TulaneLSU's 2025 movie reviews thread: The Last Showgirl

The Last Showgirl

Las Vegas is a vicious, profligate city, a fool’s paradise, a chimera. I have traveled to the city but twice, both times using it as a jumping point to see Zion and Death Valley. Entering that depressed city, anyone with half a conscience, or a quarter sense of decorum and propriety, must swallow his stomach, lest he disgorge the contents consumed there.

The Last Showgirl adds to the growing Rolodex of Las Vegas films, including Leaving Las Vegas, The Cooler, and The Hangover, that showcase the city as an engine of ruin, where people come to consume a good time, but ultimately, the city consumes a talent of them. The masses sacrifice their time, money, and spirits, and the predestined few are damned to toil, like Sisyphus, with naught but ruin to show for their labors.

So it is with Pamela Anderson’s character in the film, who starts in Vegas as a 19 year old showgirl, mesmerized by the glitz and glamor. The blinding lights of the stage, where she “just wants to be seen,” blind her to the very end. There is no redemption with her. Despite Copolla’s attempt to give us a happy ending, to make feminists proud that this wayward, neglectful mother followed her dream, the thoughtful viewer is left with nothing but a heavy, downtrodden heart.

The film is a tragic one and the superficial happy ending is a mirage. She gave up a life in New York and the life of a mother to stand on stage with her “breasts hanging out.” She deludes herself into believing she is a ballerina part of an ongoing cultural movement. She deludes herself with the notion she is a mother to fellow glorified strippers. Shelley, who is a shell of a true person, has as much talent dancing and skill mothering as Pamela Anderson does acting. How on Earth has Anderson received applause for her acting in this film? She is horrific, overacting in nearly every scene, her work gets a 0/10 from me.

Las Vegas, like Shelley, like Pamela Anderson, are all filled with delusions. They simply cannot see things for how they are in reality, which is summed up in two piercing, denuding sentences near the end by Jason Schwartzman’s character. Anderson is as responsible as any one individual for today’s culture of mutilation of the human body for the purpose of achieving a perceived standard of beauty. The rash of people, especially women, who think a surgeon can heal with steel their fleeting looks, grows. Anderson has recently tried to atone for her sin of popularizing breast implants by going natural. This publicity stunt, hailed by the entertainment press as brave and wonderful, is just another attempt to stay in the spotlight. The delusion that au naturale atones for fame achieved through nudity and lust is a laugh.

The time has passed. The show goes on. The consumers have moved to their next feast. Las Vegas consumed another lost child and spat her out as a wrinkled, broken mess. 3/10