A bunch of strippers go see Dusk till Dawn, 1996

With Plot Spoilers!

Before I let go of my job and my apartment in Atlanta and fully committed to my life in NYC, one of the last things I did in a group with my ATL strip joints friends was to go see the movie Dusk till Dawn. We didn’t know much about it, but most of us had seen Pulp Fiction and Desperado and we were ready for an action-packed time.

The movie has two distinctly different halves. The first part is the story of two brothers on a crime spree who are headed for a rendezvous in Mexico to launder stolen money and be given refuge in El Rey. They are very bad people, but for the most part very charismatically so. For those who dislike Quentin Tarantino’s screen presence and like George Clooney’s, the film vindicates their predilections. At the time I was obsessed with Harvey Keitel, and he lived up to my expectations of his ability to be warm and weird at the same time.

The story shifts wildly when they get to the rendezvous, a massive rowdy strip joint for bikers and truckers called the Titty Twister. The strippers there, who will very soon turn out to be more than they seem, dance on tables, mostly topless and wearing panel skirts. 

When I first worked in Atlanta, we also wore panel skirts, often with revealing tops and g-strings. Since weren’t allowed to go out on the floor with our asses bare, in addition to which we didn’t want to sit on the vinyl chairs with our bare asses (the chairs were only cleaned once every 24 hours), we wore sarongs or specially-made little breakaway spandex panel skirts. The breakaway panel skirts were made by costume ladies who were former strippers and who toured the clubs selling their wares. Usually, the skirts consisted of a slender panel in the front with hooks on the top corners of its underside and a wider panel in the back with eyes on the top corners of its outside. They would be any length, ending from just below the rear to at the ankles, and usually ended in a point.

The panel skirts on some of the dancers in the film were squared off at the bottom, evoking the styles of pre-columbian cultures — since the bandits are headed toward Cancun, I’m guessing specifically Mayan. (This gave me a bit of insight into how far back in history the origins of my strip joint costume pieces might go.)

Inside the Titty Twister

Then all the dancers take a break and sit with the customers while Salma Hayek comes out in a big feather headdress, a velvet bikini, and an enormous cape and feather collar, again reminiscent of pre-columbian fashion.  She does a riveting striptease which has since become iconic, and which she has said changed her entire career. She dances on the bandits’ table, is alerted by the barker that they beat him up and she turns into a vampire — a vampire QUEEN. This sets off a chain reaction, and all the other strippers and strip joint employees turn into vampires and start killing all the customers.

Salma Hayak’s famous dance as Santanico Pandemonium

When the strippers on the screen started killing all the customers, we strip joint employees in the audience started screaming and yelling and stomping our feet. You don’t have to hate your job to get darn sick of it. It’s common for people like me who’ve worked in service industry jobs long enough to get burned out to have some days when the customers are such a pain in the ass that your fantasies turn from venal to violent. I state with authority that if you can get on the other side of this initial burnout, you can become a more relaxed, compassionate, and humorous service worker than you’ve ever been. However, when entitled customers act up, you never lose that occasional impulse to rip out their throats.

Images of Graciela Mazón’s designs for Salma Hayek, from The Film Costume Collection:

https://filmcostumecollection.omeka.net/items/show/1445

Do you see other similarities between modern costumes and ancient history? Can you think of any other actresses or actors for whom playing a sex worker was a pivotal point in their career?