FanPost

The Canis Cinema Club, Episode 4a: Starship Troopers

Untitled

"Hey kids, do you like violence? Do you want to see me stick nine inch nails through each one of my eyelids?"

- Paul Verhoeven

On November 7, 1997, Paul Verhoeven predicted the next 20 years of American life. Despite a box office #1 opening weekend of $22 million against such cinematic giants as Bean and Mad City, his warning against the dangers of a militarized society was largely ignored, as Troopers ended up in-between Spawn and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery as the 35th highest grossing film of the year, earning a total of $54,814,377 on a $105,000,000 budget.

It didn't go over well with critics, either. Here's Roger Ebert:

"Starship Troopers'' is the most violent kiddie movie ever made. I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate: Its action, characters and values are pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans. That makes it true to its source. It's based on a novel for juveniles by Robert A. Heinlein. I read it to the point of memorization when I was in grade school. I have improved since then, but the story has not.

Here is Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times:

As written by Ed Neumeier, who also wrote Mr. Verhoeven's much tighter ''Robocop,'' ''Starship Troopers'' never gets over its 180-degree swivel from teen-age love story to murderous destruction. But coherence does not appear to be a major concern. This film simply piles on the bugs, lops off the limbs and provides a flaming catharsis that suits its ideology. By the end of the film, arachnid butt has been duly kicked and back-patting is in order. We won't have to worry about marauding bugs until, thanks to Hollywood, the next batch comes along.

And Rita Kempsey in the Washington Post:

"Starship Troopers" follows the escalating hostilities between the galaxy's two dumbest species -- bugs and fashion models. Unfortunately, the battle of the bugs doesn't even begin until half way through this squishy, senseless, putrescent romp.
Based on Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel and directed by lap dance maven Paul Verhoeven (of "Showgirls" infamy), the futuristic adventure takes place in a fascist utopia run by a military elite. The streets are clean, lawns are mowed and even black folks look Aryan here in Mister Nietzsche's Neighborhood. No one need do without food, clothing or personal trainers, but citizenship and suffrage must be earned by serving in the military.

You can almost forgive these poor souls for missing the point. The dot-com bubble had yet to burst, books like The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama were forming the ideals of a generation of self-righteous boomers now coming into power, and pure escapism dominated the cinema with films like Titanic, Men in Black, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park towering atop the box office charts.

In the eyes of most audiences and critics of the time, things were going just fine, thank you, and they could clearly do without a movie about how America is a violent, colonialist war power where murderous rage against far off sub-human enemies is passed down from generation to generation as if it were predetermined by genetics.

What went wrong? The problem with the movie's cold reception was two-fold. First, American audiences do not handle tonal changes very well. We tend to like by-the-numbers genre pictures and well-worn tropes. If you start your movie with 90210 characters playing sports ball and dancing at a prom and end it with them slaughtering millions of space bugs, you may be asking a little too much of our collective movie-going character. Those kids are supposed to live happily ever after, not recruit a new generation of brainwashed troops to keep the never-ending war effort going.

Second, the movie was based on a well-known pro-war (and fascist) book by Robert A. Heinlein (which is also on the US Marine's official reading list) and most people watching or reviewing the film (or reading reviews of the film) simply saw the fascist imagery on the screen and assumed that this direct, enthusiastic nod to fascism was Verhoeven's intent when it turns out that Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland, couldn't even finish the book because he found it so repugnant.

"I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring," says Verhoeven of his attempts to read Heinlein's opus. "It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?'"

Speaking at a Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective of his work in 2016, Verhoeven went even further while discussing his displeasure at the thought of a franchise reboot that would be closer to the source material:

"It said in the article [that] the production team of that movie of the remake, that they would go back more and more towards the novel. And of course, we really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic," said Verhoeven. "You feel that going back to the novel would fit very much in a Trump Presidency."

Verhoeven added that Heinlein’s philosophy was fascistic; for the director, as well as screenwriter Ed Neumeier, their film was having an open fight with the novel. The idea behind "Troopers," according to Verhoeven, was to create a story that "seduced the audience" on one level, but then make it clear to the audience what they were admiring was actually evil. "Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism," Verhoeven said.

Oh, have I mentioned that this was a Veteran's Day weekend release? You probably don't need to think too hard about how a movie which introduces the good guys with one of the most direct references to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will in film history may not have performed well on USA Troop Day, 1997.

20 years later we live in a world where not only have we been in a dual-front war for well over a decade, but American troops deployed to 134 countries in 2017. Our leaders talk of expanded war in North Korea and Iran. TV and the internet interrupt our lives with shiny pieces of overt, militaristic propaganda, quashing any sort of "radical" deviance from the accepted narrative of American Force is a Force for Good.

starship-troopers.0.jpg

Verhoeven has been rewarded for his efforts to warn Americans about the dangers of fascism by being sent to Hollywood director's jail (to be fair, Hollow Man didn't help his cause) and he is currently back in Europe at the top of his game, having filmed two of my favorite movies of the new century: Black Book and Elle, both of which are very Americanized films that also happen to be state-of-the-art movie making in the hands of a master. It is an artistic tragedy of the highest order that this man is unable to make more movies.

We have a little bit of an extra-credit project for this week's CCC selection: Marshall Curry's A Night At the Garden, a 7-minute story about the 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden where 20,000 Americans celebrated the rise of Nazism.

You can read more about the film here, but the thing that caught my eye is this quote from journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was present at the rally.

Several years after the events of "A Night at the Garden," Thompson contributed a famed article to Harper’s Magazine called "Who Goes Nazi?" In it she describes a "macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know."

"Nazism," Thompson said, "has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. … The frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success — they would all go Nazi."

If 90210 can go Nazi, anybody can.

Starship Troopers is currently available to rent on all the major platforms. You can also find a copy at your local library.

We will be back next Saturday with a review/discussion post on the film.

Until then...