Striptease (1996)

Striptease arrives in 1996 with a $12.5 million paycheck for its star, a sum that made Demi Moore the highest-paid actress of her era and, apparently, the whole of its marketing campaign. The film concerns Erin Grant, an FBI secretary turned strip-club performer who needs fifteen thousand dollars to appeal a custody ruling against a drug-dealing ex-husband. This is the raw material of empowerment, and Moore has spoken about refusing to shame the body. The camera, however, has other plans. It lingers where a serious drama would not, and the result is a film that argues for a woman's agency while selling her anatomy as the main attraction.

The screenplay, adapted from Carl Hiaasen's novel, spends its energy on broad corruption: a congressman in thrall to sugar barons, lobbyists who kill to protect price supports worth hundreds of millions, a blackmail plot involving photographs and a drowned man in Lake Okeechobee. There is a faint eat-the-rich tang here, though the film is far too busy being zany to press the point. Its jabs at political graft register as texture, not sermon. Ving Rhames and a handful of Latino performers fill supporting roles with no comment attached, which is how a 1996 ensemble crime comedy operated.

What the film does not contain is instructive. No LGBTQ characters. No racial commentary, despite a Miami setting that would invite it. No environmental conscience. No neurodivergent figures. No revisionist history, the story being invented outright. The body-positive gesture, such as it is, drowns under choreography designed for the back row of a bachelor party. What remains is a curiosity: a star vehicle that won six Golden Raspberry Awards, made its leading lady briefly the most powerful woman in Hollywood, and settled into history as a cautionary tale about the difference between taking your clothes off and taking control. The sommelier notes a thin, acidic vintage with an unexpectedly bitter finish.