Sharpe's Opinion
Thursday, 26th Nov, 2009
‘As It Turns Out, the Apes DO Want to Live Forever’
It’s articles like this one, on the fascist imagery of Starship Troopers and why it’s harder to deal with than that of Robocop, that make me love reading Overthinking It so much. A difficult-to-choose excerpt:
It wouldn’t be fascist satire unless we were supposed to cheer for the characters — regardless of what they did. In a good bit of fascist propaganda, like Triumph of the Will or Starship Troopers, what makes the heroes heroic is the color of their uniform and their ability to channel rage in the service of the Nation. That’s it.
So the critics were right and they still got it wrong. Starship Troopers is fascist propaganda — for a fascism that does not yet exist. The problem isn’t that Verhoeven got his fascist propaganda all over your action movie. The problem is that your action movie springs directly from fascist propaganda.
Comments
Nothing at all, as long as you’re one of the fascists. And as long as you’re not a bit weird.
Doesn’t work out so great for their enemies, though…
Hadn’t encountered Overthinking it before, definitely liked the article though.
I remember going to see Troopers when it came out, with a bunch of colleagues from the GW store—all of them completely missed the point, whereas I thought the film was fairly obvious. I guess maybe the critics were sort of right, many people did miss the satire.
Overthinking it is wrong on one point though—Warhammer is influenced by both Dredd and the original Heinlein, and the film is definitely influenced by WH40K, there was talk in the legal department of seeing if they could take it anywhere, but then it was pointed out that they’d never got permission for any of the stuff they were ‘inspired’ by anyway.
I don’t think anyone walks away from the film believing the message is ‘we should all become fascists and go out killing aliens’, though. I think perhaps the audience divides into those who like it because it’s a funny sci-fi action movie and those who like it because it has a clever message about Naziism.
In other words, I think it’s either screamingly obvious what the political message of the film is, or you’re not really the sort of person who would be particularly fussed about the political message in the first place.
Overthinking It are sporadically awesome. I first came across them last year when they made a video of ‘“40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 minutes”:http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/12/10/40-inspirational-speeches-in-2-minutes/’ and have read the blog on and off since then – does exactly what it says on the tin and subjects pop culture to more scrutiny than it arguably deserves. Their Grand Unified Theory of Schwarzenegger stands out in my mind particularly, for instance, as does the comparison between Hogwarts and Xavier’s School for Gifted Children. Oh, and the analysis of the use of deus ex machina in Doctor Who is good, too… 
So whats wrong with Fascism?
Ragnar
November 27, 2009 at 7:03 am