Starship Troopers (1997)
After the Showgirls fiasco, Verhoeven decided to reunite with a lot of the behind-the-scenes talent from Robocop and return to SF, with an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's legendary (and legendarily controversial) 1959 novel Starship Troopers. (Hilariously, they were developing their own giant bug movie and bought the rights to the novel in pre-production so Heinlein's estate wouldn't sue them).I'm hard-pressed to think of a writer and director more suited to each other than Heinlein and Verhoeven, simply because both of them are so batshit insane. Heinlein was capable of a bit more lucidity, and the thing that's so scary about the novel Starship Troopers is just how lucid it is. Although it's been accused of advocacy for fascism so often that it has its own corollary to Godwin's Law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”) stating that due to Starship Troopers, whenever Heinlein is mentioned in an online debate, the maximum time before Nazis/Hitler are dragged out of mothballs to participate is three days.
Starship Troopers is not fascist. Its utopian society is not a dictatorship, it is actually a democracy, but it's a democracy where the franchise has been restricted severely: only military veterans are eligible for citizenship, but citizenship confers all the same freedoms in Heinleintopia as it did in the US at the time he was writing. Heinlein's justification for this is that you should have balls if you're going to be voting and stuff, which is a fair point—balls are important—but many of his critics counter that there's more than one type of balls, more ways to demonstrate possession thereof, etc etc. I'm definitely on the side of Heinlein's political critics, but I can't get with the cats who try to undermine his skills as a writer and rhetorician: he makes the case for his militaristic society very well. As for the accusations that there's no plot, just Heinlein surrogates lecturing the protagonist in his History and Moral Philosophy classes, sure, that's basically the whole book, aside from some loving descriptions of military life, but keep in mind that's the book Heinlein was writing. His two points were a) the military is awesome, and b) you're only worth a shit as a human being if you man up and enlist. Disagree with either point? Fine, I do too, but don't sweat the technique.
Heinlein's influence on SF was, it goes without saying, massive, and his books where he isn't typing one-handed while maniacally fapping to military recruitment posters are pretty fuckin' sweet. Starship Troopers, though, resonated in three historically important ways:
(1) The concept of powered armor was introduced to SF. Sound like a minor point made by a geek who overinflates the importance of SF minutiae? Nuh uh uh, my friend, without powered armor what the fuck is Ripley supposed to kick the Big Bitch's ass with in Aliens? And are you seriously telling me you're willing to live in a universe without the climax to Aliens? That's what I thought.
(2) Starship Troopers, combined with his experiences in Vietnam, pissed Joe Haldeman off enough to write The Forever War, which is one of the best SF books of all time on top of being some damn fine lit-crit (although the “enemy” in The Forever War is, like in Starship Troopers, an alien hive-mind, Haldeman's take is that humans need to evolve to finally communicate with the bad guys—a nice fuck you to Heinlein's “we rule and are the clear superiors” bluster—and it's only a couple thousand years in the future when humanity has become several million genetic clones of the same individual and thus a hive-mind of its own that we can finally talk to the aliens and end the war.)
(3) Paul Verhoeven read about the first ten pages of the book and said, “Vot de fock is dis boolshit? Dis esshole writes booook vere Nazis err goot gice? Fuck Rubbert Heinlein, I mek moofie vere ve mek fun of dis kind uff shit vith scathing satirical perspectif unt indict mess media een complicity vith muddern feshism. Fuck de Nazis . . .” as he threw the book down and walked away mumbling to himself.
Starship Troopers the movie has very little to do with the book. Some character names are the same, and people are fighting giant bugs, but that's about it. The quotes from the book, like when we sit in on Casper Van Dien's History and Moral Philosophy class and Michael Ironside is lecturing with Heinlein's exact words, the perspective is different—Heinlein's not in charge, Paul Verhoeven and his mighty Verfremdungseffekt are.
I mentioned this when I was talking about Robocop, and may have seemed like a pretentious wiseass while doing so. But to thine self be true, I say, and since I am a pretentious wiseass let me expand on this idea. Starship Troopers is, on every level, deliberately slick and artificial. The choice to cast people in their late 20s and early 30s to play high school students was deliberate, as was the choice to make all of those people impossibly beautiful. The acting may look stiff—if you're a fucking civilian—but it's because Paul's not concerned with reality here, he's making a self-reflexive post-modern giant bug movie where the observed is the primary observer and is the first line of aesthetic and political defense. People and events exist for their semiotic value, not as representations of reality. Tropes like the periodic internet browser scenes where the movie asks you, the audience, if you want to know more about things like televised executions, the torture of military prisoners, and the rule by fiat of the Wehrmacht-uniformed world military government basically serve to remind the audience that if you agree with any of this shit you're watching, you're an asshole. In the end, Starship Troopers is an anti-propaganda movie made to look like it's pro-, due to the immense skill and insanity of the director.
The story opens with a news broadcast of a battle where the people are getting their asses handed to them by giant bugs. Casper Van Dien runs in front of the camera, hollers some shit at the cameraman before the cameraman gets impaled by a giant bug, who subsequently fucks Casper up. Fade to black, flashback to one year earlier, where a freshly scrubbed Casper is in high school, with best friend Neil Patrick Harris showing off his nascent psychic abilities, cocktease girlfriend Denise Richards, and awkwardness with the quarterback of the football team, who has a crush on him, but it's not gay because the quarterback's a girl, Dina Meyer.
NPH and Denise enlist in the military to become citizens, but Casper's pussy-ass limousine liberal parents want him to go to Harvard and attempt to bribe him with a vacation to a fairly hedonistic-sounding alien planet, but Casper is desperate to impress his cocktease soon-to-be-spaceship-pilot girlfriend, so he enlists.
Basic training goes pretty well, as Casper realizes immediately that drill sergeant Clancy Brown is only busting his and everyone's balls as motivation. But soon there's trouble in paradise as Dina Meyer transfers into Casper's unit, re-introducing their weird sexual tension resulting from her being too hot for Casper to want to fuck or something (why he's so hung up on Denise Richards is an eternal mystery), then Casper gets dumped by Denise Richards and accidentally gets one of his fellow grunts killed during an exercise, for which Casper gets publicly flogged. At loose ends, Casper decides to quit the infantry, but before he can, the Bugs bug-nuke Buenos Aires—Casper's hometown (globalization has turned the whole world into Southern California)—and he goes back to Clancy Brown and asks to take back his resignation. Clancy Brown—being awesome at this kind of thing—barks “Is this your signature [on the resignation form]?” and Casper says “Sir, yes, sir,” because it is, but Clancy Brown rips up the form and says, “Doesn't look like it to me.” BECAUSE THIS IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Having testicles means never having to reveal your sentimental side.
So our intrepid heroes go to war. Casper gets into a fight with Denise Richards' new boyfriend, a smarmy asshole whose football team Casper's beat right before they all enlisted. Jake Busey settles nicely into the role of big, backslapping hick best friend, and Casper gradually warms up to Dina Meyer (seriously, it takes him so long I started thinking he was gay), and his former high school civics teacher Michael Ironside shows up as the leader of a particularly hard-ass unit Casper gets reassigned to after getting “killed” (which only requires a brief stay in the hospital under the right circumstances, though mysteriously some other people actually die when they get killed). Also in this unit is a pre-Wire Seth Gilliam, playing a scenery-chewing lunatic nerd.
So a lot of machine-gunning of Bugs happens. Casper finally fucks Dina Meyer. And the Bugs lay a terrific ambush for our heroes by butchering a bunch of Mormons (though this accidentally makes the Bugs a little too sympathetic . . .) and leaving a raving Marshall Bell the only warning that the people are about to get their asses kicked. Michael Ironside and Dina Meyer both die (unless Michael Ironside gets killed earlier; it's a little confusing with all the Bugs running around) and Casper is left in charge to rescue Denise Richards and Patrick “Smarmy Boyfriend” Muldoon from the Brain Bug, who is really fucking disgusting. Muldoon is toast—the Brian Bug eats his brain—but Casper gets Denise out of there, and ultimately Clancy Brown captures the Brain Bug (he had himself busted back to private so he could go kick ass BECAUSE GODDAMMIT THAT'S HOW MEN oh never mind) and Neil Patrick Harris, looking tres fasciste, reads the Brain Bug's mind and announces triumphantly “He's AFRAID!” to full-throated cheers. And we close with a military recruitment video starring all our surviving protagonists.
Starship Troopers, due to its deliberate use of artifice to make its political points, sounds kind of retarded when you recap the plot, precisely because the plot has to be retarded in order to make the political points about the dangers of unthinkingly supporting militarism and the way diagrammatic pro-military cinema does so by being so constructed, leaving nothing for the audience to think about, resulting in the audience accepting the message by default because they've shut down though. (Who's got my bail money when I get popped by the grammar police?) In a funny way, Paul Verhoeven made a better movie by not having read the book (or the whole book, either way he clearly didn't give much of a fuck about fidelity to source material) because a careful reading of the not-quite-fascist perspective of the book would have weakened the force with which Paul put militaristic fascism on blast in the movie. Everything, Casper Van Dien's seemingly genetically engineered Master Race look, the military uniforms taken directly from WWII German designs, it's all about sticking it to the Nazis.
This makes Starship Troopers, bizarrely, the kind of personal/political cinema advocated by the French New Wave. Granted, Truffaut and Godard weren't envisioning personal expression as requiring $100 million, giant CGI bugs from horizon to horizon, or the expression of gender equality through gratuitous coed barracks shower scenes. But clearly for Paul Verhoeven, who grew up during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, this anti-Nazi middle finger has personal resonance, and that personal resonance makes this more than just a Giant Bug Movie.
In Conclusion, some anticipated FAQ's:
Q: Hey, Bowes, why the fuck did you need three parts to write about one part of Paul Verhoeven's career when it only took you one each to write about Tony Scott and Kathryn Bigelow?
A: Fuck you.
Q: What's so special about Paul Verhoeven's middle five American movies?
A: I'm glad you asked. Ever since the Hollywood studio system started absorbing UFA expats fleeing Weimar and then Hitler, foreign directors have provided an important perspective. It's basic human nature that one's perspective on one's own people is different from one's perspective on someone else's people. Immigrants have defined the American experience because, by choosing to come here, they clearly like the place a lot more than most of the rest of us do. And, as with any observer, if you actually observe rather than use your observations to reinforce preconceived results, the observation of a strange place using one's own previous experiences in another place can lead to new insights to the natives of that place. Which is a murky and convoluted way of saying that Paul Verhoeven sees a lot of the fake sex, obsession with violence, and omnipresent artifice in American society.
Q: Why didn't you talk about Flesh + Blood or Hollow Man, since you're talking about the movies Paul Verhoeven made in America?
A: Because they both suck.
Q: You claim Paul Verhoeven is an auteur. What is/are his directorial signature(s)?
A: (1) Meticulous and unique framing (watch his movies, adjectives fail me), (2) the smoothest steadicam shots you'll ever see, (3) a tendency similar to Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, and Quentin Tarantino to stylize his depictions of violence, but in a more graphic and brutal way than any of the others mentioned who, respectively, are slightly more realistic, far more dance-inspired, and more cartoony, (4) the mistaken belief that a woman can come while doubled over backwards and grabbing her ankles with her teeth, and (5) the way his characters walk—the only way I can describe it is as “striding determinedly with upright posture.” Maybe it's the way his steadicam operator shoots those shots, but I swear I've never seen anyone walk like they do in Paul Verhoeven movies.
Q: Which is more awesomely ridiculous in Paul Verhoeven movies, the dancing or the sex scenes?
A: Definitely the dancing. Some people actually tried to do the sex positions in Basic Instinct,
even though they all pulled hamstrings in so doing.
Q: How come you didn't mention the triple-breasted whore in Total Recall?
A: So I could mention her here. One love for Hitchhiker's Guide!
Q: Can I stop reading now?
A: Sure. Thanks for sticking around for all this!
No comments:
Post a Comment