|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Nathan Newman
|| What pissed me off about Starship Troopers is that it was a
|| cartoon version
|| of fascist propaganda, where the original Heinlein source was a very
|| conscious attempt to promote a military quasi-fascism at a
|| rather high level
|| of argument.
||
|| I actually think the movie reflects the infantilization of the pop left
|| (Verhoeven, Stone) which by creating cartoon enemies, they
|| refuse to directly
|| engage with the real intellectual and social basis of rightwing
|| thought and
|| practice and why it gains adherents.
||
Your points would be valid if the film were really what you make it out to be. First of all, Verhoeven appears to have predicted that the US - bec it's obvious that's what the movie is about - will not produce a more sophisticated ideology in the future, but a dumber one. The elements of this ideology: The war, the enemy, the public figures, the rhetoric, the institutions, are straight out of comics, where indeed they increasingly appear to come from today. Turbaned bad guys with beards living in caves, US soldiers on horseback, elected administrators who don't need to answer any real questions as long as they sound rousingly jingoistic enough, Shrubya's lowbrow, barely articulate "you're with us or against us" rhetoric: Everything is dumbed down for the anti-intellectual US public, reduced to comic-book goodie-baddie basics.
So it is in Starship Troopers, which is as open a condemnation of fascist anti-intellectualism as you're ever likely to get in a feature film whose target audience, as for any major feature, is the teeners that also make up its cast. The youthful cast's pre-army life in the movie seems like a version of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills 90210, which is where Verhoeven also got the "actors", such as they are. Verhoeven then shows us how fascist militarism is readily accepted by these brain-dead happy teeners, who embark enthusiastically on a journey to oblivion without once questioning why they are fighting - a lot like what the 82% approving public are doing right now. Just as Verhoeven's teeners never ask why some bugs from another planet should want to attack them, the US public doesn't want to know what the Islamic terrorists and the Taliban have against the US, or indeed who they really are. For all they care, they are bugs from outer space.
Of course, what is missing in Verhoeven's picture are the capitalists. But he is looking at everyday fascism from within, as experienced by the fascist youth, who would naturally not be exposed to nor would be curious about the Krupps and Thyssens behind the scenes.
Hakki