In 1997, my buddy AJ and I drove down from Dayton to Cincinnati for a sneak preview of Starship Troopers. We were both huge Verhoeven fans. Neither of us had read any Heinlein. We borrowed his Dad's Vanagon for the journey - I love those things - and it was my first time seeing Cincy.
THE NOVEL
I'd never understood the intense, special kind of hate fans of the book had for the movie. I assumed it was just a generational thing. Heinlein has never really landed with me. I've made multiple attempts in multiple places and have never understood the fanatical appeal his work has for some people. So, that was my bias going into this: let me try and see what "these people" are seeing here.
Well, what do you know - it's great reading. I had zero problem getting into it and at no point felt swept up into any kind of personality cult of the author. (And the writerly tics that prevented me from "grokking" other Heinlein works are absent here.) It's well-written and engages with its philosophies (essentially Athens vs. Sparta, hardly "fringe" stuff) intelligently and accessibly. You'd have to basically hate western civilization (in the very specific way Marxists do) to see in it a glorification of fascism, which is the criticism most often echoed about it. Ezra Pound this is not.
As such, I completely understand why fans of the book (as separate from fans of Heinlein, who seem to respond more to the personality cult of the author) hate the movie. The movie seems like it was made by people who actually hate the book. Which, actually, is likely the case. So, there's an antagonistic relationship engineered into the very making of the film that I could not see before.
I still love the movie, though, not having had that relationship with it. So let's just focus on the book. I concede that the aggrieved fans of the book have a point, and it's the sort of point (hey, the adaptation hates the source material - and us) that supersedes most others.
The book references some manner of military disaster in the past (Chinese hegemony, eastern bloc vs. west) that proceeded a domestic collapse. When crime and corruption proved incurable, the vets took control.
"At first, this is unmistakably nothing more than vigilante justice. But through sheer force, they are capable of maintaining a rudimentary peace. The order of martial law is a low form of order; no great civilization can flourish with a boot on its neck. But eventually, not through any formal grant of legitimacy via democratic processes but a gradual acceptance of the new ad hoc regime, regularity returns to the social world. On-the-spot justice gives way to regular procedures for ascertaining guilt and assigning punishment to perceived criminals. As these practices become institutions, civilization shifts from one sociopolitical equilibrium to another. With regularity comes justified expectations of future behavior by the new government, and along with it the rule of law, and the return of some semblance of democratic and parliamentary governance. The chief difference is that society is now quasi-Spartan: only those with a military background can participate in the governance of the polity; key civilian positions are reserved by law for veterans; and those who do not perform at least two years of federal service cannot exercise “sovereign franchise.” That is, they cannot vote.
(...) In the real world, we tend to view sovereignty in ethical terms. We answer “Who rules?” by asking, “Who ought to rule?” This is how we continue to affirm democratic legitimacy even though it is obvious that the will of the people has little to do with how modern Western polities are actually governed. The characters in Starship Troopers have no truck with romantic theories of governance that have no basis in reality. At its root, sovereignty is power, which means force. The quasi-military government of Starship Troopers exists because the founders of the Terran Federation, back when they were little more than a vigilante mob, were willing to impose themselves on others. As it became clear that nobody could oppose them, they became the new de facto government, and eventually the new de jure government. The essential truth of sovereignty, in terms of who actually rules, is that sovereignty is inevitable and, in a higher sense, arbitrary. Why do veterans govern the Terran Federation? The only possible answer is because they can. To be clear: This is not a claim that social order requires violence. It is the claim, as historically robust a truth as can be found, is that someone, somewhere, will wield the sword. To the extent that our political constitutions can be founded on “reflection and choice,” our choice is not power versus self-governance, but responsible versus irresponsible power.
Heinlein had the audacity to explore a world where Sparta works, and is durable. Understandably, this puts our Athenian sensibilities on Red Alert. The novel’s justifications for franchise restrictions, perhaps the ultimate blasphemy in our egalitarian-democratic age, highlight a second sociopolitical truth: Any society that decouples rights and responsibilities thereby enables irresponsible power."
That review of the book is good stuff. I wish the site would rethink its name, so I could post it to social media. But who needs the aggravation. Anyway, we hear this debate raging in 2021 re: any society that decouples rights and responsibilities enabling irresponsible power. The book directly addresses this:
"To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster: to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies (of the twentieth century) were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."
While imperfect, military service was better than having no stake/ skin in the game.
It's easy to see how a generation (or mix of generations) having just lived through appeasement, the Depression, World War 2, the advance of communism on all fronts under guise of others, and Korea could have these thoughts, or find resonance in works like Starship Troopers. It was the force of Allied guns - the efforts and "fascism" of millions of Allies - not its rhetoric that silenced what the political machinations of those who appeased from drawing rooms wrought. Broadly speaking.
Broadly speaking, too, the bugs were a great metaphor for the new threat of assembly line communist automatons, etc.
"Those bugs lay eggs. They not only lay them, they hold them in reserve, hatch them as needed. If we killed a warrior – or a thousand, or ten thousand – his or their replacements were hatched and on duty almost before we could get back to base. It takes a minimum of one year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting with his mates. A bug is hatched able to do that. Every time we killed a thousand bugs at the cost of one GI it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient pure communism could be when used by a people adapted to it by evolution."
Dehumanizing the enemy, of course.
