Pamela Anderson and “The Last Showgirl”

Pamela Anderson (b. 1967) is younger than me so you can see why I’ve been in no rush to include a post about her in my blog on traditional show biz. But her recent film The Last Showgirl (2024) is definitely relevant to our usual themes, and we also watched recent stuff like Pam & Tommy (2022) and Pamela, A Love Story (2023), and my wife read her 2023 memoir Love, Pamela (and she always gives me book reports!) so, right now seems right. Also: Anderson was literally born two days after Jayne Mansfield’s fatal car crash! Can transmigration be involved?

Back in the day, I was apt to mix her up with Anna Nicole Smith. Same age, same physical type. Both curvy bleach blonde Playboy models. Nowadays it is easy to tell them apart. Anderson is still very much among us, Smith died tragically almost 20 years ago. Also Anderson has a respectably lengthy resume of acting credits, and Smith (who I’ll also be writing about) had scarcely any.

Anderson’s early screen roles included a couple of guest spots on Married…With Children (1990, 1991), and a recurring role on Home Improvement (1991-1997). It was her regular role on Baywatch (1992-1997) that first garnered widespread attention, of which I was vaguely aware at best. But I did read the tabloids, so I definitely became aware of the 1995 sex tape scandal involving herself and husband Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe. Her campy movie Barb Wire, with its echoes of Barbarella, came out the following year.

Most of her screen jobs were of a similar vein. It’s stricly about her beauty and her body and not a jot else. She starred in several more TV shows, such as V.I.P. (1998-2002), Striperella (2003-2004), Stacked (2005-06) and the reality show E’s Pam: Girl on the Loose (2008). There are scores of guest shots on tv, either as herself, or a character based on her image, and movies like Scary Movie 3 (2003), Blonde and Blonder (2008), and Superhero Movie (2008).

In recent documentary projects and interviews Anderson has expressed her frustration at her inability to get cast in serious projects, even going so far as to shun make-up, glamorous hair, and clothes in public to make her point. It’s almost like she’s been on strike. Finally this year, she got the project she wanted.

The Last Showgirl has all the ingredients for a great movie but ironically sidesteps the razzle dazzle that might have made it one. It has a decent script based on a play by Kate Gershen developed at the Roundabout, inspired by the closing of the long-running Parisian style Las Vegas revue Jubilee which ran in residence at Ballys from 1981 to 2016. It basically has an all-star cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis who outdoes even Anderson is deglamorizing herself as a former chorus girl/ mentor/ seedy cocktail waitress; Kiernan Shipka of Mad Men and Brenda Song of Dollface as up-and-comers; Billie Lourd (Carrie Fisher’s daughter) as a daughter with issues about her performing mother (surely no stretch); and former pro-wrestler Dave Bautista as the show manager (an inspired choice — this movie easily draws as much from Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler as it does from things like Showgirls and Burlesque). And Anderson holds her own in this straight-up dramatic role (though her baby-girl voice takes some getting used to. Not unsurmountable. Melanie Griffith got past hers.) I mean, no one expected Anderson to be Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point. It’s not that. But she gives an honest, diligent performance, and well, the stunt-casting does the rest.

The film was directed by Gia Coppola (Francis’ granddaughter) and co-produced by Robert Shwartzman (Jason’s brother, Francis’s nephew, Talia Shire’s son). And Jason Schwartzman has a small role too. These factors no doubt helped this movie get made, and I’m glad it was, though while it has won many awards, and has been nominated for many more, it is destined I fear not to win ALL the awards, as the makers were probably hoping. With a budget of under two million (much of which was surely spent on talent), the screenplay fails to “crack the spine” of the source material, if I recollect the term they use in Hollywood correctly. It’s very claustrophobic, and feels very much stagebound — in the wrong way. The right way would be to open it up and let us see the dance numbers. This story can actually bear spectacle, and we have all those backstage musical dramas of the 1930s to provide the template. To have a story about show girls, and to show so little of the girls “showing” seems perverse to me. Instead, the film seems to take the P.O.V. of the cranky daughter (Lourd), who hates show business from top to bottom for stealing her mother (impossible not to connect to Mariska Hargitay’s former attitude toward her own mother’s art).

There are other aspects that feel off, as well. The movie is unclear as to historical timeline. Now that I’ve learned that it’s based on the Jubilee show it makes more sense, but there still seems to be some confusion about the old vs new. In its way, a show like Jubilee is closer to the burlesque revival than it is to the Vegas of old. But the script somehow creates the impression that the older gals are from farther back than they are. And (a bias on my part, I guess), they make the incoming neo-burlesque circus show a kind of villain in the piece — and that I can never cotton to! Further, anyone I’ve ever met in neo-burlesque has nothing but awe and respect for their elders in the biz, the so-called legends. Granted, showgirls are not burlesque dancers, there is a distinction, but I don’t think it’s a binary one. The bigger issue, as with the Olivier character in The Entertainer,or for that matter, like Willy Loman, she was never very good at what she did. That’s definitely in the script, and it’s dramatized onscreen, but that’s a different tragedy from one about obsolescence. Some clarifying is needed by the director. Lacking that, we’re unsure how to feel. Oh, you lost a job you loved, but you were terrible at it, anyway? Would it be in bad form for me to advise you to “dance it off”?

Conversely, the real-life lesson of the film is that, by jing, Pamela Anderson CAN do the job and is NOT down for the count. She wanted respect, deserves it, and got it. That’s a wonderful story arc.