:yea:
Verhoven picked up the novel, read about five pages and threw it out of the window. He wasn’t interested in the least in actual science fiction. And Starship Troopers the novel is definitely science fiction in the proper sense of the word. It is legit literature.
Instead, he made a “parody” movie that most people didn’t get. But hey, at least we got the unforgettable image of Doogie Howser, SS. Yay?
It’s a generic hero story to push pro-fascist speeches and politics. Defending it here is extremely sus for a 1 hour old account.
Instead, he made a “parody” movie that most people didn’t get. But hey, at least we got the unforgettable image of Doogie Howser, SS. Yay?
Satire is dead and ineffective everyone here already knows this. Anything you satire will always just be used unironically be the fash as aspirational and reinforce them. That doesn’t change the fact that the original is a trashy generic pro-nazi book.
The book was tossed out for the satire of the movie because making the book as a movie would have been the production of fascist agitprop. Nobody really knew what we know now about satire not working.
Is Satire really pointless though? It reaches its intended audience very well.
Just because some chuds are too brain dead to realize they are being made fun of doesn’t change the fact that they are being made fun of.
The alternative is they rally around legit fascist agitprop like “day of the rope” or some nightmarish genocide fantasy - it’s not like they will waste away into dust.
In my opinion yes, it’s pointless.
It serves as entertainment for the people who already agree with the message of the satire. It achieves nothing with the people who take media at face value. And worse yet it becomes completely unironic media that the subjects of the satire use to promote themselves and be aspirational about.
If we score this, nothing is gained for group 1, nothing is gained for group 2 (and sometimes they like it which is really bad), something is gained for group 3. The fascists gain something from it.
It is far better for us to produce completely unambiguous good guys and bad guys content, rather than satire of the fascists as the ““good guys””. While the latter is very entertaining for us it is a mistake and a trap.
Safire is the highest form of posting. As posters that appeals to us. It however is not effective. There is something g called there mere exposure effect. It is a marketing term. Just being exposed to a thing increases people’s tendency to like it. Satire devote brain wrinkles to the bad stuff, and they are happy brain wrinkles. Without specific work your brain tends to like things it has more wrinkles for. So in agregste it creates more harm that good.
Look at The Producer’s. Alot of people have very fond memories of Hitler now. Around the edges your brain will start to forget why it has fond memories of Hitler and it might soften your negative associations. Across a population effects like that can produce shifts that are big enough people make marketing careers off them.
Satire is dead and ineffective everyone here already knows this.
I think satire for any broader audience needs to clearly include and demonstrate the contradiction of what it’s seeking to satirize: simply showing something that’s absurd and awful and trusting people to realize it’s mocking it is bad practice, especially when its mockery is only a little exaggerated from reality. Starship Troopers is bad satire because it doesn’t refute the system it is satirizing, and it just comes across as generic corny military sci-fi with a similar fascistic tone to normal American slop if someone isn’t already aware of its goals. All the nationalism and bloodlust in it is just a clearer statement of what most American theater-goers already expected from media.
To be effective it would have had to be more overt and actively spell out what it’s implying: include a scene establishing the meteor was a natural phenomenon and the government knew it, hell establish that they decided against having asteroid-defense-systems because it would have meant raising taxes or diverting half a percent of military funding or something, and so clearly establish that the ridiculous casus belli is explicitly a lie; establish that the pointless invasion of the bug worlds is failing and the war is going poorly overall so that it doesn’t look like they’re just winning a hard fought victory against a monstrous foe; hell establish the bugs as individually smarter and more concerned with their own lives with something like a direct attack on a nest being met with a holding action from worker forms who fall back when actual soldier forms arrive and repel the attack; etc.
It basically needed to make it clear that the humans were in the wrong and the villain was the Fascist regime behind the war in the first place, and that they’re losing because they’re disorganized and launching a genocidal war against an entrenched foe over literally nothing but sheer stupid bloodlust.
The problem here is the intellectual trap.
Intellectual people LIKE media that trusts its audience to understand it is satire without the overt spelling out of it. Without the explanation. The intellectual audience that satire targets prefers not to have it so they can have they’re “i’m clever for getting it” feeling.
This is the trap of satire. The trap of intellectual entertainment. It is masturbation and because it feels good it is so easy to make the mistake of helping the fascists while making the content feel as good as possible for its intended target audience. This isn’t helped by the fact that doing so not only nets you more viewers from the intellectuals but also more viewers from the fash.
Wow, reactionaries were able to recuperate They Live and Starship Trooper and Full Metal Jacket and American History X and Fight Club and American Psycho and Judge Dredd and WH40k to serve reactionary ends, but surely, surely this time it’ll be different.
It was kinda piloitically incoherent libertarianism. So yeah, it is close enough to fascist to get work done.
piloitically incoherent libertarianism.
Pretty much all of heinlein is this with a healthy dose of eugenics, a lot of mysogyny and being overall horny, including about questionably young characters.
People shouldn’t be subjected to Heinlein’s writing unless out of academic interest on why he sucked so much.
Verhoeven’s movie, like all good sci fi, is a commentary on the present disguised as a story about futury stuff.
That American’s (including me but also I was twelve) were too dense to get it isn’t Verhoeven’s fault. If anything it just demonstrates the point he’s hammering on in so many of his movies. Look at how many people unironically like Robocop, while disdaining Showgirls!
