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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."
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.
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?
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.
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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."
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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.
Given what liberals have done to the country, who can blame them? If I have to choose between liberals and Nazis, give me the Nazis.
And this is how we get a Hitler, ladies and gentlemen.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
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.
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'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.