Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Well, what is "Starship Troopers" saying, exactly? Robert A. Heinlein's novel paints a glowing portrait of the fascist future Earth society engaged in war against the giant bugs of the planet Klendathu. Critics and audiences alike seemed baffled by the sardonic distance maintained by Ed Neumeier's screenplay and Verhoeven's direction. In my view, the film devastatingly portrays an all-too-possible future in which Earth is ruled by a gender-neutral, race-neutral military dictatorship; you might call it P.C. totalitarianism.
All the same, "Starship Troopers" -- still one of the most elaborate and expensive technical achievements in film history -- is also a stunningly realized war movie, a gory, thrilling adventure yarn driven by Verhoeven's elaborate camera work and Phil Tippett's astonishing creature effects. "If you look at the movie and don't think about it," Verhoeven said at the time, "it's really just young kids fighting giant bugs." Even that conflict is viewed with ambivalence. Naturally the viewer roots for the kids against the bugs, but it gradually becomes clear that human aggression started the war and most of what is "known" about the arachnid civilization is only prejudice and false supposition.
I don't know whether to view Verhoeven's invitation not to think about the film as cannily disingenuous or charmingly naive, but either way it represents his need to have his cake and eat it too, to create boffo entertainment and a critique of American imperialism at the same time. To its core of admirers, "Starship Troopers" is a delightful commingling of seemingly incompatible themes and tones, one of the most complicated and even subversive films ever made at the top end of Hollywood production.
But there's no denying that in commercial terms Verhoeven outsmarted himself. The film's moral ambiguity -- in a genre where such complexity is virtually unknown -- is both its strength and its great weakness. Blockbuster audiences (and a disconcerting number of critics) prefer the moral kindergartens built for them by the Lucases and Spielbergs of the world, in which the difference between good and bad, innocent and guilty, is always obvious.
"Starship Troopers" was released just two years after Verhoeven's debacle with "Showgirls" in 1995, and many critics, I suspect, had simply made up their minds that he was an incompetent sleazemeister who couldn't possibly have intended his new film as an intricate, double-edged satire. Here again, Verhoeven for the most part made his own bed. "Showgirls" has its defenders, but I'm not among them. I've heard the opinion that it is also meant to be a sweeping satire, a tongue-in-cheek indictment of American tastes in sexuality and entertainment. Verhoeven has specifically denied this interpretation, and it strikes me as a version of my old evil-genius theory carried to extremes. It's even stranger to consider that "Showgirls" was made in deadly earnest.
I see "Showgirls" as an attempt to exorcise or fulfill an archetypal female presence that first surfaced in Verhoeven's films two decades earlier in Holland and culminated with Sharon Stone's role in "Basic Instinct." In creating Nomi, the picaresque heroine of "Showgirls," Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas were trying to redeem this sinister female figure from earlier films -- let's call her the Temptress -- by turning her into a masculine-style protagonist, on the road to meaning and self-definition. Like the male heroes of Verhoeven's films, Nomi is jilted by faithless lovers, challenged by homosexuality and must resort to ruthless violence to get ahead.
As far as all that goes, it was a well-intentioned effort, and explains why Verhoeven could say with a straight face that he thought the film was feminist. But neither he nor Eszterhas (both generationally challenged European immigrants) were capable of making this transfiguration seem convincing. As one female friend of mine has observed, the women in "Showgirls" all behave like men, or at least like drag queens.
Looking for the origins of Verhoeven's Temptress, I can only guess that whoever the inspiration for this black widow figure was, she entered his life sometime between the liberation of 1945 and his first feature film in 1971. An outstanding student, Verhoeven attended the prestigious University of Leiden (the principal setting of "Soldier of Orange") and actually earned a doctorate in math and physics.
While he was in school he began to make short films and then, probably to further his craft, he served a hitch in the Royal Dutch Navy as a documentary filmmaker. So there was the boy whose first cinematic experiences had been propaganda films, making them himself for his own government.
In 1971, Verhoeven directed his first feature, "Wat Zien Ik?" (literally, "What Do I See?"). Its U.S. title was "Diary of a Hooker," thereby establishing a crucial precedent: In America, Verhoeven was a pornographer. I can only presume that the prostitute played by Ronnie Bierman is an early version of the Temptress, but by the time of Verhoeven's second feature, "Turkish Delight" (1973), the archetype that would haunt the rest of his work was already in place.
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