Double Feature: Starship Troops and First Reformed

Not a long post today. I wanted to write about the Starship Troopers discourse on Twitter, but only after the heat had died down. Someone very foolish wrote a long thread about why ST wasn't satire, including such shallow examples as "the fascist characters are good looking." The level of conversation went down hill from there.

But the sticking point that does have many people convinced of the rightness of the heroes in that movie is they are actually fighting bugs. Fascism is about starting wars of aggression, and genociding human beings or aliens that look cuddly, right? You can't be fascist if you are defending against an actual inhuman, implacable menace, right? It's one thing to call Jews bugs, but what about actual bugs?

Which reminded me of SMG paraphrasing Lacan back in the Gamergate days.

It doesn't matter if there is a conspiracy in reality or not. Paranoia is in how you yourself think.

In the classic example: a man can be paranoid that his wife is cheating on him, even if the wife actually is cheating. He might start obsessively documenting her activities, going on about a conspiracy by wives to cheat on their husbands, etc.

Which isn't to say it never matters if a conspiracy has a point, but rather the question is how you react to it. 

The Starship Troopers movie takes fascism at it's own face value (ie, the original novel by Robert Heinlein) where their beliefs about the Enemy are empirically true -- and shows why that is still wrong. Why would should still mock, disdain, and avoid these fascist impulses.

Myself, I have found the "Would you like to know more?" clips the best demonstration of how someone who controls information doesn't try to convince the populace by censoring, but by flooding them with so much more empty and unfounded information (gasp, maybe even the evil world "misinformation") that even the intelligent leaders feel educated for believing the lies.

What movie skewers the left as effectively? The powerhouse Paul Schrader movie "First Reformed."

FR is a tightly directed movie with a stunning performance by Ethan Hawke, about a minister of a dying Episcopalian church giving into despair.

The object of his fixation is the collapse of the environment, and America's inability to face it. Like Starship Trooper's bugs, this is in universe an undeniable problem. The minister is not making it up. There's not some Scooby Doo villain behind it all who can be thwarted by apolitical misfits and then everything returns to normal. There is no normal possible anymore.

And yet the minister's response is suicide and terrorism. This is not the right response even if you are right about the problem. We are supposed to explore the pathology of this character even when his object of fixation is real.

(As he contemplates his stolen suicide vest.) I have found a new form of prayer.

I don't know what you've seen on Twitter or Letterboxd reviews, but suffice it to say, some watchers do not get the nuance of that point anymore than the Starship Troopers "defenders."