In
1997 I saw a movie that tickled all of my primordial teenage senses, like the
kind of senses that make every teenage boy think he can fight hordes of aliens
in a spandex uniform. For its time Starship Troopers was a visual feast—with
effects from Phil Tippet who gave us the Jurassic Park dinosaurs—and it was a
gory sci-fi celebration of cartoonish violence, camaraderie, and a few cheeky snippets
of nudity. What thirteen year old boy wouldn’t completely flip his lid in
anticipation? Mothers would wrinkle their brows in disgust, censors would point
fingers at violent video games, and all the while we happy teenage boys would
watch again and again to relive its highlights. I’m twenty-six now, and it
suffices to say that I, like many of you, have moved on from most of the
irresponsible fantasies of my youth (except maybe for the occasional snippets
part). So now I stand clutching a DVD case of this film with fifteen years of
retrospect, two sequels, a cartoon series, and a copy of Robert E. Heinlein’s
original book, and I find myself drawn to one conclusion: This movie outsmarted
me. It outsmarted me, and it outsmarted the vast viewing majority. It
outsmarted many of those critics that watched it just once, and even some of
those who watched it twice. But what is really remarkable, and is possibly the
film’s greatest quality, and greatest weakness is that somehow this film
managed to outsmart itself.
So
now I know that you think I’m crazy. Here we are talking about a movie that
contains the line: “They sucked his brains out,” and I’m somehow supposed to
convince you that this movie was too subtle for the mainstream audience, and
even for a sizable part of the critical establishment that panned it for being
either a big dumb blood fest, or for being a raving fascist’s wet dream. Even
to this day I try to explain what an amazingly clever film this is to fellow
writers, and find them looking at me like I’ve fallen out of a tree. So then,
how is this big budget CGI showcase, and rightwing gunwank all that different
to the modern schlockbusters of the Bay establishment? Well, when we take a
moment to lay out all of the main features of ST, we find that the ingredients
for a truly subversive piece of satire are actually quite obviously present. We
first notice the combination of writer and renegade former-studio exec Ed
Neumeier, and the legendary provocateur and sometimes filmmaker Paul Verhoeven.
Given the joyous satirical romp that was Robocop—this pair’s previous venture—we
should have all heard the claxons wailing, and the big red arrows directing us
to the sign that says, “You are not meant to take this at face value”. Next we
can take another look at the source material. The ST movie is quite famous for
how greatly it diverges from the Heinlein novel, and in critical debates this
has sometimes overshadowed the movie’s own qualities. Ever the topic of late
night internet flame wars, and forum-based intellectual debate—with “your mum
certainly thought so” being the typical clinching argument—the major
differences between the film and book should have also be a sign that the we
should not regard the film as a true adaptation of a book that is quite
unambiguous in its militarist connotations.
Okay,
so if it is actually a clever satire then what is this joke that we all
apparently missed? To put it frankly, the joke here is that the movie was
intentionally designed to make us root for a mindless swarm of violent
monsters, and I’m not talking about the insects. As the film comes to its final
moments we see our protagonist Johnny Rico has completed his development from a
low scoring high school jock with no ambition, and no real grasp of the society
he lives in, has evolved into a suicidally loyal soldier that honestly believes
that his state’s cause is just, that his enemy is a grotesque and inferior life
form, and that any one man can win the war. At this point the film kicks into
its trademark newscast mode, blasts us with a bombastic score, and says “We
need you, join up today!” This generally elicits a hooting cheer from the
audience, myself included, and we all drain from the theatre filled with dreams
of glory. As Paul Verhoeven says in the ST DVD commentary, “War makes fascists
of us all”.
Okay,
so to keep things clear, no, I did not just call you a Nazi. Much of the film’s
critical backlash came in the form of critics that did recognize ST’s mock
fascist connotations, or were unable to see them within the context of a
satire. Perhaps the biggest reason for the film’s mixed reception is that it
represents something that is very difficult for modern audiences and the critics
to come to terms with. The film was purposely designed to be a complete
reproduction of a war propaganda film, and to function in very much the same
way. The film’s almost comical choice of perfect bodied, square jawed main
actors, as well as its in-your face violence against a distant and dehumanized
enemy, and its “one man can make the difference” theme make this film almost
indistinguishable from the kind of wartime propaganda that dominated early
twentieth century theatres. The film deliberately sets out to present the
audience with a propaganda film about a future fascist society in a war against
a far off and technologically inferior enemy, and despite all of our supposedly
evolved sensibilities as a late twentieth century society—and now early
twenty-first—the majority of the audience cheers, jumps onboard and say, “where
do I sign up?” So jarring is this notion to most of the critics that watched
this film during its theatre run that many were simply unable to see past the
film’s outer layers of campy violence and fascist iconography. Such as the case
of Synoptique.com film reviewer Owen Livermore who found himself “stunned and
appalled” at the sight of audiences cheering a film he found so reminiscent of
the 1934 German propaganda film Triumph of
the Will.
So
I guess now we find ourselves asking two questions, what is the point of such a
filmmaking stunt, and how does this still affect us? Critical opinion of ST has
shifted significantly over the past decade, and more critics are turning their
heads to review this film retroactively. The previously mentioned Owen
Livermore has reappraised the film, and recognized its satire, though he still
questions its validity as a film that sets out to deceive its audience, and
other film analysts, such as Robert Ager of collativelearning.com have
completely changed stance altogether, regarding the film as a near-masterpiece
of modern satire. So to address the question of what purpose the film serves,
it is worth looking to the words of the creative team themselves. In the DVD
commentary, Neumeier and Verhoeven call the film an attempt to warn the viewer
of the seductive nature of fascism. In Ager’s analysis he points to a rather spooky
coincidence regarding propaganda’s seductive qualities when he notes that the
supposedly unprovoked bug meteor attack in the film sparks a massive propaganda
driven outcry that leads to war against the bugs, which was designed to
resemble the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the subsequent propaganda
built around it. This contrasts quite shockingly to the terrorist attack of
9/11 that also led to an enormous increase in nationalist propaganda that left the
majority of the population clamouring for revenge. He goes on to note that ST
came out in 1997, which was a time when the Neo-Conservative movement was
gaining ground in the US, and while the film didn’t literally predict 9/11, it
certainly was a film that was aware of the new nationalist conservative mood in
the US. Now it is by no means the
purpose of this analysis to dive into the politics of the current War on
Terror, however, when one considers the raving rightwing nature of the original
ST novel—described by Roger Ebert as a “right-wing sabre rattler”—the
re-establishment of American hegemonic conservatism that was on the rise in
1997, and the provocateur natures of Neumeier and Verhoeven, it does occur to
me that the “warning” that was supposedly the underlying message of this film
was far more relevant than any of us might have predicted at the time.
Okay,
so now that I’ve given this article its obligatory “9/11 analogy” let’s ask how
this film continues to affect us today. I think I’ll start by talking about
something that hits me a lot closer to home: video games. Stay with me on this.
When I ask myself, “How does ST still affect me today?” I can’t help but look
across modern media as a whole and notice that ST’s themes have lived on in
endless video games aimed at teenagers, notably games where: noble, physically
perfect specimens of manhood go out into the universe and slaughter inhuman
beasties from beyond (for great justice). While video games have always copped
a lot of heat over their violent content, and I have always stood up for their
rights as a media form, I have started to see that not all is well in the world
of video game gore. My attention was first grabbed by film analyst and pop
culture expert “Movie Bob” Robert Chipman who noted that the popular Halo
series of games portrayed its blank slate hero and his brand of soldier: the
Spartan Trooper, as being genetically homogenous, emotionless killing machines,
while the series villains represented a culturally diverse society with
multiple races working in cooperation. He notes that the game’s attitude seems
to revolve around the following theme: “Militaristic culture, visibly pretext
on submission of individual-self to a quasi-fascist collective equals good,
while multiple species working together to a common goal equals evil?” While
the ST similarity is almost obnoxiously present within this science fiction
context, the thing that isn’t present in Halo is irony. Halo and the majority
of other mainstream game titles strive to capture the blood and guts crust of
ST, and yet almost none of them seem to realize that ST does not set a societal
template to follow, but to avoid. If this still seems a little distant, and
like it has nothing to do with current events, then let’s try something a
little more contemporary. The recent documentary Returning Fire examines the cross-platform blockbuster game series Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, and its
legion of pretenders, and clone games, and points to the way that they thrust
the player into perfectly simulated war environments, modelled on video footage
sent back from Iraq, and Afghanistan. These games, though entertaining, are
visual simulations of war that invite us to become desensitized to the strange
environments and new technologies of war, and even the notion of killing via
remote control. If any of this sounds familiar, then I might direct your
attention to various newsfeed scenes throughout ST, namely the one where Dougie
Houser methodically explains the how to terminate an entrapped arachnid warrior
in a live public service announcement. To put this in slightly less ambiguous
terms: a high ranking military officer shoots a captive enemy soldier on live
television, and we didn’t feel a thing. This newsreel goes on to show school
children being taught to stamp on cockroaches for fun, and then the children
are given an opportunity to familiarize themselves with an assault rifle and
take home their own bullet so they can be comfortable with them. The games I
mentioned are largely targeted at teens and young adult males, the exact
demographic that cheered in 1934, and 1997 respectively.
As
I come to the end of my train of thought, I am forced to regress to my original
statement on this matter. I said that this film didn’t just outsmart the
regular movie-goer, and manage to shock critics into disbelief, or even denial,
I also said that it managed to outsmart itself. The film’s weak critical
reception was not purely a result of its confronting subject matter, but also
it was due to the creative team’s decision to hide its true meaning under a
blockbuster exterior, and make no attempt to hand-hold audiences by drawing
attention to the notion that war and fascism are bad things. Making such a
statement without any attempt at subtlety would have made it impossible to
connect to the book at all, and likely have made the film come across as sanctimonious
and preachy. By remaining ambiguous the film strayed into the awkward zone
between blockbuster military wank—what it is typically mistaken for—and a more
direct criticism of militarism such as Dr Strangelove, all of which led to the
film being largely misunderstood, and even derided upon its release. An
amusing, and perhaps even poignant moment in the film comes when an accused
murderer is tried, and convicted to death on the public newsfeed, with his
execution scheduled as prime time entertainment later that night. This cameo by
Ed Neumeier always manages to bring a smile to my face, as I watch poor Ed
hangs his head in resignation as he accepts his inevitable execution by the
media. Maybe he didn’t outsmart himself after all. Maybe he knew exactly what
he was doing, but he just accepted the consequences. As Neumeier stated in a
response to Mimi Brickmeyer’s 2003 article on ST, he believed that “Starship
endures so successfully in its afterlife, finding a
growing and loyal audience along with many re-appreciations by the critical
community” and this is precisely because it did not treat us like fools
that needed to be told what a terrible thing war is. Somehow, in not telling
the truth, this film has actually succeeded in being more honest to its
viewers. Watch it again sometime, and when the film asks you to join up, take a
moment to think your answer through, because figuring things out for yourself
is the only true freedom, make up your own mind. See you on the bounce trooper.
