Neil Patrick Harris as Colonel Carl Jenkins, Denise Richards as Carmen Ibanez, and Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico
Alex Brannan explains how Starship Troopers, both Robert Heinlein’s book and Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation, operates in a satiric mode that can make it easy to miss its darker implications.
The cover of my copy of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers declares the novel “the controversial classic of military adventure.” Heinlein won the Hugo Award for the book, as he did with several other works, yet he remains an albatross over the history of science fiction. Ideologically speaking, you could call him slippery, sticky, or simply confusing. Daniel Dickinson, in Modern Fiction Studies, posed the question of Heinlein’s alignment: “Is he some sort of literary chameleon, changing ideas, creeds, mores from work to work as he sees a philosophic New Jerusalem? Alas, this explanation is too neat, and is far, far from correct” (128).
Dickinson argues, as others do, that the founding belief of Heinlein’s philosophy was a libertarian championing of “the individual over the group” (128). Glancing briefly at the world of literary criticism, however, it is clear that Heinlein is not so simple as this. Literary scholar Tom Shippey identifies an often-discussed contradiction in Heinlein’s work. Shippey argues that Heinlein’s writing indicates a “deep respect” for the United States government while also “presenting simultaneously extreme and convincing criticism of the incompetence of democratic government” (279-280).
This contradiction makes reading Heinlein’s fictional political structures a somewhat arduous task. One could read Starship Troopers as a treatise for a primarily militaristic republic organized into an elitist hierarchy. The textual evidence for this is certainly foregrounded. The soldiers are taught a blind allegiance to military rank. Service members are the only citizens who are allowed to vote. On the other hand, the rigidity of these structures is not uncritically presented.
Starship Troopers, the movie, taught me how to read Starship Troopers, the book. For that to work, of course, one must read the movie correctly in the first instance. Just as readers have grappled over Heinlein’s potential fascism, Paul Verhoeven’s film was met with a similar reticence by critics, some of whom failed to see the critique beneath the blunt representation of a fascist state.
Verhoeven’s follow-up to the much-publicized flop Showgirls was Starship Troopers, a film some critics heralded as a return to form for the director. Contemporaneous reviews, both positive and negative, seemed to misinterpret or ignore Verhoeven’s politics. George Powell at the San Francisco Examiner believed the film largely retained the politics of Heinlein, yet that it also flattened the ugly notion of jingoistic politics into the simplest base urges of “facing a real nonhuman enemy that just wants to kill you.” Mick LaSalle, at the Examiner’s sister paper the San Francisco Chronicle, concurred: “It’s interesting that the bugs’ existence is never explained or for a moment doubted. They are simply out there as a malevolent force.” Richard Schickel’s review in Time put it most bluntly when he argued the film depicted such a “happily fascist world” that the filmmakers may be “so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don’t give a hoot” about the implications of that idea. Rita Kempley of The Washington Post agreed: “It’s impossible to decide whether [Verhoeven is] sending up the Third Reich or in love with it.”
While the online critical reappraisal of Starship Troopers often points to these reviews as evidence that spectators at the time just didn’t get it, not all of the reception was so misplaced. LaSalle pointed to the newsreel propaganda and saw it for the commentary that it was, suggesting a “populace that’s happy, gullible and unquestioningly patriotic.” Roger Ebert illustrated the contrast between Heinlein’s “right-wing saberrattler” vision and Verhoeven’s “sly satire” revision. A contemporary analysis from The Guardian’s Ben Child claims that critics failed at the time to see the irony in Verhoeven’s vision of fascist “utopia.” In truth, the critical consensus was far more mixed and varied.
Verhoeven shoots the propaganda interludes in the style of war newsreels and Leni Riefenstahl films
In the movie, young Johnny (Casper Van Dien) joins the infantry because his girlfriend (Denise Richards) is enlisting. In the book, he does it because his best friend has decided to enlist. In both, Johnny is strong-headed but naïve and apolitical. He joins the military not for the sake of patriotism or civic duty, but because he is a follower. This makes his assimilation into the military hierarchy all too easy. Without much thought to politics or morality, Johnny rises in the ranks, becoming so embedded in the system that he couldn’t see the murky ideological forest for the bug-shaped trees, even if he wanted to.
Because Johnny’s journey involves giving himself over completely to the Army, it is easy to read the book’s narrative as an endorsement of a democracy that privileges militarism, a government in which citizenship must be earned by service to the warring cause. This would track with Heinlein’s background, as he proudly served in the military. He was medically discharged in 1934 after contracting tuberculosis, but he nevertheless attempted (unsuccessfully) to re-enlist when America entered World War II.
Had I not watched Starship Troopers long before tackling the novel, I may have made this very reading of Heinlein’s text. Because Verhoeven’s style is marked by a definitive lack of subtlety, understanding the almost cartoonish ways in which the film paints military order as absurd provided a grammar which allowed me to extract the smaller details in the book which propose a possibly similar critique. Regardless of Heinlein’s intent (we tread in the waters of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” when we must), a critical view of the military industrial complex is present in the details of his prose.
Heinlein’s military is presented, from the beginning, as a manipulative organization in which the individual (even though they may elevate themselves in a vague sense of meritocracy) is a means to an end. The recruitment officer Johnny and his friends interact with, initially seen missing three limbs, badgers the boys about enlisting without considering the consequences; “The government doesn’t care one bucket of swill whether you join or not,” he says (30). When Johnny later encounters the recruiter off-duty, now walking on prosthetic limbs, the man explains that the presentation of his war injuries is a “horror show” meant to scare off potential enlistees who aren’t there for the right reasons (41). Johnny tells the recruiter that he was placed in the Mobile Infantry, and the recruiter beams with pride (a pride Johnny later apes when he defends the glory of the Infantry to his roommate).
The entire enlisting process is presented as an exploitation of young people’s pride in country. The military openly works to separate those who enlist solely for the benefit of citizenship and those who it believes will be loyal soldiers. Johnny, who arrives without this sense of pride, ends the day with the patriotism implanted into him by the institution’s propagandizing.
Johnny tells the reader that basic training is viewed by essentially every recruit that has gone through it as a “calculated sadism,” in which leadership imposes just as much suffering as is necessary to separate the fit from the weak (55). Not “cruelty for the sick pleasure of cruelty,” basic is described as a necessary step in insuring that a soldier does not get called to the front lines without being ready. Johnny (who is a lieutenant retelling this story in hindsight) characterizes the suffering as actually being a form of mercy for the soldier: a platoon is more likely to survive if every man in it has been proven able to serve. The image of Darwinian meritocracy that this conjures has an internal logic to it, but the narration of Johnny and the actual events during his time at basic contradict each other. If basic is meant to prevent death on the battlefield by cutting weak chaff away from hardened wheat, then what is the pragmatic value of recruits dying during basic training itself? Again, the expendable nature of the individual puts the image of the ideal soldier into a haunting relief.
In depicting the war itself, Heinlein and Verhoeven both deindividuate the enemy, creating instead an abstract non-humanoid threat: bug drones that share a hive mind and thus are viewed as lacking individual consciousness. Verhoeven’s satirical gaze undercuts this dehumanization by exaggerating it — for instance, Colonel Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) says the “Brain Bug” is afraid of the human soldiers, and the troops cheer riotously. Heinlein, conversely, equates the networking of bugs to a dictatorship. The soldier “caste” of Bugs are smart and skilled, but they are also described as automatons which cannot surrender and live to serve the queen (142). The Army’s presentation of the Bugs — both the soldier and civilian worker castes — is that their only reason for being is to prop up a violent authoritarian regime. This, and the fact that the Bugs share no resemblance to humans but “look like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider” (142), is justification for the human soldiers to ethnically cleanse them through laying waste to their cities and bombing their civilian population. In the battle that opens the book, the platoon leader tells the soldiers that they are meant to demonstrate a show of force in which the mission “is to let the enemy know that we could have destroyed their city — but didn’t” (3). In the next breath, the platoon sergeant insinuates that any soldier returning from battle without using all of their bombs would be punished (3). Before the reader is given full context on the Bugs or the war itself, they are shown a platoon of soldiers destroying portions of a Bug town, including the leveling of industrial and civilian buildings and critical infrastructures (“I was trying to spot their waterworks; a direct hit on it could make the whole city uninhabitable”) (14). In one pivotal moment, Johnny encounters a civilian Bug and without a second thought kills it with a flamethrower under the assumption that the Bug was reaching for “a weapon, I suppose” (13). Hoo-rah though the rhetoric of the characters may be, it is easy to read this opening skirmish and identify a more insidious reality under the surface, the same brand of garish insidiousness that is hidden underneath the patriotic adverts in Verhoeven’s film.
To portray it perhaps too simplistically, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is something of a Rorschach Test. The amorality and lack of agency in its protagonist allows the reader to map a lot of external ideological baggage onto his narration. Viewing it retroactively, from the vantage point of Verhoeven’s pointedly anti-fascist satire, allows pockets of irony to bubble up from the double-speak of the book’s characters. I’m not arguing that Verhoeven has rehabilitated Heinlein for those who view the author as a third-rail figure in science fiction. My analysis has neglected to consider Heinlein’s misogyny, for one thing. It is a glaring omission, to be sure, given its presence within Starship Troopers, with the diminutive way in which the male hero views women in his life (e.g., “little Carmen was so ornamental that you just never thought about her being useful”) (29). It is worth noting briefly, however, that the author’s depiction of women has also been re-evaluated by some culture critics.
What I will argue is that the two texts illuminate each other in fascinating ways. As a work of adaptation, the film leans heavily and mostly faithfully on the world Heinlein envisioned, zooming in on the warts of the world through obvious allusions to Leni Riefenstahl and wartime newsreels. Just as Heinlein wrote many of his works for juveniles, Verhoeven disguises a satire underneath Hollywoodized genre trappings that would appeal to teenagers. In both cases, the texts are denser than they first appear, proposing ideas about our world as all good science fiction should. I can’t read either text without seeing the horrifying implications underlying those ideas.
Dickinson, Daniel. “What is one to make of Robert A. Heinlein?” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, Spring 1986,127-131.
Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. 2nd edition. New York: ACE, 2018.
Shippey, Tom. Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Starship Troopers screens on June 4 at 7pm as part of Granfalloon 2025, presented by the IU Arts and Humanities Council.