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Your points are all well-made, but I don't know if a message has to be surprising to be worthy of studying, whether satirically or otherwise. That said, I do t

Your points are all well-made, but I don't know if a message has to be surprising to be worthy of studying, whether satirically or otherwise. That said, I do think it's genuinely subversive, and effectively so. It's in conversation with its genre of 'science fantasy action schlock'; it's satire in the same way that, say a late Western Revival like High Plains Drifter is. If you examine it on its own, it barely makes any sense. But when taken in context with what it's supposed to be, in its genre, then I think it becomes a deliberate kind of commentary on those tropes. The old joke goes that, from the other side, Star Wars is about a terrorist organization that murders millions of government servants. It's cautionary less in the direct sense of "Nazis are bad", than "Take a closer look at the mythologies you believe in".

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Your points are all well-made, but I don't know if a message has to be surprising to be worthy of studying, whether satirically or otherwise. For satire to work, the message must be surprising either in content or in context. Sure, the effectiveness of fascist propaganda is worth studying (in both the investigatory and artistic senses), but I don't think Starship Troopers does so effectively, and particularly not as satire. > It's in conversation with its genre of 'science fantasy action schlock' I might agree that ST does not completely fail as somewhat meta-level (and cautionary) satire of the way that 'science fantasy action schlock' (and war porn more generally) function as militaristic authoritarian propaganda simply by being so deliberately modelled on and prominently incorporating heavy-handed fascist propaganda and still succeeding, enough to foster production of sequels, largely as 'science fantasy action schlock'. I don't think that was Veerhoeven’s intent. > It's cautionary less in the direct sense of "Nazis are bad", than "Take a closer look at the mythologies you believe in". I don't disagree that it wants to do that. I just don't think it produces the level of identification needed to do that effectively. I don't think audience members see thenselved and their own mythologies in the movie’s Johnny Rico, and his transition from doubter to drone in the militaristic mythology to which he is subjected.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Your points are all well-made, but I don't know if a message has to be surprising to be worthy of studying, whether satirically or otherwise. For satire to work, the message must be surprising either in content or in context. Sure, the effectiveness of fascist propaganda is worth studying (in both the investigatory and artistic senses), but I don't think Starship Troopers does so effectively, and particularly not as satire. > It's in conversation with its genre of 'science fantasy action schlock' I might agree that ST does not completely fail as somewhat meta-level (and cautionary) satire of the way that 'science fantasy action schlock' (and war porn more generally) function as militaristic authoritarian propaganda simply by being so deliberately modelled on and prominently incorporating heavy-handed fascist propaganda and still succeeding, enough to foster production of sequels, largely as 'science fantasy action schlock'. I don't think that was Veerhoeven’s intent. > It's cautionary less in the direct sense of "Nazis are bad", than "Take a closer look at the mythologies you believe in". I don't disagree that it wants to do that. I just don't think it produces the level of identification needed to do that effectively. I don't think audience members see thenselved and their own mythologies in the movie’s Johnny Rico, and his transition from doubter to drone in the militaristic mythology to which he is subjected.