How I Got Radicalized
When I Realized ‘Showgirls’ Was a Work of High Art
Before it was a camp classic, the 1995 film liberated me from the politics of taste
Welcome to How I Got Radicalized, a new series that tells a story about a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.
I still don’t entirely understand the brief teenage phase I had in the mid-1990s, seeking out things I considered outright bad as entertainment. It lasted six to nine months, around the time I was gearing up to take my driver’s test. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was hiding from. This period of time, circa 1996, was a great run for pop culture with a noticeable edge: How weird can you go? People were shocked by Dennis Rodman; Kool Keith put out an album about a time-traveling gynecologist; Blind Melon’s “Bee Girl” was a meme before we knew what that was; you could turn on MTV and see Björk’s psychedelic take on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” in a video directed by Michel Gondry. What a time to be alive, truly.
I wanted to be weird. Or at least I wanted people to think I was peculiar, because of the things I read, the music I listened to, the topics I talked about. I was a teen actively trying to be out of step with other people my age, whether it was by dyeing my…
