- (Jared) Wisecrack wants you, yes - you!, to watch this video! It will fill you with
a tiny morsel of knowledge and broaden your horizons- So take your mind off your job.
Off your schoolwork. Off your life and succumb to our hypnotizing logo.
Because, let’s be honest, what else is there to do right now?
(electronic music)
- (Jared) What’s up, Wisecrack. Jared here. Today we’re going to dive into the work
of one very controversial filmmaker: Paul Verhoeven.
Verhoeven’s films have divided critics -- some call him misogynistic, kitschy, and sadistic;
others call him a brilliantly subversive satirist. So which is it?
To find out, let’s explore Verhoeven’s most divisive films to see if his work is
as DEEP as his champions claim or as DUMB as his detractors decry.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Paul Verhoeven: Deep or Dumb. And as always, spoilers ahead.
Verhoeven's had a controversial career
from the get-go. He began in the 1970s as a mainstream filmmaker in
his native Holland, making provocative work that combined high-brow melodramas with frank
depictions of sex and violence.
However by the ‘80s, Verhoeven’s films were condemned by his government for being
“too violent, perverted [and] decadent” and for not having “an explicit message.”
Unable to find financing, the Dutch filmmaker took his talents to America-- where ironically,
he would face these exact same criticisms.
His American films generally fit into two camps: violence-filled action spectacles and
sexually explicit dramas. With RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers, Verhoeven injected
a sci-fi sensibility into traditional action film formulas --a revenge thriller, a spy
adventure, a war film. And of course, it’s all *incredibly* violent. And when I say
violent, I mean this:
- (Robot) Brute force - (gunshots)
- (flesh being ripped apart) - (screaming)
- (Jared) Verhoeven did the same with his dramas: but instead of explicit violence,
there was explicit sex and nudity. Just look out how much we had to censor this Showgirls
clip.
And the feedback? Not great. One review of Total Recall called it “Dumber than WWF
wrestling” and innocent of hypocrisy about its cartoon violence."
As for Starship Troopers, The Washington Post
said it was “exactly like Star Wars, if you subtract a good story, sympathetic characters,
intelligence, wit and moral purpose.”
And in Showgirls’s case, the Austin Chronicle said it was “So shabbily built” that it
must have been a cynical desire to cash in on the public’s perviness.
Now, Verhoeven undeniably loves depicting excessive sex and violence. But is that all
there is to his work, or are the critics missing something?
As with most filmmakers, understanding Verhoeven’s *intentions* is helpful in deciphering his
work. Ironically, the man who was driven out of The Netherlands for being too extreme,
was shocked by American culture.
To quote Verhoeven, “Perhaps I was naïve but when I arrived in America I was amazed.
I was curious about the things that were shown on television and in the cinemas and, having
not been in the US for that long, I was able to distance myself and look at American culture
in an ironic way.”
Perhaps in reaction to America’s culture excess, Verhoeven quickly embraced over-the-top
violence in his films. Take Total Recall. On the surface, the film appears to be just
another big-budget Arnold Schwarzenegger flick in which he offs countless goons and saves
the day. But Verhoeven amps up the violence to ridiculous heights. When bullets hit people,
they explode in grizzly, bright red flourishes. And it's not just the bad guys who die in
glorious detail. Innocent civilians are mowed down -- Schwarzenegger even uses one unlucky
sap as a meat shield, the gunfire shredding his torso into pieces.
The brutality is so extreme that it becomes in and of itself the point, transforming the
film into subversive commentary on America’s fascination with violence.
- (Head) Get ready for a surprise! (explosion)
- (Jared) Indeed, the absurd violence only highlights how nonsensical your typical action
film truly is, a fact Verhoeven himself acknowledged -
“I have a feeling that making these kind of idiotic things, that is Total Recall, Robocop,
Superman, Spider-Man, it’s all completely nonsense...”
In the film, Douglas Quaid, an ordinary construction worker, undergoes a memory implant that allows
him to live out his dream of being a secret agent on Mars. However during the procedure
something goes wrong -- and Quaid’s previously suppressed memories come flooding back, suggesting
that he really is a secret agent… Or is he?
Total Recall constantly pokes holes in its so-called reality. When Quaid goes for his
memory implant, the Total Recall Rep tells him that for two weeks he will get to live
out his secret agent fantasies
- (Rep) People are trying to kill you, left and right. You meet this beautiful, exotic
woman... - (Quaid) Go on.
- (Rep) I don't want to spoil it for you Doug but you rest assured by the time the trip
is over you get the girl, kill the bad guys, and save the entire planet!
- (Jared) And this is exactly what plays out in the film, word for word: Quaid meets an
exotic woman, kills all the baddies, and saves the planet. And it all happens in...
- (Woman) Two weeks!
- (Jared) What’s more, when the technician implants Quaid with his memory package, he
remarks -
- (Male Technician) That's a new one, blue sky on Mars.
- (Female Technician) Been married long?
- (Jared) And how does Total Recall end? With blue skies on Mars, obviously.
By constantly questioning the very reality of Total Recall, Verhoeven draws attention
to the un-reality of the violence on screen. If none of this is actually happening, then
you can’t take any of the violence on screen seriously. The violence almost becomes a joke,
as if highlighting how silly the traditional American action film truly is.
But this is only the tip of the Verhoevian subversive iceberg.
The filmmaker’s protagonists all fit the same basic mold: seemingly moral & upstanding
citizens who turn into instruments of violence at the drop of a hat. In Robocop, Murphy starts
out as a loving family man:
- (Murphy) Well my Jimmy watches this cop show 'DJ Laser' and this laser guy does this
every time he takes down a bad guy. So naturally my, my kid thinks that every good cop should
be - - (Anne) And you don't want to disappoint
him?
- (Jared) Only to become a literal ‘killing machine.’. In Starship Troopers, a bunch
of doe-eyed teenagers become bug-killing tools of the government. And in Total Recall, a
seemingly normal ‘average joe’ becomes, well, “Arnold Schwarzeneger.” Per Verhoeven,
there’s a point to all of this:
“After what went on in the Second World War and we saw what people were capable of
doing to one another, audiences simply wouldn’t buy the idea of perfect heroes anymore. People
all over the world were forced to realize they were no better than the Germans and were
capable of committing similar acts… ”
Similarly, Verhoeven’s films show how easily normal people (just like every-day Germans
in WW2) can be seduced to violence. In Starship Troopers, Rico rejects the advice of his father.
- (Rico's Dad) Because you're going to Harvard and that's the end of it!
- (Jared) He doesn’t want to go to Harvard or to take a vacation abroad to a peaceful
planet. Instead Rico wants to join the Federation and kill a whole lotta bugs. Similarly, in
Total Recall, Quaid longs to be more than just an Average Joe, stuck working a blue
collar job.
- (Quaid) Don't you understand? I feel like I was meant for something more than this.
I want to do something with my life. I want to be somebody.
- (Jared) What he really wants is to get into the thick of the action on Mars, a place of
civil unrest & terrorism. Both Rico and Quaid yearn for the excitement that only violence
can provide: the exhilaration of killing alien scum on foreign soil or shooting up the baddies
on a covert spy mission. All these characters need is a little push-- a propaganda pamphlet,
a memory implant-- to instantly become the killing machines of their dreams.
In an interview promoting Total Recall, Verhoeven said the film actually depicts his greatest
fear:
To quote Verhoeven, “Total Recall, for me, had to do with fear of psychosis... It has
to do with the fear— a basic fear of myself— that psychosis is a way my brains could go…
When people who behave nice suddenly turn out to be monsters and criminals and kill
you...” []
By showing how quickly his characters can be drawn to brutality, Verhoeven comments
on how we as a society can also so easily be seduced by violence -- in the name of war,
law and order, or even just because (deep down) we like it.
But that’s not all. Verhoeven doesn’t only use violence as a meta-commentary on
the absurdity of American cinema or as a critique of human nature… To really understand his
DEEPEST intentions, we have to go all the way back to his childhood.
Verhoeven grew up in Nazi occupied Holland, where he was exposed to unimaginable horror
- bombings, fires and mutilated bodies on the street.
To quote Verhoeven, “I remember seeing dead people. I remember, when I was with my father,
being forced to walk past a group of Dutch people who had been executed by the Germans
in a reprisal.”
But young Verhoeven didn’t realize the severity of what he was witnessing, and instead detached
himself from the violence. He later likened the experience to watching a movie. In Rob
Van Scheers’ biography on Verhoeven, the filmmaker recalls watching houses be blown
up, burning across the horizon. He calls the experience less scary, and more akin to watching
a particularly intense special effect.
Similarly, each of Verhoeven’s characters detach themselves from the horrors happening
around them.
- (Jenkins) And every day, I have to make decisions that send hundreds of people like
you to their deaths.
- (Jared) Verhoeven’s films are filled with people nonchalantly watching violence on screens.
Robocop constantly cuts to world news of oppressive governments and insurgency, only to cut to
ads for a game about nuclear war
- (Robotic voie) Red Alert. Red Alert.
- (Jared) In Total Recall, Quaid watches people being shot repeatedly on the news while drinking
his morning smoothie.
In Starship Troopers, the news cavalierly shows gruesome images from the ongoing war.
Hell, there are even advertisements for live executions.
- (Narrator) Execution tonight at 6. All net. All channels.
- (Jared) These films depict a world totally desensitized to violence, just as five-year-old
Verhoeven was numb to the carnage he witnessed.
In a meta twist, Verhoeven uses this detachment to indict us. Because who is more desensitized
to violence than an American audience munching popcorn, laughing and cheering in a darkened
theater as people are viciously killed onscreen?
To quote Verhoeven, “People love seeing violence and horrible things… The human
being is bad and he can’t stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark
theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he’d walk out or fall asleep.”
Just look at Starship Troopers. The film is framed as one long recruitment ad -- not for
any of the characters in the movie but for us, the viewers.
- (Announcer) Join the mobile infantry and save the world! Service guarantees citizenship!
- (Jared) In the film, we watch as a bunch of beautiful, carefree ‘teenagers’ become
gung-ho soldiers. We cheer as Rico and Carmen shoot down a bunch of grotesque, hideous bugs,
save the day, and still find love. We’re so busy applauding and laughing -- that we
fail to notice that we’re rooting for… the bad guys.
The idea behind Troopers, according to Verhoeven, was to create a story that “’seduced the
audience’ but then make it clear to the audience what they were admiring was actually
evil.
The Troopers in the film are actually part of a Fascist empire, committing genocide against
an intelligent alien race.
Per Verhoeven, “We wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story
about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people
are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism…"
By getting us to root for pseudo-Nazis, Verhoeven implicates the audience in the character’s
crimes. We, just like Rico, Carmen and friends, are so easily seduced by flashy images that
we don’t ever stop to think about their context. We’re just cute, innocent sheep
-- brainwashed by the deranged images of facist violence up on screen. A similar sentiment
is seen in Robocop, where the news shows constant images of chaos and disorder that leave the
characters, and us, yearning for some unfettered, crotch-shooting, street justice
(screams in pain)
- (Jared) So Verhoeven is incredibly deep, and the critics completely missed the point
of his work -- case closed, right? Ok. We know, we know, we still haven’t addressed
the elephant in the room: a movie so reviled it won the Razzie for worst picture. A movie
so bad-- even the people who like it, tend to do so ironically. Yes, I can only be talking
about the one and only: Showgirls.
Ok but here’s the thing - Showgirls actually isn’t that far off from Vehoeven’s previous
films. Just as the director critiqued violent action films, in Showgirls - the filmmaker
goes even broader, turning his sights on the entertainment industry as a whole.
Showgirls is the quintessential rags-to riches Hollywood story: a woman with nothing to her
name works her way up to become a star. This is the same story every Hollywood wannabe
dreams about- move to LA, make it big in the movies, and become famous. Except in Showgirls,
Verhoeven shows how rotten this dream truly is. Instead of centering his film around Hollywood,
Verhoeven transplants this narrative to the glitzy, artificial Las Vegas. And instead
of making it big in the movies, Nomi works her way up from dancer to background showgirl
to star showgirl. But all that glitters is not a gold nipple tassle - Verhoeven makes
sure that Nomi’s ascent is anything but glamorous. In fact, there’s hardly any difference
between the low-level strip club where Nomi starts out and the flashy high-end Las Vegas
showroom where she ascends to stardom. Both places are driven by the same craven commerce:
sex.
As Verhoeven puts it: “With Showgirls, the attack on Vegas, for example… was that everything
is bottom line and that sexuality is only another thing that you can sell for the highest
price.”
Everything in Showgirls is a sexual transaction, from the driver who picks Nomi up, expecting
a little something in return -
- (Driver) You can sit a little bit closer if you want.
- (Jared) to the man who pays Nomi five-hundred dollars for a lapdance ...to the boss who
Nomi sleeps with in order to secure a role. As her archrival Cristal says:
- (Cristal) You are a whore darling. - (Nomi) No I'm not!
- (Cristal) We all are. We take the cash, we cash the check, we show them what they
want to see.
- (Jared) But Nomi constantly tries to fight this commodification, insisting that she won’t
sell her body. But by the end of the film, she realizes the truth: that her dream job,
becoming the star of a Vegas show, is yet another exploitative sexual transaction.
- (Zack) Your face is gonna be up on billboards. (Nomi cries)
- (Zack) You're going to make a lot of money for the Stardust.
- (Jared) Whether she's dancing at the strip club or posing on a giant billboard, it's
Nomi's body that's making her money. Faced with such a realization, Nomi spits in Zack’s
face and walks away from the show.
As for the actual commerce of the film: Verhoeven lampoons our cultural obsession with sex just
as he did with violence by gratuitously going over the top. So over the top, in fact that
we can’t show you the scene where Nomi gyrates around to an absurdly comical degree.
Here, the sex, just like the gore in Total Recall & Starship Troopers, becomes designed
to incite laughter. It too is a part of the joke.
And every aspect of Showgirls is in on this joke. The film’s excessive over the top
style is used to lampoon the quintessential Golden Age Hollywood musicals. But while Old
Hollywood had lavishly-choreographed classy song and dance numbers, Showgirls has lavishly-choreographed
buck-ass-naked gyrating that, again, we can’t show you.
What’s more, it mocks the competitive dog-eat-dog nature ubiquitous in films about big Hollywood
dreams by again taking the genre to absurd extremes. In a conversation between rivals
Nomi and Cristal -- they bond over both enjoying dog food growing up, literalizing the two
as dogs fighting over the same bone.
- (Cristal) I used to love Doggy Chow. - (Nomi) I used to love Doggy Chow too!
- (Jared) But who is the ultimate target of this joke? Yet again: it’s us: We are the
audience at the Cheetah Lounge… who “can look but never touch.” We, who pay money
to see the same recycled Hollywood stories over and over again. We, who can’t help
but vicariously get off on the wanton violence and sex depicted on screen. When the light
dims -- finally WE can indulge in our true debased selves.
So, we’re gonna give Verhoeven’s work, or at least this portion of his work, a certified
Wisecrack “deep” with no reservations.
But what do you think, Wisecrack? Is Verhoeven brilliantly roasting our gluttonous desire
to consume outrageously graphic media? Or are we trying way too hard to justify watching
this? Let us know in the comments.
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