By now everyone knows the “real” story underneath the plot of Starship Troopers. Director Paul Verhoeven describes it as the “second narrative” buried just under the surface of the first.
“There is a narrative saying that 'these are wonderful guys and they fight for their country and they're really heroes and they're supporting each other and they're wonderful and they’re going to win,'” Verhoeven said during a Tuesday night screening of Starship Troopers at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “That was the first narrative.”
But just underneath is a brutality, conformity and militant nationalism that stinks of Brownshirts and S.S. officers in Hugo Boss trenchcoats, girded by a propaganda machine to trump Leni Riefenstahl, prodding its citizens to ever greater heights of hysterical rage with a simple phrase, a promise of spoonfed certainty: “Would you like to know more?”
“We wanted to tell that really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting bugs, but we also wanted to show that these people are really — in their hearts or without knowing — they’re on their way to fascism,” Verhoeven said. “So one story is ‘they’re great and wonderful heroes’ and the other story is, ‘by the way, they’re fascists.’”
The fascist society of Starship Troopers held a fearful resonance for many audience members in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election win the previous week; a resonance Verhoeven commented on several times, to nervous titters and scattered applause from the audience.
“It’s really about the possibilities in the United States,” Verhoeven said. “More visible now than 30 years ago” (when his American movie career began with Robocop).
When moderator and Film Society Director of Programming Dennis Lim commented on the Starship Troopers remake hewing closer to Heinlein’s source material, “basically to make a more fascist film,” Verhoeven agreed.
“They’re basically following the times. I mean, it’s up to date, you know.”
But Verhoeven insists he’s no oracle. Instead, he describes the writing process with Edward Neumeier as an argument with Starship Troopers the novel. “The book of Robert Heinlein — at that time one of the most important science fiction writers — is militaristic and fascist. I mean, his philosophy is that way. And our philosophy is really different.”
Writing the script became a joking form of catharsis, as they worked to undercut Heinlein’s signature macho pomposity. “ All these things that are, let's say strange or funny or satirical or ironic, we invented that laughingly. We were laughing at our own proposals, when we were showing young children fighting to get a gun in their hands and all that stuff. And immediate death, no trial — we took that all from Texas basically. Bush was then governor. I remember, when we were writing it we were laughing the whole time. So we didn't try to say we were going to make a really political, philosophical statement. It came really in our fight with Robert Heinlein's book. We already came to that because that was our protection,” Verhoeven said. “It came, in a very organic way, in our resistance to accept this militaristic, fascistic philosophy.”
While Verhoeven believes Starship Troopers depicts a militant fascism that echoes trend lines in American society, he cautioned against trying to draw too-close parallels or expecting modern fascism to take familiar shapes. “We are living in extremely — you could call it interesting or scary — times,” Verhoeven said.
“And so, basically when all this happened, recently I started to read about Adolf Hitler,” he said. “Study 1933 and 1934 and it could be taken as a metaphor for now.”
But that doesn’t mean fascism will arrive with the sound of marching boots and flapping flags, as in Starship Troopers. “Nothing is the same, of course,” Verhoeven said, referencing the 1980 book Friendly Fascism, which posited a growing alliance between business and government that could massage America into a totalitarian state without any obvious warning signs. “Fascism with a smile. That’s what we might be facing,” he said.
