Starship Troopers
With Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, Seth Gilliam, and Patrick Muldoon.
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By national cinema, I mean a cinema that expresses something of the soul of the nation that it comes from: the lifestyle, the consciousness, the attitudes. I wouldn’t want to quibble with anyone who argues that Starship Troopers is American in the same way or to the same degree that french fries are French. What I mean is something more delicate and complex–a matter of substance more than packaging yielded by most national cinemas over the past century, but no longer available to us in most multinational blockbusters.
For a movie to belong to a particular national cinema often means that it has a stronger impact on its home turf, as the recent American art movie In the Company of Men did. In France the film was cursorily dismissed by the two leading critical film magazines, Positif and Cahiers du Cinema, while at the Viennale in Austria last month, which I attended, its impact seemed minimal alongside other current American films, even Joe Dante’s made-for-cable The Second Civil War. I suspect this is because taboos against discussing capitalism critically, which gives In the Company of Men much of its subversive impact in the United States, don’t exist in the same fashion in Europe. But a pseudo-American farrago like Starship Troopers will likely be appreciated (and avoided) for the same reasons everywhere on the planet: high-tech special effects, severed limbs, and lots of action.
The incidents that ignite the wars in Starship Troopers and Star Wars are hardly the same either, however rudimentary in both cases. When Luke Skywalker loses his relatives to alien villains, we’re invited to spend at least a few seconds commiserating with him to validate his desire for payback. But when the parents of Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) get nuked–among 12 million other earth dwellers, no less–what we’ve already seen of this pair makes them only slightly less repellent than the bugs who wipe them out, so the tragedy and outrage are strictly rhetorical. Just about the only glimpses of private life we see are of this yammering couple in their home: is this the life on earth worth risking one’s life and limbs for? By comparison the coed showers and 20 minutes allotted for sex between battles (two perks of committed army service) are considerably more attractive. (The lead characters’ home base is “Buenos Aires”–a dimly defined setting with no traces of Latin culture whose loss is about as wrenching in this movie as stubbing one’s toe.)
Franklin also points out that Starship Troopers–which is as steeped in cold war ideology as Heinlein’s 1951 The Puppet Masters, and thus in striking contrast to his neo-hippie and neo-communist Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)–suggests that the alien bugs represent Chinese communists and that another humanoid race (the “Skinnies,” omitted in the movie) reflects Russian communists. In fact the novel is crammed with pompous lectures about the communist menace and the errors of Karl Marx, most of them linked to the bugs’ “hive” mentality–which makes it all the more ironic that the classless military utopia Heinlein proffers as an ideal alternative is no less socialist and totalitarian. The movie actually intensifies this paradox by showing how impossible it is for Johnny to speak to his girlfriend or his parents on the videophone without all his bunk mates being present.
