Although generally understood to be a satire, a proper understanding of this film today should attempt to recover the historical context from which it arose and to which it ultimately owes its true meaning. Whether the director believes in it or not.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

What is Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film Starship Troopers, and what does it mean today, in 2022?

At the time it was released, it was expected to be the next in the highly anticipated summer special-effects spectacular routine, following in the procession from Jurassic Park to Independence Day. It was a film that, although it contained some of the most impressive special-effects—and can be considered to represent the height of pre-CGI effects—seemed to fall a bit flat. For while there were plenty of explosions, guns, space ships and aliens, there were also long stretches with no action that gave the impression of not fulfilling the expectations of its genre at the time. It was only later (for some of us), and in retrospect, that it became clear that the film aimed at a social and political commentary or critique. According to this interpretation, it became known as a profound satire on fascist, authoritarian societies. Today, though, in 2022, its no longer clear how one should interpret it.

In the first place, if it is to be considered a satire, this implies some external illegitimacy to the war the fascist form of humanity has decided to wage against these bugs. The bugs should be anthropomorphized in some way to create a sympathy with the audience that isn't apparent to the characters in the film and that casts their actions as deliberately misguided. There is maybe one sentence in the film that could support that: the newsman giving a report says something about scientists questioning whether or not they should have just left the bugs alone. And also perhaps the fact that the brain-bug 'felt fear' in the end and was styled in such a way as to seem vulnerable and weak on its own. Otherwise there is nothing apart from what we can glean from the structure of the film (which will be addressed below).

How then are we supposed to understand the central supposedly satiric moment of the film? This would be when, after an unsuccessful attack on the alien world, a starship is returning to base and two central characters, Carmen (Denise Richardson) and Zander (Patrick Muldoon) see the destruction their military endeavor has wrought on them: 'How could this have happened?' Zander asks; 'We thought we were smarter than the bugs', Carmen deadpans. And this is funny. But it isn't satirical. Its funny because they really should have known better, considering the onslaught they just survived. We laugh with them, not at them or their folly, nor in silent commiseration with our own world that doesn't make such stupid mistakes. The war seems justified: a swarm of bugs from another world has destroyed cities all across Earth, and they've gone to fight back. Why the hell wouldn't they? We're supposed to believe the idealized concept of humanity the director has is that it would have the sweeping foresight, vision and empathy to know before rushing to their own demise that, 'hey, step back for a second, these disgusting looking viscous bugs that do nothing but kill us, destroyed our cities, we need to just accept our losses here otherwise we're doomed by our own self-destructive tendencies'? This doesn't make any sense, really. Perhaps if the response went something like: 'we need to hit them harder and faster, the only thing we didn't do was nuke the entire planet, damn our own soldiers who were trapped down there!' That would point in the direction of satire.

But that's not what the film does and so we need to look further for another way to understand it.

The concept of society and humanity portrayed in the film

A key to developing a proper understanding can be found in the second scene of the film, '1-year later', after the first scene where we foresee the future futility of waging war on the bugs:

TEACHER(JEAN RACZAK): Pay attention! Let's sum up: this year we explored the failure of democracy, when the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.

TEACHER: What is the difference—if any—between a citizen and a civilian?
STUDENT: A citizen accepts responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his life, a civilian does not.
TEACHER: Exact words of the text. But do you understand it, do you believe it?
STUDENT: I don't know.
TEACHER: Of course you don't, I doubt any one of you would recognize civic virtue if it jumped up and bit you in the ass.

What this amounts to is a critique of all forms of impassioned action through which a society might choose to organize itself. Rather than submit to our base instincts, to attempt to find meaning in the crusade, in the togetherness of the fight, these words caution against any such action. This is not what is said; in fact the opposite is said. But in the context of the film, and what its commentary seems to be, this is the point. For in the end, although humanity has succeeded in killing a single brain bug that might then lead to the eventual extermination of the alien threat, the film concludes with the text: 'THEY'LL KEEP FIGHTING; AND THEY'LL WIN'. Not: 'we' will win; an ambiguous 'they'. Does this refer to the bugs, or to the soldiers? If its the bugs, then the entire film is in this way cast as itself being a document of how precisely not to act. It thus points back to moderation, respect of the balance of forces, acceptance of reality as it is, however anodyne it might be.

Which is a bizarre point to make when each and every aspect of the document of humanity pursuing these goals not only makes sense within the logic of the film itself, and the emotional logic of the characters, but all together reflects a profound concept of society. As was discussed in this essay, this concept has to do with a (Roman) form of civic religiousness through which an act of foundation of a world is perpetuated through the obligation and responsible comportment of a citizenry that is able to see in the act of foundation the divine and sacred nature of preserving this god-given fortuitous gift of a home, without which human-being would be lost to itself and without a place to live. Being obligated together in the careful, deliberate construction of a world occurs in an attunement and profound historical consciousness with the act of foundation and the existential, political context from out of which it occurred (which is human-being's fundamental and unconditioned freedom from out of which arises its necessity to cooperate). It is this form of religiousness from which derives the authority one submits to when they take-up the responsibility for their world. It is divine in nature.

This film seems to comprehend this completely. This philosophy of foundation is reflected in the dialogue above and as well in the way in which the film unfolds. A comfortable life of the civilian with what amounts to an ordinary liberal future is abandoned for that of the citizen, and taking responsibility for a world that has come under attack by alien bugs. Contrived relationships based in the avoidance of loneliness and an alignment of careers to enable them to persist is abandoned for relationships formed in the exposure of one human-being to another, exposed for each who they are in the course of action, when each rises to their full potential to be who they are. It is a story of transformation, from rationalized to impassioned life, of sacrifice and heroism, of one for the other and each for all.

And yet, as the film concludes as it does one has to wonder if they are supposed to actually shake off the truth of what has just been experienced—because it is an experience, a real masterpiece, this film—and reflect themselves back into the mindset of the rationalized existence of the civilian? Back to submission of society's liberal, non-conflict based conditions. Back to relationships based on the safety and predictability of friendship rather than love. Back to the safety and careful calculation of risk avoidance. Back, after having seen the truth of the crusade, the unity of purpose, the willingness of obligation to the preservation of a world, the passions and truth of confronting oneself and another as who each can be and became—it is back to the anodyne reality from which all the acts of the heroic citizen emerge as the true expression of human-being's full-and-rendered-palpable potential that one is to believe is the actual point of this film. It is actually a satire? Ha ha, LOL, pulled one over on you, all that meaning and purpose, the most profound mode of being-together in this world and religiously obligated to upholding our world is all the ruse, the trick—the delusion. Reality is actually in the autonomous function of anti-conflict of what amounts to reality as it is today, or at least as it was in 1997.

An alternative interpretation: a crescendo of ideological containment

What we might consider this film to be—not as a plot interpretation, or in its significance in the history of cinema, but the film itself as an expression of human-being's potential to create an artwork, an object that persists in our world—is, rather, an expression of a particular form of ideological capture and containment. Emerging as a method of enforcement at that time in the 1990s when the film was made, this method has persisted until only very recently when the contours of another future have begun to emerge. Accessing this reality, the fundamental historical consciousness of the moment this film was created in 1996, is possible through the song that defines it: Mazzy Star's Fade Into You:

I want to hold the hand inside you
I want to take the breath that's true
I look to you, and I see nothing
I look to you to see the truth.

Fade into you
Strange you never new
Fade into you
I think its strange you never knew.

These lyrics, written in 1993, 4-years before Starship Troopers is a song of the angst, alienation and search for meaning that still defined the 1990s. It was a time when, thrown to each their own in a rapidly liberalizing economy, the belief in an alternative version of life persisted that hadn't yet been extinguished or transformed into superficial, commodified and politicized dissatisfaction. A profound sense of searching for a truth in ones own life and work and an expectation that others would also believe the same and that, through the occurrence of common action, the romantic idea that one might find in the encounter with another redemption from the prison of professionalized life that was then beginning to suffocate hope for a more authentic and meaningful existence.

The 1990s still believed in this possibility. The 1970s still believed in this possibility. And today, we are once again confronted with this possibility again. And once again, we are confronted with every effort to subdue it, redirect it back into conformity. Only this time, a single summer blockbuster film isn't enough; what is required is full spectrum narrative saturation. Nothing is what it seems. One can't even any longer be permitted to see the possibility of another form of existence, anything more truthful. Pop-cultural production almost exclusively aims at captivity, the risk that even a 'satire' of an alternative might provoke inception is already too much.

Today, in 2022, we should try to see the truth of Starship Troopers for what it is: it is not a satire. What it portrays is the truth, a truth to live by and that can save us from the morass we now find ourselves in. The colonization of our world will not stop if we simply refuse to resist. This is no lesson. These forces want nothing short of full-scale cooptation and incorporation into their matrix of orchestrated and narrated political-economy, over which nothing will remain of human-being's agency but his rote persistence as a subsisting animal.

And so, while this form of ideological containment, of liberal ideological containment might have had more resonance as a satire in the 1990s as a caution against foreign military escapades and any romanticized concept that underpins it, today, the situation has changed. Today, while foreign militarism is certainly an issue, the threat we face now is much more pervasive and it comes from within. It is no longer exactly over the preservation of a functioning, redeemable liberal society that the conflict arises; rather, it is over a perverted and unbounded global liberalism masquerading as a 'global left' and whose ideological containment itself alone has become its reason for being and that seeks to cling to power through every means of suppression, censorship, surveillance and moral manipulation available to it. This is the actual authoritarian threat.

As such, it is important in this moment to be able to recover the truth within this film, to see it stripped of the deceptive misdirection of the garb of authoritarian militarism, soldiers and weapons, and to rehabilitate the pure civic obligation to uphold our human world that lies in plain sight within it. To not see it as obscured within the neutralizing comfort of satire. Today, the world has essentially become the existential conflict depicted in the film; except that today it is anything but a satire. Which is why we need to take what the film tells us at its conclusion seriously, in the full expanse of the meaning it should have for us today: it is service that guarantees citizenship.

And, so, although the deluded, superficial, petty and ironic will certainly be unlikely to abandon the convenience and comfort of their despotic political narrations and deceptive machinations, it is also true that WE'LL keep fighting. And, knowing well our foe: we'll also WIN. No matter how perverted, pervasive, agitated, brainless and parasitic they become in their swarm.

There really is no other way this turns out.