1999

21.3

Jeffrey Cass
SS Troopers: Cybernostalgia and Paul Verhoeven’s Fascist Flirtation

Edward Neumeier, writer for the screenplay of Starship Troopers (1997), identifies the imaginative source for the film’s "new kind of enemy"—multitudes of relentless, malevolent bugs—as fear of the cultural other. He imaginatively links his childhood fear of bugs to a lecture that a junior high science teacher once gave on the Chinese. He recalls the instructor’s words: "‘The Chinese, they’ll march at you like zombies with wooden sticks in their hands, and even if you had a machine gun in your hand, they’d overwhelm you.’ That’s what I think about the bugs" (Kronke 1). Perhaps not coincidentally, the film depicts no central Asian characters, for their cultural otherness has been subsumed into the nearly impervious bodies of alien insects. Their conspicuous human absence makes their inhuman presence all the more palpable. The infantry in this futuristic film seems fully integrated and politically correct in most ways; in fact, Paul Sammon refers to Camp Currie’s famous "shower scene" as the film’s "presentation of a non-sexist, egalitarian future" (Making 79). Men and women, blacks and whites and hispanics, train together, shower together, and—armed with Neumeier’s childhood "machine guns’ (now futuristic weapons)—fight and die together. But the suspicious lack of Asian characters undermines the democratic globalism seemingly promised by the UCF (United Citizen Federation) and points to the political danger posed by Asians, reified both by the bugs’ bodily invulnerability and implausibly cunning intelligence. The movie’s sub rosa Orientalism, camouflaged by spectacular special effects, a mind-numbing soundtrack, and appealing (non-Asian) teenage characters, quietly emerges in Verhoeven’s filmic representation of two titanic military dictatorships that struggle for galactic dominion.

The political overtones of the movie, powerful and disturbing, have their origins in the ideological intensity of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel, and critics have debated whether Heinlein’s irony redeems his novel from an unremittingly grim fascism. Elizabeth Anne Hull attempts to place Heinlein within a sermonizing tradition that ironizes its subject matter so that readers will not find "clear answers to vital questions." Instead, Heinlein gives them the freedom to draw their "own conclusions" (38). Absolute choice, in effect, absolves the novel from its darker underpinnings and the reader from reacting distastefully to the novel’s overarching imperialism. H. Bruce Franklin contends that "Starship Troopers measures the distance from the conscript army that fought against the Fascist-Nazi-New World Order drive to conquer the world and the growing ‘military-industrial complex’ . . . that was attempting to hold and expand a worldwide empire against a rising tide of global revolution" (112). In essence, Franklin historically contextualizes Starship Troopers by juxtaposing its military configurations to those of post-World War II America and ratifying them. The United States, thus, may safely rationalize its aggressive imperialist doctrines by claiming it fights a perceived, aggressive imperialism. Dennis Showalter vehemently (and spuriously) defends Starship Troopers against charges of fascism by arguing that the society Heinlein portrays in the novels has "none of the characteristics commonly associated with fascist societies" (114). He writes further: "Such concepts as a revolt against bolshevism, a reaction to liberalism and positivism, and a desire to restore an organic community, can be neither supported nor extrapolated from the novel’s context" (114). Showalter’s literal reading of the novel’s politics glibly pushes aside the ideological implications of a society strictly governed by militarism and the novel’s insistently romantic view of an ungifted soldier who commits himself to an ethos of self-sacrifice and personal responsibility. Finally, Everett Carl Dolman attempts a more sophisticated argument to retrieve Heinlein from the stigma of fascism. Using Weberian political theory, he cleverly suggests that military might has always been the basis of democratic rule. If "militarism can be recognized as an ever-present menace," he writes, "then a fortiori, the danger it represents is even more critical for existing democracies" (197).

While these attempts to retrieve Heinlein’s novel from the jaws of political incorrectness underscore the problematic nature of Heinlein’s glorification of the military, they have largely remained academic debates. Neumeier’s script re-ignites these debates, making them far more public than they had been, for film critics have reenacted the academic disagreements that have dogged Heinlein"s work (Starship Troopers in particular) for the last forty years. Richard Schickel views the world of Starship Troopers as "happily fascist" (102). Similarly, Mark Steyn labels Verhoeven’s film in The Spectator as a "techno-fascist reductio" (36). In the journal Sight and Sound, Steyn further argues that Verhoeven transforms the utopian ethos of the novel into "an aesthetic and ideological field of play" in which "humans . . . look and act more like the Nazis than the Allies." David Denby remarks that the human bug fighters "are made to look like uniformed Fascist hordes" and that "it’s these very Fascist hordes that . . . the movie is celebrating" (72). But J. Hoberman rightly distinguishes between the period in which Heinlein wrote his novel, a decade fraught with "Sputnik anxiety" and mutually assured nuclear destruction, and our own, in which Verhoeven and Neumeier ironize fascism, which the film caricatures, reducing a sinister political movement to yet another "postmodern shibboleth" (77).

Neumeier’s script of Heinlein’s work, which the irrepressible Paul Verhoeven transmutes onto the screen, seems viciously pertinent to a ’90s context. For ours has been a decade that has seen the meteoric rise of military fascism around the globe (from Indonesia to Rwanda to Iraq to North Korea). Ours has been a decade that views with some awe and a great deal of trepidation the enormous growth of the Chinese economy, even as the Chinese government has refused to acknowledge the necessity of those liberties and freedoms that we believe (dubiously, it seems) enable capitalist success. Just as Heinlein’s novel accurately reflects the paranoia of Red Chinese marching zombies, so Neumeier’s script re-inscribes that Orientalist paranoia within a radically altered American landscape. The simple dichotomy between the East and West of the late 1950s has given way to the global slippages of the 1990s: transnational corporations, Web-based markets, polyglot ethnicities, and policing technologies have utterly transformed the meaningfulness of terms like citizen and personal responsibility, terms that seem hopelessly anachronistic for the approaching millennium. Yet the film Starship Troopers nostalgically yearns for precisely this political simplicity, for that easy-to-see cultural difference, for a time (probably mythical) when alienness was often readily visible and identifiable.

Intentionally or not, Neumeier’s script draws upon what I would characterize as Robert Heinlein’s cryptofascism, manifest in his books about conquest and colonization, such as Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Glory Road. Neumeier’s screenplay depicts a "Federal" state that creates a perpetual enemy against whom patriotically inclined men and women, talented and untalented, enlist into military service. During basic training they sharpen innate skills and learn others while transforming their personal, individuated identities into those that fit collectively within the Federal (or State) apparatus. Neumeier’s childhood obsession with the perceived Oriental Other underwrites the film’s ideological descent into empire building and empire defense. The head of the Federal State’s armed forces, Sky Marshall Dienes, both declares war against the bugs and urges galactic dominion: "We must meet the [bug] threat with our valor, our blood, indeed with our very lives, to ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this galaxy, now and always."

The fascist production of symbols in Starship Troopers conforms to the institutional design and intent of the imagined State apparatus. While director George Lucas once used the destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars (1997) to underscore the Empire’s immoral use of powerful technologies over and against the democratic will of its citizens, director Paul Verhoeven repeatedly employs quasi-Nazi symbols in Starship Troopers to emphasize the sleek beauty of technology and its dominant place within the State’s imperial logics. In the Star Wars trilogy, Luke’s severed hand uncannily reminds him of a human ethos that opposes the Empire’s unethical use of technology to dominate intelligent species and exploit their civilizations. In Starship Troopers, the reverse ideology holds sway—the Federal State eagerly sacrifices the individual human life for State conquest. The prosthetic hand becomes the metonymic sign of a technologically dependent and soulless empire. It equips its wounded officers (like the enlistment officer at the Federal Building and Johnny Rico’s commanding officer, Rasczak) with cybernetic, "steel hand" replacements, yet it cares little for their personal disposition. The enlistment officer, who has also lost both his legs, barely manages to hand out paperwork to incoming recruits; Rasczak, the film’s most vocal exponent of the Federal State, asks Rico to shoot him after a Tanker bug rips him in half. Despite his valor, Rasczak’s violent death does not even warrant a memorial service. Thus, technological logics in Starship Troopers promote and drive State security interests; personal fulfillment for the principal characters of the story lies in their heroic self-sacrifice as they enforce that security, whether or not the State ever acknowledges the sacrifice.

The Federal Eagle functions as the State logo, adorning buildings and uniforms alike, eerily similar to the one that graced the architecture and fashions of the Nazis, so prominently displayed in propagandistic films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Moreover, the uniforms of the military elite seem exact replicas of SS uniforms, retro perhaps in this futuristic environment, but nonetheless apt in this familiar yet sinister milieu. Paul Verhoeven intentionally intersperses Nazi imagery and allusions throughout the film. As he admits in an interview with Paul Sammon:

I’d always wanted to do a movie about the Second World War, because I think it is an extremely interesting period. And since I’d experienced the Nazi occupation of my homeland when I was a boy, the concept also had personal connections; Starship Troopers seemed to be an opportunity to explore that period in an unusual way. . . . (68)

The fascist motifs most strongly resonate with Colonel Carl Jenkyns (played by Neil Patrick Harris, Doogie Houser, M.D.), academically the most brilliant among the three friends who have enlisted into Federal service. He also has psychic abilities that he eventually uses on an unsuspecting Johnny Rico. Not surprisingly, by the end of the film, he has achieved a much higher rank than either Carmen or Johnny, twice appearing in jarringly fascist regalia. The first time he appears in a fascist uniform, he admits to his friends that during his stint in Military Intelligence, a State ministry euphemistically referred to as "Games and Theory," he has sent thousands to their deaths in order to obtain valuable information for the war effort, darkly intimating that those are again his intentions, even if his friends are included. When Carmen quietly questions this strategy, he condescendingly booms, "You don’t approve. Well, too bad. We’re in this for the species, boys and girls. It’s simple numbers. They have more." Because authorities need to know more about the "brain bug," the central intelligence of the "bug" hive they are fighting, Carl has no qualms about sending the Federal Transport Authority or the Mobile Infantry out again into battle, sardonically rewarding his friend Johnny Rico, who has barely survived earlier action, with a field promotion to lieutenant. Rico’s response: "I’ll take it, sir, until I die, or you find someone better."

The second time Carl appears as a Federal colonel, he provides the movie’s final encomium (and interpretive gloss) for the efforts of the State’s fighting forces. Predictably, many more thousands of infantry have perished in order to bring the colonel the "brain bug." Carl even disingenuously suggests that the private (Zim) who captures the brain bug is infinitely more important to the war effort than the entire military arsenal of the Federation. That piece of propaganda is aimed directly at Rico and his men in the MI (Mobile Infantry). Carl’s real intentions lie elsewhere. The last image of him is in his state-of-the-art laboratory. Like Dr. Mengele, Colonel Jenkyns experiments on a captive, intelligent life form, knowing (because of his psychic abilities) that the sentient bug is afraid, yet ruthlessly and sadistically continuing his experiments. The filmed experiments are so graphic that FedNet actually censors some of his live experiments on the Brain Bug, sparing the audience from the most disgusting and violent aspects of his investigations, yet affirming at the same time the unbridled power of Games and Theory and the extent to which the Ministry will go to win the war, up to and including genocide. The bugs have been so thoroughly exoticized and demonized throughout the film that the characters (and, I suspect, the film’s audience) care little about the truth of the unknown and unknowable cultural Other. The Ministry only needs to extract the keys to the Other’s destruction as a species. As one survivor of the Buenos Aires disaster puts it, "The only good bug is a dead bug." Neumeier’s childhood visions of unstoppable, colonizing Chinese zombies have been transformed into an allegory of fascist empires and genocidal bug zapping.

The imperialist, military metaphors in Starship Troopers invert the plots of movies such as Star Wars because the inhuman and the technological subvert the human and the mythic. In Return of the Jedi, for example, the Ewoks on Endor’s moon ally themselves with the Rebels against the Empire, their primitive technologies upending more formidable ones wielded by mindless, imperial storm troopers. The organic (in whatever form) overturns the cybernetic. The machines Lucas valorizes—C3PO and Artoo Detoo—still personify human virtues, particularly loyalty and determination; they are at a far remove from their counterparts in Cloud City or on the Death Star. Finally, even Darth Vader wishes to see his son Luke "with his own eyes" rather than with the cybernetic implants he has been using to pursue his enemies throughout Lucas’s trilogy. In Starship Troopers, however, the Federal State privileges the machine: the human being is only a useful conduit for the transfer of deadly technology; the State War Apparatus subsumes him into its ever voracious internal workings. Interestingly, the bugs’ weapons are their bodies, and their colonizing of other planets derives from natural reproduction. They merely send their spores into space. An anti-technological species, the bugs develop a sophisticated war machine that depends strictly on biological manipulation and social function: Warrior bugs (engineered into aggressive infantry fighters), Tanker Bugs (equipped with armored exoskeletons capable of ejecting bursts of corrosive fire), Chariot Bugs (living transports for the Brain Bug, which is incapable of self-propelled movement), Plasma Bugs (equipped with plasma bursts that destroy air cover or incoming battle cruisers), Hopper Bugs (capable of jumping and flight), and Brain Bugs (capable of reasoning; the hive "mind").

The military machinery in Verhoeven’s film, both that of the Federal State and that of the Bugs, reflects imperialist logics, and consequently the hierarchies that comprise their social and political regimes ironically resemble one another. In other words, despite the Federal State’s reliance on technological wizardry and the Bugs’ bodily evolution into biological weapons, the two cultures uncannily mirror one another. Both sides mass and swarm like "locusts," using infantry marines that mindlessly attack the perceived enemy so that their secret and well-protected brain trusts can discover new methods of annihilating the other. Both military machines construct and privilege the values of the species. Both sides exhibit hive mentalities, and both sides appear willing to suffer recklessly high body counts for victory over the perceived enemy. More disturbingly, there is no latent republican or democratic ideology embedded within either war context, as there is in the Rebels’ fleet in Star Wars or the remnants of the American military in Independence Day. There is not a temporary suspension of civil rights because of a state of emergency; there are simply no civil rights at all. Verhoeven has essentially obliterated 1960s and ’70s populism, validating instead a militaristic fascism that seems in line with Europe’s newly emergent movements on the Right, Le Pen conservatives in France, and skinhead, neo-Nazis in a democratically unified Germany. In other words, the sacrifices caused by military action in Starship Troopers, do not merely result from a threat by a powerful, dangerous aggressor; rather, such sacrifices become the end in itself. The Federal State’s xenophobia becomes the cultural ballast for a society that constantly perceives itself under siege and threat from an alien Other.

As the State Apparatus thwarts perceived enemies from without, it also prevents potentially divisive scrutiny from within. Through relentless propaganda via the Internet and hi-tech multimedia, as well as through the "proper" education of the young, the Federal State apparatus perpetuates itself. That the society remains firmly stratified between "civilian" and "citizen," an essential distinction for any fascist war machine, first emerges when Verhoeven cuts from live war footage at the beginning of the film to a high school political science class that takes place a year earlier, prior to the annihilation of Buenos Aires. Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside), the teacher and war veteran whose arm stump hangs prominently, a visible sign of his war record, inculcates antidemocratic ideology by reminding the class of the failure of democracy and the deleterious role social scientists played in social history. Taken directly from Heinlein’s novel, the following dialogue from the film illustrates Raczak’s propagandistic social role. He lectures: "Let’s sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy, for the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since." Rasczak’s pseudo-Socratic teaching methods are frightening; they are a great deal less about the free interplay of ideas than they are about propagandizing the State’s "politically correct" version of its own history and political legitimacy. He assumes as "fact" the historical "failure of democracy," the destructive beliefs of "social scientists, the martial ideology of "veterans" who imposed social "control" and "stability," and the necessity of violence underpinning all forms of authority, even the franchise. When one student recalls her mother’s advice that "Violence never solves anything," Rasczak testily responds: "Really. I wonder what the City fathers of Hiroshima would say about that?" Thus, he even deprecates familial wisdom, sarcastically laying waste to the mother’s advice against violence as a solution to problems, personal as well as social, and he zealously pursues a political agenda that seemingly gives students freedom to make their own decisions. In fact, he coerces them to reach beyond a textbook definition of citizenship, which might well include considerations of family, in order to co-opt their independence and choose Federal service. A classroom instructor at the beginning of the film, a battle commander by the end, Rasczak pointedly distinguishes between "citizen" and civilian, and in the global Federation culture of Starship Troopers, citizenship becomes a reward, a privilege earned through military service, not a natural right, as it once was during those failed democratic regimes of the past. In effect, Verhoeven represents Rasczak as a futuristic, undemocratic John Wayne. He even leads a platoon against the "bug" infantry, appropriately named Rasczak’s Roughnecks.

Each branch of Federal service socializes the new soldier into its particular subculture, its formal and informal rules. The Federal military discourages fraternization among the branches. A scene after basic training exemplifies this brand of socialization. Rico (MI) and Zander Barcalow (FTA), Rico’s rival for Carmen, have a fist fight on the Ticonderoga battle station. Since Zander is an officer, Johnny’s infantry pals pull him away before the MPs arrive; they further bond with one another other by having "Death From Above" tattooed on their forearms before they go into battle. This scene logically follows an earlier one in which Carmen has sent Rico a "Dear Johnny" cyberletter. His infantry companions witness the letter, but even though they tactfully ignore it, their presence nonetheless buoys Johnny in Carmen’s absence. When Rico and Carmen again accidentally meet during battle, Johnny’s passion for her lingers, but he cares far more for the men and women under his command, in particular Dizzy Flores, who has given her life to save the lives of fellow Roughnecks. Giving her elegy back on the battle station, Rico observes: "Once, somebody asked me if I knew the difference between a citizen and a civilian. I can tell you now. A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility. Dizzy was my friend. She was a soldier. And more than that, she was a citizen of the Federation." With battle experience, Rico has moved far beyond the definition he "once" recited by rote in Rasczak’s class. The death of Dizzy has solidly confirmed his belief in the sacrifice of self as well as his desire for citizenship. "The safety of the human race" has replaced the "safety of the body politic." With the ghost of Rasczak hovering above the proceedings, Rico’s noble words of experience ring truer than the rarefied words of the textbook. He has been fully socialized as a member of mobile infantry. He is a true believer. And even though the unit is ultimately renamed "Rico’s Roughnecks," Rico embraces his expendability, not his individuality—precisely the intention of the Federation’s war machine.

In his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin argues that because film changes frames constantly, it cannot be "arrested" by thought. Film becomes a perfect medium with which to "shock" an audience, their thoughts replaced by a barrage of moving images. As a result, according to Benjamin, Fascism easily makes use of film, "press[ing] [it] into the production of ritual values" (241). In Starship Troopers, Verhoeven disguises what Benjamin describes as "the horrible features of imperialistic warfare" (242) through a dazzling blitzkrieg of violent, computer-generated effects—bug armadas overrunning infantry outposts, bug plasma blasts splitting enormous battle cruisers apart, thousands of bug and human corpses exploding in a mélange of body parts—all of which coerce filmgoers into accepting the necessity, even the beauty, of violent warfare. In this sense, the film-goers submit to a collectivist ideology, to a fascist technocracy that justifies its imperial logics through artistic propaganda. Fifty years after the end of World War II, we have become so alienated from the values of self, that we can, in Benjamin’s words, "experience [our] own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (242). In effect, Starship Troopers represents a nostalgia for a period of our history in which we defended our territory by blowing our enemies up. Yet Verhoeven’s use of fascist symbols and metaphors that impel the film’s nostalgia also touches a nerve of fear: our future enemies may not be so visibly alien as our former ones. In fact, aliens may already be among us, and they may be far deadlier than we ever imagined.*

Jeffrey Cass
Dept. of Language, Literature, and Arts
Texas A & M International University
5201 University Blvd.
Laredo, TX 78041

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—. The Making of Starship Troopers. New York: Boulevard Books 1997.

Schickel, Richard. "All Bugged Out, Again." Time 10 Nov. 1997: 102.

Showalter, Dennis. "Heinlein’s Starship Troopers: An Exercise in Rehabilitation."Extrapolation 16 (1975): 113-124

Steyn, Mark. "Starship Troopers." Sight and Sound 8 .1 (1998): 53.
—. "Who Needs Actors?" The Spectator. 3 Jan. 1998: 36.