Starship Troopers & Trump

If there’s one thing we relearned following Trump’s nomination, it’s that people are willing to look the bad thing in the eye and smile. Grab a woman by the pussy wasn’t enough but surely, saying windmills cause cancer will be. No? Social sciences brought our world to the brink of chaos? Haitians are eating dogs? Injecting disinfectant to get rid of COVID? The bottom line is this: if something is loud enough in its rhetoric, pretty enough in its ideas (even if those ideas have no basis), and vulgar enough to appear anti-establishment, people are likely to listen and love it. Puff out your chest and shoot long enough, you’ll eventually hit a mark. Obviously, we’ve seen these fascistic talking points before, but it’s hard to think of another modern movement with the anger-filled fervour and relentless momentum of the MAGA lot. What’s crazy is that if you asked them about any of the quotes above, they’d say Trump is onto something - even the one he didn’t actually say.

Maybe that’s why Starship Troopers is being perpetually misunderstood. A movie all about how understanding and meaning are secondary to aestheticism has ironically become the cultural touchpoint between Trumpians and leftists for the entirely opposite reasons. One crowd sees it as a movie praising the ethno-homogeneity that fascism provides. They love how it looks at the military as a structured set of rules and regulations that should govern an entire people, and above all, they love watching those damn bugs die (just last month Elon Musk misinterpreted Starship Troopers in this way). The other crowd sees it as a movie that is undermining these beliefs by showing how comedic and downright terrifying they can be when put to a massive scale, that recognises the evil invasion of the bugs planet and sees that Verhoeven has a clear disdain for humanity. One side sees what it is pretending to be; the other sees what it is. One side sees a possible future; the other sees a mirror.

‘You can’t make an anti-war movie’ is essentially the adage that Verhoeven builds the entire film around. Show heartbreak, destruction, ruin, the impossibly harrowing effects of war, and it will still be pro war because it will still be inherently ‘cool’. Bullets piercing skin looks cool. Massive explosions look cool. He has always been a director that has understood the sexuality of violence and how to flip that on its head. Robocop is a movie about how an individual has become a slave to corporate America, and even in that, an audience can’t help but gaze in awe at the big robots and huge guns – the very same guns that have enslaved our protagonist. Total Recall is more of the same as Arnie tries to navigate a dictatorship willing to steal oxygen from people, but there are big diggers that were built by said government. Size and scale and sheer force Trump meaning, every time.

Whether that be Rico riding on the bugs' back and exploding it, aerial battles in space as they dodge meteorites, or even smaller things like having the test results on a big board, so everyone can see. ‘Service guarantees citizenship’ and before you are a citizen, you must endure the system that has been built to project your confidence and your insecurity to the world. All fascist governments operate on the same doctrine to force the best of the best out into the open and shame those who are doing poorly into doing well or dying. Look at Triumph of the Will, a Nazi propaganda film from 1935, which is essentially an hour and a half of gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the propaganda behind the machine. A movie which pointedly frames non-Nazis as others. Thousands of like-minded men and women listening intently to some of the most evil speeches ever told, eager to sign up, lapping up the ideas on display because they’re covered in the sickly-sweet promise of togetherness. Utopia, built on the bedrock of an evil so blatant it can scream it into your ears, and you can phase it out under the cheers of millions of your compatriots.

That’s why Trumpians are so quick to ignore the misinformation on display, instead favouring their near-blasphemous adoration of him. It’s easy to get lost under the bombardment of sounds, noise, and praise. Words become meaningless, until phrases from movies like Starship Troopers begin to blend into real life. That social sciences quote isn’t from Trump, and looking at it side-by-side it seems to make too much sense for his rambly style of speaking. Paul Verhoeven’s satire from 1997 is right there on the surface, and in the ensuing 30 years it has come to pass in a way far funnier and scarier than his movie cared to suggest. Critics at the time attacked the film for being far too kiddy in its dissection of fascism. What we’ve learned now is that it’s not childish enough.

In time, and perhaps as America dives deeper down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism, Starship Troopers will become a prescient text on the fall of the empire, ironically made by a Dutchman so horny that he was kicked out of his own film industry and had to immigrate to another. Only an outsider can so thoroughly portray an American’s atrocities from the inside, and even abiding by their teenage boy, action sci-fi aesthetics, this was shunned upon release. It is, and will remain, possibly the greatest movie I’ve ever seen.