1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 92: Starship troopers

Well, that was a ludicrous display. Palmeiras 4, Liga 0. The Brazilians advance, 4–3 (on aggregate).

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Happy Halloween. This month, I review a 1997 movie with the IMDb description, “Humans, in a fascist militaristic future, wage war against giant alien bugs.”

“Fascist” – or something else? “Advanced neoliberal,” perhaps? That would make the movie a more pointed commentary on its time.

(“Neoliberalism” has several definitions, but the most common one is something like “the pursuit of economic integration on a global scale” – capitalist economic integration, to be precise. Warring doesn’t come into the definition, but it certainly has aided capitalist powers in establishing and maintaining their trade networks.)

Globalist capitalism appears to have triumphed so comprehensively in Starship Troopers that the planet’s cities have become indistinguishable. Our young protagonists hail from Buenos Aires but speak in English and look and act like stereotypical rich kids from Southern California. Most are concerned, not with the polis – the “Federation” – but with personal projects and desires. They aren’t nationalists, racists, or devotees of a “Great Leader”; but the common good isn’t foremost in their thinking, either.

The most ambitious high school graduates are willing to endure privation in order to rule. In the Federation, military service is what confers “citizenship” – roughly, the right to extend one’s influence by other means than capitalist free exchange. (This is my characterization. The movie doesn’t state this rather abstract notion in so many words.)

Hence: voting, governing, teaching, and childrearing are permissible only for the few. The violence-wielders. The warriors.

Domination is the basis of the global order. All pretense to the contrary has been dropped.

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This is made clear during a high school civics lesson:

TEACHER

All right, let’s sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy: how our social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and established the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts, but have I taught you anything of value this year?

(To a student)

You. Why are only citizens allowed to vote?

FIRST STUDENT

It’s a reward. Something the Federation gives you for doing federal service.

TEACHER

No. Something given has no value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

SECOND STUDENT

My mother always told me that violence doesn’t solve anything.

TEACHER

Really? I wonder what the city founders of Hiroshima would have to say about that.

(To a student)

You.

THIRD STUDENT

They wouldn’t say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.

TEACHER

Correct. Naked force has resolved more conflicts throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion, that violence doesn’t solve anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always die.

The teacher (Michael Ironside), a grizzled old soldier, delivers his lesson sternly, compellingly. It sounds better than it looks on the page. I can think of a few objections to the argument. But then I imagine the teacher knocking me out cold with his arm-prosthesis: “I refute you thus.”

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Ideological stage-setting occupies the movie’s first half. The second half is given over to Humanity’s war against the Bugs, in scenes that manage to be cartoonish but also, dare I say, sublime.

The troopers land on a craggy desert planet. Most carry only machine guns – mere pea-shooters (the Bugs’ exoskeletons are bulletproof). The slaughter of Humans is terrible but not terribly affecting. Troopers are impaled and burned. Their brains are sucked out. Their limbs and heads are severed. Such things do happen in combat (well, maybe not the brain-sucking). I don’t know if they look ridiculous in real life. They do onscreen.

The sublimity of these scenes comes from seeing Bugs cover the landscape. The troopers’ situation is grave – tragic, even.

It ought to dawn on these soldiers – aspiring citizens, i.e. dominators – that they’ve been brought in as Bug fodder. Being dominated is their lot, as it is that of enemies and civilians. High-ranking warriors dominate their subordinates: they “play God”; they delegate suffering and death to the lower ranks while uttering platitudes about the good of the species. To the audience, these platitudes ring hollow since the species is evidently not very concerned about the common good.

But a curious thing happens. Maybe it happens in real life, too. The troopers – not the lofty generals, colonels, and starship captains, but those belonging to the lowliest infantry ranks – develop something akin to altruism. Faced with likely death, they become intensely loyal to their unit. They assume responsibility for the well-being of civilians – those whom they’d set out to dominate. I say this is akin to altruism because they still have no sympathy for the enemy. But it’s something.

There are viewers who interpret the whole movie cynically, who read the pervasively campy, mocking tone as applying to everything that happens. (It’s well known that the director, Paul Verhoeven, was deliberately subverting the jingoistic 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein.)

They have a strong case. Why are Humans and Bugs at war? Not just because the Bugs bombed Earth (but did they? see the last video below). Rather, because Humans first encroached. Encroaching is what Humans do. In particular, it’s what expansionist capitalists do. (Recall Hannah Arendt’s quotation of Cecil Rhodes: “I would annex the planets if I could.”) It’s briefly noted, early on, that a group of rogue Mormons has attempted to settle in Bug territory. Their foray may have been illegal and ill-considered, but the other Earthlings are happy to endorse it – post hoc – with force. Doing so allows them to flex military muscle abroad and at home. By implication, this isn’t the first expansionist war against residents of other planets, and it won’t be the last. The troopers themselves may develop noble, self-sacrificial ideals, but these just serve a regime of mostly selfish, violently competitive individuals doing land grab after land grab.

I don’t say the movie doesn’t intend to make these points, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t regard the troopers’ ideals as something valuable.

There’s a romantic subplot. Johnny (Casper Van Dien) loves Carmen (Denise Richards). Carmen, a selfish careerist, is on track to become a military starship pilot. Johnny doesn’t have the test scores for that, so he joins the infantry; he can at least become a citizen like Carmen. Dizzy (Dina Meyer, from Dragonheart) loves Johnny. She could become a professional athlete, but instead she joins the infantry so she can be near to Johnny. She knows that Johnny loves Carmen, but she pursues him anyway, even if it means dying. Here is self-sacrifice, born not out of servility to dominators or the trauma of war or hopeless nearness to death, but autonomous and unconcerned with death. Here is something good.

The classroom scene:

A relatively tame (still gruesome) battle scene:

One of 10,000 “fan theories” from the Internet:

My reading year has concluded

I’m glad to report that I finished reading the principal works of Homer, Dante (not his Vita Nuova), E. M. Forster, Anthony Powell, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. And I finished all I’ll ever care to read about J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

I reached my numeric goal, too. But I was forced to rationalize at the eleventh hour. I’d galloped through The White Darkness – David Grann’s little picture-book about antarctic exploration – but was unable to do the same with Michel Foucault’s little picture-book on Magritte. I called it quits. It was almost midnight. I was two books short.

Then I remembered that the three parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism were first published as separate volumes. I’d finished reading Antisemitism and Imperialism. I did some reverse-gerrymandering and included them in the tally. Not without qualms. I appended asterisks.

Last night, I began reading Proust. I joined the long tradition of those who fall asleep reading the “overture” in Swann’s Way, which is about falling asleep.

Arendt, pt. 3

Perhaps Origins is just so huge, so comprehensive, that no matter what travesty might occur nowadays, it will have been foreshadowed in that book’s pages.

(I suspect that this very nearly is the case regarding some other interminable writings, e.g. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.)

Today’s historical parallel is with France’s notorious Dreyfus Affair, discussed in Origins, ch. 4. A mostly ordinary man – a member of an ethnic minority group – is shipped away and imprisoned. Probably, he is innocent; certainly, he is deprived of his basic procedural rights. His imprisoners, caught out, refuse to rectify their mistake. The incident divides society. One faction supports the prisoner. (If his rights are so egregiously disregarded, why trust the state to uphold others’ rights?) The other faction supports his captors. (Who’ll protect the nation if the captors lose face?)

The current travesty is less awful than the Dreyfus Affair in two ways: many politicians and ordinary people already support Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, and judges already have insisted on due process. Whether the righteous prevail remains to be seen. (And if you don’t know which side is behaving righteously, see this.) If the righteous do prevail, this item by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, ought to become a classic. It was written for posterity. It will be anthologized. If highschoolers can still read, they will be made to read it. (A PDF is here.)

See, also:

France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Brief Documentary History

Prisoner of Honor (1991; dir. Ken Russell; feat. Richard Dreyfuss)

An Officer and a Spy (2019; orig. J’accuse; dir. Roman Polanski; feat. Jean Dujardin)

More Arendt

… which I’m sure you were itching to read this morning.

But first, an item of local interest: a graduate of nearby Goshen College is the author of the Library of America’s latest “story of the week.”

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From Origins, chapter 7:

It took the Boers several decades to understand that [British] imperialism was nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Australia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one specific field [gold mining]. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the abolition of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.

In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrible price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid white wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.

The racism described here is race-rule. Boer clans subsisted by forcing native tribes to farm for them. They didn’t want this arrangement upset by the development of industry or bureaucracy. (They got their wish.)

“Mob” in Arendt refers to the agglomeration of misfits: people excluded from the workings of a polity: people fulfilling no communal organizational or economic function. Mere hoarders of wealth; speculators; subsistence farmers; unemployed workers (the individualistic ones, not those moved by solidarity).

As separatist farmers, Boer clans belonged to the mob. So did people involved in the gold rush: investors as well as individual miners. Rich and poor.

Mob-rule occurs when such people use politics to prevent the development of “normal” governance and commerce. For example: Jews

settled down permanently into a unique position for a white group. [Footnote: “Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and … in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than a per cent.”] They neither belonged to the “lifeblood” of Africa nor to the “poor white trash.” Instead they started almost immediately to build up those industries and professions which according to South African opinion are “secondary” because they are not connected with gold. Jews became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.

The timeless lesson is that it behooves the most speculative and exploitative businessmen – captains of mostly useless industries (extraction of ornamental minerals, space exploration, gambling, luxurious transportation and housing) – to maintain a dysfunctional society: to lord it over desperate, disconnected, disaffected workers and voters. Plodding but sound officials and workers who bring order to chaos are best eliminated. Energetic immigrants who do so are best kept out. You can see how this describes our own moment.

As I read, I’m tempted to draw analogies between past and present, almost to treat Arendt as an oracle. Of course I don’t know enough to judge whether she gets the past right. And the analogies that suggest themselves in certain moods seem farfetched in others. How closely can Obama really be likened to Arendt’s Disraeli? I don’t know.

The origins of totalitarianism (1951)

A slog of a book, with prophetic flashes. Here’s one.

“I would annex the planets if I could” (Cecil Rhodes said this). Arendt comments in ch. 5:

The imperialist-minded businessman, whom the stars annoyed because he could not annex them, realized that power organized for its own sake would beget more power. When the accumulation of capital had reached its natural, national limits, the bourgeoisie understood that only with an “expansion is everything” ideology, and only with a corresponding power-accumulating process, would it be possible to set the old motor into motion again. At the same moment, however, when it seemed as though the true principle of perpetual motion had been discovered, the specifically optimistic mood of the progress ideology was shaken. Not that anybody began to doubt the irresistibility of the process itself, but many people began to see what had frightened Cecil Rhodes: that the human condition and the limitations of the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catastrophes once it had reached its limits. …

By “Victory or Death,” the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to “annex the planets,” it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.

There it is: why Elon Musk wants to colonize space and destroy the U.S. government.

I’d say “there in brief,” only it could be briefer.

I have a friend, a Trump/​Musk fanboy, who says he needs the “CliffsNotes” version whenever he’s directed to an explanation of why Trump/​Musk’s actions are illegal, repugnant, not in the country’s best interest, and so on. Usually I want to say: Just read the article (the legal document, etc.).

But I admit we need CliffsNotes for Arendt.

Here’s my own summary and application – not so brief, alas, but with plainer language.

It used to be that businessmen driven to make wealth from wealth didn’t involve themselves in national politics. (Arendt goes on about this at length.) If the government kept things stable enough for business, businessmen didn’t care who ruled the country. But countries are too small. Eventually, businessmen would use up their countries’ resources and saturate their countries’ markets. So they couldn’t indefintely keep growing their businesses at home. They’d have to go elsewhere.

Businessmen tried speculating abroad as private agents, but conditions proved too risky – too unstable. So they brought in their countries’ armies to guarantee stability. (And a leg up – although I don’t recall Arendt saying this; anyway, she doesn’t emphasize it.) Deploying armies required businessmen to involve themselves in governing their own countries as well as the new lands where they did business. So, eventually, businessmen came to dominate the business of governing (in no small part, by promoting the myth that businessmen are the best rulers). But, eventually, they’d run into trouble with other countries (ruled by their businessmen). Besides, the planet was too small. Country-scale problems of exhaustion and saturation were bound to recur on a global scale; as it’s shrewdly noted on James Bond’s familial coat-of-arms, “the world is not enough.” So, one “Bond villain,” Musk – possibly with Rhodes’s words in mind, Rhodes having been a big cheese in Musk’s home of southern Africa – tried colonizing other planets. But that was stupid. So, instead, he just took over the world’s most powerful government and destroyed as much of it and the rest of the globe as he could so that he could get more wealth for himself doing what governments used to do. This was less stupid, insofar as it profited him (tabulation is ongoing), but it sure was petulant, and the casualties were enormous.

I want to stress that I’m not endorsing ideas, just formulating them.

Inflation; remembering the Holocaust; I am a V.I.P.

Karin went to the grocery store. A man in the bread aisle turned to her.

Man: “It’s all so damn expensive!”

Karin: “It’s pretty bad.”

“This is my first time shopping in ten years!”

“It must be bad.”

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As I type, I am listening to a long phone message from the local superindentent of schools urging us all to think about the Holocaust. Appropriately, my mother-in-law just returned my copy of Maus. I’d lent it to her to read to her current foster son, a highschooler whose plan of care includes being read to. He’d been objecting, reasonably enough, to the children’s books my mother-in-law had been reading to him. I suggested Maus. He liked it at first but later refused to sit next to my mother-in-law to look at the pictures. “And it’s pointless to read a graphic novel to someone who won’t look at the pictures,” my mother-in-law explained.

Some future Holocaust reading (for me):

Our Nazi (reviewed here).

Diaries of Victor Klemperer (hat tip: my cousin-in-law Peter and his Facebook friends).

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (this has been scheduled by my reading group).

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Samuel chose me to accompany him to today’s “V.I.P. breakfast” at his school. The scholars ate fruit and cheese. The grownups had coffee and donuts. They sat at cafeteria tables with their children. I stood while Samuel ran laps around me. “Take me to your friends,” I told him. He’d guide me within five feet of this or that child. Then he’d laugh and run away. I couldn’t always tell whether the child was his classmate.

A few parents introduced themselves. “My child often talks about Sammy,” they’d say. Most parents just looked at us as if we were deranged.

One child (not acquainted with Samuel, apparently) had smuggled Lego bricks into the cafeteria. Samuel kept trying to run away to play with those toys. The mother covered the Lego bricks with a jacket. Samuel lifted the jacket to get to the Lego bricks. I dragged him to the picture-taking area. We posed with an inflatable donut. Samuel took me to his classroom. His teacher put him right to work, and I went home.

Behold him watching football, earlier this week, with his abuelos and his Grandaunt Linda (a rabid Chiefs fan).

Isla Cromartie

My new Chromebook arrived a day early. What with the Scottish TV I’ve been watching, I named her Isla Cromartie.

The good: compared to my previous Chromebooks, Isla is built like a tank.

The bad: she loses power faster. And she has a touchscreen for Samuel and Daniel to interfere with. Perhaps this feature could be disabled.

She is a Dell. I considered naming her Adelle. Also: Philadelphia, after Philadelphia Bobbin, a character in Nancy Mitford’s Christmas Pudding.

It’s unlikely but possible that one day I’ll sire girl-triplets: Philomena (“Mena”), Philippa (“Pippa”), and Philadelphia (“Dee”). Karin hopes not.

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The Drake Passage, in a nutshell (National Geographic).

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An exam from a class taught by Hannah Arendt in 1955. (Click on the image to make it sharper.)

When I was growing up and aspiring to become an academic (among other things), I read a few books from the 1970s and ’80s – whatever I could find in Ecuador – on how to teach in college. These books had sample exams. One basic type was Arendt’s: Here is your chance to demonstrate what you have learned.

For the student who’d learned little, there was nowhere to hide. For one who’d at least absorbed a few key lessons, arriving at a decent launching point for subsequent, mostly unguided study, this was an arena in which to shine.

I was enamored.

This was not what my exams were like in college or graduate school.

If memory serves, just one exam, a take-home from my second semester of college, was remotely like Arendt’s.