May 17th saw the release of Starship Troopers: Extermination, a video game based on the 1997 Paul Verhoeven movie Starship Troopers. This may or not be a fun or well-told game, but there are some deeply sinister undertones to its existence. A silver lining is that the Starship Troopers franchise helps us understand how parody degenerates into promotion of the idea it satirizes.
Paul Verhoeven’s film is itself an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same name. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is sincere and unironic. It portrayed a future in which humanity, led by the militarist Terran Federation, is at war with bug-like aliens. In the Federation’s society, only veterans can vote or hold office, corporal punishment is common, and war is perpetual. It is more or less fascist. Heinlein portrays this positively.
Verhoeven, who grew up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, decided to use Heinlein’s basic plot but added a satirical layer to it: After brief opening credits, the story is told entirely BY the Federation as propaganda. Thus, the film is less a movie overtly criticizing fascism than a movie made by a fascist society about itself, with all the subtle horror that entails.
Upon first viewing, the plot is straightforward: Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) graduates high school and joins the Mobile Infantry, the Federation’s shock troopers. He and his fellow recruits fight the aliens and eventually participate in an operation that captures a member of their leadership caste, with the implication that the knowledge gained from this “brain bug” will help win the war. But that’s just the surface.
The careful viewer will discover grim details that shed light on the Federation’s monstrous society. An early, brilliant scene has Rico and two female love interests, Dizzy (Dina Meyer) and Carmen (Denise Richards) surreptitiously flirt while their teacher Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside) delivers a lecture. The camera focuses almost entirely on the teens, while Rasczak’s speech flies under the radar. He says:
This year we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.
Here, in the fascist imagination, military discipline is the antidote to democratic instability. Substitute “the social scientists” with “cultural Marxists” and striking parallels to modern reactionary thought emerge.
Other details are equally disturbing and sometimes comical: “The Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today,” gushes a veteran to Rico. The veteran is missing three appendages. The soldier Ace (Jake Busey) performs the Confederate anthem “Dixie” on the violin, implying the Federation is the moral equivalent of the Confederacy. The only hint of a civil society is a brief debate between two Federation scientists over whether the bugs can think. One, dressed in a ridiculous suit and bowtie, says that he finds “the idea of a bug that can think OFFENSIVE!” And when the Federation soldiers finally confront the bugs, the battle scenes are horrific, with dozens of human troopers killed for every bug slain. Most disturbing of all, echoing real-life Nazi tactics, some Federation soldiers are clearly children.
The fascist aesthetic is the main tip-off Verhoeven uses to show us that all is not well. The Mobile Infantry rifles are gigantic and cumbersome, some boasting hilariously large scopes. Federation military personnel dress like Nazis, all grey uniforms with black leather. Carl (Neil Patrick Harris), Johnny’s nerdy friend from high school, reemerges towards the end of the film as a military intelligence officer in a uniform identical to the Nazi SS. And like the Nazis, David Roth notes in a 2020 essay, the Federation is implied to be losing.
Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is brilliant. Critics that panned the film’s performances missed the point: Fascist art is bad. The scenes of idiotic teen drama mimic the similarly vapid German films of the Nazi period.
But because Starship Troopers was a success, and because of the incentives of capitalism, a franchise was inevitable. Multiple sequels, animated films, a pinball machine, and more were spawned. A story about perpetual war was incentivized by its success to replicate itself and eventually drop its satirical themes. Similar franchises include Rambo and Death Wish, the first entries of which portray good-hearted veterans forced into horrific situations. These franchise’s subsequent entries become bloodbaths obsessed with the spectacle of supposedly righteous violence.
And this brings us back to the video game Starship Troopers: Extermination. Its creator, Offworld Industries, describes the game as a cooperative first-person shooter “that puts you on the far-off front lines of an all-out battle against the Bugs! Squad up, grab your rifle, and do your part as an elite Deep Space Vanguard Trooper set to take back planets claimed by the Arachnid threat!”
The anti-fascist parodic message of the 1997 film seems entirely lost. When we are incentivized to make our parodies profitable, the social critique will ultimately be stifled.