Hope you’re finding time in your Saturday to do what you want to do today, friends!
Arriving to the weekend like
I’ve seen a number of posts over the past few days that cal into doubt the wisdom of the 8 Can’t Wait/Campaign Zero initiatives that I’ve promoted through The Distancer. I know a number of people on this distribution list favor an alternative approach — thank you for educating me and sharing your opinions. I think it’s helpful to contextualize that campaign within the broader conversation around how to best move forward with policing apart from the tweets and Instagram Stories. Charlotte Alter at TIME had a great breakdown that approaches the topic from a journalistic remove that I found very helpful. (And if you liked that, I’d also recommend her book “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For” on millennial elected leaders.)
Some personal/professional news: my employer is now matching up to $1,000 of donations to the following organizations devoted to racial justice! If you want your money to go farther, feel free to Venmo me at @marSHAffer and note any destination preferences (if you have them).
Now, what you came for…
DAY 86: Starship Troopers (available on Netflix)
I can imagine if I’d have seen Starship Troopers as a teenager with little critical facilities, I’d have assumed it was a regular gung-ho Hollywood action movie. Indeed, it has all those trappings and embraces them with zeal. In fact, it’s so over the top with its jingoistic pride in the military unit that goes to fight intergalactic war against alien “arachnids” that the film feels stilted and even a bit corny. (It’s a bonkers fun movie, even if it’s a bit bombastically ridiculous.)
Luckily, I didn’t see Starship Troopers until the fall of 2016 against the backdrop of the election, and the real purpose of the film became quite obvious: it’s a satire of how action movies smuggle fascistic, militaristic propaganda into the action genre. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven just manages to pull it off with such an unbelievable poker face that it fooled many critics at the time, who took the film largely at face value. Don’t believe me? Check out the film’s Rotten Tomatoes page, where the consensus reads: “A fun movie...if you can accept the excessive gore and wooden acting.”
Audiences in 1997, innocently believing they had reached the End of History, failed to grasp that these perceived shortcomings were the point. The hammy, schlocky style create an almost Brechtian-style remove that encourage us to step back from the movie so we can analyze the ideology and aesthetics. We become aware of how easy it is to get swept up by propagandistic nationalism when it’s sleekly packaged. The story is mostly beside the point here; it’s interesting enough to keep our attention but deliberately clichéd so we can keep our focus on the film’s style.
We like to tell ourselves about how easily we could resist the pull of Nazi-style fascism. Starship Troopers challenges us to be vigilant about how it seeps into our cultural drinking water. When it takes a familiar form, this ideological poison can become imperceptible and pernicious. What Verhoeven concocts here is more than just an action film. It’s like a pair of spectacles that allow you to better see what’s really at the heart of other films within the same genre. His satire is, unfortunately, better built for our moment than the ‘90s, but it will forever be timeless so long as practitioners of political manipulation have access to video cameras.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall