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'How We Made Starship Troopers' (theguardian.com)
The Guardian quotes Paul Verhoeven, the director of Starship Troopers:
Robert Heinlein's original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren't aware of their fascism... I was looking for the prototype of blond, white and arrogant, and Casper Van Dien was so close to the images I remembered from Leni Riefenstahl's films. I borrowed from Triumph of the Will in the parody propaganda reel that opens the film, too. I was using Riefenstahl to point out, or so I thought, that these heroes and heroines were straight out of Nazi propaganda...
With a title like Starship Troopers, people were expecting a new Star Wars. They got that, but not really: it stuck in your throat. It said: "Here are your heroes and your heroines, but by the way -- they're fascists."
The actors weren't even clear on what the giant arachnids would look like, since their "Bug" battles were filmed entirely with green screens, remembers one of the movie's stars, Denise Richards. Instead Verhoeven "would be there jumping up and down with a broom in the air so we would have a sense of how big they were."
Verhoeven told one interviewer that he never actually read Robert Heinlein's original book. "I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring. It is really quite a bad book."
With a title like Starship Troopers, people were expecting a new Star Wars. They got that, but not really: it stuck in your throat. It said: "Here are your heroes and your heroines, but by the way -- they're fascists."
The actors weren't even clear on what the giant arachnids would look like, since their "Bug" battles were filmed entirely with green screens, remembers one of the movie's stars, Denise Richards. Instead Verhoeven "would be there jumping up and down with a broom in the air so we would have a sense of how big they were."
Verhoeven told one interviewer that he never actually read Robert Heinlein's original book. "I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring. It is really quite a bad book."
We're almost back to full fascism with the democrats:
- Black-shirts: Antifa
- Propaganda: Fake News machine
- State police: FBI and DOJ colluding with politicians
- Racial policies: Most of the DNC's program
- Personally cult: Obama and others, usually identity representatives
Of course, to a large degree this situation is a response to the Cons' retardation.
I didn't hate the movie. Just had to treat it as something that took a few ideas from the book and ran off in a totally different direction. If you went into the movie expecting to see something that tied into the book you were going to be sorely disappointed.
Hollywood is pathologically incapable of making a movie that conveys a conservative message. I doubt we will ever see a faithful interpretation of any golden age Heinlein novel.
Both of you are wrong about the book. Heinlein defended it quite well, so I don't need to.
Anyway Verhoeven didn't read it, and I suspect you didn't as well.
But thanks for jumping on some internet meme bandwagon.
From what you write, you have either not read his books or you have read them but didn't understand the messages in them.
Many science fiction authors used a future setting to talk about current topics, drawing them to extremes. Believing that a setting somehow shows the true essence of an authors beliefs are laughable. You can write about something as a cautionary tale, and in fact advocating the total opposite of what you write about.
A lot of conservative fuckwits love him. Not because he's any good, but that he wrote in fiction the most quoted for fact fiction line I see on Slashdot, "An armed society is a polite society." America proves him wrong.
You're doubly wrong. TANSTAAFL is, by far, more quoted than that.
And Americans are exceedingly polite. When you meet Americans, they will smile at you, eyeball you, and ask how you are. And expect you to be polite enough to not respond with truth. It's a society built on polite fiction. That doesn't stop them from stepping on your body to make a buck. But they'll smile at you while doing so.
Conservatives hate his view on government because he didn't buy into legislating morality. You don't grok if you think he didn't piss off the right as much as the left...
Money is the root of all evil?
The book was infinitely better than the film.
America has more experience with immigrants probably than any other nation, and from the looks of it Germany hasn't bothered to learn from any of our mistakes. Good luck with that!
No, the better comment (a long one), and very appropriate to today's society, comes from The Cat Who Walks Through Walls:
or maybe hollywood is too dumb to understand conservative messages. ..or perhaps it's both. Ideologues hate free expression and debate of other positions. It doesn't matter what their ideological bases are. The worst ones are those who want to use institutional power to impose themselves on others.
Those old action movies (many of which also have truly liberal themes btw) have far more depth to them than just about any movie made today. With all the thinly disguised hyper-left themed propagandic elements imposed by virtue signaling studios, they seem more like the boring, preachy 'educational' videos imposed on children in school than entertainment.
Hollywood is pathologically incapable of making a movie that conveys a conservative message
Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street don't convey the conservative message of private industry championing over government interference, where free markets know best, where those who takes risks are rewarded, where personal responsibility takes hold?
Considered the last of Heinlein's juveniles, Starship Trooper is a Hugo winner and a true classic. Paul Verhoeven's movie is a travesty, raped the book, and doesn't deserve to carry the title.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
drinkypoo opined:
I thought it was a great book, but I actually liked the movie a lot. I didn't think it necessarily needed to be called Starship Troopers, but I did feel that it perfectly captured the atmosphere of fascism in the original book, which was its most important aspect.
I think you misremember the book.
The society Heinlein depicted in Starship Troopers bore no meaningful resemblence to the one in Verhoeven's movie. In interviews after the book was published, RAH stressed that military service was not the only path to the sovereign franchise in the Starship Troopers world. He envisioned any number of public service paths - specifically including something very much like the Peace Corps - as routes to voting status. The point of the model he created was not worship of the military, per se, but rather earning the franchise through service to society (as opposed to "the State" - of which he had a notorious distrust).
It wasn't fascistic - it was pragmatic (at least in Heinlein's view). And the Dean himself was a personality of considerable complexity: equal parts civil- and economic-libertarian, with a strong anti-Soviet bias (although, as evidenced by Stranger in a Strange Land, not necessarily an anti-communist one), and a passionate advocate of the goal of becoming a Renaissance man; he advocated suspicion of altruism, all while being selflessly generous with his time to Red Cross blood drives, and his mentorship to younger writers, such as Spider Robinson. I've seen the man spend hours being patiently courteous to a seemingly-endless line of fans seeking his autograph, yet turn coldly dismissive of one who casually admitted violating the terms on which he offered those autographs (either donate blood, or be rejected as a donor).
While I disagreed with much of his politics, I admired RAH enormously as a man, and even moreso as a writer. He played devil's advocate for many positions he, himself did not hold - but fascism definitely was not one of them ...
Check out my novel.
... read Gordie Dickson's Dorsai!. Starship Troopers is something very, very different, and more difficult to dismiss. You can't put Heinlein in a neat box because he challenges you, and himself. That's what makes Heinlein a great writer where Dickson is merely an entertaining one.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Dickson, he's just not on Heinlein's level.
Now is Starship Troopers militaristic? Absolutely. Is it fascist? I think not, although I can see the appeal for the simple-minded fascist. It is a militaristic novel that questions the concept of fundamental individual rights.
But I don't think Heinlein was a fascist, I think he was a ferocious skeptic. What if you organized a society around something other than inherent an inalienable individual rights? What's telling is the Heinlein makes this world neither a dystopia nor a utopia; it's just workable. Fascists are always selling a formula for establishing a kind of golden age.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The book should probably come with a warning that it may be too intense for adults.
I read it as a kid, and devoured all the ideas, though, oddly, I did't become militaristic or in any way right-wing. Vietnam was going on, and you could see where real wars end up.
The review by James Davis Nicol highlights the stuff that I thought was cooool as a kid, and gagged at as a grownup:
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/r... ...Rico is a very young war criminal in scenes where the "demonstration of firepower and frightfulness" (heh: now, "shock and awe") includes toasting a church congregation of the "Skinnies" with his flamethrower, and looking for the town's water treatment plant with his micro-nuke. (After a 25-year career with the local waterworks, I know that's germ warfare...)
And it sinks in that the basic philosophy is that humanity must grow, must colonize forever, to live, constantly expanding through the galaxy, and that any species also wanting the same "real estate" must be fought. The word "liebensraum" does come into the mind.
Heinlein had a few philosophies to expound, of course, and the whole rest of the book is built around having some reason to have a busy military with occasional heavy losses and routine light losses. Oh, and a need to assault planets from space with anything smaller than nukes.
He wanted to look right inside the mind of a military volunteer who understands that this will likely enough cost his life or at least limbs, and accepts it as the noble thing to do, to sacrifice the, ah, One for the Many. It is made clear what the movie did even better, that Rico, while well-indoctrinated with the understanding of this nobility, that only those who have done this are worthy of voting rights, really joins to impress a girl. (In the promo book for the movie, writers said they asked actual Soldiers and vets if that was corny. They were told with grins that it is still common.)
The key to the training section (classic military book structure: first bit is training camp, then on to the story of actual battles; see Full Metal Jacket, Dirty Dozen, etc) is that when Rico internalizes and accepts the noble reason rather than the girl reason, "The noblest fate a man can endure is to place his mortal body between his beloved home and war's desolation" (I just typed that from memory...jeez.), then the torturous training camp is suddenly almost easy.
Heinlein's defense in "Expanded Universe" noted the book is "militaristic" specifically to the Army/Marines, rival services to his beloved Navy, where at least you usually die with a full belly and not frozen in a trench; that it's a love letter to the heroic sufferings of "the doughboy, the duckfoot....the thin red line of heroes". This is hardly more militaristic than the displays at most American parades and football games, and obviously, Veteran's Day. That's fine.
It's setting up that story in a world where human expansion makes war with aliens inevitable, that's the problem. And the war-crime stuff. He could have set up his war-needing-environment with a need for pure defense of home, and outlined some rules of war descended from Geneva Conventions rather than the chapter "Caesar Chastens Gaul" of his memoir.
That he was pushing out the endless-expansion thing instead is all the more problematic in that the Bugs were a pure Communism by nature, oddly enough, and the real geopolitical concern of the time was that the First World (us) was in a game of Risk with the Second World (communist countries) fighting over the rest of the global real estate. Tends to make anybody even faintly left look askance. I was mercifully unaware of all this, enjoying it at 11. (1970) And on re-reads though teen years. I missed Vietnam by both nationality (Canadian) and a few years of time; Boomer Americans were probably clearer on it.
Salon.com seems to have lost the 1997 review that nailed the movie's total fa
This is actually true, in the case of Hollywood at least. Unless you're already a big star like Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis, you absolutely can not even be associated with somebody who might express the slightest interest in not being a Democrat. If you do, you have to Scientology style disconnect from them, or else you'll have to forget about getting work there. I'm not making this shit up, I've seen it happen, somebody finds an outspoken relative on Facebook and then it snowballs.
Of course, if you have to go there to find work to begin with instead of the other way around, you're pretty much guaranteed to be poor anyways, and a lot of people go there thinking they have talent just to end up joining the homeless population, where they weren't homeless before they got there. That's because 99.9% of self proclaimed artists and actors don't have any actual talent.
I don't see fantasy as being intrinsically toxic; it's mixing up fantasy with reality that's dangerous.
That includes de-humanizing the SS. The problem is that the SS were all too human. We call them "inhuman" because they violate our ideals about what humans are supposed to be like. But in fact what they did was far from historically unprecedented, except for the way in which modern organization and technology gave scope to their behavior, something that should give all of us a shudder of horror.
Still, those ideals, while historically false, are important. As Terry Pratchett said, "Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I know it's popular to assume Heinlein was conservative, but that's usually coming from people like Verhoeven who couldn't get through the set up chapters and get to the philosophical pay off. Stranger in A Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress include themes of strong secular humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and ecological responsibility along with libertarian economic concepts. I don't think it's correct to assume Heinlein advocates extraordinary conservative views in Starship Troopers (i.e. flogging as punishment) when you could more easily interpret those passages as critical when put in context of his other books.
It's unfortunate that Verhoeven didn't read the book, and that no one associated with the movie seems to have read any serious critics of the book either. One way you know Heinlein wrote a great book is that there are so many interesting critical insights linked to 20th century culture from wildly different perspectives. The movie lacks the exploration of asexual masculinity, elitism, and technology that give the book depth and complexity. Why is the power armor both so appealing to us and horribly savage? Why does (book) Rico find women "fascinating" but never express a desire for any kind of relationship? The quintessentially American ideal that freedom requires sacrifice is tested in an extreme case, raising questions about what "freedom" and "sacrifice" mean. This is what science fiction should do.
The original article, as saved by the Internet Archive, had a slightly different subtitle:
‘I borrowed from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to show that these US soldiers were like something out of Nazi propaganda. I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed’
(Emphasis added to highlight the text that was removed).
The current version has a note at the bottom saying:
The subheading of this article was amended on 23 January 2018 to remove a reference to US soldiers.
Given that the characters were from Buenos Aires in the movie that does seem like a reasonable edit. Admittedly they did speak English but, well, it doesn't seem a bit unlikely that the soldiers in the movie were specifically supposed to be US soldiers.
No the proper form should be "A civilized society is a polite society"
Oh yeah? Then explain France.
Yep. Moreover, IIRC, you didn't get your franchise until after releasing from the service, which is the exact opposite of what the movie suggested. In the movie, society is run by the "sky marshals" - active military leaders - whereas in the book the military doesn't get a say at all; the direction of their society is determined by voting citizens.
It takes an incredibly thoughtless person to read "fascism" into that.
I'm a big Heinlein fan, and "Starship Troopers" is a GREAT book.
The book is more philosophical than militaristic, the lead character was Juan Rico, a Filipino from Luzon. To cast Van Diem in the role simply proves that Verhoeven had never actually READ the book. In the book, all of the "Mobile Infantry" are men, but all of the starship pilots are women.
The movie of "Starship Troopers" was a horrible movie. No "Mobile INfantry", no drop capsules coming in from orbit, no philosophy, no morals. Just guts and core. There;s one scene in which the M.I. troopers on the ship are having a mass, co-ed, naked shower scene, This was, frankly, the ONLY redeeming value in the entire movie.
What's there to wave away? Let consenting adults do what they want in the privacy of their own bedroom. You would think that "progressives" would be all over that.
Nice conflation of nothing. No one ever said socialism was better than a free market, yet for all the talk about free markets it is conservatives who consistently go out of their way to thwart and warp the free market.
If the free market is so good, why were trading collars instituted on the stock markets? Why not let the markets move as they wish instead of confining them?
If free markets are so good, why is it Republican-led towns and cities enact laws to prevent competition in broadband service?
If free markets are so good, why are we subsidizing multi-billion dollar companies such as Exxon with taxpayer money?
If free markets are so good, why are taxpayers being taken to the wash to the tune of $4 billion in Wisconsin to entice Foxconn to put in a plant?
If free markets are so good, why did George Bush hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money to J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and a whole host of other Wall Street firms and banks so they could pay out their bonuses?
As to those companies you mentioned, they're the same ones who said raising the minimum wage would cripple them. And as for those $1,000 bonuses, yeah, work 20 years at WalMart and get the bonus. $1000/20 = $50 for each year worked. That's $4.16 per month. Around .15 cents for each day you worked for them. Wow. Just staggering how generous they are.
Tell us, how many times did those at the top get raises, bonuses, stock options and other perks during those same 20 years? Why weren't the employees getting similar treatment throughout that time? You know, trickle down.
Excuse me, but can we stop using the term 'conservative' in reference to Heinlein's writings. They are 'libertarian'. While libertarianism has some things in common with what we characterize as 'conservative' it also is far more 'liberal' and 'progressive' then what those two words convey today.
Claiming Heinlein's books were 'conservative' misses fully half of the message.
Now, it is true that Hollywood has never (*) and likely will never make a faithful interpretation of any of his books (**) that's because nobody other than libertarians would like it. It would be royally panned & hated by both what we call 'conservatives' today AND 'liberals/progressives'. The former because of any hint of 'homosexual sex' (or 'polyamory') or similar 'diversity' themes, the latter because his books universally require you believe in 'self-reliance' (taking responsibility for your life) over government imposed rules.
(*) Destination Moon which I have on DVD and made in the '50s is extremely 'campy' & kind of 'silly' in it's treatment of sending humans to the moon but tha's more a function of it being shot in the '50s then in respect to not trying to be 'faithful' to the book.
(**) It occurs to me that there may be 1 'character' that reoccurs in a set of short stories Heinlein wrote that could potentially be made in to a movie that shot 'reasonably faithfully' would only have half the population hating it (liberals/progressives) and only because the character becomes 'filthy rich' (the adjective selected from a 'progressive' point of view of 'rich' and of course only those 'rich' that don't agree with their philosophy) in the pursuit of his child-hood dream of personally setting foot on the moon. The characters name is Harriman, and the details aren't truly important here but it's potentially possible to shoot such a movie 'reasonably faithfully' and not royally piss off everyone as the character appears in no story that include 'icky' themes of sexuality, 'diversity' efc at all. Just 1 person's life-long driving dream to set foot on the moon and dying happy when he finally does. Then again the 'world' would probably end up thinking 'how quaint that anyone would believe that setting foot on the moon is a good dream to have vs solving world hunger' or something like that. Or that having attained your dream you can 'die happy' rather than fighting to live a shitty/zombie life without any 'dream' for as long as medical science can keep you alive no matter how shitty your life is (e.g. it would be considered 'old fashioned & out of touch with modern society').
I agree it isn't a single fascist leader, but the military effectively gets to decide who can vote.
No. The only obstacle to service was volunteering. Service is not required to be military in nature, there are also those doing hazardous construction (on moons/asteroids/etc). No one volunteering was considered "unfit" for service. If a person had a disability there were to be somehow accommodated and allowed to contribute and serve, and of course be at risk. The military could decide who could serve in the infantry, who could serve as ship's crew, etc ... but they could not deny all types of service to a volunteer, they had to find some accommodating role somewhere.
Those are people who have gone through training where they are taught to follow orders without question (for the safety of themselves and others), that their enemies (militarily or politically) are not people, and that the military is important. Anyone who doesn't learn these lessons is unlikely to survive. This makes for something very similar to having a society run by the military.
No. These people are free to believe whatever they chose and free to vote accordingly once discharged from service. Following orders in a chain of command is not something that continues after service. Look at the real world, there is no shortage of people who served honorably and well that were quite critical of the military after discharge, there is no shortage of veterans on the political left or right. Military service does not turn people into mindless robots, it generally teaches several things. People can accomplish far more than they think they can. A group coordinating their actions can accomplish more than a group of people acting individually. Bad sh*t happens and you just have to work your way through it.
I don't think anyone believes RAH was a Nazi sympathizer, but the system of government in SST is fatally flawed. Anyone can enlist in a service, but not anyone can complete service. Severe corporal punishment, and even capital punishment, can be enforced with the thinnest veneer of a trial that has no independence from the chain of command. Despite the promise of universal enlistment, the government has strong control over who gets the franchise.
There are other services than the military, but in a time of constant interstellar war, the military must be bigger and more prestigious than the other services, which means the government will be predominantly run by military and ex-military people. I don't have to point out that such governments aren't futuristic near utopias, but are among the most common form of governments throughout history.
In SST, the success of the government does not seem to rest so much on its form, as on the goodness and incorruptibility of the people running it. That bizarre assumption is so obviously contrary to human experience, and so destructive when relied upon in practice, that the book may be as much a satire as the movie.
Play Command HQ online
I'll admit that I haven't read Starship Troopers, but I've read other Heinlein books, and he has a fair amount of overt racism and sexism in every book of his that I have read.
Sexist? In this 1950s book Starship Trooper he had women serve in combat and argued that the number of pull-ups and pushups one could do does not define one's worth in the military. That many roles do not require brute strength and that women can excel in military leadership and in some military roles their physical differences made them, on average, superior to men (for example combat pilots).
Racist? The central character and hero of this 1950s book Starship Trooper is Juan "Johnny" Rico. A resident of Buenos Aires, Argentina of Philippine descent.
Those are people who have gone through training where they are taught to follow orders without question
This is a caricature used by those who have never served. Every western nations puts great emphasis on the difference between lawful and unlawful orders, and makes it clear in no uncertain terms that a soldiers duty is to follow all lawful orders, as well as to reject all unlawful ones. If you are given an unlawful order not only is it your duty to refuse to obey, it is also your duty to report the person who issued it.
As far as the book goes, the oath of the terran federation specifically stated that the members vows to follow "all lawful orders". Heinlein did not include that word by accident.
that their enemies (militarily or politically) are not people
In the book the enemy quite literally are not people. But it doesn't matter, since the purpose of the war was never extermination, or enslavement, or any form of subjugation; it was self defence. The enemy attacked, and the mobile infantry responded.
I seriously hope that this part of your comment only applied to the book, because if you think it plays any relevance to how modern armies operate you are seriously misinformed.
and that the military is important.
Isn't it?
Anyone who doesn't learn these lessons is unlikely to survive. This makes for something very similar to having a society run by the military.
If you caricature of the military were at all accurate, I suppose there might be some truth to that. But if that were the case, we wouldn't be a having this discussion; you would already be living under a military dictatorship supported by the millions of men and women who are serving or have served in your armed forces.
SJW is the new "Jew" for certain groups.