less than her younger, sexier colleagues. One of the film’s best scenes is her small and beautiful defiance against this -performing one of her former exotic slow dances on a table to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. Though even this warrants so little attention from patrons.
Shelly faces this kind of rejection as well, only much more directly. And for her, her own desirability is barely even something she seems to consider -for her job or anything else (another remarkable acting feat of Anderson’s). She has insulated herself within the revue, blotted out her sexuality through her performance endurance and her bevy of emotional delusions; but it does little for how she is perceived and objectified, even if in a past tense, and even from those like her daughter and Eddie with whom she craves deeper connections. So when she does finally shore up the courage to put herself out there for another job, the full force of this barely contained pervasive lasciviousness comes at her in the form of a single producer, tearing down every shred of her cultivated self-image. The effect of it is like Coppola herself pulling back the blinds.
Coppola dares to let Shelly's story be a tragedy, and one that speaks with condemnation to a wider culture as well as the entertainment apparatuses of Vegas. She stands in for so many women left antiquated by narrowing definitions of beauty and talent, but also just anyone whose mental health is dependent on convenient fictions. In any case, she, her defences, and her situation are deeply felt -especially by the ending, which in spite of some overtures of hope, is heartbreaking -as we are finally permitted to see Shelly as she identifies herself for the last time, enjoying a bliss and comfort that will be fast to vanish and at the same time envisioning the fantasy of a perfect resolution she so desperately wants to be real. With a wide smile that is both false and genuine.
Though Gia Coppola has been on the scene for a while, no doubt in part due to her famous last name, The Last Showgirl feels like her first big statement. It’s not all that original a statement on its own, but in concert with Gersten, the lens that she employs and the humanity of the characters that she explores with clarity and beauty and a critical sadness, is exquisite. The film is disarming in its power and simplicity, and especially in Anderson’s performance, captivating from start to finish and putting any preconceptions about her and her abilities to rest. In some sense I do think that Shelly makes her case, disheartening context around it notwithstanding. There may be some real dignity to being one of the last Las Vegas showgirls. Just remember that it is not a shackle.

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