Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 02:21:22 +0200
From: douglas edric stanley <destanley-AT-teaser.fr>
Subject: Re:  Re: STARSHIP TROOPERS


>I haven't seen Starship Troopers yet, but I am amazed at all the movies that I
>read as ironic to the point of histrionicity (e.g. Independence Day), that
>other people read straight.  The same irony that academia seems rife with.
>The same irony that may be the privileged mode of docilizing bodies in what
>Deleuze called the societies of control.

This to me is a real cop-out. Typical postmodern hash. I've never bought
the whole "it's ironic" deal. When you look at something like Dr.
Strangelove (as this dicussion seems to be taking a very male military
bent, even if it does pretend critical attitudes), it is in the form
itself, the narrative devices used, and certainly the figures or "tropes",
that determine the irony. In other words, the film is ironic through and
through. In that sense, I can understand what people mean by ironic. But
now, on the other hand, if you take a film like Independence Day (which is
absolutely NOT an ironically charged film, and which without a doubt
attempts reconstruction of an ever decaying american ideal [America as
oddly charged "desoeuvrement"]), and then you slap a sort of parentheses
around it, almost like bookends, saying "ha ha, it's ironic", well... the
joke just doesn't stick. Having seen that horrible film (Independence Day),
I still feel like I lived through it as if someone were bonking me on the
head. You can tell me that it was only a joke, but my head hurts
nevertheless. A bit like what people here are calling a "frat joke" or
frat-whatever : oh, but we were just joking.

The question is what is constructed by the film, what does the film or even
the story achieve in its construction, and not what the "intentions" of the
makers or the interepretors were or are. What is the displacement, what is
the "dispositif", what is the machine, what is the process? Not: what are
my intentions, what am I trying to say, in whose name am I speaking, etc.,
etc.


Speaking in one's own name is difficult enough. How then can people pretend
to be speaking in the name of someone else, or something else? Beyond me...


Douglas Edric Stanley
destanley-AT-Teaser.fr