Paul Verhoeven's 1997 sci-fi epic Starship Troopers, based on the 1959 Robert Heinlein
novel, is a singularly crazy film, with the kind of well developed, futuristic society
that you’d expect from the director of RoboCop. Set hundreds of years in the future, the film
follows Johnny Rico through his decision to enlist in the Mobile Infantry, a highly trained,
heavily armed unit on the front line of a galactic war with the "Bugs," a hideous and
dangerous alien species bent on the destruction of humanity. Johnny follows his girlfriend
Carmen and best friend Carl into military service, and is also joined by Isabelle "Dizzy"
Flores, whose unrequited feelings for Johnny complicate matters.
The film is memorable for many reasons, from its attractive young cast, to its intensely
violent battle scenes, to its frequent use of military recruitment commercials that are
always end with the phrase:
"Would you like to know more?"
These commercials serve to illustrate the extreme ideology of this future world in which
military service is all but compulsory. Another frequent refrain of the commercials, "Service
guarantees citizenship" implies that veterans are not just given favored status in society,
but are the only ones who have the kinds of rights that we take for granted.
The implications of this are laid out nicely in one of the movie's most eye-popping scenes,
although you could be forgiven for missing it. Early in the film, a Mobile Infantry recruit
named "Kitty" with aspirations of becoming a journalist playfully questions his fellow
recruits, including an uncooperative Rico, as to their reasons for enlisting. Their answers
are quite revealing, but their focus may have been elsewhere, because the scene is also
revealing in another, more literal sense.
The scene takes place in a communal shower where all of the recruits, both male and female,
are present, and completely naked. Kitty's line of questioning evokes a variety of responses.
One recruit simply wants to get off the family farm. Another has political aspirations,
"Oh, I'm goin' in for politics. And, you know, you gotta be a citizen for that, so here I
am."
Still another was accepted to a prestigious university, but couldn't afford the tuition,
and yet another wants to have children, and "it's a lot easier to get a license if you
serve."
Finally, Kitty lands on Rico, who refuses to reveal his motivations, but Dizzy won't
let him off the hook, telling the other recruits that he enlisted "because of a girl."
It's interesting to note that the entire vibe of the scene is chummy, but not flirty, and
there's a clear implication that all recruits are equal in each other's eyes. It might be
a mark of a truly egalitarian, enlightened society were it not for a couple of the answers
sprinkled in among those that one might hear today.
There are many active duty service members who have their eyes on a career in the military,
or who saw service as a great way to pay for school or to gain life experience outside
their home towns. But the subtext of the responses involving citizenship and the licensing requirement
to have children is plain, and it lines up nicely with Verhoeven's subversive take on
Heinlein's novel.
These scenes are loaded with irony. Anyone who has seen RoboCop likely understood what
Verhoeven was going for here. He's satirizing what he saw as a black-and-white authoritarian
worldview, lifting dialog almost verbatim from Heinlein's novel, which lionized voluntary
military service and the concept of duty to society.
"We talked about how the veterans took control and imposed the stability that has lasted
for generations since."
By subtly shifting the tone to give the material a satirical bent, Verhoeven effectively flipped
the source material on its head. In a 2014 interview with Empire, Verhoeven admitted
that he had to have screenwriter Ed Neumeier relate to him the story of Heinlein's book,
having found it too boring to read himself. And he confirmed his intent.
"The idea I wanted to express was that these so-called advanced people are without libido.
Here they are talking about war and their careers and not looking at each other at all.
It is sublimated, because they are fascists."
This goes a long way toward explaining why everyone was able to keep their eyes "up here"
during the soapy scene. It was all a part of Verhoeven's grand satire of fascism.
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