I Am Divine (2013)

WHO: Harris Glenn Milsted a.k.a. Divine, who died twenty-five years ago, is the subject of this documentary.

WHAT: I haven't yet made it to a screening of this documentary but I recommend this Projection Booth podcast interview with its director Jeffrey Schwarz (who has made documentaries on fascinating cinema figures such as Curtis Harrington, Vito Russo and others) and with frequent Divine co-star Mink Stole.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 7:00 and 9:00 at the Castro Theatre and daily a the Roxie December 27th, 2013 through January 2nd, 2014.

WHY: With so many Frisco Bay connections (including an on-camera interview with Joshua Grannell, the alter ego of Peaches Christ) I Am Divine promises to be a perennial for local film fans to see and revisit. But this week is a particularly special time to see it, because it will prepare you for this Saturday, December 14th's now-rare 35mm showing of the film that made Divine a star: Pink Flamingos at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

HOW: Digitally-produced documentary screens digitally, preceded at the Castro by a 35mm short film called O Sandra, which I've been unable to glean any other information about.

Showgirls (1995)

WHO: Elizabeth Berkeley stars in this.

WHAT: Showgirls was the first film rated NC-17 by the MPAA to receive a wide release in US theatres. It flopped, and signaled to major studios that they needed to make sure their mainstream theatrical releases went no higher than 'R' (though these days 'PG-13' is more customary), and ever since the NC-17 rating has been essentially relegated to films aimed solely at the art-house or home video markets. 

But in the meantime, Showgirls has become a cult phenomenon in those markets, screening to enthusiastic fans as a midnight offering in the former, and being frequently re-published in increasingly elaborate DVD packages for the latter. Not only has it found a growing fan club, it's also become re-evaluated by critics and academics and even highbrow filmmakers like Jacques Rivette. I hate to name any review as 'definitive' but I have to admit that I pretty much consider Eric Henderson's masterful 2004 write-up for Slant to be just that. Here's a sample:

Gleefully inspiring audiences everywhere to challenge conventional definitions of "good" and "bad" cinema, Showgirls is undoubtedly the think-piece object d'art of its time. It is Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas's audaciously experimental satire-but-not-satire, an epically mounted "white melodrama" (to borrow Tag Gallagher's description of Sirk's early, less mannered, and more overtly humanistic comedies of error) and also one of the most astringent, least compromised critiques of the Dream Factory ever unleashed on a frustrated, perpetually (and ideologically) pre-cum audience. Many things to many people, and absolutely nothing to a great deal more, Showgirls's proponents and detractors still square off, digging nine-foot trenches in the sand (some planting their heads therein instead of their feet) and lobbing accusations of elitism and anti-pleasure. It is perhaps one of the only films to bridge that critical gap between Film Quarterly (which hosted a beyond extensive critical roundtable on the film last year) and Joe Bob Briggs.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 8:00.

WHY: I've already related on this blog my story of experiencing Showgirls for the first time. Since writing that piece, I attended two more screenings of the film hosted by Peaches Christ, the last two held at the Bridge Theatre before the annual summer party moved to the Castro Theatre in 2010, with an according ticket-price hike and shift from midnight to prime time. I have to admit that my Peaches Christ devotion dried up around the time of this venue move. I attended dozens of Midnight Mass presentations at the Bridge in part because they were fairly inexpensive and didn't conflict with other potential Saturday evening plans. The Castro shows were said to be better-choreographed and more spectacular (thus deserving of their extra cost) but I found it hard to get motivated to attend one. It may not have helped that the films selected to fill the Castro have to skew more toward mainstream mass-appeal- true oddities like William Castle's Strait-Jacket or Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 have to be passed up in favor of more well-known films like Mommie Dearest and Purple Rain. (Although a 2013 development of including documentaries like Paris Is Burning and - up next October 12th - Grey Gardens in the program rotation is certainly welcome.)

But tonight's 16th presentation of Showgirls feels like the right time to rejoin the annual tradition. I finally attended my first Peaches Christ presentation at the Castro this summer, helped along by a return to a midnight time slot and lower ticket prices (courtesy Frameline). It didn't matter that the movie screened, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, didn't become a new favorite, or that the on-stage interview with actor Mark Patton & cinematographer Jacques Haitkin was more awkward than Peaches' interviews I've seen conducted at the Bridge (including Mink Stole, Mary Woronov and Cassandra Peterson). The over-the-top, highly-polished, exquisitely costumed and cast stage show that opened the presentation was worth the ticket price alone. It may be hard to believe that  seeing a Freddie-faced and fedora'd drag queen in a form-fitting orange-and-grey-striped sweater wreak havoc with her claws while lip-synching to Metallica's "Enter Sandman" would be one of the most thrilling live performances I've seen in a long time, but it's the truth. And I'm realizing that, as elaborate and entertaining as the Bridge Theatre Showgirls stage shows got, they'll surely be handily topped by a company that can make full use of a stage built in 1922 for dancing usherettes (such as future Best Actress Academy Award-winner Janet Gaynor). It's got to be the closest thing to being in Vegas next to actually going there!

For those seeking more intellectual stimulation, tonight's screening can launch an in-cinema study of the history of "adults-only" rated movies over the next few months. A good deal of landmark X- and NC-17-rated movies are coming to local theatres in the near future. In just a few weeks, Salo and Arabian Nights screen as part of the Roxie's contribution to this Autumn's Pier Paolo Pasolini celebration; both films will be repeated in October as part of the Pacific Film Archive's full retrospective of the director's work. The PFA is also showing the recent NC-17 sensation Killer Joe in a William Friedkin series (he'll be in attendance at the September 21st screening). 

I've also been tipped off to the titles involved in an all-35mm series of non-pornographic X-rated films  expected to play Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October through December: Midnight Cowboy (in case you missed it this past week at the Castro), Last Tango In Paris, Fritz the Cat, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Bad Timing, and Henry & June are all expected to screen as part of this series, and provide a pretty good cross-section of films that have become classics despite (or perhaps in some cases because of) an adults-only rating. Hopefully healthy audiences too young to have experienced these when they originally appeared in theatres will turn out to see them in a cinema setting. There's a few on the list I've never seen at all and will definitely be making a priority.

Finally, the Castro's Coming Soon page indicates a few titles that make interesting contrasts to the aforementioned MPAA-"scarlet lettered" titles. Whether re-cutting a movie in order to change an initial NC-17 rating to an R, as Paul Thomas Anderson did with Boogie Nights (screening September 28th), or simply declining to submit a film for a rating at all, as with Paul Schrader's The Canyons (screening with Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game Sep. 11), there have always been options for filmmakers trying to release films containing adult themes, even if each of them involves its own set of drawbacks.

HOW: Showgirls screens in 35mm, with an extensive live stage show performed beforehand.

Fog Over Frisco (1934)

WHO: Bette Davis stars in this, looking astonishingly young to anyone who has her performance in All About Eve, made sixteen years later (or even in Now Voyager, made eight years later) burned into their brains.

WHAT: Film historian William K. Everson called it the "fastest film ever made" and compared it favorably to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as a screen textbook for film editing. But for viewers interested the history of San Francisco's depiction in Hollywood films, Fog Over Frisco takes on special significance. It's one of the very few big-studio productions of the 1930s that actually brought some of its cast (although not Davis, as far as I can tell) and crew to the City By The Bay in order to film sequences on location here.

There's a dynamic sequence in which a gaggle of reporters await Margaret Lindsay (who plays Davis's sister) outside her family's mansion in order to ambush her with their cameras. This is shot in Pacific Heights, right at the corner of Octavia and Washington, and you can clearly see Lafayette Park, Spreckels Mansion (pictured above, and currently resided in by novelist Danielle Steel) and other still-standing structures in the scene. The cable-car line on Washington Street, however, is no more.

Another scene in the film calls for a bridge- but since the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges had only just begun construction in 1933, the filmmakers utilized the Third Street Bridge (now known as the Lefty O'Doul Bridge) in China Basin- a neighborhood that has evidently changed its appearance far more than Pacific Heights has since 1934.

These sequences make Fog Over Frisco one of the most extensive on-location Hollywood film to use 1930s-era San Francisco that I've ever come across. Films like Ladies They Talk About (1933), Barbary Coast (1935), San Francisco (1936) and Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) for instance,  use stock photography of the city or none at all, evoking San Francisco entirely through the construction of Hollywood sets. It's a very different story from that of the 1920s, when films like Moran of the Lady Letty (1922) and Greed (1924) were just a few of the productions able to shoot extensively in town (without sound crews, of course), or of the 1940s (particularly the post-World War II era) when developments in cameras and film stocks helped usher in a vogue for location photography in this city that has essentially never looked back. But any student of history wants to fill gaps in the record however possible, so a chance to see what 1930s Frisco was like, through the lens of a First National production, is all the more precious.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 6:10 and 9:05, and the West Portal Branch of the San Francisco Public Library at 6:30 PM on July 23rd.

WHY: I'm thinking a lot about San Francisco-shot films this week because I just received an advance copy of World Film Locations: San Francisco, a book tracing the history of San Francisco moviemaking in a fun and informative way. I'm proud to have been able to contribute to this handsome volume packed with maps, images, and short write-ups on forty-six of the most notable films made in my hometown, each represented by a different scene and location. There are also six essays contextualizing certain recurring trends (the Golden Gate Bridge, car chases) and filmmakers (Hitchcock, Eastwood) involved in shooting here, and a seventh that discusses the current reigning local favorite filmmaker (at least according to a plurality of SF Bay Guardian readers), Peaches Christ.

I've mentioned here before (perhaps too frequently) that my contribution was one of these contextualizing essays, in my case on the topic of film noir in the 1940s and 50s. Though I had free reign to approach this topic how I liked, for which I graciously thank editor Scott Jordan Harris. I had no input in the rest of the book, including the selection of the 46 featured and mapped titles. Of course there are some omissions I'd have stumped for if it had I been involved in that part of the process, but that's a natural reaction any movie fan would feel. Perhaps there can be a sequel if this edition is a success- I think it will be. Overall the book does a great job in bringing together the famous films everyone around the world associates with this city, with a healthy dose of unexpected surprises.

So no, Fog Over Frisco is not featured in the book, but that doesn't mean Spreckels Mansion isn't. It gets its own two-page spread as the chosen location from George Sidney's 1957 musical Pal Joey, starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. I don't want to give away too much about the contents of an unpublished book yet, but I will note that nine of the book's forty-six featured films are planned to screen for free this month at San Francisco Public Library branch locations as part of a twenty-title SF Library Film Festival. (To further narrow a few guesses, I'll hint that two of the three of these titles screening Thursdays at the Main Library are in the book).

HOW: At the West Portal Library, Fog Over Frisco will screen via projected DVD. At the Stanford, it screens on a 35mm double-bill with the Of Human Bondage, the career-defining Davis role that was filmed just before, and released just after, the filming of Fog Over Frisco.

Two Girls Against The Rain (2012)

WHO: Sopheak Sao directed this.

WHAT: I've only seen a few brief online clips of this short-as-it-is documentary, but from what I've seen it looks like a sincere portrait of two lesbians in Cambodia who have been a couple since the days of the Khmer Rouge, in the face of family and societal pressure for them to deny their identities.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 7PM at the Victoria Theatre, as part of a Frameline festival.

WHY: I went to three Frameline screenings over the weekend, all at the Castro Theatre. Briefly, I enjoyed But I'm A Cheerleader but was perhaps hoping for a bit more depth to it, especially after seeing how rich I found the preceding short film by its director Jamie Babbit, Sleeping Beauties. Big Joy: the Adventures of James Broughton, however, was about all I could ask for in a documentary about an experimental filmmaker. The interviews with friends and family were fascinating and often poignant. The archival footage (both from his films and from the contextualizing era) was generously excerpted, and some of it was in the "deep cuts" category (I suppose I could quibble a bit about some of the image quality and identification labels, but this honestly felt minor). I felt like no major aspect of Broughton's life was glossed over, and though I've read a fair bit about his filmmaking and far less about his poetry, I learned quite a bit about both. 

Finally, though I don't feel like naming A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge a new personal favorite (I'll grant it superiority over the film it sequelizes), I was thrilled to finally see Pecahes Christ's Midnight Mass return to its proper witching-hour time slot, and was dazzled by the creativity and panache of her slickly-designed and choreographed pre-show performance, which filled the Castro stage perfectly; I'd previously only seen her stage shows at the too-snug Bridge and Victoria Theatres, and while more enjoyably homespun, they could never quite reach the arch outrageousness of this weekend's winking performance. Oh, and the interview with Mark Patton was pretty good too.

There's still almost a full week of Frameline screenings left in the festival, but I feel remiss not having already linked to the previews by Tony An and Adam Hartzell of some of the many Asian-made films in this year's program, most of which still have at least one screening. After several years of relatively slim selections of LGBT films from East Asia, this year's program has multiple films from several countries across the Pacific Rim from us, including South Korea, Thialand Cambodia mainland China and Taiwan, and a film apiece from Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and even the festival's first-ever selection from the (less East, more inland) country of Nepal.

 Two Girls Against the Rain screens on a program called Between Ring And Pendant, named for a Hong Kong short in the program, which is described by Frameline thusly:

This stellar collection of Asian & Pacific Islander shorts take us on a journey across the Pacific Rim and back to the Bay Area with fearless tomboys, aspiring pop divas, and some deeply complicated familial bonds.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digitally-produced doc. The only remaining film in this year's Frameline festival program expected to screen on film is The Shower, a Chilean film from 2010 screening in tomorrow night's program Tu Recuerdo.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)

WHO: Terry Gilliam directed this.

WHAT: This psychedelic adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's scalding portrait of American decline at the end of the 1960s is the last Terry Gilliam film that I really enjoyed, and it seems hard to believe it was released into multiplexes fifteen years ago. (I saw it at the Kabuki.) Gilliam's back-cover blurb for Bob McCabe's book Dark Knights and Holy Fools seems all the more poignant to a (former) fan in hindsight:

When Bob approached me about this book I was in the middle of making Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As I continued with that movie, it started to become clear to me that it was a culmination of many things for me, maybe even a natural end to one stage of my work. So now seemed like a good time to look back at what we've been doing all these years.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 4:35 and 9:35.

WHY: This is precisely the kind of film that made for a perfect revival at the Red Vic Movie House, which shut its doors and removed its 35mm projector a little under two years ago. So it seems a good time to mention that the Haight Street space is in the midst of preparing for it's second act, literally: it'll be turned into a performance space called Second Act that is expected to include screenings (on video, presumably) as part of its repertoire. Check its Facebook page for details and updates.

It also seems like a good time to mention a few screenings and series that may appeal to the, shall I say, "impaired" moviegoer. Former Market Street movie palace the Warfield is having a rare screening in the midst of its usual fare of live concerts and comedy performances. This Saturday it shows Jay And Silent Bob's Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, featuring characters created by Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, who will be on hand (live in person, I think, though promotional materials don't 100% clear that it won't be a live-by-digital hookup situation) for a Q&A. I'm not a Kevin Smith, but I'm a little tempted to attend just so I can say I've seen a movie in the venue that played the likes of Gone With the Wind and Spellbound in the classic Hollywood era, more cultish hits like The Hobbit and Dawn of the Dead during the 1970s, and where I've seen concerts from musicians from Tears For Fears to George Clinton to Einstürzende Neubauten.

The Landmark Clay Theatre continues to run midnight movies all summer long (this weekend is Jaws) and while their recently-installed digital projection system has precluded the use of 35mm projectors or prints, several of the shows attempt to make up for that with live elements, including an appearance by author JT Leroy at a June 28 showing of Asia Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. Other bookings include the Frisco premiere of horror anthology V/H/S/2 and monthly showings of Tommy Wiseau's The Room. In case scotchka is your favorite method of impairment. The Camera 3 in San Jose has its own midnight/cult movie series, and is the last Frisco Bay venue that still regularly shows The Room and The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 35mm.

I definitely get a sense from the programming of this summer's sets of outdoor movie screenings (those in Marin and San Francisco are tracked at this website) that they've opted to pick movies less likely to bring audiences who like to flout open-container laws and send wafts of funny smoke into the atmosphere, than in some previous years. But these (all-digital) projections seem worth mentioning as well as the season gets underway.

But the Castro itself has more "cult movies" to show after tonight as well. Tomorrow it's Repo Man, on a 35mm double-bill with one of director Alex Cox's inspirations, Kiss Me Deadly. The 37th Frameline festival starts there the next day, and includes among its lineup the long-awaited return of Peaches Christ to midnight-movie hosting duties as she presents the (I've been told) surprisingly queer A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddie's Revenge starring "scream queen" Mark Patton. Of what we know of the Castro line-up after Frameline ends June 30th, the most relevant selections to this theme appear to be the horror movies screening in early July: Jaws on the 3rd of the month, and Suspiria and The Exorcist paired on the 12th.

HOW: On a 35mm double-bill with Oliver Stone's The Doors.

Paris Is Burning (1990)

WHO: Jennie Livingston directed this documentary about the New York City ball scene. Image above is of Octavia St. Laurent, one of the characters the film helps us get to know.

WHAT: Two years ago I attended an afternoon screening of an incredible film portrait of a subculture I knew absolutely nothing about. It was the Frameline festival's commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Paris Is Burning's commercial release in 1991, when it became one of the best-attended documentaries ever released to theatres.  Director Jennie Livingston was on hand for the event, and even showed one of her short films made since Paris Is Burning was completed. In short, it was an ideal way for a newcomer to be first exposed to a landmark film that I can't believe hasn't been inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry yet. 

Or so I thought. Tonight's screening of the film, hosted by local drag celebrity Peaches Christ, promises to be an even more jubilant celebration of the film and its participants (most now deceased, sadly). If you've seen Paris is Burning you want to be there tonight. But if you haven't seen it yet you might want to go too. 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 8:00 PM. Advance seats have all been sold, but there will be day-of-show tickets available for cash purchase when the box office opens at 2PM.

WHY: I believe this is the second time since beginning her career as a midnight movie presenter at the now-shuttered Bridge Theatre that Peaches Christ has picked a documentary feature to present to her loyal fans (the prior example being Madonna: Truth Or Dare in 2005), and also the second time she's presenting a feature-length film directed by a woman (after Doris Wishman's Double Agent 73 way back in 1999). 

HOW: 35mm print.

Vision Thing

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Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the release of Showgirls in director Paul Verhoeven's Mother Holland, and it didn't take much prodding for me to be convinced to join the appreciation party happening right now in the blogosphere. Yes, I actually like this perhaps inherently misogynistic film that rates a measly 3.8/10 from imdb voters and a 16/100 score on Metacritic. I count myself among the growing number of cinephiles whose views at the very least fit under the umbrella statement, "It doesn't suck."

I first saw Showgirls in the summer of 2001 when I scored free passes to Peaches Christ's summer series of witching hour cult movies called Midnight Mass. Showgirls was the second film in the series, and unquestionably the most raucous evening of those I attended (I skipped 9 To 5). The audience was packed with drunks, butch dykes, drag queens, and a few of us token "normals" who maybe didn't feel quite so normal anymore. I had the distinct impression that my friend and I were the only ones who'd never seen the film before, especially when most of the audience seemed to be yelling half the lines of dialogue at the screen. It was clear that at least we'd stumbled into a true cult phenomenon, and indeed Peaches has screened the film to sellout crowds at least once every summer since 1998. Well, how can you not enjoy a film on a certain level when surrounded by enthusiasm like that? I even got into the spirit of the evening and at one point around the midway mark yelled out (something I never do in a movie theatre) in my most nasal geek voice, "Excuse me, I'm trying to watch the movie!" It got a laugh, but there was some truth in my mock complaint. It was fun but difficult to untangle my reaction to the film from my response to the audience's shouts and cheers. I remember thinking that the film had utterly failed at being sexy if that was the intention, but I had the impression that the sterile plasticity of the sex and nudity just might have been part of a grander scheme to satirize the American Dream. Though I hadn't yet read Charles Taylor's review of the film, I agreed with his premise that Showgirls is intentional camp. I had been exposed to the idea of Verhoeven as satirist (through Zach Campbell for one) before seeing the film, and I found myself agreeing.

Here come spoilers in case you're still a Showgirls virgin...



I was totally caught off guard by Molly's rape scene, though. It's a truly disgusting and shocking scene, and sharply contrasts the good-natured humiliation, back stabbing, lying, pimping and whoring that make up the bulk of the film. Perhaps I was reacting less to the film than to the way the Midnight Masses became so much more subdued for this scene and its aftermath, but it felt like a real miscalculation to suddenly change the film's tone so radically. It took exposure to insightful analysis by the likes of Eric Henderson for me to start to understand the function of that scene in the film, and to finally see Verhoeven's creation as something more than a fun but flawed film.

So when the call went out for participation in a Showgirls-a-thon, I was ripe to revisit the film on DVD, which I finally did last night. What follows are a few thoughts and questions, not coherently gelled into any kind of argument whatsoever.

1. I own the soundtrack on audiocassette (it features excellent tracks from likes of Killing Joke, David Bowie, and Siouxsie and the Banshees) but I'd forgotten that in her initial hitch-hiking scene, Nomi changes the music from Dwight Yoakam (who she mislabels as Garth Brooks) to a song not found on my tape for whatever reason. "Vision Thing," by one of my favorite bands of the late eighties and early nineties, the Sisters of Mercy, is a song about America's cocaine-fueled aggression and imperialism. Though we don't hear the beginning of the song (which starts off with the sound of a coke sniff) I'm sure that whoever selected it knew what Verhoeven was up to; it's no coincidence that the Bowie song that plays in the dance club is "I'm Afraid of Americans". Oh, and guess where the Sisters are launching their 2006 American tour on March 22? Sin City itself, where the streets are lined with the tossed-away hamburger wrappers left by Nomis of the world over.

2. Having recently seen Footlight Parade for the first time and being struck by the incredible speed of the first half of that film, propelled of course by the actor who personifies "rapid-fire", James Cagney, I have to say Verhoeven doesn't quite capture that feeling of intense organizational energy though he comes close a couple of times. I'm not saying he's even trying to. The 1933 Lloyd Bacon/Busby Berkeley film Showgirls usually gets compared to is of course 42nd Street which is less fresh in my mind. But I definitely feel that Footlight Parade is worth a comparative look too, if only because the milieu seems somewhat more similar; aren't the depression-era girlie shows Cagney is trying to put together in that film some of the more apt equivalents to big Vegas shows like "Goddess"? And wasn't a big part of the appeal of Busby Berkeley's most lavish production numbers (like the ones in Footlight Parade) the feminine flesh on display, even if they never provided audiences the full frontal nudity required to bat eyebrows in 1995?

3. What kind of fantasyland is this where not only does someone suggest that Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul might star in "Goddess", but that the president of the hotel actually repeats the dismissed suggestion to the media? Or am I remembering 1995 inaccurately, with my post-Super Bowl, post-American Idol perspective clouding my sense of history?

4. What's with Cristal's underdeveloped Elvis fixation? Is there some character backstory or a key line that got trimmed out somehow?

5. Least-sexy sex scene in the film: Elizabeth Berkley flopping like a fish in the pool with her groin attached to Kyle MacLachlan's abdomen.

6. Spoilers again. That means you, mom; I know you haven't seen the film. Here's a wacky and/or trite interpretation of Nomi and Molly's relationship for everyone to point and laugh at. Let me know if this has already been proven or disproven somewhere I haven't seen (like in that Film Quarterly roundtable on the film that I still haven't read). Molly, who reiterates that she hasn't had sex in many a moon at the point Nomi comes into her life, represents Nomi's virginity (or born-again virginity if you will, since we later learn Nomi's a reformed Oaktown crack-whore). Though surrounded by wanton Vegas sexuality, Nomi's roommate remains chaste, ensuring that no matter what our natural-blonde heroine goes through in her escapades at the Cheetah club or with aspiring gynecologists by which I mean choreographers, her hymen remains intact. But when Andrew Carver and his gang force their camels through the eye of the seamstress's needle (sorry about that turn of phrase but I couldn't resist) it's as if Nomi has herself been raped. And though she gets revenge on the rapist, she also feels the blame and shame rape victims (I'm told) often do. Looked at this way, it seems that perhaps her departure on the road to Los Angeles is not so much a return to blind ambition but an escape from a community where she no longer can live in her own skin. Or is that what ambition always is anyway, an escape from our selves?