Triumph without will
The momentary advert-stories that Instagram showed me during the height of lockdown - companies that usually market organic linen chore jackets at eyewatering prices proferring tasteful masks, direct-to-consumer coffee roasters whispering sotto voce if I needed beans while I was “not going out” - reminded me in an odd way of the commercials of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987). They present imaginary solutions to the kind of problems that the companies they advertise generate. Unsafe transport or housing because Omni Consumer Products have cast thousands into unemployment and poverty, with few options but carjacking or alcoholic despair? Try MagnaVolt, which electrocutes the poor suckers, and it won’t even run down your battery. A deadly flu spreading largely unchecked through the general population because many still need to go to work? Get £10 off Korean food with Deliveroo and a mask that goes with your outfit. And yet the brilliance of the ads in Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier’s schema is that they stand slightly apart from the actual operation of the market. In them sanctimony sits side by side with the bleak auto-hedonism of It’s Not My Problem!, one enabling the other: the ritualistic public phrases of “remember, we care” allow the dumb self-indulgence of “I’d buy that for a dollar”, curbing any actual belief in either, in the operation of what Peter Sloterdijk calls “cynical reason”. Meanwhile, in the boardroom and the R&D lab, capital accumulates itself in the “economic personhood” of Bob Morton or Dick Jones, beyond any mere human motivation like greed, fear or discomfort. This isn’t quite what used to be called ideology critique, in which the actual functioning of objects was to be viewed in the light of their concepts, the ideals or fantasies they generate as part of the monstrous accumulation of appearances that constitutes capitalist social life. But it is at least an astonishingly virulent strain of irony: the viewer, having seen the actual calculation of the OCP suits, can identify the drive to profit that animates the most pearl-tugging commercials and reflect that back on the obvious emptiness of their heartfelt concern. Irony resides in Verhoeven’s overall presentation, the marginal gap or dissonance he creates through his framing.
For the adverts of the last few months, the basic logic is the same, even if the contents are different. The exhortation to support independent breweries - well you need a pick-me-up these days, don’t you? - and the virtue of muted couture exist as debris drifting down the same Instagram feed. And yet that doesn’t explain why the odd unreality of the present seems different from the dystopia of Robocop, which was racked by similar levels of inequality but sporting cooler urban-decay sets. What’s different is that we don’t get the contrasting peek behind the curtain at what’s “really” going on behind the ideology of responsible consumerism. Or rather, we do: even the most reliably pro-Tory media has published stories on the government’s disarray and habitual corner-cutting that lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths, and reproduced the blank idiocies of ministers without attempting to defend or contextualise them. But it doesn’t matter: even if it turns out the Health Secretary had positive patients discharged into nursing homes or the Prime Minister’s Spad broke lockdown for no good reason and faced no consequences, matters that would fatally weaken governments back in the long-lost 20th century, the opinion polls don’t budge. The horror of money-grubbing short-termism and the utopia of beige culottes co-exist but don’t contrast, in the queasy unreality that Adam Curtis called “hypernormalisation”. The only time dissonance emerges is when our eyes drift to someone forgetting to say the quiet part at the right volume, as with the Mail or Express headline of a few weeks ago: “STAY SAFE BUT GET BACK TO THE SHOPS”. We might be in Robocop’s world of race-to-the-bottom savagery and yukking moralism, but we’re very deep inside it now: with this same media’s relentless assault on any electoral alternative, we can’t get outside the picture or reframe it.
I was thinking about all this because of David Roth’s recent New Yorker piece on Verhoeven’s film of a decade later, Starship Troopers. Roth’s claim for the film’s relevance to Trump’s America - its prediction in the late 90s of the future ahead - is minimal and almost tangential. The elitist military authoritarianism of the society the film depicts and Robert Heinlein’s original novel presents as a utopia is very far from the wheezing burger fantasia of Trumpism. Trump’s oafish cult of personality differs starkly from the interchangeable Spartans at the top of the Federation’s military hierarchy. And the clean-cut multiracial global society of Starship Troopers is some distance from the imagined white republic that constitutes the core of Trump’s brand of popular racism. For Roth, it’s the empty incompetence of a state stripped of all its civil functions, its copper wiring of social infrastructure sold off for capital’s miniscule returns, that resonates with now:
For most of “Starship Troopers,” humanity, in every possible facet, gets its ass kicked. A culture that reveres and communicates exclusively through violence… keeps running up against its own self-imposed limitations.
Donald Trump didn’t empty American politics of everything but violence; he’s just what was left afterward. He is more an emblem of American defeat than its author. The world of “Starship Troopers” aligns with our moment in its wastefulness and brutality, and most of all in being so helplessly recursive. At the end of the film, the human survivors of the bug siege become the heroes of a bombastic military-recruiting ad. A splash of onscreen text cheers, “They’ll keep fighting… and they’ll win!” The second promise is extraneous. All that’s left to win is the chance to fight more, and to fight off the realization that the fighting itself has become the point.
Roth’s conclusion is all indisputable in its own way, even if the forces that Trump continually directs against his enemies - the online cadres of QAnon, nameless suburban posters of comments on local news sites, neo-Nazis, the same aggressively white business unionists that arranged the Hard Hat Riot for Nixon, and above all the police - notably exclude the military. The baseline setting of politics in the 21st century - a continual neoliberal firesale secured by the creation and military pursuit abroad of new “enemies within” - made the perfect setting for the Trump project. The fact that Trump has seemingly only gotten involved in foreign skirmishes through ill-planned aggression rather than need is incidental. The functions of civil society have been snuffed out like a pilot light in a boiler. What replaces them in the 23rd century of Starship Troopers is the overweening presence of the military state; what replaces them in Trumpism is shopping, the secular religion of Building The Wall and, as a last resort that increasingly becomes the only resort, the check of armed police.
And yet the piece feels oddly unsatisfying as an account of Verhoeven’s work. For the hollow constitution of its society comes across in a very specific way, which gives some grounding for the sheer difficulty many critics had in getting the joke of Starship Troopers. As others have noted, and as Roth implies in passing, it’s as if we were watching an action film made by the very fascist society it depicts, an equivalent to the not-so-soft propaganda of Where Eagles Dare or Rambo III. (It’s very easy to imagine Starship Troopers boasting a dedication to the anti-Bug equivalent of “the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan”.) It begins in media res, with the televised images of a disastrous invasion that the film will then spent its first hour building up to. The fatal bungling to which we’re secondhand witnesses doesn’t seem to deter the military, who merely exchange empty phrases (“to DEFEAT the bug, we must UNDERSTAND the bug”) as current governments alter coronavirus messaging. The recruits, despite seeing their comrades massacred, choose to continue the fight. But the film has to keep inventing obviously spurious narrative motivations: when Buenos Aires is wiped out by a meteor presumed to have been sent from the Bug home planet, Klendathu, it’s as if the generals conjured it into being simply to give the military characters something to do outside of boot camp. They believe utterly in the cause, but their motivations only make sense within the closed logic of their society’s values. Protagonist Jonny Rico (Casper van Dien) joins up to gain the right to vote - suffrage is restricted to those who’ve served - but can say nothing about the ideals of the society he’s joined; by the end, when he’s lost the need to impress Carmen (Denise Richards) and seen a general, horrific sacrifice in the war effort, he’s none the wiser: “a Citizen takes responsibility for the safety of humanity”, as if body counts didn’t result from the blowback of military incursion in the first place. The fascist cult of heroism or self-sacrifice to the military collective loses its mythic depth; the whole thing is as flat as the screens that incessantly mediate it. But there’s nothing to contrast it with: when a Tucker Carlson-like debater - “frankly I find the idea of a bug that thinks OFFENSIVE” - faces off against a scientist in a Federal Network segment, it’s clear we’re watching controlled opposition.
It’s at this point that the depleted world of Starship Troopers intersects with ours. For the vision Verhoeven crafts is of a time where irony has disappeared. The internal contrasts, multiple perspectives and conflicting values that structured narrative since the novel cede to a single frame identical with its instantiation in postmodern advertising. The emotional beats and middlebrow attachments that form the architecture of the blockbuster script remain, but only as rigid objects. The half-lavish iconography of martial valour is indistinguishable from the adverts - spots on televised executions and mothers cheering on their kids stamping on cockroaches - that surround it. One thinks inevitably of the improvised mental world of Johnsonism, in which one-nation Tory conceptions of the body politic are channelled through back-slapping chumminess and the provision of dine-in discounts (not applicable to alcohol, £10 maximum per person), while Keir Starmer’s Labour Party provide an identical product but aimed at a different audience segment. This is exactly the “recursion” Roth sketches: when shopping and the nation are continuous, each will continue the other in its flat, charmless accumulation through a narrative time without demarcation, even as the bodies, ever-growing in number, lie unburied in the open.