I
experienced a rude awakening last semester when I decided to show Paul
Verhoeven’s 1987 satirical superhero flick RoboCop as part of my New School Criterion
Collection screening series. It
was the first screening of the semester, and my partners in crime and I wanted
to start with something accessible, a fun piece of cinematic candy to entice
the masses and draw attention to our screening series’ presence, regardless of
the fact that we had no free pizza to offer (a feat that, given the prevalent
attitude of New School apathy, is far easier said than done). I was excited by RoboCop’s timeliness: the parallels that could
be drawn between it’s staunchly anti-corporate message and the ongoing Occupy
movement, and, half-jokingly, labeled the screening as “our ode to Occupy Wall
St.” When the night of the
screening finally arrived, I was pleased to find that around 20 people had
actually turned out (though half of them were friends of mine I had berated
into going). The other half — the
students who were actually interested in the event that they had seen
advertised around campus — was made up of members of the New School’s Occupy
contingent whom, it would seem, had taken my words to heart in a way I had not
expected. The next hour and a half
went without a hitch. There were
no technological difficulties, everyone actually seemed to enjoy themselves and
I overcame my fear of public speaking long enough to say a few words about the
film’s significance, but the night still left a bad taste in my mouth.
There
is no way around the fact that RoboCop is a very funny film — it’s a scathing satire of Reaganomics
and all the privatization, gentrification and corporations that go with the
territory — but one thing it doesn’t send-up is the police force. Regardless of the film’s message, the
Occupy kids proceeded to laugh and scream with delight every time a cop was
maimed or murdered. When they left
the theater and told me how much they had enjoyed themselves, I didn’t have the
heart to tell them they had laughed at all the wrong parts. I think it’s safe to say that I resent
the cops as much as the next guy, but that still doesn’t mean I advocate any
kind of violence against them. I
was disturbed by the audience’s response and couldn’t help but feel like I was
to blame, guilty for providing the outlet for their misplaced aggression. But that’s the risk you take when you
show one of Verhoeven’s over-the-top, borderline exploitative, yet ultimately
subversive epics.
Verhoeven
has made a living out of being misunderstood; time and time again crafting
gleefully gratuitous, deceptively trashy works of art that critics malign and
popular audiences flock to, though neither group truly grasps what they are
being confronted with. He’s a
self-conscious sultan of sleaze, a purveyor of moral filth and degradation
whose films both revel in and transcend their wanton depravity, often to
disconcerting effect. His most
effective films, RoboCop
and 1997’s Starship Troopers,
are brilliant mixtures of high- and low-art — works of subtle social satire
that titillate the viewer with excessive violence while imparting an entirely
different, usually contradictory message that makes his exact point of view
difficult to decode. It’s a strange
concoction and, if you aren’t willing to give Verhoeven the benefit of the
doubt and accept him as the world-weary cynic that he is, it’s easy to join the
ranks of the opposition, to miss the sly criticism he offers of the very values
he appears to extol.
Even
Verhoeven’s other American films, though often falling short of the mark of
excellence exemplified by RoboCop and
Starship Troopers,
are significant in their own right.
1990’s Philip K. Dick-inspired sci-fi action blockbuster Total Recall, then the most expensive film of all
time, was also the last big-budget American film to be made entirely without
CGI (save for one shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger going through a metal
detector). The 1992 erotic thriller
Basic Instinct is a
pitch-perfect exercise in Hitchcock hero-worship. And 1995’s notoriously awful All About Eve rip-off, Showgirls, Verhoeven’s one box-office flop,
deserves attention if only because it is an experiment in the impossible —
attempting to exaggerate Las Vegas, a city already defined by its
excesses. Verhoeven has become a
lowbrow auteur of sorts, a director who marries a distinctly decadent,
commercial visual aesthetic to an overly enthusiastic emotional tone that gives
the appearance of buying into the very corruption it is instead taking the
opportunity to lambaste. His is a
cinema of excess, of gratuitous sex and violence presented in an indulgently
glossy fashion, where everything is blown out of proportion to the point of
satire. The only thing more ironic
than Verhoeven’s films is the fact that most of the world has decided to take
them seriously.
RoboCop is the first, and best, example of the
kind of genre-cloaked Trojan horses Verhoeven loves to sneak into
theaters. On the surface it’s just
another action film, albeit a far bloodier, more entertaining one than the
norm, but at heart it’s a work of black comedy, a critique of the times that
doubles as the moving tale of a tragic everyman’s dehumanization at the hands
of corporate America.
RoboCop is set in the not-so-distant “future”
where society has derailed and the government has lost control of the populace,
allowing corporate giant OCP (Omni Consumer Products — a hilariously vague and
grandiose name that embodies all of bureaucracy’s inherent emptiness) to privatize
the police force in an effort to gentrify (and pacify) “Old Detroit” and make
way for the construction of the futuristic “Delta City.” The glass-and-steel skyscrapers of OCP
headquarters look down on the rusted, anarchic dystopia Detroit has become, a place
where street gangs rule and every day brings the police closer to organized
strike, walking off their jobs in protest of horrendous working conditions (an
OCP higher-up’s televised reaction to hearing that a group of cops has just
been murdered is, “Any cop will tell you: ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out
of the kitchen.’”). Enter doomed
hero Alex Murphy, a loving husband and father who also happens to be one of the
city’s last honest cops. Crime
lord Clarence Boddicker guns him down on his first day at a new precinct but,
in a Christ-like twist, he’s resurrected by OCP as part of an experimental new
program that furthers their modus operandi of increasingly fascist methods of
lowering the crime rate.
Transformed from a standard, if well-meaning, patrolman into a
mechanized superhero of the technology age, he doesn’t arrest bad guys so much
as incapacitate them by any means necessary. Fight scenes and explosions abound as Murphy’s new cyborg
identity eclipses his human past.
It
becomes apparent that the corporations create the crime that they then set out
to police, in a perverse twist on the classic economic formula of supply and
demand. OCP second-in-command Dick
Jones is secretly in charge of the street gang that runs rampant in Old Detroit
and hooks the residents on cocaine, while his company owns the police,
hospitals and army. The corporate
world’s lack of any kind of sympathy or care for its customers’ well-being
echoes Orson Welles, as Harry Lime, in The Third Man, when he says, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped
moving?” The only difference is
that the question is posed metaphorically, from the window of a skyscraper’s
100th floor, as opposed to literally, from that of a Ferris wheel.
The world presented in the film is
inundated with advertisements, which become the key to understanding RoboCop’s implicit satire. Everything is a glitzy and garish
product that comes equipped with an asinine catchphrase, from fake, robotic
hearts (“And remember… we care.”) to the game show everyone in the city watches
(“I’d buy that for a dollar!”) to Delta City (“The future has a silver lining”)
to RoboCop himself (“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”). When the recently replaced mayor holds
his successor hostage at gunpoint, part of his list of demands is “a new
car! Something with reclining
leather seats that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage!” The car in question, the Porsche 6000
SUX comes with its own telling catchphrase: “An American tradition.”
Fake TV snippets are interspersed
throughout the film, replicating the ironies, and reflecting on the
consumerism, of the ‘80s. (The
most obvious jab at Reagan is the Earth-orbiting “Star Wars” Strategic Defense
Peace Platform which later misfires, destroying all of Santa Barbara in the
process.) The advertisements are
Verhoeven’s “tell,” his way of revealing his hand and injecting some much
needed levity to what would otherwise be a slightly too deadpan lampooning of
the times. Through the figurative
nudge and wink the ads provide, we realize how to interpret the plethora of
disturbingly ambiguous scenes scattered throughout the film. It becomes ok to laugh at the
nightmarish scene in which the prototype of the hulking, robotic monstrosity
ED-209 (ED for “Enforcement Droid”) malfunctions, pumping an unfortunate OCP
executive full of lead (in unflinchingly gory detail) for no reason at all,
during an otherwise normal business meeting, and all the grandfatherly CEO can
say is that he is “very
disappointed,” but only because the glitch means the loss of 50 million dollars
“in interest payments alone!” (The
ill-fated executive’s “friend” offers the fittingly perverse epitaph, “That’s
life in the big city.”)
Conversely, the satire imbues the film’s ending with a tragic,
pessimistic subtext that recalls the “unhappy happy endings” of 1950s American
melodramas. RoboCop may finally
kill Dick Jones and regain some consciousness of his former self, but he is and
always will be an OCP product. His
very heroism is undermined from the start by his inherent submission to the
evil empire that exploits the citizens of Old Detroit. He’s won the battle, but lost the war.
Verhoeven isn’t content with just
satirizing consumer capitalism, exaggerating the generic tropes of action films
to comic proportions as well. When
RoboCop saves a woman from being assaulted by two rapists, he uses his
automated accuracy to shoot through the woman’s dress in order to pierce one of
the attackers through his legs. He
symbolically “gets the girl” by tearing open her dress and literally, bloodily,
castrates the other man. Later,
when Clarence Boddicker (played to coke-addled cartoon villain perfection by
Kurtwood Smith, obviously relishing the chance to play against type) impales
him on a massive metal shaft, RoboCop prevails by way of the computer interface
ice pick implanted in his arm, which he uses to stab Clarence in the
throat. In this new age of
techno-fetishism, digital aggression triumphs over that of the human or the
industrial. Even in the case of
Murphy’s Macchiavellian RoboCop resurrection, technology doesn’t giveth (life,
efficiency) nearly as much as it taketh away (free will). In no other film is mankind’s
tumultuous relationship with technology rendered (or exaggerated) so
exquisitely.
Exactly
ten years after he made RoboCop,
Verhoeven decided to revisit the same themes with Starship Troopers.
As if RoboCop
weren’t filled with enough deadpan vitriol already, Starship Troopers finds Verhoeven taking the earlier
work’s generic, aesthetic and tonal exaggeration to its logical extreme,
amplified to a point of surreal absurdity. The film is a veritable piece of concept art, an exercise in
social criticism that genuinely seems to celebrate the fascism, globalization
and the unbelievably horrible reality of war that it so deftly skewers.
Using as its source material Robert
Heinlein’s controversial 1959 novel of the same name, Starship Troopers at first seems like an example of wish
fulfillment, of a world close to Utopia.
It’s setting is Earth, 300 years in the future, at a point where race
and gender are meaningless and humanity is united as one under a world
government called The Federation.
Education is available to all, poverty is no longer an issue and the
only social distinction is that of being a civilian or a citizen, citizenship
being a privilege earned by enrolling in the Federal military service. Governmental authority and media
accuracy are unquestioned, as the Federation seems to work for the good of all
mankind. The film focuses on three
Argentinean youngsters, Johnny Rico, Carmen Ibanez and Carl Jenkins, who, fresh
out of school, decide to enlist just as humanity goes to interstellar war with
a hostile arachnoid species known only as “the Bugs.” The war escalates, and the three friends quickly rise
through the military ranks, Johnny as a grunt in the Mobile Infantry, Carmen as
a pilot and Carl as a psychic intelligence officer.
Once again, Verhoeven proves himself a
master of sloganeering and propaganda.
Engaging in a self-conscious dialogue with the modern world, the
director uses Starship Troopers
as a way of furthering the implicit social critique embedded in RoboCop’s TV commercials, updating them to fit
the Internet age. Through the
Federation’s friendly, accessible, interactive news broadcasts, we see a world
where a man can be arrested, tried and convicted within six hours (then
publicly executed in a televised broadcast later that evening); where you need
a license in order to do anything as natural as have children; where humanity
can decide to go to war within seconds of a disaster’s occurrence, regardless
of its actual cause. One
commercial forcefully declares, “The only good Bug is a dead Bug!” Another urges civilians to “Do your
part,” illustrating the ideal by way of young children gleefully squashing bugs
in a residential backyard while a mother whoops with joy and cheers them
on. Social Studies teachers speak
of “the failure of democracy” and how “naked force has resolved more issues
throughout history than any other factor.” The world leader, shot from below (in one of the many scenes
that echoes Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will), gives a speech, the point of which is
that “[we must] ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this
galaxy now and always!” It’s
practically redundant to have Carl make his grand reappearance at the end of
the film decked out in a black leather cap and trenchcoat, as if he were a
member of the Nazi SS.
This is a film that has been consistently
misunderstood by critics, many of whom have decided to take the spectacle at
face value. Sure, the fascist
cheerleading is obvious, but so is the inherent irony, especially when, as in RoboCop, you follow the clues provided by the obviously
humorous commercials. Combined
with the fact that this a film made by a man who spent his childhood running
from fascists, it becomes apparent that Starship Troopers isn’t a celebration of all that is evil
in the world, but a pitch black comedy in disguise.
Because of its innate moral ambiguity, Starship
Troopers gets under your
skin in a way that few films can.
Verhoeven’s trademark excess is made somehow more excessive, as the
film’s ludicrously gory ultra-violence pushes it to the very boundaries of its
R-rating. The violence is entertaining, but to the point of being
disturbing. Something about it
just isn’t right. The film is a
little too gung-ho about its world of totalitarianism and senseless
inter-species slaughter, precisely because these are the ideals it is
mocking. By not providing the
blatantly condemnatory message we expect to accompany these values, by
utilizing a casually skewed moral compass, the film finds a way to be even more
deadpan than its predecessor, to the point of caching us off guard and tricking
us into thinking, even for a second, that maybe it’s right. It’s easy to root for humanity when the
war against the Bugs seems justified, stemming from an “unprovoked” “attack” that
demolishes Buenos Aires and leaves millions of humans dead, but that is only
what the news tells us. There is
no proof that the Bugs are actually responsible and, even if they are, it is
alluded to that their viciousness is a response to our attempting to invade and
colonize their solar system.
The funniest part of Starship Troopers might just be that, to all appearances,
the actors don’t seem to be in on the joke. Verhoeven uses young soap opera stars (Casper Van Dien, who
plays Johnny, starred in One Life To Live and Beverly Hills 90210, and Denise Richards, who plays Carmen,
appeared in Life Goes On
and Melrose Place) to
convey a world of shallow humanity and inherently fake emotion. The acting is undeniably terrible, but
in that cliché, cardboard-cutout manner that feels so at home in TV soap
operas. Verhoeven is obviously
using this acting style to self-conscious, self-aware effect, presenting a
future of ideal, depthless humans whose very bodies have practically become
consumer products, but the irony is doubled by the self-assured quality of
these authentically fake performances.
It is unclear whether the actors understand their exact purpose in this
work of satire, or whether they’re merely going through the motions of the
hollow kind of performing they know so well.
Just as RoboCop made its statement (about late-stage
consumer capitalism) by way of satirical exaggeration, so does Starship
Troopers. This is a future society (equal parts
Nazi Germany and modern-day America) ruled, and fueled, by the notion of
globalization cranked to 11, where multi-nationalism has become planetary
dominance of literally universal proportions. The subtle tragedy of RoboCop’s ending is amplified exponentially in Starship
Troopers. Johnny, Carmen and Carl may walk off
into the proverbial sunset, celebrating mankind’s ultimate victory, but it is
an intrinsically corrupt version of mankind. If RoboCop
is the tragic tale of one doomed man, Starship Troopers is a cautionary tale of our whole doomed
species.
This is Verhoeven’s true talent as a
filmmaker: his ability to craft works of trashy entertainment that also serve a
higher purpose. RoboCop and Starship Troopers are works of genius because they have
something for everyone. They give
the people what they want, supplying all the extravagant surface qualities
(violence, excitement, etc.) that characterize a good action film. They work as popular entertainment so
well (often breaking box-office records) precisely because they are, above all
else, a joy to watch. And beyond
that, Verhoeven goes deeper into the thematic potential of filmmaking by giving
the films a political dimension, by imbuing them with relevant social
commentary. They’re works of
subversive fiction, not necessarily implying anything “offensive” (there isn’t
much controversy in asserting the horrors of Reagan or fascism), but still
tricking the masses into getting far more than they bargained for. The films fulfill the urges of those
looking for “substance” in their viewing material, but also those who just wish
to see stuff blow up. The result
is an abstract quality that I believe is a standard of worthwhile viewing in
movies — a self-conscious form of entertainment that caters to the id while
simultaneously subverting popular conventions in order to deliver a social
message, to offer guidance without being preachy or self-righteous. The films serve to titillate as well as
educate, and, honestly, what more could you want?
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