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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Years ago, when I reviewed "Basic Instinct" for a San Francisco newspaper, I wrote that Verhoeven was not just a genius but an evil genius. That was a joke, but there may be something to it. Verhoeven's evil, I have since decided, is an innocent evil like that of Alfred Hitchcock, rather than the smug, calculating evil of Hitchcock's innumerable imitators. To me, at least, the comparison is inescapable: Like Hitchcock, Verhoeven is an ice-veined European expatriate whose sleek filmmaking style cannot conceal the fact that he's not in control of his own obsessions. For both directors, male sexual anxiety is at the center of their aesthetic universe, and both have been accused of hating women. The charge may be unfair or overly simplistic, but in neither case can it be totally dismissed. (The best response to this belongs to another cold-hearted filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, who always insists that he is a misanthrope, not merely a misogynist.)
In Verhoeven's films he is tormented by beautiful and potentially predatory women, consumed by doubts about his sexual identity, haunted by visions of shocking violence and by the conviction that love is a disfiguring and destructive ailment. He addresses the same themes -- and in fact makes versions of the same films -- over and over again.
Like Hitchcock or Fritz Lang or Ernst Lubitsch, Verhoeven is a European director who became an ironic observer of the American scene by translating his filmmaking style into Hollywood's terms, without ever entirely abandoning his Old World values and mores. He has said he was reared on American musicals and melodramas, so one can imagine that when he was offered the opportunity to come to Hollywood in the mid-1980s he saw it as a kind of homecoming.
He could have become another Douglas Sirk, who came to America with a substantial career in Germany behind him and churned out such sudsy '50s studio hits as "Imitation of Life," "All That Heaven Allows" and "Written on the Wind." He may become one yet; Sirk's Hollywood melodramas were not widely recognized as classics until recently, after prominent buffs like Martin Scorsese took up his cause. At the moment, however, Verhoeven's muddled track record makes him seem a stranger in a strange land, with a sensibility too American for Europe, yet too European for America.
Verhoeven's career would certainly look different if it were not divided into two ungainly halves; if he had stayed in Holland through the '80s and '90s, or come to America much earlier, or simply been born in Lubitsch and Lang's era or another yet to come. But he was in his late 40s, with seven features behind him, when he moved from Amsterdam to Los Angeles to make "RoboCop" in 1986. So his Dutch films are extremely difficult to find (with the sole exception of "The Fourth Man"), and his American films are generally seen as disposable crap. Verhoeven has largely determined his own destiny and has been handsomely paid for it. But in neither case is this fate just.
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Paul Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam on July 18, 1938, so he was not quite 2 years old when the Germans overran Holland in the spring of 1940 and not quite 7 when they left. He has discussed this aspect of his childhood only briefly in American interviews, but has said that he saw the bodies of downed Allied pilots in fields near his home and has implied that the first movies he ever saw were Nazi propaganda films.One should, of course, resist the temptation to psychoanalyze a total stranger based on sketchy anecdotes, but the image this presents is nearly irresistible: a child confronted with and fascinated by violence and death, and enthralled by images that, as he comes to understand later, cannot be relied upon to tell the truth.
"It's really that age between 5 and 8, when you are extremely susceptible and starting to develop as an individual, when you are really formed," Verhoeven told Strauss. "My brain was impregnated by these images that I saw, and as a child, of course, they seemed to be the norm. German occupation and war all around was what I was used to. By the time peace came, I was like, 'What is this?'"
Specifically, Verhoeven has said that his childhood experiences under the occupation have informed two of his films. The most obvious of these is "Soldier of Orange," a tale of the Dutch Resistance that won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1980. (Its Dutch release was three years earlier.) In most respects a straightforward patriotic adventure, "Soldier of Orange" marked Verhoeven's first attempt at action cinema and the first touches of an odd satirical mode that would later become his Hollywood hallmark. (Like most of Verhoeven's Dutch films, it's out of print on video, although I found a copy at a rental outlet.) It opens, in fact, with a fake newsreel that celebrates Holland's liberation while conveniently ignoring the widespread Dutch collaboration with the Nazi regime.
"RoboCop" (1987) and "Starship Troopers" (1997) also begin with parodies of propaganda broadcasts, and the latter film, as Verhoeven has admitted, is essentially a remake of "Soldier of Orange," albeit a remake in which the irony meter is cranked to 11 and the story's moral polarities are thrown into grave doubt. You could argue that nearly all of "Starship Troopers" is a parody of a propaganda film; its cast of hard-bodied young unknowns (including future Bond girl Denise Richards) and its "Melrose Place"-style love quadrangle mimic the ideals presented by both wartime Hollywood and Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine. "That was the style of the movies in the '30s and '40s, and also of the fascist idiom," Verhoeven told Strauss. "There is an indication that this society is not so far away from fascist thinking, which is what the movie says, isn't it?"
