Thread by @whydoisay

Rewatched Verhoeven's 1997 Starship Troopers film and I gotta say, it holds up. I was definitely annoyed then at the lack of power armor, but still. People have argued for decades if the book is pro-fascism or a satire played very straight, but the movie is unambiguous. 🧵

My take is that the book is also satire, but it was written in the 1950s when World War II was still fresh and there wasn't a lot of pushback on the idea that Nazis and Italy's National Fascist Party were indeed fucking bad.

I also want to talk about Heinlein as an author a bit. He was in the military, but he wasn't drafted. His family was broke so he tried to get into a military academy, which succeeded in doing after some community college. Graduated from the Naval Academy in the late '20s.

Heinlein was a radio operator on a Navy boat and fought in World War II. Heinlein's politics are complicated and shifted over time. The '30s he campaigned for Upton Sinclair for California Governor. Sinclair wrote The Jungle exposing the abuses of the meatpacking industry.

Isaac Asimov wrote in I, Asimov that Heinlein was in those days, "a flaming liberal". But after Sinclair lost, Heinlein turned into an anti-Communist Democrat. I want to talk about the books he wrote around Starship Troopers for context.

So Heinlein's 1958 novel Methuselah's Children is the first to introduce Lazarus Long and establish the recurring theme of trying to extend human life alongside a bunch of Biblical allusions. A lot of eugenics-like ideas are mixed in here to try to breed long-lived humans.

And also for context, this book comes after many years of writing juvenile sci-fi short stories and some meant more for adults that were very much "hard sci-fi", meaning very focused on then-current science, math, and technology but often used to explore more human ideas.

And it's also important to note that even by the '30s was an open nudist and advocate of "free love". He was in an open relationship with his second wife Leslyn. They married in 1932. That is REALLY ahead of the curve. By DECADES.

His marriage to Leslyn didn't lost (reportedly she was an out of control raging alcoholic). After WWII, he married fellow engineer Ginny Gerstenfeld and they designed their own crazy science house will living a lifestyle very outside the mainstream.

Did I mention when they were in the military Ginny outranked him? She spoke seven languages, was a chemist, and once when he collapsed on a beach she saved his life. She carried his ass to an airplane where he was flown to Australia for treatment. Like what the hell. Amazing.

So you have a swinging, nudist, engineer couple who both were in the fucking military. And while in this relationship Heinlein in '58 that Heinlein wrote Methuselah's Children. There's a later quote from him about his politics then.

"At the time I wrote Methuselah's Children I was still politically quite naïve and still had hopes that various libertarian notions could be put over by political processes. It seems to me that every time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away. Maybe two.

And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it gets older, and more crowded, and higher taxes, and more laws." If sounds like later in life Heinlein was what we now call Libertarian even though he describes his younger, more radical days as being libertarian.

So after Children, he writes Starship Troopers. 1959. It wins the Hugo award. It's a bullet in the head to his juvenile novels, signifying his intention to write only for adults going forward. Here's the cover the book had when I first read it in I dunno, 1994 or so.

It's funny the cover describes it as "the controversial classic of military adventure". Controversial here refers to the question of whether it's pro-fascism or satire. And military adventure is an interesting interpretation...

If you actually read the book, huge portions of are delivered in the form of class lectures, practically polemics. The movie has exactly one classroom scene like this, and combines the teacher character with the leader of protagonist Rico's Mobile Infantry group.

The debates about morality and the necessity of a political system where only people who serve in the military are franchised citizens who can vote goes on for many, many pages. While it's set in a classroom and quite a bit is lecture, there's also students rebutting the teacher.

In the movie, the kids are about to graduate high school and totally disinterested, just biding their time and flirting and such. In the book, Rico is at first disinterested but later the teacher gets through to him.

I think it's also important that note that while in the days Starship Troopers was written, American men where required to sign up for the draft at age 18 (and a lot of them were drafted against their will), Israel had recently been established as a country (~10 years prior).

In '49, the Israeli Security Service Law made military service mandatory for all Israelis upon turning which exceptions for Orthodox Jews and Arabs.

But there's also Heinlein's 1940 serial novella If This Goes On… which is about a fundamentalist American Christian theocracy and soldiers in their military trying to overthrow it, so maybe Heinlein wouldn't been pro-Israel exactly when writing Starship Troopers, y'know?

So a big chunk of Starship Troopers is classroom, but another big chunk of the book is boot camp. And it kind of expands on the ideas presented in the school sections, including teacher Dubois' promotion of corporal and capital punishment.

Dubois essentially says juvenile crimes can be stopped by flogging or executing said criminals and suggests this has a deterrent effect on other juveniles. This also connects thematically with later Heinlein works including The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

I believe the quote is "an armed society is a polite society". But Dubois also compares raising a child to training a puppy and my take is that this shit is ironic. To me, OF COURSE this is satirical. But in the radical gnarly '90s, perhaps this was not so obvious.

Verhoeven doesn't DO subtlety. So in the movie this part is taken away from the teacher and becomes one of the web 1.0/TV tabloid journalism meets WWII propaganda newsreels that goes on about how criminals are arrested, tried, and executed the same day.

Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier (who also wrote Robocop) made the correct choice by jamming the satire lever into overdrive. There some very dated things about this movie (like the pseudo-grunge band that plays at our protagonist's high school dance) but this was right.

So when Rico goes to boot camp, he is indeed flogged for his own negligence, but one of his fellow cadets also goes AWOL and murders a young girl and is executed in front of them all. The flogging sequence is indeed incorporated into the movie and it is absolutely NOT glorified.

Shit looks fucking awful. In the movie, Rico is like, "Fuck this, I quit" and only changes his mind with a giant asteroid sent by the aliens completely destroys his home of Buenos Aires, killing his mother and his estranged father. He explicitly finishes boot camp for revenge.

In the book, the aliens do attack Buenos Aires and kill Rico's mother there, but not only does his father survive and reappear later in the book, it's made clear that this attack is not a Pearl Harbor style attack that started war with humanity...

...but rather part of a series of ongoing smaller scale border conflicts that escalate to all-out war. I see why the movie makes it a Pearl Harbor type event, though. It really rams home the satire of traditional American militarism.

The allusion to the period when the country was country was MOST united in its militaristic goals and honestly imperalistic expansionism was right after World War II. I mean it wasn't the first time (it had been going on since the start).

But that was the era of "we saved the world with our military but most of it is burnt cinders so let's scoop up as much of it as we can while the getting is good, before USSR can do the same".

Anyway, in the novel after Rico graduates boot camp, there's a section where the Federation completely gets the shit kicked out of them on the alien homeworld of Klendathu and Rico's own unit is almost completely wiped out. The movie recreates this more or less, but...

... it's much goofier. I remember the MST3K Summer Blockbuster Special or whatever it was named saying something about perky young models stumbling onto a battlefield in almost no protection getting torn to shreds by insects and that's about right.

The incredible hubris of the Federation military and the idiotic naïveté of the barely armored and barely armored Mobile Infantry torn apart while a tabloid reporter films the carnage in realtime is impossible to interpret as heroic. They are a bunch of fucking morons.

And the movie explicitly tells us they are dying because of human expansionism. One of the propaganda reels mentions and then dismisses humanity taking up the Arachnid's natural habitat as being the cause of the war in the first place.

My interpretation of the book is that it has serious respect for grunts, foot soldiers, the boots on the ground soldiers, and disrespect for the suits and politicians at the top who throw men into the meat grinder.

The movie really, really hammers that home with the brass really only showing up on TV, distant and removed from the conflict, feeding the soldiers bad intelligence on purpose and getting thousands of soldiers killed just to test how smart the bugs are.

And while World War II was still fresh in the minds of Americans when Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers, much more recent was the Korean War, which was kind of a debacle that cost something like 50,000 American lives for really not much gain.

The book says things like, "no 'Department of Defense' ever won a war" and of course, "Come on you apes! You wanna live forever?" which paraphrases Dan Daly at the Battle of Belleau Wood who said, "Come on, you sons of bitches! You wanna live forever?"

It's also important to point out that when I say Heinlein "fought" in WWII I mean "worked a radio" and was honorably discharged for tuberculosis. So maybe that's part of why the military stuff in the book seems so focused on not just boot camp, but Rico's later officer school.

It's not like Heinlein was on the shores of Normandy, you know what I'm saying?

And getting back to whether or not the novel is pro-fascism, I think it's interesting to note that the book explicitly does NOT have conscription at all. When I turned 18 I had to sign up for Selective Service. Sure, I wasn't drafted, but I could have been.

When Starship Troopers was written, 18 years old where drafted all the time, including the Korean War, which JUST HAPPENED. One of the dedications to the book is "to all sergeants everywhere who have labored to make men out of boys."

I think Heinlein is very pro-grunts but I don't think you can expand that to say Heinlein is pro-militarism, expansionism, or even pro-military government. The novel in fact mentions OTHER forms of public service that will grant you voting franchise besides military service.

Interestingly, the movie takes away that nuance by presenting a character who wants to be a politician and says it's much easier if you've been in the military. It doesn't COMPLETELY remove that option, but it flattens it somewhat.

And anyway, the book still implies the majority of voters are veterans. The book explicitly states soldiers cannot vote while on active duty, as well, and by being a career soldier you are essentially waiving your voting rights that you allegedly earned by said military service.

I have heard people describe Starship Troopers the novel as both a dystopia and a strange utopia, but it's very hard to argue that Starship Troopers is depicting a repressive military dictatorship. I just don't think that's what the book is stating at all.

And in the movie, it seems like life on earth (unless you get blown up by a bug asteroid) is nothing but wealth and leisure. We never EVER see any poor people, we never see any downtrodden folks, there's no apparently racism or sexism.

In many ways, even the military is depicted as far more egalitarian than the US military is today. The soldiers are all co-ed and shower together yet no one is being sexually harassed or raped or anything. I can't imagine it being like that in our world ever.

Well, I guess you can argue that the woman who slaps Rico's ass while everyone is teasing him about signing up for the military over a woman is harassing him but...

In the book, our protagonist Juan Rico is Filipino and his friend (not girlfriend, they only ever kissed once) Carmencita Ibanez is presumably Latina. Basically all of the main characters in the movie are white or Black, despite many of them still being from Argentina.

But if you remember that Verhoeven and Neumeier don't do subtle, when you have a clean cut square jawed ARYAN man from fucking Argentina, uhm, yeah I'm pretty sure we're supposed to surmise that Johnny Rico is descended from Nazis who fled Germany at the end of WWII.

So I think Heinlein was trying to depict a much more egalitarian future than we had in the '50s and that included way more racial integration than we even even have today in 2022.

And I think it was important for the movie's satire to work to explicit connect '90s American militarism to not just 1950s American militarism but to Nazi Germany shit. I think the last 20 years have proven Verhoeven and Neumeier to be horrifyingly correct.

It's also important to place Starship Troopers the movie in film history context because while it absolutely is a part of the blockbuster movie consolidation of the film industry and part of the process that led to multiple cookie cutter Marvel and Star Wars films a year...

... it was also released during a wave of World War II movies that were re-interpreting the war in a post-modern context. Some of the movies were focused on the Holocaust like Europa Europa, Schlinder's List, and the Life Is Beautiful, buttt...

You've got movies like The Tuskegee Airmen right before Starship Troopers and it's followed by movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.

Yes, Starship Troopers was absolutely criticizing the then-contemporary American military that had not long before had its first "adventure" in Iraq, not to mention intervention in Somalia, the Bosnian War and Croatian War, and Haiti. This was all very recent history.

But Starship Troopers was absolutely also criticizing the American militarism of the past, with all the super obvious allusions to WWII and post-WWII America. Now was Heinlein's book criticizing America's warmongering? People have been arguing about this for literally decades.

My own interpretation is that its complicated but I think the book is anti-military and anti-war but pro-soldier. I also think it is explicitly anti-Communist, which is both unfortunate, and fits perfectly with Heinlein's politics at the time.

There's some evidence that he was more directly anti-Bolshevik than generally anti-Communist (in fact he was aligned with Socialist in his youth including as I mentioned, Sinclair), but he was also in support of McCarthy's HUAC bullshit.

Here's a quote from the book Starship Troopers: "Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution...

"The Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance...

"However the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins."

So you have here an alien race that is only vaguely defined in the books other than to compare them to Earth-based arachnids, you know, bugs. Which of course goes right with the idea of "anti-like conformity in USSR" and that sort of thing.

But I want to highlight the "didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo" part and contrast that with "Fleet does the flying, MI does the dying". Especially in the movie, soldiers' lives are extremely expendable.

But I think in the book there is tension between the what it depicts as the laudable work of being a soldier and the actually horror of war. Another quote, "The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation."

And "A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not" (which is quoted verbatim in the film).

But here's the crux: "The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him... but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing... but controlled and purposeful violence."

"But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals."

"The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say—supply the control. Which is as it should be."

So, essentially, you as a soldier, surrender agency to the brass and the government and do essentially state-sponsored violence on their behalf. This is completely unambiguous. And again, active duty soldiers have no voting rights in the novel. They are there to kill and die.

Another good quote (most of these are from Dubois, BTW) is, "When you come right to it, it is easier to die than it is to use your head."

So we set up that bugs are cannon fodder and then we expand onto that that human soldiers are cannon fodder and we add that it is good and correct that soldiers carry out their orders without question, in the name of bringing violence on behalf of the state. AND THEN.

"Everything went wrong. It had been planned as an all-out move to bring the enemy to their knees, occupy their capital and the key points of their home planet, and end the war. Instead it damn near lost the war.

"I am not criticizing General Diennes. I don't know whether it's true that he demanded more troops and more support and allowed himself to be overruled by the Sky Marshal-in-Chief—or not. Nor was it any of my business.

"Furthermore I doubt if some of the smart second-guessers know all the facts. What I do know is that the General dropped with us and commanded us on the ground and, when the situation became impossible, he personally led the diversionary attack that allowed quite a few of us...

"...(including me) to be retrieved—and, in so doing, bought his farm. He's radioactive debris on Klendathu and it's much too late to court-martial him, so why talk about it?"

This is one of many examples of the people in charge being fucking incompetent and costing many soldiers their lives. So Heinlein has created a world where the only way to have controlling interest in your government is public service, which is in most cases military service.

And then as a military serviceperson, you are to surrender to authority absolutely, and kill and die as required, according to the whims of incompetents who have no fucking idea what they are doing.

There's also a ton examples of the military dehumanizing soldiers from the little to the big. One quote, "Don't you know about SGTs? ... They don't have mothers. Just ask any trained private... They reproduce by fission ... like all bacteria." This is Instructor-Corporal Bronski.

So I really do think it is wrong to read Starship Troopers as saying a fascist military dictatorship is great. It specifically spells that war fucking sucks and that the leaders of the military are fucking incompetent getting men killed left and right over bullshit reasons.

And it is not depicting a military dictatorship in the first place. It's a more limited democracy where the leaders are elected by voters but the voters gain franchise via public service, military or not. Leaders can be and are removed.

The book specifically says that statemen are in charge of the generals and goes on to say that there's not one leader.

The movie lays in on this. The Sky Marshall, de facto leader apparently of the civilian AND military population makes disastrous, terrible decisions that get thousands of soldiers killed for zero gain after failing to prevent an attack that destroyed a major city killing millions

And then the Sky Marshall resigns on live TV, immediately replaced by a new Sky Marshall (a Black woman, no less, again showing the more integrated egalitarian fascist dystopia) who sends a bunch more soldiers to die on the exact same planet they did in the last scene.

Again, the message is far less subtle in the movie and I think that was the correct move. I still think the book is satirical, but Heinlein's tone is so straight I can see how people miss it.

Even some of his fellow sci-fi writers didn't see it. The Forever War is a direct reaction to Starship Troopers.

(Well a reaction to both Starship Troopers and Haldeman BEING A SOLDIER IN VIETNAM)

I will get back to the movie in a moment but I do want to digress a little and look at the next book Heinlein released immediately following Starship Troopers, '61's Stranger in a Strange Land (uncensored longer version released posthumously in '91.

This is kind of sorta a follow up to his old juvenile book, Red Planet, much like Starship Troopers is a "goodbye forever" to his juvenile sci-fi. It's about a human born in a spaceship that crashes on Mars who is raised by native Martians.

He returns to Earth, perplexed by human society and is basically a free love nudist with psychic powers who founds a religious cult based on the ethos he apparently adopted from his Martian "parents".

This book would later be adopted by the hippie generation and like how can you immediately follow up Starship Troopers, your supposedly fascist pro-military dictatorship book with an anti-Christian, pro-commune, pro-non-monogamy book??

Heinlein said the book was attacking, "the two biggest, fattest sacred cows... monotheism and monogamy." The New York Times, reviewing the book at its original release called it "a disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism."

Ironically, it went on to be the first sci-fi book on the bestseller list of the New York Times Book Review and when the expanded version was published, the NYT had a much more positive review. But again, I want you to think about Starship Troopers in context.

The book is sandwiched between Methuselah's Children, a book about trying to achieve eternal or at least really long life via selective breeding and a book about an alien influenced non-monogamous free love polytheistic commune.

I just do not see how you can possibly interpret Heinlein as a 1950s war hawk conservative nutjob EVEN THOUGH he was pro-HUAC and anti-communist. He was ALSO a free love nudist anti-Christian hippie before being a hippie was a thing.

He was regularly pissing off the establishment and writing books deeply unpopular with the literary world.

EVEN if they literally encourage you to read Starship Troopers when you join the American military today (my stepdad borrowed my copy of Starship Troopers when he came back from boot camp I swear to god), he immediately followed it up with Stranger in a Strange Land!

Swerving back to the movie, the screenplay that became Starship Troopers did not start out that way. Originally it was Bug Hunt at Outpost 7. Producer Jon Davison said it was similar to Heinlein's book so he drastically rewrote it to be ST, an attempt to appeal to studio heads.

Keep in mind, this 1991, immediately after Verhoeven's Total Recall, a big budget satirical sci-fi movie based on literary sci-fi, in this case Philip K. Dick, rather than Heinlein. Again context is very important. Total Recall is WHY Starship Troopers was ultimately made.

Total Recall was a monster hit, managing to even out-perform Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' opening weekend, not to mention being in the list of the ten highest-grossing three-day opening weekends in history.

And Verhoeven directed Total Recall, which was written the Alien team of Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett plus Gary Goldman of Big Trouble in Little China. Starship Troopers was in development hell for a while, but it made sense to pair Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier again.

Why? Well, Verhoeven directed two salacious Joe Eszterhas scripts in a row, the hit Basic Instinct and the bomb Showgirls. Going back the old successful formula of sci-fi tinted satire that worked so well with Robocop and Total Recall that made so much money was a no brainer.

Not only was Neumeier the screenwriter of both Robocop and Starship Troopers, he was co-producer of both, and went on to write Starship Troopers 2, write, executive produce, AND direct Starship Troopers 3, executive produce Invasion, AND write/executive produce Traitor of Mars.

He also gets writing credit alongside two others for the reboot of Robocop and wrote Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. I just don't think Neumeier does anything other than satire.

P.S. The murderer sentenced to execution in the web 1.0/'90s tabloid TV/propaganda filmreel is played by Neumeier himself, so if you've been following this thread, you've seen the man's face.

I don't know how much of the original Bug Hunt script remains in the finished Starship Troopers film, but I can tell you TONS of the material in the movie is right out of the book including the classroom scene, most of the boot camp stuff, the bungled mission on Klendathu, etc.

What is NOT in the book are the propaganda newreels, (human) psychic powers, detailed information about the aliens including the many different species (or castes? unclear) of bug, with the exception of the brain bug, which IS in the book.

They are described "barely functional legs, bloated bodies that were mainly nervous system" and if they die, the entire colony collapses. It's implied they telepathic or something but not really expanded on.

So I really do think the vast majority of the material in the movie comes from the book, but it's also heavily re-contextualized and a lot of what were lectures from teachers or boot camp instructors or what have you is replaced by the propaganda reels, which is good thinking.

I really do think Starship Troopers is a good film and a good anti-fascist satire. I think the only way you can interpret as a pro-fascism is by willfully ignoring the entire tone of the movie and the way everyone a fascist would idolized is portrayed as buffoonish at best.

More often they are portrayed as suicidally incompetent. It's constant. It's Everything from the troopers firing tactical nuclear weapons into targets 100 feet away while wearing nothing more than helmet and a little vest...

...to the newsreel soldiers handing literal children enormous machine guns to play with. Like this is so obviously satire. If you think this movie is promoting the kind of government, the kind of military portrayed in the movie, you are just as buffoonish.

P.S. I've talked before about the influence of Starship Troopers on military sci-fi anime but rather than cover old ground, check out this podcast @VF5SS and I did on the anime many years ago

ia801803.us.archive.org/20/items/destr…

and this old Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/whydoisay/status/1451242040180674562