I don't know where this will take me, so just bear with me. This is a new style of journalism I'm innovating called 'fevercrit;' I've been running a temperature for two days and my brain's been running wild with all sorts of streams of consciousness - some pleasant, some not so pleasant. Like Professor Pyg, "I want to be sick in front of everyone..."
Verhoeven. Last time I saw one of his films was about two years ago. And yet, he became one of my favourite directors lately (while I've been a fan of his work with the Jesus Seminar for somewhat longer). It might be because my housemate bought the Alien boxset. The first Alien film... well, what can you say that hasn't already been said. An excellent film, and sci-fi to the core, because it's all about that fear of the viral invasion of the body, not to mention AI anxiety. Then again, it's also all about working class solidarity, and anti-colonialism. Drawing deep from two the two great wells (or Wells) of specfic there. Whereas Aliens turns things rather on their head. It's the retribution of the colonialists - masculinising Ripley into a kind of intergalactic John Wayne from The Green Berets (but with a feminine side, so Cameron still gets his violent woman... uh, I mean, female action hero... kick), and transmuting the xenomorphs into space gooks who will soak up plenty of American... uh, sorry, human... bullets. Aliens is unforgivable for two reasons - it creates a franchise, and reclaims Alien for the populists, even going so far as creating a blue collar family at the end (and David Fincher basically had no choice but to slaughter this Space Family Robinson right from the getgo, but that's another story).
So I started reimagining Starship Troopers as a kind of response to this. Maybe it's just the European citizen in me, wanting one of our lot to go and give what Zizek calls Cameron's hypocritical Hollywood Marxism a kicking. But I think there's something to it. Cameron seems more than willing to go along with the American flavour of the Just War while ostensibly criticising it, much like how films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Rambo: First Blood and Predator were used to recruit mentally deficient highschool jocks, and left themselves open for it by not offering up a single valid characterisation of the other side. Verhoeven, on the other hand, just doesn't truck with it - Soldier of Orange is far from the usual hoo-rah for military heroism, and this comes back again in Black Book, which completely removes the moralistic aspect of anti-Nazi resistance and instead places emphasis on survival under occupation.
Let's be honest with ourselves here. Service-men and women aren't heroes. They're real, breathing people, and they range from the exploited poor to psychopaths who have played too many video games. Some of them are even normal people. In conjunction with the generally rightwardsly retarded political awareness and miseduction of Americans, making stuff like Stone's movies and Cameron's is not just questionable, it's downright bad fucking ethics.
So roll on Starship Troopers. While Cameron's Aliens are space gooks, Verhoeven's space gooks are whoever's been on the end of an American propaganda campaign. And while Cameron's heroes are the troopers, Verhoeven's troopers are the sorts who saw Aliens/Predator/Rambo/Platoon and signed on the dotted line. While Cameron sneaks in the back door with his propaganda, Verhoeven has Arnie bursting through your window with a ripped shirt and an implausibly big gun screaming THIS IS PROPAGANDA THIS IS PROPAGANDA THIS IS PROPAGANDA until we can recognise the propaganda tropes more clearly.
(Wait, that was Total Recall... point still stands. Recall, along with Robocop and Troopers, forms a thematic trilogy of satire and subversion. The uninitiated might see Total Recall as an American sci-fi action flick. When in fact, it's two European con-men, Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger, oiling themselves up and giggling the whole time. But while it's sodden with bitter sarcastic loathing, it's also bursting with invention (which is true of every Verhoeven film), with genetic mutants and colonies on Mars and dual personalities and virtual realities.)
We might here recognise Verhoeven as a deconstructive director, but that's only if you weren't paying attention when Basic Instinct deconstructed the genre so that Sharon Stone is in fact the wide-eyed innocent and Michael Douglas the exploitative villain. This is playing with the conventions of the Hitchcock knock-off, and he did the same with The Fourth Man in case you're one of the Bill Hicks crowd who just doesn't buy it. And then we might look at his sarcastic, camp and knowing takes on the historical movie, the sports movie, and the social realist movie, and returning to sex again with Showgirls.
Indeed, I fancifully imagine Verhoeven getting off the boat, looking around, seeing neon dollar signs everywhere, knowing they're all traps, and asking himself "how can I milk these cunts for all their worth, take the utter piss out of them, and stay true to myself?" The answer he came up with was to turn his career into a drag act, wearing genres like Divine wore wigs, 'whoring' himself so blatantly that it made the pimps feel uncomfortable, gave all the patrons a good time and thoroughly pissed off the literalists and moralists who just didn't get it.
He then has to ask himself what the American people want. And he doesn't like what the answer is. They want to be couch potatoes, and have the fucking cops or the army save their ass, and then they want to be the American James Bond, and they want Sharon Stone to be their wife, and they want to be the great individual myth hero standing up to the evil corporate machine, but really they just want to have done all these things already, because really they want to be sitting on the couch, and they want to be drinking a Coke, and if they can't have done those things that's okay because Arnie's got that covered and aren't we all Arnie anyway? What they don't want to do is examine these ultraviolent crypto-fascist fantasies, or in any way consider that maybe those fantasies have something to do with why the gooks/commies/sand niggers/japs don't like us, or why Private Joey Sixpack Jr., American Hero™, got killed overseas last week. And they certainly don't want to know what the real life Rekalls or Omni Consumer Products like Coca-Cola get up to in places like Colombia or India. Because a Coke goes down really well with another stupid fucking Arnie action movie.
VERHOEVEN: "Here is your Nazi propaganda, you fucking moron. And here's some more. Here is you being made into a real man by the army. Here is your American fascist narrative being taken into space. Recognise it yet? No, no, of course you don't, you fucking moron. Here's some women being exploited. Not ringing any bells? Here are some women, being exploited, to the point, where they have had to grow six titties! Got the joke yet? Of course you fucking haven't. You cunt. Here, buy the fucking action figures. Hahahahaha I'm rich!"
All of which is not without precedent. And we should mention that Verhoeven isn't doing anything that Pat Mills and John Wagner weren't doing for longer in Britain with 2000 AD (fitting that Stallone and other Americans would later take Judge Dredd on face value). Robocop borrows liberally from this, as well as from Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, and the whole thing came full circle when Chaykin acolyte Frank Miller wrote for the Robocop sequels and TV series. But that puts Verhoeven in a good company of sardonic, and perhaps evil, creators who didn't let their cynicism about their audiences prevent them from creating great art.
Original publication date: December 17th, 2010
