Starship Troopers and the Fascists Who Don’t Know They’re Fascists
University seemed out of reach. Nobody in my family had gone past community college, my grades were unremarkable, and I had no idea how to even apply. I thought seriously about becoming a cop, but the police were a peril in everyday life; might as well become a pimp or a drug dealer.
But, by this time, movies had become my soma for a life without a future. One of the favorites in my escapist catalog was Starship Troopers—Paul Verhoeven’s action sci-fi meditation on antimilitarism. It had all the things dudes like—guns, blood, bugs, boobs, butts. I was taken by how the protagonist Johnny Rico made his own way in life by joining the military, serving his planet, and (sort of) getting the girl in the process.
What went completely and utterly over my teenage head was that Verhoeven’s rendition of Starship Troopers was meant to be a satire of fascism. One of the more embarrassing truths about my life is that my entire career trajectory owed something to unintentionally modeling myself on a fictional soldier from a fascist planet doing fascist genocide against an alien bug race.
Incredibly, I wasn’t alone in misreading Starship Troopers—every major film review at the time failed to see its political commentary. Verhoeven gave many frustrated interviews venting about the poverty of American cinematic literacy. Something was going on in the ‘90s that blunted society’s ability to think critically…
Anyway, I had a blast revisiting this film with Andy Facini, Sam Ratner, and my co-host Lyle on The Bang-Bang Podcast. The movie holds up a twisted mirror to our present. No filmmaker has understood the United States as well as Paul Verhoeven, who could never quite believe that Americans could be prudish about sex but gratuitous about violence. We owe it to ourselves to consider what he has to tell us about us.
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