Gia Coppola’s The Last Show Girl is more than a film
— it’s a requiem.
A love letter to a kind of womanhood that has been chewed up and spat out by a culture that has no patience for subtlety.
What’s left to sink our teeth into?
The eroticism of exhaustion.
The spectacle of oversharing.
The pornification of everything.
I was waiting for The Last Showgirl with rare excitement.
A Gia Coppola film, shot in that hazy, dreamlike way
— where everything feels like a memory before it’s even over.
You know, those muted neon lights, the slow glances in dressing room mirrors, the feeling that something is slipping through your fingers.
And then there she is — Pamela Anderson, the last showgirl.
Once larger than life, now just… there. Standing at a self-checkout, unable to scan her groceries.
And that’s when I realized something.
The showgirl doesn’t belong here anymore.
Glamour had rules — it was curated, restrained, built like an illusion. Showgirls weren’t just performers; they were untouchable, commanding attention without begging for it.
The tease is dead, because why tease when you can just flash? The new icons of female sexuality don’t trade in allure, they deal in visibility.
Gia Coppola films this shift with nostalgia, but she doesn’t romanticize.
She knows the showgirl is an artifact. A feathered fossil from a time when sensuality was about power, not just access.
The Last Show Girl isn’t asking whether this world can be revived —it’s just watching the curtain close on it.
If The Last Show Girl feels like a eulogy, it’s because Gia Coppola has always been obsessed with liminal spaces
— the moment when one world fades and another takes its place.
Palo Alto was about disaffected youth.
Mainstream was about the corrosion of identity under the weight of digital fame.
And now,The Last Show Girl mourns the death of a certain kind of femininity — the kind that required patience, artistry, illusion.
I grew up with a certain idea of glamour.
The kind where femininity was sculpted, orchestrated, mastered. Where a woman could be desirable without being devoured.
The showgirl, the femme fatale, the Hollywood icon — these women weren’t just sexy, they were aspirational. Power wasn’t in what they revealed, but in what they chose to withhold.
And yet, here I am, a French girl in my 30s, watching this film and realizing that kind of woman no longer exists.
Not in the mainstream. Not in pop culture.
Not anywhere.
Instead, we have women livestreaming their body count like it’s a personal best.
Celebrities pretending that grinding half-naked on a stage for an audience is empowerment. The new showgirls aren’t in control — they’re just giving everything away, faster, louder, rawer.
They tell you this is feminism. They tell you this is liberation.
But when I watch them, all I see is the male gaze, repackaged and resold as a choice.
Gia Coppola doesn’t try to resurrect the showgirl — she just films the last moments before she disappears completely.
And sitting in that theater, I felt it. Not nostalgia, not regret. Just the quiet, sinking realization that glamour didn’t just die. It was replaced.
What’s left isn’t mystique, it’s just a never-ending, algorithm-driven strip show.