Silly me. I thought the Nazis lost the war.
I don't mean to suggest that it's political propaganda in the literal sense or that it advocates Nazism. But it's a film that presupposes it. It's spiritually Nazi, psychologically Nazi. It comes directly out of the Nazi imagination, and is set in the Nazi universe.
It hails from what would be Year 64 of the Thousand-Year Reich, a sanitized utopia of heroic, sexless young folk grandly aware of their role as defenders of the known reality and descended from the Nazi pioneer generation of the 1930s and '40s. Of course the great Fuehrer has gone to Valhalla, but it's possible that in a home in some mountain fastness, some shiny facsimile of Holy Berchtesgaden, the 97-year-old Heinrich Himmler still dodders about, drooling and filling his Depends with waste, and on the odd clear day when his mind doesn't buzz with Alzheimer's he remembers with pride the greatness he helped create. In this universe, he has already seen "Starship Troopers" 14 times. He has been quoted in the New York Volkischer Beobachter as saying "Thumbs up!"
Fortunately, back here in grumpy reality, all that was blown to dust, crushed bone and ash back in Year 12, a very bad year for the Thousand-Year Reich and a very good year for the rest of us.
But you couldn't tell that from "Starship Troopers."
We'll skip the obvious Nazi fashions and the appearance of Doogie Howser late in the film in a black shirt, overcoat and SS-style cap; we'll skip the stylized swastika that is the Mobile Infantry's symbol; we'll skip the fact that the movie will soon be abbreviated in the vernacular "SS Troopers"; we'll skip the hazy intimation of a world fascist order contained in the film. Begin with the faces.
At first I thought that the notoriously perverse director, Paul Verhoeven, had a particularly inane imagination when it came to faces. No indeed; he has a very good imagination when it comes to faces. He knows exactly what he wants. So regular are the faces of the "cast" -- the acting is so bad, the quotation marks are required -- that it clearly represents a conscious decision. The stars, Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey and Neil Patrick Harris, share this in common: They all look alike.
They have oddly square faces and broad cheekbones, unprominent noses. They're blond or at least fair and boast some of the whitest choppers seen this side of a Dentyne commercial. But it's more than shape and form: Their faces are also somehow uncomplicated, almost cartoon versions in flesh of actual humanity. Van Dien and Richards are particularly noteworthy in this regard. There's a simplicity and emotionless beauty that's far too vivid to be coincidental. They are generic. And all through the cast you see other iterations of the same principle: smooth, hairless, square, almost idealized faces. Even the odd token black person in this universe has the same bone structure and close-cropped hair.
What's going on? Well, one idea would be that these beings are produced through genetic engineering on an industrial basis, as in "Brave New World" or more recently "Gattaca." But there's no mention of that in the film. A more insidious possibility relates exactly to Hitler's crazed state: that the size and range of the gene pool has been greatly reduced through some form of purification. So in an unsettling sense, "Starship Troopers" appears to be set in a post-Holocaust world, a world where the body count didn't stop at 6 million but went on and on and on until only Aryan stock remained.
There are other, deeper issues. One is the movie's obsession that parallels a particularly loathsome Nazi obsession -- cleanliness. In fact the Nazis saw their adversaries as representing some form of filth or infection. Their idea of the best world was Judenrein, meaning cleansed of Jews. They murdered, in the millions, under the guise of showering. In their hyperfervid imagination -- visible in all their documents and propaganda -- Jews and Bolsheviks were seen as eastern "hordes" representing not merely the swarm but the swarm of infection and disease. Look at the concept of Lebensraum, living room: Essentially, it is freedom from the filth of crowding.
And that's exactly the obsession with the spiders of Klendathu. In the movie's best special-effects sequence, our heroic platoon stands off hordes of the monsters (who aren't even armed, as a matter of fact, and would seem to be no big deal for any moderately equipped industrialized power with good Krupp and Mauser firepower). The creatures have been imagined horribly as the worst kind of body filth -- they are not spiders at all, they are lice, huge infestations of crab lice, with ripping mandibles and piercing claws, who slay by rending their victims into parts. How filthy is that?
At its most visually impressive, the movie seems to recount a Hitlerian fantasy: a platoon of SS men in the far regions of the world standing firm against subhuman hordes, killing them in their millions and themselves dying in the best kind of nobility and sacrifice. The movie has a kind of pornographic relish in its depictions of slaughter. It isn't really set on Klendathu at all, but at Stalingrad.
You can take this even further with just a little research. The best description of the method of "Starship Troopers" came not from the great critics Anthony Lane or Janet Maslin or my brilliant colleague Rita Kempley. Rather, it came from historian Richard Grunberger, who noted that "brutal descriptions of fighting alternated with bathos-dripping comradeship.' " That's it perfectly: the utter savagery of the fighting to the last quarter, intercut with the most sentimentalized, infantilized version of human relationships, as reflected in dialogue so bereft of individuality that it could have been written by either a hack or a machine. It's a world where two forms of emotional expression exist: puppy love or death battle.
What Grunberger is describing, however, isn't "Starship Troopers" but a lost work of utter banality titled "Gruppe Bosemueller," by Werner Beumelburg, a bestseller in Nazi Germany that was representative of a genre called Fronterlebnis, the notion of "war as a spiritual experience."
And that is exactly what "Starship Troopers" is selling. Unlike films from a civilized society that see war as a debilitating, tragic necessity, such as "Bridge on the River Kwai" or "Platoon" or "A Farewell to Arms," this movie sees it as a profoundly moving experience: war as ultimate self-help course.
Its most blasphemous stroke is its inversion of one of the greatest war novels ever written, Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." This film is explicitly conceived as a rebuke to that great humanitarian soliloquy. It plays with Remarque's opening scene, where a schoolteacher lectures the boys sternly on the duties of manhood, the disciplines of the fatherland and the glories of war. Believing him literally, our hero Paul rushes to the front, where he discovers the hideous lie his teacher has told him, as millions of other boys the world over are discovering the same lie.
"Starship Troopers" takes this conceit and literally perverts it. Not only does the teacher (Michael Ironside) tell them of the glories of war, he turns up as their platoon leader, a legendary figure known as "the Lieutenant." Initially missing an arm, he now has a mechanical one; he has been gloriously completed by war. Here, what Remarque treated ironically, Verhoeven treats literally. The lieutenant stoically guides the platoon through its most savage encounters with the spider hordes, and then -- this is the film's idea of heavy emotion -- is trapped and has his legs ripped off. His stumps spurting blood, he asks our hero Van Dien, who, far from being brutalized by the war, has turned into a butt-kicking NCO, for the ultimate act of intimacy in this world: to kill him. Now Van Dien is man enough to do just that.
That is love among the Nazis: a blast of withering fire through the heart. CAPTION: Seth Gilliam, Casper Van Dien and Jake Busey as the square-faced young men defending a sanitized utopia in "Starship Troopers." CAPTION: Casper Van Dien's emotionless face of fascism in "Starship Troopers."
