The sex scene from Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls will haunt my dreams forever. Kyle Machlachlan’s little white butt (Special Agent Cooper!), poor sweet Nomi getting covered in champagne. Those dolphins. All the accoutrements of poor taste are there: it’s tacky, loud, too much, terrible…or is it?

Toronto based writer, film critic, and teacher Adam Nayman says not so much. He defends the cringe classic in It Doesn’t Suck, his new book and part of the ECW Pop Classics series. We chatted with him about film, the “joys of auteurism,” and why we can’t stop watching bad movies.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What first got you interested in looking at film critically?
I grew up in a household where Pauline Kael’s volumes of criticism were always within reach, and the accessibility of those books, combined with my mother’s encouragement to read them and talk about movies at the dinner table, set me on this destitute path. I’ve been writing about movies for myself since I was twelve ( I convinced an elementary school teacher to let me do it as an “independent study” and she was shocked when I submitted a piece on Glengarry Glen Ross that quoted its salty dialogue) and professionally since the first year of university.

What was your first job in film? How did you get it and what did you learn?
My first job in film was slinging videotapes at the Blockbuster Video at Bayview and Millwood. I guess the most important thing about that gig was that I met my wife, although there were other fringe benefits, namely access to new releases and older movies and a chance to act as a sounding board for renters to rant and rave about whatever they’d just watched. In 2002, I got a bit of a reputation in the neighbourhood for being able to “explain” David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. which resulted in a lot of long talks with alternately irritated and impressed customers. Of course, it helped that at that point I was already freelancing for Eye Weekly and had interviewed Lynch at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival—a name I dropped more times than was probably bearable for the people I worked with.

When was the first time you saw Showgirls? How did you feel about it? What compelled you to write an entire book in its defence?
I saw Showgirls when I was 14, during its first run in theatres; I snuck in like any red-blooded teenage boy. But I wasn’t going there because it was a dirty movie, or at least not entirely for that reason; I was curious to see why it got zero stars in The Globe and Mail. Because I fancied myself a budding little film critic at the time—and because I had just discovered the joys of auteurism—I decided I was a fan; it wasn’t until a few years and several hundred hours of viewing and reading other material later that I had anything like a developed “critical take” on the film. That said, I still like it for the same reasons I did when I was 14: it’s funny, outrageous and entertaining, and it’s beautifully made. My desire to write a book on the movie was borne out of wanting to test my own responses—as a teenager and as an adult—against the deluge of bad reviews it got back in 1995.

Go on, tell: how many times have you watched it.
Over the years, probably at least ten times from beginning to end, but when I was writing the book, I was close-watching scenes and sequences for entire afternoons. That’s pretty common practice in film studies, though, and there are movies I’ve seen many more times than Showgirls: Jaws, Planet of the Apes, Spaceballs, and all the other precious VHS titles I watched almost daily as a kid.

Why do you think so-bad-it’s-good movies like The Room (NOT like Showgirls, as you’ve effectively convinced me) develop cult-like followings who watch over and over what they never watched in theatres? What makes an incredible flop so appealing?
I’m teaching a course in cult cinema this summer at U of T, and this is one of the big questions I’ll be asking in the class: what is the nature of our attraction to trash? Part of it is a desire to be included and excluded at the same time — part of a cult that exists outside the mainstream. Part of it is the urge to be a smarty pants—to go against the conventional wisdom and stake out a previously godforsaken stretch of territory, and maybe rebuild it in one’s own critical image. And part of it is probably spectatorship-schadenfreude of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 variety. It’s rarely ever just one of these, and Showgirls exists in a nexus between all of them—with the added bonus of an easy auteurist reading. Paul Verhoeven is a subversive smart-aleck so why did people take this particular movie as failed straight-faced melodrama? It’s a good question, and I ask it in the book.

Do you have any other films that you think deserve defence/re-examining?
One thing that writing a book about Showgirls has done is make me very self-conscious about “reclamation projects;” I feel like it’s sort of an easy critical move and while I tried to guard against simply being outrageous or provocative in this book, I know it’s getting a lot of attention on those grounds. One of the reasons I felt okay really going for it with Showgirls is that enough time has passed and enough writing has come out examining its critical reevaluation that I feel like my book is synthesizing as much as forwarding its own argument. What makes me uncomfortable is the recent tendency to reclaim movies approximately a week after they come out—as with The Counselor last year. All that said, I’d love to write a book on a semi-acclaimed thriller from 2009 called A Perfect Getaway, which stars Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich and strikes me as one of the most narratively sophisticated Hollywood movies of the last decade. I doubt, however, that that would appeal to a publisher as much as a book about Showgirls. I guess I have to hope that this sells some copies and then I can do whatever I want! (Note to aspiring authors: this is not how this actually works).

So, the book was your big project for the past year or so. What are you onto next? 
Well, I’m teaching a class on David Lynch at the Miles Nadal JCC starting on April 28 on the films and career of David Lynch—one of my artistic heroes. I’ve done courses there in the past on Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers, and I feel like Lynch is right in that same wheelhouse: a commercial entertainer who is also a stringent, principled artist — with the added bonus of being a complete weirdo as well! I blend lectures with clips and questions; the crowd tends to be young and cinema-literate but I try to make the material accessible to first-timers too. Films discussed include ERASERHEAD, BLUE VELVET, and MULHOLLAND DRIVE—I guess I just can’t stop trying to explain that movie!