Pamela Anderson’s ‘The Last Showgirl’ Proves She Should Be an Oscar Contender

Suffice it to say, pop culture and the entertainment industry didn’t objectify Pamela Anderson through the 1990s because of her voice; her cachet grew commensurate with the display of her bust, the cut of her swimsuit, her bubbly blondeness, and the details of her personal life. In Gia Coppola’s new movie, The Last Showgirl, Anderson seizes the recognition denied her decades ago, playing the veteran Las Vegas dancer Shelly on the precipice of future flux. But the role doesn’t orient around her body. Instead, it invests in what she says.

Anderson’s currently enjoying a watershed moment in her career following years of dismissal as the Baywatch babe. Fresh off a surprise SAG nod and a Golden Globe nomination, she’s a major contender for the Oscars’ Best Actress shortlist, alongside the likes of Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, and Cynthia Erivo. It’s a resurgence few could have predicted for Anderson, made all the more profound by the character she plays and work she does in the movie, which sum up to more than a mere second-act Cinderella story.

The Last Showgirl, which expands to wide theatrical release on Jan. 10, following an awards-qualifying run in December, opens with Shelly on stage, visibly anxious in her street clothes under a spotlight’s ruthless glare. She’s speaking with an unseen man whose rank indifference to her is like a color gel shading their exchange with a bleak palette. “A gentleman never asks a lady her age,” Shelly coyly says when he inquires, briefly wresting control over the proceedings before providing a knee-jerk answer: “36?” The lie whiffs, though Coppola holds off showing us how badly for the next hour.

Shortly after, the movie cuts to chaos in medias res, backstage at a performance of Le Razzle Dazzle–the kind of prototypical Vegas stage show where beads, rhinestones, and sequins layer artificial sophistication on entertainment that’s just a few G-strings away from exploitation. Through the din of dancers freshening up their makeup and putting on jewelry, Shelly fusses over a hole she’s torn in her costume’s wings, and also, of all things, citrus. “Lemons, and now this,” she pouts. Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), two junior showgirls who regard Shelly as their proxy mother figure, react with bewildered exasperation at the abrupt leap from pomp to produce. Frankly, in that moment, they read as the parent surrogates.

Then Shelly speaks, and Anderson’s high-pitched sing-song inflection flattens both of these concerns into a single compounded layer. Le Razzle Dazzle is as much one of life’s certainties as grocery bills; there is no gulf between Shelly, the glamorous faux-Parisian dancer, and Shelly, the working stiff fretting over tomorrow evening’s meal plan as she soldiers through her shift. She is committed to being her most authentic self at all times, and her most authentic self is aggrieved about the high cost of lemons now, during what she eventually learns will be one of Le Razzle Dazzle’s final shows. C’est la vie.

Much has been made of The Last Showgirl as Anderson’s “comeback” role, in notices peppered with various tenses and forms of “reveal” and buzz words like “breakthrough.” Everyone likes an awards season narrative that writes itself. But this kind of language reduces the sober subtext The Last Showgirl wrings out of Anderson’s career, as well as overlooks that the brushing began on her “comeback” trail last year with Ryan White’s Pamela, a Love Story. (You could argue that Seth Rogen and Robert Siegel beat White to the punch in 2022 with Pam & Tommy, their limited series focused on the infamous honeymoon sex tape scandal that kneecapped Anderson and boosted her then-husband Tommy Lee.)

There’s a fundamental question at the center of Coppola’s movie that the well-deserved plaudits elide: If Anderson informs Shelly through her own Hollywood experiences, then what, exactly, is the subject of the praises–Anderson’s acting, or her endurance?

Solving for the answer here is nigh impossible, but it’s the implications of the question that matter. Anderson, for clarity, isn’t Shelly; her star is rising, and Shelly’s is starting to flicker and dim. But both women know the sting of underappreciation and rejection, of being told that it’s their time to fade away.

“The costumes, the sets,” Shelly seethes at Eddie (David Bautista), Le Razzle Dazzle’s stage manager, nearly as weary as she. “Being bathed in that light night after night, feeling seen, feeling beautiful. That is powerful.” There is a confluence in Anderson’s face of pleading and grief, as if Shelly’s as desperate to make Eddie understand what the show means to her as she is bitter that it’s ending all the same. “I just have to disappear,” Shelly says, surrendering to fate with a wry chuckle and a shrug of her shoulders.

It’s the “have to” that cuts like a scythe. Shelly doesn’t have a choice. The decisions are all being made for her.

In the late 1990s, Anderson likely had her share of conversations that sounded uncomfortably similar to the ones Shelly describes to Eddie, though The Last Showgirl keeps Eddie’s hands clean; he’s not responsible for canceling the show. Something wild flits across Anderson’s face during her monologue to Bautista, as if it’s just now dawning on Shelly that she, now no longer kept in Le Razzle Dazzle’s employ, is free to make of her life whatever she desires. But that’s a frightening prospect, and thus an unattractive one. The spotlight gifted Shelly with dignity and influence, which time’s passage, plus the inexorable change of taste and trends, now mean to repossess. Rightly, she is wounded. She is angry. She could be angrier, if she so chose.

Anderson chooses to transfer Shelly’s rancor, contempt, and heartache into her voice: a breathy treble register, disarmingly girlish with unmistakably confident undergirding. Whether Shelly’s absorbing the news of Le Razzle Dazzle’s closure, stumbling through her doomed audition, or going on a date with Eddie that ends almost as disastrously, Anderson maintains that tone while carrying Shelly’s exhaustion in the creases fanning out from the corners of her eyes.

Like Shelly, Anderson is worn out from the demands of others that she justify herself for a reputation she never sought after and an image she never wanted. With The Last Showgirl’s success, maybe Anderson won’t have to suffer that expectation ever again.