I just saw Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. It’s an uncannily prescient movie. Released in 1997, it imagines a quasi-fascist future in which the earth is militarized to fight the bugs — a race of giant insectoids. The war really kicks into high gear after the bugs launch an asteroid from space and destroy one of the earth’s major cities, Buenos Aires. (As a television announcement says: “Out of the ashes of Buenos Aires comes first sorrow…then anger. The only good bug is a dead bug!”)
One of the best parts of the film is the very end. The humans had always assumed that the bugs had only rudimentary intelligence. But while this is true for the most part, it turns out that there are a few “brain bugs” — giant gelatinous larvae-looking things, which can suck out human brains the better to understand the enemy, doncha know. Our heroes are drafted for a suicide mission to bring one of the brain bugs back, dead or alive. They succeed, of course — and it only takes them about a year, as opposed to ten for us (though to be fair, they’ve gone farther down the road of authoritarianism, and so are of course more efficient.)
Anyway, all the troops get together and they haul the giant larval brain bug out of its dank cave in the mountains, and then the creepily psychic military intelligence guy (played by Neil Patrick Harris, believe it or not) walks down to confront it, stylishly dressed in Nazi-chic full dresscoat.
“What’s it thinking corporal?” his superior officer asks him.
He walks up to it and puts his hand gently on the side of its head, not too far from its vagina-like mouth. There is a long pause.
“It’s afraid,” he says softly. And then louder. “It’s afraid!”
And all the grunts explode into cheers! Happy ending! Terrified, captured, evil sentient lifeform can now be systematically tortured to death! Huzzah!
(I can’t embed the clip for some reason, but you can watch it here.)
The best part of the conclusion is that capturing the bug does not, of course, end the war. This is a fascist fantasy, after all. As Nietzsche says,
Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory…. Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity.
The happy ending to a war is more war, more courage. Victory doesn’t mean truce; it means everybody gets promoted and you get to torture the enemy and discover new and better ways to grind him (and her!) into ever finer bits of ichor. The last we see of the brain bug (in a scene that I think is excised form that Youtube bit) some faceless tech is sticking a phallic laser drill into that suggestively formed mouth, and a giant “CENSORED” sign appears on the screen, the better to allow us to imagine the stimulating shenanigans.
And what do those shenanigans stimulate us to do? “We have the ships…we have the weapons! We need soldiers!” the movie blares in its closing moments. And that surely applies even more to us. After all, the Starship Troopers are only fighting one war. We’ve got three going (if Afghanistan/Pakistan is one, and not counting Yemen because it is secret.) There will be much more heroism to come, and many more brains to kill. To paraphrase the last words emblazoned on the screen, we’ll keep fighting…and we’ll win!
To be fair, Noah, that movie was supposed to be somewhat satiric.
There’s also a strong suggestion that in the war against the Bugs, humans were the agressors, expanding our Imperium into Bug space.
The movie Starship Troopers is a brilliant satire of the original, fascist utopian book. Actually it’s a little too brilliant, since lots of people love it straightforwardly XD.
I’d totally forgotten that Neil Patrick Harris was in this movie!
Alex, I know it’s a satire. I’m not joking when I say I like it!
Or, at least, I like it in parts…the satire doesn’t exactly play throughout; it sort of see-saws back and forth between being a straight action movie and making fun of its own tropes; definitely trying to have its cake and eat it too. I don’t think it’s too brilliant; I think it’s just committed to having that big action movie audience rather than the smaller audience that would have enjoyed a thoroughgoing satire more. Still, overall, it’s pretty darn entertaining, both as a genre film and as a parody of genre film….
Noah, please. Libya is not a war, it’s merely a kinetic military action mixed with a little humanitarian intervention.
Plus, we have the support of Britain AND France. That’s the international community!
KMAWALHI?
I like the acronym potential….
Noah: As I remember, I found the “straight action genre” goes in tandem with the satire pretty well if you look at the actual movie as a propaganda film made in its own universe. That is, Starship Troopers is a movie the military in Starship Troopers would commission. The action sequences are all a bit too perfect, with the weak/non-military getting it (often for humor) and the chiseled hero landing some game-winning stunt.
Hey Jason. Yes, I’ve seen that theory…and I don’t doubt that Verhoeven was thinking something like that. The thing is…what’s the difference between a too-perfect recruiting film and a standard genre hollywood action film? And sure, you could say verhoeven is making us aware of that…but at the same time he’s delivering exactly the genre tropes.
I think it’s a fair bit less uncomfortable than something like Death Race 3000 (if I’m remembering that title right…?) It’s just not quiiiiitttteeee willing to lay the satire out there.
Like I said, I don’t think it’s a bad movie. I think it’s a good movie! But if it were a bit ballsier, it could have been a great movie, which I don’t think it is.
I’ve been watching a bunch of Verhoeven (I saw Robocop and Total Recall), and I think thatd’s true of him in general. He’s really smart and funny, but is overall too wedded to the genre narratives he half despises to really make an entire movie worthy of his best moments.
It may be just a question of taste, though. I feel that the mix of genre tropes and satire in the three movies you quote is actually what makes Verhoeven original, and his movies more enjoyable than pure satire or pure action.
Also, the ambiguity of these Hollywood action flicks is just one facet of his general pursuit and study of ambiguity in everything, as best exemplified in Flesh+Blood, or his latest, Black Book.
Haven’t seen those! Hope to get to them…though I don’t know how available flesh and blood is….
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Josselin says:
… I feel that the mix of genre tropes and satire in the three movies you quote is actually what makes Verhoeven original, and his movies more enjoyable than pure satire or pure action…
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Exactly!
Some great lines in “Starship Troopers,” which the Missus and I delight in quoting to each other. Such as, “It’s an ugly planet…a bug planet!”
For those who may not know..
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…In 1943 [Verhoeven’s] family moved to The Hague, the location of the German headquarters in the Netherlands during World War II. The Verhoeven house was near a German military base with V1 and V2-rocket launchers, which was repeatedly bombed by allied forces. Their neighbours’ house was hit and Verhoeven’s parents were almost killed when bombs fell on a street crossing. From this period, Verhoeven mentioned in interviews, he remembers images of violence, burning houses, dead bodies on the street and continuous danger. As a small child he experienced the war as an exciting adventure…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Verhoeven
Re the film that first made him famous:
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Apparently when Spielberg saw ‘Soldier Of Orange’ he phoned Paul Verhoeven congratulating him and urging him to come to Hollywood. That took about ten years but in retrospect in might have been a big mistake. Despite an excellent Hollywood debut (the savage science fiction satire ‘RoboCop’, still one of Verhoeven’s best), the directors movies have been mostly disappointing ever since. Just compare his most recent movie, the lame ‘Hollow Man’, to this one. There’s no denying that there has been a major drop in quality. ‘Soldier Of Orange’ is worth mentioning in the same breath as such classic war movies as Kubrick’s ‘Paths Of Glory’, Fuller’s ‘The Big Red One’ and Peckinpah’s ‘Cross Of Iron’. It’s that good. Considering it was made by a director with a reputation for provocation and general outrageousness, it plays it surprisingly straight, and in my opinion is all the better for it. There is some violence, but it is appropriate for the subject matter, and there is very little sex…
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076734/
What I find creepy about the Starship Troopers book…it was conceived and marketed as a ‘juvenile’…what we call ‘young adult’ fiction. Wonder if it spurred recruitment in those Vietnam years.
A “juvenile”? I dunno.
In the years when I was working my way through the science fiction section of the Coral Gables public library, I had fond memories of Heinlein books aimed at younger readers (“Have Spacesuit, Will Travel,” “Tunnel In the Sky”) along with fare aimed at adults, and “Starship Troopers” didn’t strike me at all in tone like the former.
Google’ig some info, it turns out that…
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Starship Troopers [was] first published (in abridged form) as a serial in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction…
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Which was/is the “thinking man’s” magazine of the genre; hardly featuring youthful fare.
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…Heinlein examines moral and philosophical aspects of suffrage, civic virtue, the necessities of war and capital punishment, and the nature of juvenile delinquency….To Heinlein’s surprise, Starship Troopers won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960….
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers
Google’ing “Starship Troopers young adult book” I found…
“Starship Troopers [is listed] at Young Adult Books Central…Age Appropriate For: 12+. Genre: Science Fiction..”
“Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with Starship Troopers (1959), a controversial work and his personal riposte to leftists…” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein
“Is this an adult or child’s book? – Adult or Young Adult Book” – http://www.allreaders.com/topics/info_86.asp
OK, so we’re both right…
The ideal outcome!
I’ve been working this past year part-time as a reader of American young adult novels, for a major French publisher. I’m constantly surprised at the quality of the writing.
Well, kids and teenagers have a zero tolerance attitude towards shoddy bullshit fiction. They could teach us grownups points.
I think of YA books I read myself in my youth, such as ‘Citizen of the Galaxy’, ‘Little House in the Big Woods’, or ‘Johnny Tremain’.
Still great stuff!
The original Novel was probably one of the influences in my life that drove my own expression of citizenship, joining my nation’s cadet movement, volunteering as a reservist, serving my province’s undermanned and under-equipped rural ambulance service as a V-EMT, all came about from deeply accepting that those who wanted to have a say in their country ought to put something on the line for it.
I don’t think of myself a fascist, but perhaps that counts as indoctrination.
I think you hit the nail on the head Noah as to the film’s popularity. It’s the perfect guilty pleasure for the left leaning lover of action and military pomp.
You can thrill to Wagnerian background music, cheer for the heroes, all the while laughing at the overdone propaganda. and thus have you’re cake and eat it.
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