ArchiveGuy, *Starship Troopers *is not an attack on Twelve O’Clock High, and I never meant to suggest that it was.
It’s an examination of the vocabulary of propaganda (or apologia) filmmaking. The two films share a great deal of that vocabulary. Not sound pedantic, as I’m sure you know this, but to clarify what I mean: that vocabulary is about HOW it is said, not about WHAT is said. I focused on the former, while your defense of the film focuses on the latter. And is, at least as far as I’m concerned, an unnecessary defense of a great film.
He’s like the Balki to Brian de Palma’s cousin Larry – wackier, European and more over-the-top. De Palma’s another director of metatrash who I like in select doses – I’m more likely to enjoy any given De Palma flick, but there’s still a lot in his filmography that I find artfully constructed but utterly unenjoyable.
I have been following this thread, and I want to weigh in.
On one side, I understand PV’s satire, and can see what he was trying to convey. (At least I think I do. Having read lissener’s, and Cervaise’s posts, I think I have a good handle on it.)
On the other side, I am a huge fan of RAH, and ST was the first book of his I read, and still one of my favorites.
I think I understand the problem that people have with ST the movie. Simply stated the book is a science fiction icon. I know people that have read that book 20 times or more over the years. To give you an idea, John Ringo mentions ST by name in his book Into the Looking Glass.* And yes the plot bears more than just slight resemblance to ST. There are people that love this book as much as there are people that love Lord of the Rings. When the first LOTR movie came out, I recall discussions about very minor details being different between the movie and the book and did people think this was OK.
Can you even begin to guess the uproar if PV had made LOTR and adapted it like he did with ST? There would be lynch mobs out in the streets out for blood IMHO.
Well guess what there are people that love ST (the book) just as much as those LOTR fans.
Now if PV had made this movie and instead of naming it ST he had called it Bugs from Space or what ever no one would be pissed off at what was done to the source material. We might have still laughed at the stupid tactics that were shown in the movie, but it would not have been condemned to the degree that it was. It would have been a great summer popcorn movie with satire for those that wanted to look deeper.
When you attach the name ST to it, certain expectations are established in the fans of RAH. These expectations were not met by this movie.
This is where much of the PV is a hack comes from.
If I watch ST with the expectation of it being from a work by RAH I am disappointed. If I watch it as a Bugs from Space movie, I enjoy it.
Understood and previously (repeatedly) acknowledged, but ultimately nothing more than irrelevant cultural/contextual noise. Such a response from RH fans has more validity, but no more relevance, than someone who hates Gone With the Wind because they have an aunt named Scarlett and she is NOT a bitch.
Understood, though even King’s staging of the briefings and particularly the discussions in the officers’ quarters is much moodier than something you would’ve seen a few years earlier. In your original discussion of 12oH, you emphasized the dialogue (which is the “what”) more than any inspiration Verhoeven may have gotten from the film’s mise en scene (the “how”). I think the vocabulary he was using/referencing visually in ST seems OTT because the worst users of that style are typically from films that don’t have the same cultural life that the best films from that time do (I’m speaking of newsreels from the period and some of the shorts & docs commissioned by the Army that were more Capra and less Ford/Huston)
Actually, it is relevant, lissener. The cultural context of the movie is important, isn’t it?
You can’t isolate the movie from what it is trying to critique… and what it is apparently trying to parody… is nothing of the sort, of the subject that it is parodying.
Personally, one of my favorite bits of Troopers (the book), for example, is the digression on the earring. Remember when the book was written. Think about men wearing earrings at that point in time.
Yes, in a discussion about the cultural context of the movie. Less so in a discussion of the thematic intent of the movie, which is what this has been. In a discussion of “What was the director trying to communicate with this film?”, a response of “Yeah, but the book was better” is not really relevant to the substance of the discussion at hand. I didn’t say it was universally, objectively, scientifically irrelevant (that’s why I distinguish between “valid” and “relevant”); only that it’s not really relevant to an analysis of the film. That Heinlein fans feel insulted by Verhoeven’s treatment of the material is relevant to them; to a discussion on different styles of literary adaptation; to a discussion on written-vs.-filmed SF; etc. It is less relevant to the discussion at hand. That’s all I meant to suggest. And again, both Cervaise and I have acknowledged that Verhoeven was indeed very disrespectful of the original material. So by calling it irrelevant to this discussion, I’m not defending Verhoeven on that count at all. I’m saying that his goal was different. His goal was NOT to “send a valentine to Heinlein’s fans.” Heinlein is irrelevant to this discussion because Verhoeven *made *him irrelevant by the way in which he completely ignored Heinlein’s intentions in his approach to the film. Besides, nothing is more mind numbingly boring and insulting to an audience, in my view, than a “valentine to the fans.” You won’t get a much more artistically limited wankfest than a movie that is slavishly faithful to the book.
No, but you can discuss them separately. And Verhoeven isn’t “trying to critique” Heinlein. He’s not bothering with Heinlein. He’s got bigger fish to fry. Sure, he has fun with some of the 50s-SF conventions that Hoban helped to establish, but he’s AIMING at them. He’s USING them to aim at larger targets.
Sorry, not parsing.
Again, that’s still there in the book. No need to demand it from a director, when you can go back to the book for it any time.
Well, except that my use of the dialogue as an example was specifically in reference to the “how”; the cliched “propaganda-speak.” The mise en scene of 12O’H seems less influential on Verhoeven (his visuals owe more to Riefenstahl than to Hollywood), to me, than the over-the-top tough-guy-poetastry; the extremely artificial speechifyin’ of the latter two examples, and the “give this man a medal!” of the first. The rousing and parodistically brutal speeches of the Michael Ironsides character, the instructor, in Starship Troopers are obvious parallels (to me) of the “dying for your country will make you a man” speech given by Peck to his new crew of softened pilots. And no, Peck never says “dying for your country will make you a man,” but for me that works as a parody of his speech.
I think Saving Private Ryan is exactly the kind of movie that ST parodies, even though it came later. 166 minutes of “War is hell. Man, does war suck. There’s nothing, NOTHING, I tell you, that could ever POSSIBLY be worth all this suckitude!” followed by 3 minutes of, “Hm, you know what? I was wrong! It is worth it! No matter how much war sucks, it’s always worth it!”
Saving Private Ryan is a propaganda film. It’s not propaganda for WWII, it’s propaganda for war in general. Saving Private Ryan is a sales job, telling you that you should send your kids to war because if they get killed, they’ll be heroes, and who doesn’t want to be a hero? Its entire purpose is to make parents whose children are killed in war feel GOOD about that, rather than angry about it. 12O’H, for all its complexity, offers the same product for sale. Those stirring speeches that I quoted are basically not very different from “Third prize is, you’re fired.”
I read the words, but I am having a hard time making them make sense. If PV wanted to make Heinlein irrelevant, then why did he bother to get the rights to Starship Troopers at all? If he had just used different character names, Og knows no one would have recognized the plot. He would have then saved whatever fee he paid for the use of the ST name.
He saves money, Heinlein’s fans aren’t pissed off. Sounds like a win win to me.
I maintain that he did not understand the book, and made a movie of what he thought the book was. Which I would have enjoyed the hell out of, except for the fact that it was not the movie I expected.
NO I did not want a “valentine” what I wanted was someone who understood the source material and faithfully brought it to the screen. I wanted to see how they saw what I saw in the book. Much like reading the book Run Silent, Run Deep and seeing the movie. They were not the same, it was not a “valentine”, but it was a faithfull rendering.
$.02
Well we can’t know for sure, but I disagree. I don’t think it was important to him whether he “understood” the book or not. I think he just used it as raw material to approach an idea of his own. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’d never heard of the book until he saw the screenplay. Then he saw certain possibilities in the screenplay and “made it his own.”
Regardless, I have always viewed a book and a movie of that book as two separate artworks. Those two works are of course related to varying degrees. In this case, I think the degree to which they’re related or not related is obviously a smaller degree than many movies and their sources.
The point remains, that V. carefully chose the property to adapt in order to make this most perfect of all satrical movies. If everything else in it was so perfectly designed, why must one simply ignore the title and backbone that the movie is developed upon?
In short, why Starship Troopers and not Bugs In Space? Starship Troopers is as much a propaganda book as 12 O’ Clock High is a propaganda movie… that is, only on first look.
Do you think that perhaps you’re missing something here? I’m seeing a pattern.
