Tag Archives: Paul Verhoeven

The Successful Fascism of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers

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Paul Verhoeven’s reputation as a visionary director took quite a hit after his 1995 Showgirls, and the release of Starship Troopers in 1997 only damaged it further. But twenty years have passed and the fickle tides of critical revilement have begun to turn. Adam Nayman’s new monograph on Showgirls, It Doesn’t Suck, argues, well, that Showgirls does not in fact suck. Meanwhile, at the Atlantic, Calum Marsh has been encouraging critics and fans to reexamine Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, pointing out that, contrary to what many critics previously thought, the movie “is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism.” I’m all for critical reassessments. I think they can add much to our understanding of a work of art. But these particular reassessments fail to account for what was actually wrong with Verhoeven’s later American filmography. They fail to see that just because a movie imitates a terrible movie perfectly doesn’t make it satire – it just makes it a self-aware terrible movie.

Calum Marsh is not the first person to argue that Starship Troopers is a great movie masquerading as a bad movie. I had a college roommate who thought much the same thing. It is so awful, it is good, he would say, quoting the final line of Sontag’s “Notes of Camp” out of context like a good college student. It is also clearly bad on purpose, my roommate would say, which makes it really ironic, and hilarious. Moreover, my roommate would contend, more quietly now, as the conversation in the space of two sentences had turned deadly serious, it has a message – it is making fun of people who champion war and the effects of fascism.

“Really?” I asked as another bomb blew orange bug blood over the lead space marine.

“Yeah,” he said, “fascism.”

And then one of the characters would say, “do you want to live forever?” and the space marines would charge the bugs with their guns and their bombs and my roommate would laugh and cheer at the irony and the “awesome” CG special effects.

I get what Marsh (and my old roommate) is saying. It’s satire. It’s making fun of people who act like this and the propaganda that creates these situations through hyperbole. In this interpretation, Verhoeven went about with the fastidiousness found in a Borgesian narrator to recreate and caricature the world of fascist propaganda. The clumsiness of the plot, the wooden acting and the facile characterization represent what happens in a fascist society. “War,” Verhoeven himself argued when asked about the movie, “makes fascists of us all.” Elsewhere, he claims he played “with fascism or fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American society.” By choosing the worst possible (but fantastic looking) actors and then making them naked and have sex and then die at the hands of giant bugs, Verhoeven, it seems to many, has made a teenage fantasy; but it’s okay, because it’s making fun of those teenagers (and their adolescent-minded parents) while it entertains and makes money off of them.

Having been swept into similarly disastrous martial project in real life, I am enormously sympathetic to Verhoeven’s critique of American society. What I find off-putting though is the way Verhoeven went about accomplishing this critique. I have no problem with irony if irony is understood to be – as Richard Rorty claimed – the constant search for more useful metaphors (rather than the search for things as they actually are). Likewise, I have no problem with using irony to effect satire. I do have a problem with people who fall back on irony in lieu of criticism and to escape criticism. Verhoeven and his fellow directors only play at the pretense of irony, an irony that wants to be ironic when it works in their favor to be ironic and obnoxiously moralistic – and decisively reductionist – when it wants to be so. The advantage of this peculiar variation is its utter abnegation of ownership and responsibility – one can enjoy (and market) horrible and exploitive experiences while simultaneously condemning them, a curious rhetorical trick that manages to be both sententious and prurient all at once.

If – in conversation with my roommate – I accused Starship Troopers of being almost nostalgic toward the idea of “a great war” and the propaganda surrounding fascism. He would say, no, the movie is a joke; it’s making fun of this propaganda. But if I accused him of treating it as a joke, he would say, no, it’s a serious commentary on fascism. This sounds a lot like camp, not satire, where the line between that being mocked and that doing the mocking is purposely blurred (check out Oscar Wilde for examples). But the problem with movies like Starship Troopers, which attempt to treat war and fascist ideologies similarly, is the fact that fascism is already a variety of camp. The fascist has, as Walter Benjamin famously pointed out, aestheticized politics. Fascist aesthetics are already achieved through ironic choice – in the idea you can create a new morality and new type of people through a carefully cultivated, exaggerated and self-aware aesthetic of violence and manhood. It is not simply reactionary, but reactionary modernism, part of the same aesthetic world of the surrealists and the “degenerates” they despised. Thus, when a director attempts to mock it through hyperbole, the director reproduces not only the image of fascism but its substance.

You could argue that this is Verhoeven’s point, I suppose, and this is why he did this, to teach us how fascism works by letting the audience stick their hand in the proverbial fire. Yet, I would argue, his source material, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, is already fascist (in so far as it celebrates a cult and art of virility and war as an answer to social degeneracy), as opposed to faux-fascist, or camp-fascist, and does not need to be imitated through camp. If this is the joke, and the lesson, the book itself is sufficient. He could have used the 100 million he spent on CG effects toward making a movie that really tried to grapple with the dizzying refractions of aestheticized violence rather than imitating it and calling this laziness satire. And this brings me to another problem with the film: if Verhoeven’s project was indeed a straightforward satire, it lacks one important precondition of satire – namely, it isn’t in fact funny. Swift’s “Modest Proposal” is morally horrible and hilarious. Starship Troopers is just horrible, filled with hackneyed pop-cultural references to Vietnam movies as if written by a bunch of teenagers quoting Full Metal Jacket in funny voices. This is not satire, or even amusing, just sophomoric and stupid. At least, more often than not, the pulp violence of Tarantino – which also touches on the intimate and problematic connection between violence and representation – redeems itself by being genuinely clever. I can see parts where Verhoeven (or the screenwriter, Edward Neumeier) tries to be clever, but trying and being clever are two very different things.

In an article on Adam Nayman’s Showgirl’s revisionism, Noah Berlatsky identifies a “long and hypocritical tradition” where “earnest commenters enjoy the degradation of sex workers, and enjoy decrying that degradation, and decry the enjoyment of that degradation—all at the same time.” He suggests Showgirls – if truly a statement about sex workers in America – falls firmly within this prurient, confused and highly sententious tradition. I see no reason why Starship Troopers cannot be considered similarly; it is as a movie like say, Stone’s Natural Born Killers, where earnest commenters enjoy the degradation of violence, and enjoy decrying that degradation, and decry the enjoyment of that degradation. This has the appeal of looking very sophisticated, of having two opposing thoughts in the mind at once, while being, in practice, not only sophomoric and pornographic, but a travesty of self-criticism that strategically insulates itself from criticism.

After nearly twenty years, Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers does not look so original, just one more in a long line of alien invasion movies. It even has sequels, TV shows and video games, all hyperbolic replications like the movie that inspired them. The art, the symbol of war and alien invasion and the purging vision of apocalyptic violence still very much define our politics and culture. This is not Verhoeven’s fault of course, but Starship Troopers in no way contributes to the conversation substantively. At the end of his Atlantic article, Marsh argues that if you get what “was really going on. If you’re open and attuned to it – if you’re prepared for the rigor and intensity of Verhoeven’s approach – you’ll get the joke Starship Troopers is telling. And you’ll laugh.” I can personally attest in the real wars fought since his movie, soldiers honored one of their favorite movies by asking each other, “you going to live forever?” as they charged down hillsides and took pictures of themselves in the streets of Baghdad, Mosul and Kabul. They were being ironic of course, and this made them laugh because it was “self-aware.” Too bad this brand of self-critique looked a lot like fascistic self-indulgence to those not in on the joke.

Read more by Michael Carson at http://wrathbearingtree.wordpress.com/
 

Robocop (1987): Chianti in the Rock Shop

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29Wine is a great accouterment for villains. Aristocratic and impenetrable, a glass of red can suggest that its drinker lounges about, sipping the blood of his enemies and chuckling evilly from the shadows. White wines code the airy disconnect of the elite, aestheticized and cruelly indifferent of everyman struggles. Hannibal drinks Chianti and eats people, and the merciless denizens of Elysium drink whites at garden parties in space. Wine conveys authority, but it’s a fairly obvious power-play. And a better villain can out-power that power-play. Enter Clarence Boddicker.

Kurtwood Smith’s performance in the original Robocop is one of a kind. Boddicker’s smile is vicious, but disturbingly sweet.  One moment he squirms with glee, only to be still and deadly the next. He’s the ringleader of a hysterical, trigger-happy gang, which more than anything resembles a group of bros gone wrong. Which is a great reminder for the goonish underbelly of many male-bonding narratives.

But Boddicker doesn’t dominate as much as destabilize. He’s balding and bespectacled, yet emotes childishly.  He throws tantrums. He unpins a grenade with his tongue, peering down at his quarry with an odd, come-hither look in his eyes, practically miming to his employer’s recorded assassination statement. Boddicker’s interaction with the one glass of wine in the film is no less subversive. When demanding a cut in the price of cocaine, Boddicker sticks two of his fingers into a drug lord’s glass of Ruffino Riserva Ducale, and then snorts the drops from his fingers. Even better, the drug lord then picks up the glass, and in a bizarre act of social facilitation, takes a sip.

It’s interesting that the wine appears here, in a cocaine factory, and not in the hands of one of the privileged board members of the evil corporation OCP. While it would have been ridiculous for wine to be served at their meetings, its equally absurd for it to appear in Sal’s rock shop. Not to mention that Ruffino Riserva Ducale is prestigious. Karen McNeil deems it a ‘must’ to try in The Wine Bible, “One of the leading producers of traditional Chianti… its Ruffino’s Chianti Claissico riserva called Riserva Ducale that is the jewel in the crown.” Sal’s bottle looks to be contemporary to the ‘80s; a current vintage Riserva Ducale would cost about $25 retail, and about $50 or more in a restaurant. Not a rare or overly expensive wine, but not cheap either, and Sal seems to be drinking it casually.  Which is a power statement in itself—Ruffino Riserva Ducale is his house wine, even when it can be barely tasted over the wafting powder.  Drinking Ducale in a cocaine factory reduces the wine to an empty signifier of prowess and sophistication. Snorting it is a more honest admission of what it is—a power trip.

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Ruffino Riserva Ducale Vinages: 2001 (Standard label), 1953 (Standard label), 1980 (Gold label)…The packaging in the still is definitely from the 80s. 

A quick dip into the history of Chianti reveals a stranger layer at play. Up until the seventies, Americans knew Chianti as a cheap, barely palatable wine in a straw bottle. While Chianti must be primarily made with the black grape Sangiovese, misguided Tuscan wine laws permitted—then required– the inclusion of Trebbiano and Malvasia into the blend, which are (usually) characterless white grape varietals that are easy to grow. This stretched the Sangiovese a little further, but watered down the quality significantly. While there had always been a tradition of making Chiantis for cellaring, like Riserva Ducale, their reputation was harnessed to the low esteem for the basic Chiantis.

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In the early seventies, Ruffino was one of the first producers to do away with the straw bottle, and presumably decrease the amount of white grapes in the mix. Other producers created “super-Tuscans,” highly lauded, heavy-weight Cabernet Sauvignon blends that often, but not always, included Sangiovese. As these didn’t conform to existing wine laws, they couldn’t be labeled Chianti, and their popularity mirrored the success of the renegade wineries in Napa, California. In order to compete with these non-Chiantis, a “Chianti Classico” designation was created in 1984, which required 80% or more of the blend to be Sangiovese, harvested from only the most traditional growing areas, and the final 20% comprised of black grapes like Cabernet, Merlot, Canaiolo or Colorino. However, the use of white grapes wasn’t completely outlawed until 2006.

Chianti’s reputation progressed enough for Hannibal to name-drop it in Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Parallel movements occurred at the same time in Piemonte, with Barolo and Barbaresco, and throughout the whole of Italy by the late 80s.  Italy attracted the attention of American wine critics and their high scores—and a preference for large, fruity wines. For better or for worse, Italian wines changed to fit American palates. In turn, America replaced fantasies of France with rustic Italy, for a variety of reasons ranging between changing kitchen habits and Reaganism. As covered by Lawrence Osborne, in The Accidental Connoisseur,

“Unlike the French, Italians were spontaneous, unsnooty, casual, unpretentiously friendly, and family-oriented—that is, much more like Americans themselves….The huge success of Italian-sounding wines like Gallo and Mondavi had much to do with this commercialized idea of Italy: the Italian family seated around the Mediterranean banquets in golden sunshine. Somehow Italy… had the innocent energy of nature. Like fruit-and-veggie-packed wine itself, that sun-kissed land had about it a whiff of the health food store.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Giuliani was patching broken windows and gentrifying Manhattan, with its heavily Italian heritage, into a safe haven for the wealthy. Film experienced the renaissance of the Italian mob-boss, who took hold of the American imagination with Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972, and was a mainstay by Scorsese’s Goodfellas in 1990, about the time Italian wines went from plonk to paragon.

Sal, wine glass in hand, registers this transformation. Authoritative, barely accented and dressed in a khaki suit, Sal is the image of late-eighties self-indulgence. He barely registers as a bad guy in comparison with Boddicker, who derisively calls him a ‘wop.’ Sal is the image of elevated crime, with a mob pedigree, which he signals not with course stereotypes, but with his enlightened, Italian wine habits. Boddicker’s gesture calls his bluff, replying that crime is always a kind of perversity.  By not relying on racial signfiers, and instead including this vinous conceit, Verhoeven can satirize mob movies, and the thuggish indulgence of Reaganism and the eighties, while avoiding actual racism against Italians.

Boddicker might be crazy, but he’s honest about who he is.  Robocop attests that crime is chaos, twenty years before The Joker’s declares this in The Dark Knight.  Boddicker and the titular Robocop oppose each other like order and anarchy, yet they exist on the same ethical axis, and importantly, are both revealed to be corporate puppets in the end. Sal floats off in cloud-cuckoo land, where there’s honor amongst thieves, or at least a hierarchy. Unfortunately for him, Robocop guns criminals down rather indiscriminately.

This post is the second in a continuing column, What Were They Drinking?!, featured on  The Nightly Glass, and occasionally co-posted here on The Hooded Utilitarian. 

 

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Just a Dull Thing In His Dream

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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The Total Recall remake is almost Platonic in that it’s pristinely superfluous. Remakes always feel more than a little pointless, but at least when you watch something like The Thing remake, or the I Spit On Your Grave remake, you get a sense that the people making the film actually liked the original… or at least saw it. Director Len Wiseman, though, has no discernible affection for his source material, nor anything to say to it.  The film is one long, uninvolving chase sequence, through which Colin Farrell (Douglas Quaid) wanders like a mildly confused puppy; in comparison with his bland performance, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990s original comes across like Laurence Olivier.  Jessica Biel (Melina) is even less involving, if such a thing is possible. Only Kate Beckinsale as Quaid’s “wife” Lori makes any pretense to watchability, throwing herself into the Queen Bitch/assassin role with welcome relish.  She still doesn’t have anything like the vindictive charge that Sharon Stone did in the original—but in this turkey, every flicker of adequacy counts.

What’s odd is that Total Recall‘s utter awfulness is, in some ways, true to its roots—not the 1990 movie, but the 1966 Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”  Dick’s story was not awful in itself, exactly. Rather, it was meta-awful, a semi-parody, dealing explicitly with the crappiness of its own genre.

In the story, loser clerk Douglas Quaid wants to go to Mars, which is to say, he wants to be in a science-fiction story. He clings to this dream even when his wife suggests a real-life vacation. “A dream, I bet,” his wife sneers at him, “you’re always full of them.”

Quaid is indeed full of dreams… and those dreams are all real. This is true in the narrative: when Quaid goes to Rekal, Incorporated to have memories of a Mars trip implanted, he discovers that he has in fact already been to Mars as a mind-wiped secret agent. But Quaid’s vision is true more broadly as well. He imagines that he is a character in a genre narrative—and he is, in fact, a character in a genre narrative.

These are, moreover, idiotic, and are specifically referred to, and thought of within the story, as idiotic. Quaid’s desire to go to Mars is presented as infantile silliness. But even worse is the end of the story, where Quaid sits for another memory implant, this one based on his deepest desires. He apparently has long had a fantasy in which, as a child, he meets an alien race which declares that its plans to destroy the earth. Quaid treats them with such kindness that they decide to wait to destroy the world until he dies. This fantasy of a pious savior is, as one character remarks, “the most grandiose fantasy I ever ran across”—a quintessence of preposterous self-centeredness.  And within the story his self-centeredness turns out to be entirely validated. Quaid really is the center of the universe; he really did meet those aliens, and when he dies, so does the world. Which, again, is not just true, but meta-true: Quaid is the main character, and Philip K. Dick built the story, and the universe, for him and around him.

“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” then, doesn’t so much reveal hidden depths as it flips open to pull the outside in. The title is a promise, not just to Quaid, but to the person flipping the pages. What it promised, specifically, is dreams, and in this case the dream that is promised is a dream of a dream. The story is a fantasy about having a fantasy, which means it’s in some sense not a fantasy at all.

The 1990 movie replaced the story’s recursive puzzle-box structure with camp, but the end effect is not dissimilar. Sharon Stone’s performance, in particular, is a masterpiece of self-referential cheese. She plays Quaid’s wife Lori as a perfect saccharine romantic glob of gush, all kittenish blonde affirmation and vacuous sex appeal—until the moment Quaid leaves for work, when her face goes blank and dull, like a performer after the camera’s turned off. After Quaid discovers that Lori’s a killer spy… she still keeps up the performance, assuring him that he was the best assignment ever and urging him to tie her up (“I never knew you were so kinky,” Schwarzenegger deadpans.) She tells him that their whole marriage is a fake, and it takes a moment to register that she’s speaking the absolute truth. The marriage isn’t real; it’s a staged performance—and so her artificial staginess, rather than undercutting verisimilitude, enacts it. When Stone “appears” on Mars to tell Quaid that he’s in a psychotic fugue state and his whole adventure is happening in his head, she’s acting the part of acting a part. The whole adventure really is in the audience’s head; the performance really is a performance, and Stone’s weirdly context-less over-sincerity, pleading earnestly with Quaid as if they’re both on a soap opera soundstage, rather than on Mars only underlines the truth that they are, in fact, on a soundstage, not on Mars. Genre, in this case, is the lie that tells the truth; if you have a transparent trope, the transparency, at least, is solid.

The half-assed 2012 remake, then, is a fitting addition to the series. It’s nothing but a third-rate genre exercise, but Dick’s story is precisely about the embarrassing appeal of third-rate genre exercises. As the memory programmer comments in Dick’s story:

“Programming an artificial memory of a trip to another planet —with or without the added fillip of being a secret agent—showed up on the firm’s work-schedule with monotonous regularity… ersatz planetary travel has become our bread and butter.”

The remake doesn’t actually involve interplanetary travel, but the point stands. People’s deepest fantasies aren’t individual desires; they’re repetitive genre product which can be purchased wholesale. Quaid’s fantasies are the most real things about him, and they are as generically tedious as the reality from which they are a putative escape. For Philip K. Dick, or some iteration of him, we are just bad remakes of someone else’s dream.

No Face in the Mirror

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“And what does Hollow Man give us apart from a gripping genre exercise? Moviegoing as leering and chortling over crushed mice.” Jonathan Rosenbaum

I just saw Paul Verhoeven’s “Hollow Man”. On first glance (not glance?) it works more or less the way Jonathan Rosembaum says. Scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) figures out a way to make himself invisible, and then uses said invisibility to realize his sadistic rape fantasies while the viewer simultaneously enjoys said fantasies and wags his (presumably) finger at them. The emblematic moment here is the scene (cut from the theatrical release, but restored on DVD) where Rhona Mitra acts out being raped while the viewer fills in the invisible Sebastian. Shot POV, it’s movie-viewer-as-rapist analogy couldn’t be much clearer. Mitra thrashes and shrieks for nobody but the camera. With the rapist transparent, the point of the exercise becomes all too visible. It’s not Sebastian, but the director who is raping her for our elucidation and enjoyment. When the camera lingers on her confused whimpering form following the rape, the answer to her unstated question, Who? is obviously supposed to be “Us.”

So “Hollow Man” is all about implicating the viewer, as the-lack-that-is-not-there provides the excuse for stripping Elizabeth Shue, playing with Kim Dickens’ nipple, and bloodily killing a mouse, a dog, and assorted humans. The Hollow Man is the absent body hollowed out of everything except desire; the full-body-castrati who has exchanged the penis for the phallus/power. The “phase shift” the scientists all gobbledygook about is not just a transformation from seen to un; it’s a move across the plane of the screen — a transformation from movie actor to movie watcher.

All of which is to say that the metaphor is clever. Unfortunately, clever only takes you so far. “Hollow Man” is willing to show the transparent voyeurism of its pulp narrative — but it never actually questions that narrative itself. As a result, all the “implicating the viewer” seems more like hand-waving than actual moral commitment — just a way for Verhoeven and his viewers to have their genre cake while feeling smugly self-aware of it.

The main problem is that, while the movie’s visuals and set pieces raise questions about viewer investment, the narrative itself is much more conventional. In particular, Sebastian is a really predictable power-crazed mad scientist. Even before his transformation, he’s an egocentric leering bastard who refers to himself as God and leches after his neighbor and his ex. Turning invisible doesn’t change him so much as it allows him to release his inner megalomaniac. His final shift to unstoppable insane slasher villain is unbelievable only because unstoppable insane slasher villains aren’t believable. There’s nothing in his character that would make you doubt it.

The point here is that while viewers may occasionally have a stake in Sebastian’s voyeurism, they never have a stake in Sebastian himself. Rape fantasies are not actually rape. One of the differences is that lots of people have rape fantasies while only rapists commit rape. That’s certainly what we tell ourselves, anyway, and “Hollow Man” is happy to go along, providing lots of entertaining voyeurism for the fans while gruesomely punishing the creepy rapist who, we are assured, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Jonathan Rosenbaum thinks the film dings the viewer for “leering and chortling” — but he rather passes over the fact that the most cathartic violence in the film is directed not against mice, but against Sebastian himself, who is lit on fire as Elizabeth Shue triumphantly tells him he’s not God.

In contrast, consider something like John Carpenter’s “Christine.” In that film, we initially pity and identify with Arnie Cunningham, the nerdy protagonist. Because we like Arnie, we want him to succeed — to get his act together, get the girl, and get revenge on his enemies. True to our wishes, the film supplies him with all he wants, with the caveat that he simultaneously turns into a monster. Our narrative investment and desires make Arnie what he is, which raises questions about what our narrative investments and desires make of us.

There are other films that work this way too — Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” for example, where the likable Jeff Goldblum becomes a subhuman insect. But “The Hollow Man” takes a much easier route. Sebastian is never the vulnerable kid or quirky nerdy scientist whose striving is our striving; we never see him as weak and hope for him to get strong. He’s always already the evil daddy-thing; the smug sadistic overlord we want to destroy. And destroying him is just what we get to do, cheering Elizabeth Shue on as she outsmarts and then satisfyingly slaughters him. His death is a straightforward triumph, untrammeled by any considerations of his possible humanity. In Hollow Man, when you look at the bad guy, you don’t see yourself.

The Brain Is…Afraid!

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I just saw Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. It’s an uncannily prescient movie. Released in 1997, it imagines a quasi-fascist future in which the earth is militarized to fight the bugs — a race of giant insectoids. The war really kicks into high gear after the bugs launch an asteroid from space and destroy one of the earth’s major cities, Buenos Aires. (As a television announcement says: “Out of the ashes of Buenos Aires comes first sorrow…then anger. The only good bug is a dead bug!”)

One of the best parts of the film is the very end. The humans had always assumed that the bugs had only rudimentary intelligence. But while this is true for the most part, it turns out that there are a few “brain bugs” — giant gelatinous larvae-looking things, which can suck out human brains the better to understand the enemy, doncha know. Our heroes are drafted for a suicide mission to bring one of the brain bugs back, dead or alive. They succeed, of course — and it only takes them about a year, as opposed to ten for us (though to be fair, they’ve gone farther down the road of authoritarianism, and so are of course more efficient.)

Anyway, all the troops get together and they haul the giant larval brain bug out of its dank cave in the mountains, and then the creepily psychic military intelligence guy (played by Neil Patrick Harris, believe it or not) walks down to confront it, stylishly dressed in Nazi-chic full dresscoat.

“What’s it thinking corporal?” his superior officer asks him.

He walks up to it and puts his hand gently on the side of its head, not too far from its vagina-like mouth. There is a long pause.

“It’s afraid,” he says softly. And then louder. “It’s afraid!”

And all the grunts explode into cheers! Happy ending! Terrified, captured, evil sentient lifeform can now be systematically tortured to death! Huzzah!

(I can’t embed the clip for some reason, but you can watch it here.)

The best part of the conclusion is that capturing the bug does not, of course, end the war. This is a fascist fantasy, after all. As Nietzsche says,

Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory…. Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity.

The happy ending to a war is more war, more courage. Victory doesn’t mean truce; it means everybody gets promoted and you get to torture the enemy and discover new and better ways to grind him (and her!) into ever finer bits of ichor. The last we see of the brain bug (in a scene that I think is excised form that Youtube bit) some faceless tech is sticking a phallic laser drill into that suggestively formed mouth, and a giant “CENSORED” sign appears on the screen, the better to allow us to imagine the stimulating shenanigans.

And what do those shenanigans stimulate us to do? “We have the ships…we have the weapons! We need soldiers!” the movie blares in its closing moments. And that surely applies even more to us. After all, the Starship Troopers are only fighting one war. We’ve got three going (if Afghanistan/Pakistan is one, and not counting Yemen because it is secret.) There will be much more heroism to come, and many more brains to kill. To paraphrase the last words emblazoned on the screen, we’ll keep fighting…and we’ll win!