How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
As a sci-fi enthusiast I love the book. As a lover of bad movies, I love the movie. I recommend both, but for completely different reasons.
Edit: If you're leaving a downvote care to explain? Do you want me to cite that Verhoeven didn't finish the book? (which is in the article here!) That the book and movie aren't different? Or what? I'm very confused. I'm just trying to say that the article is talking about the movie and not the book.
I'd put Starship Troopers in the "bad" category because it is really campy. It is so on the nose that it becomes absurd and funny (past the on the nose that is annoying). It reminds me of a scene in Birdemic where they are like "Man, that was a good movie: An Inconvenient Truth." which was thrown in out of nowhere as if the writer only read the summary on the wikipedia entry for "foreshadowing" and said "oh, I need some of that in my story." In Starship Troopers it is undeniably clear that they are drawing parallels to Nazis, they even make fun of this in this article where they talk about the identical flag. Everything about this movie is extremely over the top. But this is also what makes it so funny.
Enjoyable and a lot of fun, but definitely in the bad movie category.
When bringing up all the symbolism and themes in the movie, I always get a lot of quizzical looks and disagreement.
It's very weird/disturbing.
Thought the book was interesting science fiction with (in retrospect) bad politics mixed in.
I don't remotely understand the movie, the bits which were supposed to be satirical were lost in whatever slim excuse for a plot the movie had. It basically stripped away all the interesting science fiction bits and devolved into a bunch of people running around with guns shouting randomly at giant bugs.
That was part of the satire actually. When a pro-militaristic society knows nothing but violence, they continuously look at the problem through a violence-only lens.
> It basically stripped away all the interesting science fiction bits
The propaganda bits and sarcastic take-down of fascism is the big part of the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijvTiDnWJLE
Its probably easier to see the sarcasm with all of the Federal News Network clips in a row?
Or maybe the "Failure of Democracy" speech?
Maybe it was a good satire I have no idea. I get enough politics in my life passively without going to a movie to get even more of it.
If I'd thought of it as "Political Satire" I'd have never gone to the movie. I was looking for a good/ interesting science fiction movie which it wasn't.
I don't agree with Heinlein's weird quasi-militaristic ideals. But I also didn't want to sit though 2 hours of someone skewering it. If they'd made a good movie and skewered Heinlein, I'd have been fine with that.
Case in point: Star Wars, the beloved Sci-fi space opera, also leans on heavy Nazi / Fascist themes when building up the empire. Its supposed to be the "safe" subject of discussion and biting satire.
Whenever I point out the fact that Starship Troopers makes zero sense and is just a plain bad movie, the singular response I get is that "It's great political satire". Again, maybe it is. That's not the genre of movie I was interested in watching, it still isn't.
Also, for what it's worth, the only Star Wars movie released in the 90s was The Phantom Menace which was nearly as bad as Starship Troopers.
Its kind of straightforward to me. So I'm not really going to defend it. Its neither high-brow nor low-brow... requires a bit of thinking but not really enough to keep my brain active the whole time.
A movie that was more-low brow (ie: Mission Impossible) would be better, as would a high-brow movie. Starship troopers kinda sits in an awkward spot as a film for me.
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I think the point that David Roth is making here however, is that we're seeing more, and more politicians make "Starship Trooper" arguments today, in 2020, to defend themselves and their actions.
Starship troopers was never a "good" or "great" film. Its more horrifying to see that the modern political discourse has leaned into Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers was a over-the-top, almost cartoon-interpretation, of political satire. The fact that modern arguments of 2020 are looking anything like Starship Troopers is the problem.
I seem to remember the irony being completely missed at the time, and it simply being panned as a not-very-good action movie.
But I have seen it done so many times. Writers take a work of fiction such as a book or movie where the author generally has a similar outlook and use that to draw lessons. You see that a lot on the left, as well as on the right with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I don't think it is convincing anyone. Anybody can write a book where the people they admire become heroes and the policy they espouse has a good outcome, or the people they despise become villains and the policy they are against leads to bad outcomes. How close the book universe is to the real universe is a different story.
The real life Lord of the Flies illustrates this well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23123609
TLDR: After being shipwrecked, everyone got along and cooperated, and remained life-long friends.
Books, movies, and other consumable media (songs, poems, etc. etc.) present perhaps the strongest arguments from various "camps". They are strongly representative of the ideals and ideas of large groups of people.
Just because Logos is effective on you, doesn't mean its the best methodology in general. Arguments towards authority and emotion must be understood as such, and provide greater insight to the crowds you're discussing with.
If you're going Logos-only into a discussion, you've effectively disarmed yourself. Your debate opponent will use Ethos, Logos, and Pathos to get a rhetorical advantage against you.
Therefore, its important to learn the Ethos-based and Pathos-based arguments that members of a crowd will make, in preparation before you discuss matters with them.
Moreso, the fact that this film is so misunderstood suggests that it was an exception to its genre. Most science fiction and westerns are set as they are, in space or on a vast prairie, so as to remove all noise and closely examine an area of human interest. If not explicit, they are absolutely intended to be relevant.
It's a bit like dunking on libertarian idiots on facebook, but refusing to engage with Richard Epstein[1]. Sure, it's a thing one can do, and it's good for laughs from time to time, but ultimately, engaging with a weaker version of an idea betrays a weakness in the interlocutor, not the subject.
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No, the movie was written before someone noticed some superficial similarities and suggested seeking the rights to the book for marketing purposes. Veerhoeven read less than half of the book, sure, and thought it was advocating fascism and incorporated some cosmetic elements from that portion of the book into the film, but the book wasn't the basis of the film, even in a hostile response kind of way, just a bystander that got dragged into a canned rant by a ranter who didn’t read it before deciding it was promoting what he was already ranting about, an all too familiar phenomenon to anyone who has spent much time in lightly moderated online discussion groups, if not the most familiar origin story for a licensed film “adaptation” of a book.
Source? The Wikipedia article states that the screenwriter was a fan of the book.
[1] "We will not allow anyone to divide our citizens by race or background. We will not allow them to foment hate, discord and distrust" as just one recent example.
But check the reviews when it came out -- most of our enlightened, educated cultural critics missed the gag.
You even wind up with the two most vapid characters, after having found love elsewhere, winding up together because why not, those other, better people died. It actually works really well as an unconventional character arc that the actors may or may not have been in on.
This is why I like the movie. This is also why I call it a "bad movie" too. It can be bad and good. I'm learning that a lot of HN users don't know what the bad movie genre is. See https://www.reddit.com/r/badMovies/
> It is very campy
So... you're agreeing with me?
You say that and yet so many of its critics at the time did not get it. It is among the most blatant of all satires (right up there with Idiocracy) ever made, yet it still flew over the heads of critics like Roger Ebert [1].
Ebert claimed to have memorized the novel as a child. Right out of the gate, he calls it "true to its source." No, it's completely antithetical to its source! Verhoeven hated the source novel so much he turned his adaptation into a farce intended to depict how banal and juvenile he thought Heinlein's idea of a militaristic society was. Now, plenty of people disagree with Verhoeven and love the novel, but it's completely incorrect to call the movie a faithful adaptation.
The film was simply operating on a level that people were not prepared for at the time. Today, it's a different story. Of course, it borrows heavily from Huxley's Brave New World which itself is terrifyingly prescient (and also faced criticism at the time). Some stories might just be ahead of their time. Over-the-top satires of contemporary society seem to be particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon.
[1] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/starship-troopers-1997