No matter how many times it has been massacred by drunk coworkers in karaoke bars after one too many eggnogs at the office holiday party, Bonnie Tyler’s massive 1983 hit, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” remains a wallop to the chest. Its opening piano chords are enough to force a pause; whatever you were doing, good luck getting back to it anytime in the next seven minutes as soon as you hear those sullen keys ringing out. When Tyler’s duet partner Rory Dodd sings the words “turn around,” they’re not so much a request as they are a command. They put the “power” in “power ballad,” taking the listener up in its grasp and holding them there until the gamut of human emotion has been run through, putting us back down to heave sobs on the floor.
What initially feels cloying blooms into something utterly poignant as we watch these two Hollywood icons, playing fading Vegas stars, confront their heartbreak about the future.
That a song can still be so affecting 40 years later shouldn’t be taken for granted. Like the clothes manufactured by fast fashion retailers and knockoff products sold by dropshipping companies, music isn’t made to last anymore. Rather, most pop music is made to spike in popularity, to capitalize on a trending sound or subgenre in hopes that a streaming service algorithm might pick up the song before the trend peters out to make way for something else. The lack of true originality and sonic confidence is a major part of why audiences have flocked to Charli xcx’s “BRAT” and kept Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile” climbing the charts months after its release: Ingenuity is fading, and people crave art that’s instantly timeless or outside of time and trend altogether.
So, when those showstopping piano chords of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” play in Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” — a stirring story of a woman who realizes that the artistic era she had a small part in creating isn’t just ending, but is already a small speck in the distance — the needle drop feels almost too appropriate. The dearth of modern creativity, exemplified by the legacy of Tyler’s eternal duet, scores the affairs of those on society’s fringes, living in a Las Vegas caught in the past. Shelly (Pamela Anderson) and her best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) are, by Vegas’ standards, washed-up. Shelly’s burlesque revue on the Strip is nearing its final performance, and Annette’s attempts to gamble her way out of spending the rest of her life cocktail waitressing have proven fruitless. As both women stand at the brink, staring out into life’s abyss, the longing for sweet satisfaction in Tyler’s song starts to take on a saccharine transparency within the scene’s context.
That is until Coppola shoehorns in a subtle new layer of emotional resonance. The ensuing sequence extends just half the length of Tyler’s protracted song, but it’s all the time that the director needs to intricately craft a new layer of meaning for both her characters and the actors themselves. What initially feels cloying blooms into something utterly poignant as we watch these two Hollywood icons, playing fading Vegas stars, confront their heartbreak about the future. Like “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” this scene in “The Last Showgirl” wears the mask of cliché until it leaves the viewer helpless under the spell of bleeding-heart earnestness.
Arriving almost exactly at the film’s halfway point, the “Total Eclipse of the Heart” sequence adds a perfect inflection point for the second act of “The Last Showgirl.” The audience has already spent a fair amount of time with Shelly and Annette, who have been taking turns leaning on each other through the years. They met while dancing in Le Razzle Dazzle, a Vegas cabaret show loaded with feathers, rhinestones and pretty women with blinding smiles. It’s one of the grand performances that used to draw hundreds of people every night but slowly became outmoded as the city and its tourist attractions changed. Similar shows along the Strip closed, and instead of raking in the dough when left without competition, Le Razzle Dazzle faded too, indicating a broader public disinterest in the kinds of dance and cabaret that Shelly spent her life eager to be a part of.
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As Le Razzle Dazzle gears up for its final string of shows, Shelly looks back on that period. Her twenties and thirties saw her scraping by, trying to provide for herself and her daughter, Hannah (played as an adult in the film by Billie Lourd). Being a Vegas showgirl was Shelly’s dream, and even now, in her fifties, she’s reluctant to give up one of the few things that brings her real happiness. As a showgirl, Shelly can see the art in her beauty and the beauty in her art. Le Razzle Dazzle makes her feel like she’s a part of something bigger than herself, something important, something with history. “This show is famous, it’s a tradition, it has roots in France!” she tells her fellow dancer, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), backstage. “It’s the last remaining descendant of Parisian Lido culture. You think 85 is a big cast? There were 160 of us back in the ’80s. American Express did a travel campaign…they shot me on the Great Wall of China. I was very special.”
“Las Vegas used to treat us like movie stars,” Shelly continues. “The iconic American showgirl, the Las Vegas showgirl. We were ambassadors for style and grace. The costumes! It makes you feel like you’re stepping out of the pages of ‘Vogue’ magazine. I think that’s why women like to come to the show: The glamour is undeniable.”
Here, Shelly trails off, relenting that maybe times are different now. Shortly after, Hannah attends one of her mother’s performances for the first time after years of estrangement. Backstage, Hannah can’t wrap her mind around why the show would ever be special enough to lose out on precious memories with her mother while she was still young. She besmirches Le Razzle Dazzle and tells Shelly none of it was worth putting above her daughter’s childhood. Shelly vehemently disagrees with Hannah’s perception of the show, telling Hannah that she always tried to do her very best. “I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted from me,” Shelly says. “But if you could forgive me anytime in your life, I would love that. But I can’t defend myself anymore.”
Through their confrontation, we’re afforded a high-stakes moment to understand just how important this is to Shelly. She is sincere and passionate to a fault. She adores her daughter but, for Shelly, giving up her dream to be a mother would be a life wasted. What kind of precedent would forsaking her happiness set for her child? Suddenly, their skirmish brings all of Shelly’s feelings about the show’s ending and her regrets from the past to the surface. At the same time, Annette is facing eviction after gambling her money away, both because she’s reckless and because — as much as she says she’s willing to — she doesn’t want to die on the casino floor with someone else’s Jack and ginger in her hand. Far from her days as part of Le Razzle Dazzle’s cast, now with a crispy tan, visible wrinkles and no thigh gap, her appearance doesn’t even draw big tips from customers anymore. When she steps onto a platform in the casino and starts to dance as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” begins, the only people who look at her are those throwing judgment her way like daggers.
Annette’s movements are fiery and improvisational. She can feel every lyric of the song and every ounce of heartbreak in Tyler’s voice. The scene is intercut with glimpses of Shelly, anguishing in the unforgiving light of a Vegas afternoon, the type that tends to illuminate all of the ugly things you don’t want to see. When Tyler sings the lyric, “Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the years have gone by,” the sequence opens itself up for the viewer. On paper, it is comical to see Jamie Lee Curtis thrusting and emoting while looking like Tan Mom. But onscreen, it’s an entirely different story.
Anderson took back power in one of the few ways an actress could in the early aughts: by reducing herself to the caricature the public perceived her as.
Against the sonic backdrop of Tyler’s power ballad, we observe Shelly and Annette, but also Anderson and Curtis. These are two women who came to prominence within just a few years of each other in Hollywood, and two women who spent substantial portions of their careers fighting against being pigeonholed as mere sex symbols and scream queens, objects of titillation for male viewers. Anderson, in particular, fought for years to find scripts that suited her before resorting to winking cameo work that let people know she was in on the hot blonde joke. After the traumatic invasion of her privacy with the leak of her sex tape, Anderson took back power in one of the few ways that an actress could in the early aughts: by reducing herself to the caricature the public perceived her as. Is it any wonder that Anderson all but retired from the industry, choosing to spend her time as an activist and author rather than as a punchline?
I shudder to think that there was a part of me that ever thought this moment in “The Last Showgirl” would be corny when I heard those opening piano chords of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” But I get another chill when I think of how easily some viewers might be reluctant to see it as anything other than a joke, or sneer at the song like it’s baiting them to have an emotional response. Tyler’s track evokes a sweeping, universal desperation, the kind of yearning that every single listener can relate to someplace deep within themselves. It’s showstopping and cinematic in a way that modern pop ballads rarely manage to be. The song earns its hold over us, and so does this scene in “The Last Showgirl.” Two real-life Tinseltown poster girls become one with their characters at this moment. They ask us to grieve for the way that they were treated by the industry and the public, and lament the culture that persists where seeing two middle-aged women actors in these kinds of roles still feels exceptional. Anderson and Curtis are at once saying that things have gotten better, but that they are changing too fast for everyone to keep up. Somebody somewhere will always be left behind.
As Tyler’s gravelly voice sings out, “Forever’s gonna start tonight,” the viewer braces themselves for what might come next. Where will Shelly and Annette find themselves in the film’s latter half, as their dreams slip through their fingers? If only they could hold onto them, if only anyone else had given a damn, if only circumstances had been different in the years leading up to this crossroads. Their forever is uncertain, and as Tyler says softly in the song, there’s nothing they can do. Like “Total Eclipse of the Heart” itself, this scene in “The Last Showgirl” seems easy to refute until you realize you’ve started to cry and you’re relating to every word. A power ballad only seems cheesy until you’ve lived enough life to feel like Annette or Shelly. Then, you realize that time has helped you understand the ache of living so much better than you ever thought you could. It’s that insight that Coppola draws out from her stars, and watching it on shining display makes “The Last Showgirl” feel the way Shelly describes Le Razzle Dazzle in its heyday: a marvelous exhibition of style and grace, where the glamour is undeniable.
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