The Last Showgirl (2024)

Writer: Kate Gersten

Director: Gia Coppola

Starring: Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwarzman

The Last Showgirl sure has split the critics. In two separate reviews in the Guardian it has received both a one star:

“A forgettable, empty trifle”

And a four star:

“Pamela Anderson gives the performance of a lifetime in a rhinestone studded tale.”

I have never really seen Pamela Anderson on the big or the small screen. I was just aware of her as a phenomenon, as a symbol of a particular kind of female desirability, a mute pin-up that has now moved to being a bare-faced ambassador for ageing. In The Last Showgirl she plays Shelley, as both womanly and girlish. Her voice is high, her hands flutter to her hair. But she has to make ends meet, cook and clean, get on with life, offer support, ask for help.

The film is structured as a series of vignettes rather than a straightforward linear structure, so that the audience is trusted to piece the whole together.

Shelley (Pamela Anderson) is a 57 year old showgirl, who has spent the last three decades as the airbrushed face of le Razzle Dazzle, an old-fashioned revue show on the Las Vegas Strip.

The film follows the last two weeks of le Razzle Dazzle, which is failing against competition from more sexually explicit shows, to bring in an audience.

Despite the diminishing paycheques, Shelley is proud of her work and wants to continue. Others in the troupe, however, see it as a way of making a living, just like any other job and start auditioning as soon as the news of the closure breaks.

Amidst the panic for her future, Shelley is also trying to build bridges with her estranged daughter Hannah, (Billie Lourde).

Film makers often make films about show business, in the same way writers often write about writers. It is a world that is easily accessible to them. However, my imaginary 1940s screenwriter person would not understand this film. She would be aware of the archetypal older woman fading in the face of the new.

She is the delusional, angry Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard ready for her close-up.

Or she is the dethroned Margo Channing resentful of Eve in All About Eve.

Older women are just expected to move on, retire their ambition. It is unsightly to keep trying before heading for the grotesque of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

In all these films, the horrific spectacle of ageing is squarely placed in the decrepit bodies and minds of the women for not accepting their fate. But Shelley’s story is different. It is not presented as laughable or inevitable. It is a wholesale crisis of identity bought on by the circumstances of the business. And it is a kind and generous telling.

My 1940s screen writer would struggle to understand that the women backstage are not rivals but colleagues. For Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) le Razzle Dazzle is just another job, so she aims for professionalism. For Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) it is a pseudo family to make up for the one she left behind.

And then there is Annette (a terrific, chaotic turn by Jamie Lee Curtis) already chewed up and spat out by the show. She works as a cocktail waitress, trussed up in tails and tights, with an emphasis on cleavage. She is hard-bitten, brittle, aware that financial security is forever out of her reach. Proud to be still going, with just the slightest hint of regret and sense of loss, she steps onto a table and dances to Bonnie Tyler. In 1940s terms she is all washed-up, but in The Last Showgirl the story continues beyond the drowning to the resilience of survival.

Nobody is a good gal or a bad gal. They are all just negotiating with the chips skewed against them.

The 1940s production code insisted on a moral ending where the bad gal gets punished. But in The Last Showgirl the punishment is the context of tawdry capitalism and lack of choices. The moral is two-fold. First, all that glitters is not sparkly stardom, so try not to be enticed into a world of sequins. It will break your heart and tell you that you have a shelf-life that cannot equal the value and length of your actual life.

But second and more importantly, it ask the audience to stop with the judgements for women who didn’t heed those warnings, who took on the rhinestones anyway. Yes, we know we get old, we know our glitter will fade. But also while the world tells us that our stars might not shine for long, they will shine so bright and for some, the life of bright lights outshines any other viable opportunities.

Shelley: Feeling seen, feeling beautiful, that is powerful. And I can't imagine my life without it.

How could that be resisted?

Hannah: Career? What kind of career is this? You’re in the goddam back of 80 topless dancers! This was worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood?? … was it?

And was it? Was it worth it? I would recommend watching the film to decide. But make sure you fill that decision with a kindness that the system didn’t show Shelley, Hannah and the other women.

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