Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 10:04:03 -0600 (CST)
From: Bryan Alexander <balexand-AT-beta.centenary.edu>
Subject: Re: STARSHIP TROOPERS


I'm not the irony is this global.  Let me reply within:

Bryan Alexander				www.centenary.edu/~balexand
313 Jackson Hall			(318) 869-5082 (office)
Centenary College of Louisiana		(318) 869-5139 (fax)
    "We lack resistance to the present." -Deleuze and Guattari

On Sun, 7 Dec 1997 hijinks-AT-UTARLG.UTA.EDU wrote:

> I notice that all readings proposed so far of Starship Troopers see it as
> a recruiting film. Such readings de-ironize what has to be one of the most
> ironic films I've seen all year..  In fact, it's a textbook study in
> how/why people choose their own oppression (Anti-Oedipus 29). It's a study
> in the mass perversion of desire.

Yes, this is true, about choices made, the voluntary mobilization of
desire for fascisms.  And yet the movie allows no scope for any other
choice, really.  The system is total.  

> 
> Certain key scenes in the film, as well as things I've heard from
> Verhoeven, substantiate such a reading.   Verhoeven picked the most vapid
> 90210-Aaron-Spelling-schlock-reject actors he could.  Who can take that
> always-beaming young starship pilot and her stud-muffin trainer seriously? 
> (Who can even remember the character names?) And then there were the
> endless war-movie cliches trotted out for us, from Johnny Comes Marching
> Home (wasn't the main character named Johnny Rico?) to All Quiet on the
> W.Front to Full Metal jacket. Trotted out, I might add, in the slickest
> possible manner. No pathos.

Well, we do get bits of pathos throughout - Rico being sad at his fellow
trooper's perforation at boot camp, and so forth.  And Johnny's the name
of the book's main character, so we can't lay the blame fully on director
V.
	But keep in mind that such wretched actors and such vile dialogue
are actually taken quite seriously on tv and in films from Hollywood.

> 
> The teacher/recruitor -- Johnny's mentor (modelled after the same
> kind of figure in All Quiet ...) -- is our primary key for understanding
> the fascism that this movie mocks. Johnny joins up for love, pining away
> for who he cannot have and ignoring the one who pined for him (Dina Me
> NO CARRIER

Sure.  But at the same time that mentoring is very straight in the
Heinlein book (and in nearly every Heinlein work,a ctually), very sincere.
He's the dada who gets to be killed (two dead dads for Rico, notice) so he
can have mom.  Really infantilism on a vast scale.

> 
>  
>  On Sun, 7 Dec 1997, Jacob Robertson wrote: 
> NOCyer's character).  Yet later in the movie, when his mentor tells him
> it's OK, he accepts Dina'Meyer's character and sleeps with her.  What does
> this show but his complete identification with the Law? Yet what is
> crucial is that choice to obey was made freely, as his earlier
> conversation with his mentor/teacher made clear.
> 
> The ending of the film also made the irony clear.  The sign of victory is
> a neo-Gestapo figure reading fear from the Bug's mind.  What makes this
> significant is how the bugs were shown to have no feelings whatsoever, as
> demonstrated by the irrepressible gore factor. So we have two folds that
> meet at this moment: human fear is alleviated, and the completely Other is
> humanized. And then: jump cut to recruiting film! I laughed out loud in
> the theater at this point, but it was an uneasy laughter, for what it
> showed me was how easily the socius codes the flow of desire (the jump on
> Johnny's part from love to war) "to inscribe them, to record them, to see
> to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled,
> regulated" (A-O 33).

I agree.  An uneasy combo.
	Which is how I tend to view the movie, now.  There's the satire,
but it acts to support/humanize/make less onerous the fascism of it all.
Verhoeven wants to have his cake and sent it to the front lines, too.

> 
> The most interesting character, I might add, was Dina Meyer's character
> (was she called Izzy?).

Diz, worse yet.

> She was clearly the natural leader, as demonsrated
> by her position on the sports team scenario that opened the film;

Which seemed very dull and serious to me.  No real moves for comedy or
satire at all.

> she
> chose out of knowledge of who she was -- she chose the military and Johnny
> freely without the baggage of identifications plaguing Johnny. Hence her
> character rang true -- naturally she was overlooked for promotions, though
> she did everything and more that Johnny's character did.  In fact, she was
> passed over  again after Johnny's boot camp gaffe in favor of the tall
> blonde-haired doofus.  Which ultimately makes the point that idiots
> identify with the Law and will be rewarded by it -- the catch being that
> in this movie we are  cynically invited to sneer and laugh, whereas in a
> movie like Forest Gump it is played straight (at least in how it was
> appropriated by the Right ).

Similar function, yeah: disobey and be killed is the role of the point of
view character's attached one.  So the main character can obey and be
saved.

> That she is killed soon after Johnny sleeps
> with her is necessitated by the fact that Johnny can't compete with her --
> she is more interesting, stronger as a person, and therefore clearly
> marked as the sacrifice. So cearly marked that halfway through the film we
> ALL knew she was going to die! Cause who gave a shit about any other
> character?

At this point I was so clearly siding with the Arachnids, I rejoiced at
all human destruction.

> 
> I have had several discussions with friends about this movie, and about
> 3/4 of them read it straight, un-ironic. What interests me is how none of
>  them caught Johnny's identification with the Law qua his mentor/teacher
> or the blandness of the characters as significant.  Why this blind spot
> regarding such significant filmic elements?

Perhaps because the cliche was too heavy?

> 
> Thomas Rickert
> 
>  > 
> > 
> > Bryan Alexander wrote:
> > 
> > > I like the link to Virilio's dystopia.  That's pretty useful - and can
> > > also be read alongside/against Guattari's genealogical essay in the same
> > > volume.
> > >         Let me run with your tendril for a sec: if we're supposed to
> > > identify with the army in the film (hilarious Anglo-Aryan, especially for
> > > Argentina (at the start)), the way I survived the 2.25 hour ordeal (aside
> > > from standing up at one point, saluting with stiff arm forward, and
> > > shouting "Sieg Heil!", which did make us all feel better) was by siding
> > > with the aliens.  After all, they're far more interesting.  Since the
> > > movie makes them so hostile as to be nearly totally blank, I enjoyed
> > > trying to feel through their nature as machines devoted to function.  Of
> > > course, by the end I was also willing a huge rock to be hurled at Earth
> > > again... this time at Hollywood...
> > >
> > 
> >  Yeah, what could be BETTER than watching Doogie Howser in Nazi scientist garb
> > pronounce triumphantly, "It's afraid!" followed by uproarious hoorays? - as if the
> > whole purpose of the movie was to get the inhuman "monsters" to know who's the #1
> > race.
> > 
> > 
>