Bugs, Politics and Philosophy: Would you like to know more?

Chair: Martin Holtz (University of Graz)

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Blake Wilson (California State University, Stanislaus)

Law, Lawlessness, and Political Philosophy in Paul Verhoeven’s Science Fiction Trilogy

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Combining satire with stylized action and violence, Paul Verhoeven’s science fiction thematic  trilogy of RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997) manages to provide  both high entertainment value and deeper philosophical considerations about the nature of law  and law enforcement, political organization and coordination, and, perhaps most importantly,  the role of human nature in an ungoverned or nearly ungoverned “state of nature.” The films depict how their characters confront the crisis and disorder of a world either returning to the state of nature though crime, lawlessness, and corporate/governmental corruption (RoboCop), or worlds beyond earth where newfound states of nature are plagued (again) by crime, lawlessness and institutional corruption (Total Recall and Starship Troopers).

 

Political philosophers such as Locke and Hobbes have long utilized humanity’s exit from the state of  nature in order to theorize how society ought to be organized, governed, and ultimately  justified. For Hobbes, human life without authority in a state of nature may be “free,” but it’s  also “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” because humans are constantly at war with each  other over resources on the one hand, or just because of human avarice and greed on the  other. For Locke, the state of nature’s actually not that bad: human beings enjoy extensive  liberty as ‘self-owners’ and through this they gather together nature’s abundant land and other  resources in order to produce goods for the benefit of themselves and others, which they truck  and barter for through mutual assent or contract. What’s interesting about the Hobbes/Locke  debate about the origins and justifications for government is their underlying metaphysical  assumptions about human nature: for Hobbes, the human being is basically non-moral,  unreasonable, and motivated purely by fear and self–interest. Locke, on the other hand,  believed that human beings were essentially good-natured, rational creatures who, given the  right circumstances, would improve their own lot while also improving that of humankind. So:  where does Verhoeven situate himself in the debate? Using the director’s preoccupations with  authority, violence, and corruption as a starting point, this presentation will explore whether  and how a Verhoevian political philosophy can be deduced from his depictions of human beings  (in a variety of states: cyborg, mutant, transhuman, and otherwise)in terms of their  metaphysics of human nature, which–as good or evil–determines whether the state of nature’s  anarchy demands unregulated authoritarianism on the one hand (Hobbes), or the kind of  liberal-democratic restraint characterized by many contemporary nation-states (Locke).  

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Shai Biderman (Beit Berl College and Tel Aviv University)

Cinematic Thinking as Political Philosophy in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers 

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Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) seems at first glance to be a mainstream product of Hollywood industry. Comprised of dramatic action, fleshy battle scenes, fun antics of frat-house comedy and the romance of adolescence love triangles, the film seems to justify its maker’s somewhat trashy reputation, and to rest within the conventions of all possible genres and American cinematic sensitivities. On further notice, however, the film escapes this template and, while keeping with the dominance of popular American storytelling, adheres with European sensitivities and with the speculative conventions and philosophical inspirations of the Sci-Fi genre (Brooker, M.K.M 2006: 16-17). Here, the film paints a picture of human political life in a semi-dystopian media governed society. Ruled by military honor and a unifying sense of civic duty, the film follows the hardships and triumphs of humankind’s epic (yet, questionable) war against a race of sub-human bugs. It follows the war to its “American” unavoidable victory (through the downfall of traditional political and moral doctrines) while stirring questions of transnational identities, the restricting of nationalism and gender demarcations, and the need to reexamine human collective and individual existence, in the process (Elsaesser 1993).

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Starship Troopers is Verhoeven’s twelfth long feature and his third Sci-Fi bonanza. In between the successful launching of the Sci-Fi inquiry in blockbusters like Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1990) and the philosophical conclusion of this enterprise in the millennial release of Hollow Man (2000), Verhoeven presents a most intelligible view of social order and political life. Rooted in both European history and numerous philosophical traditions, this view is, nonetheless anchored in the cinematicity of its performance. Inasmuch as the view in question reflects a discussion over the Platonic Timocracy (Shaw, 2017), a metaphor for the dangers of fascism and (what Grist calls) “the spectacle of censorship” (Grist, L. 2018), or a discussion over the war on terror (Williams, 2009)—it is primarily mediated and constructed through its medial performance and cinematic aesthetics. It is the latter—namely, the media and its aesthetic power—which captures both our eye and mind. As the true center of the film, medial aesthetics shifts the focus from the political doctrine to the cinematic means by which it stand ground. A fulfilling reading of Verhoeven’s cannon (and specifically Starship Troopers) would therefore reflect the need to reexamine the manipulation of political allegiances by (and through) the aesthetics and epistemic power of mass communications media.

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The aesthetics of Starship Troopers as a mode of cinematic thinking (about political and other philosophical issues) is hence the main argument of my presentation. I further stress this point while delving into the variety of philosophical topics raised by the film. Such topics include social and gender equality; citizenship, civic duties and rights; humanism and radicalism; collective existence and its discontents; the theory and organizing force of social order; utopia, dystopia and whatever in between; etc. While briefing over these topics, as the aggregated content of Verhoeven’s discussion, I will focus on the cinematic means, tropes and strategies, which help him (and us) achieve a worthy level of philosophical discussion.

 

Marco-Benoît Carbone (Brunel University London)

Us vs Bugs: ideology, satire, and entomological othering in Starship Troopers

 

This study focuses on Paul Verhoeven’s intergalactic war satire Starship Troopers (1997) to interrogate the science-fiction commercial-cum-authorial film’s deployment of figures of entomological life and the ‘hive mind’ in the film as a rhetorical, embodied, and affective representational device. The paper interrogates how such a device is employed to explore political propaganda and sociobiological and functionalist conceptions of organised social life. A related question is whether and how Verhoeven’s purposefully self-contradictory and polysemic satire, conveyed through film as a medium for images of bodily gore and organic otherness, can be approached productively through a phenomenological lens. The study argues that Verhoeven's film may be a chance to use art and media to discuss and possibly teach the socio-political construction of Others-enemies and our species’ presumption of individual agency in contrast to the perceivably deterministic existence of the single organism in entomological ‘societies’. The paper frames Starship Troopers within three main theoretical and contextual fields. First, how it fits into established tropes of the ‘hive mind’ in culture, considered from across the sides of cultural and zoological sciences. Second, the historical and production context of the film as well as its historical source materials, including war propaganda film, Heinlein’s science fiction as the source material, and in relation to Verhoeven’s filmography’s accent on the body/mind relations. Third, the critical reception of the film, seen here as a purposefully ambiguous and meta-ideological object designed to lure contrasting interpretations from diverse audiences and to entice reactions of bodily revulsion or compassion. Overall, the paper questions whether Verhoeven’s film could be considered an example of phenomenological cinema that in being underpinned by a perceived physicality of organic images and perceptions might aim to affect spectators in a politically radical way, i.e., through contradictory affect and repugnance achieved through figures of entomological otherness and the artistic affordances of the medium.

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One Hell of a War

Chair: Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Central Connecticut State University)

 

David Barnouw (Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

 Soldier of Orange (1977), Paul Verhoeven’s Finest Hour

 

Soldier of Orange (1977) is the most important movie shot by Paul Verhoeven. Firstly, it is about the German Occupation of the Netherlands, one of the key elements of Dutch history and Paul Verhoeven (born 1938) experienced heavy bombing near his house in The Hague in 1945. It has influenced his life forever. Secondly, he was a student himself at Leiden University, just like the characters in Soldier of Orange. The film is loosely based on the autobiography of a real resistance hero: Erik Hazelhoff Roelfsema. In the 1970’s the Dutch self-image of ‘resistance by all’ against the evil Germans was changing and slowly traitors and bystanders were getting their place in history.

 

Verhoeven’s movie seems to be about patriotic students fighting against the enemy, but it is multi-layered and the most important aspect in the film is the difficult question of making choices. 

Although his movies Turkish Delight (1973) and Keetje Tippel (1975) made him popular in the Netherlands, Soldier of Orange was really his international breakthrough (with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980).

 

After twenty years of filming in the USA, Paul Verhoeven returned to The Netherlands to film Black Book (2006), more or less a sequence of Soldier of Orange. But the movie is a mishmash of history; black is white and white is black and the war is just one orgy of betrayal and violence. It comes closer to his boy’s dream of WW2 than Soldier of Orange, which seems, strangely enough, more mature than Black Book.

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Eyal Boers (Ariel University, Israel)

Black Book: Dutch Prototype or Jewish Outsider

 

This paper shall explore whether the main character in Paul Verhoeven's film ‘Zwartboek’ (Black Book), Rachel Stein, is a prototype of the ‘Dutch Woman’ or that of the ‘Jewish Other’? Rachel's character is complex: In most parts of the film, she possesses features of what may be regarded as a Dutch prototype – she is a white, blonde, sexual, secular, stubborn, self-confident and freedom-loving individualist who seems ‘Dutch’ enough to be accepted into a Dutch resistance group and even infiltrate the local Nazi headquarters. In other parts of the film, however, Rachel may be seen as specifically Jewish – she is a black-haired victim persecuted by the Nazis, transforming herself into a gentile while remaining loyal to her fellow Jews and ultimately immigrating to Israel and becoming a Hebrew teacher in a Kibbutz. The main thesis in this paper is that while Rachel's ‘Dutchness’ is symptomatic of Dutch nostalgia in the 21st century to the Jews as ‘others’ who blend more easily into Dutch dominant culture, Rachel's ‘Jewish Otherness’ and her decision to immigrate to Israel reflect a transnational identity – one that is always shifting and traverses cultural and national boundaries.

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get Ready for the ride of your life

Chair: TBD

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Martin Holtz (University of Graz)

The Meta-Cinema of Paul Verhoeven’s Hollywood Films

 

Paul Verhoeven’s films of his Hollywood career, stretching from RoboCop (1987) to Hollow Man (2000) have often been associated with postmodernism in its various incarnations, be it the self-reflexive media satire of RoboCop and Starship Troopers, the camp aesthetics of Basic Instinct and Showgirls, or the blurred boundaries between illusion and reality in Total Recall. This contribution seeks to tie these various postmodern approaches together by viewing Verhoeven’s Hollywood films as exercises in meta-cinema. In this view, all of these six films can be seen as commentaries on the aesthetic and ideological conventions they partake in by virtue of being products of the Hollywood studio system. The ways in which they do this are diverse, but the results are similar. As a whole, the films tend to satirically undermine and even attack Hollywood cinema’s effective interweaving of spectacular aesthetics and ideological conservatism (particularly but not exclusively as manifested in the 1980s and 1990s) as producing misguided, politically naïve or even dangerous, morally simplistic and misleading, populist, distorted fantasies. The films showcase the ways in which the seductive nature of beguiling aesthetics, voyeuristic pleasure, emotional manipulation, simplistic solutions to complex problems, individual heroics, and fantasies of assertion and power can be instrumentalized for and are inherently steeped in morally questionable ideologies. The films set traps for viewers and characters alike as they and us succumb to the seduction only to realize the entrapment in exalted moments of self-reflexivity. They are therefore highly sophisticated examples of cultivating critical media literacy by the astute use of filmic conventions, which are refracted through a lens of critical distance by means of ironic, satirical stylization, a self-referential use of media in the films, and/or a thematic concern with media-specific characteristics and themes, such as voyeurism, dreams, and illusions. This contribution provides an overview and analysis of the various instances and implications of the critical meta-filmic discourse in Verhoeven’s Hollywood films.

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Ian Westbrook (Bangor Film Club Founder)

Total Recall, Philip K Dick and the nature of reality

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This paper explores Total Recall (and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the story which inspired the film) in the context of Philip K Dick's wider oeuvre with reference to Dick’s life, early childhood trauma, and developing drug addiction (including industrial consumption of amphetamines); the nature of subjective reality and implanted/recovered memory (Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, Do Androids Dream…); the contrast between technology turned outwards in Dick’s work (androids, Mars colonisation etc) and drugs as ‘technology turned inwards’ to reprogram the mind; thoughts about reality as a function of consciousness; persistent themes in Dick’s work about people not being who they thought they were, and reality not being as it appears (loop back to childhood trauma, the death of Dick’s twin sister in infancy, survivor guilt). 

 

Cary Edwards (University of Derby)

Bodies of Steel, Bodies of Mush: The Hard Body and Paul Verhoeven’s Dystopian Science-Fiction Action Films

 

In Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994), Susan Jeffords’ codification of the Hard Body Action film, Richard Nixon is quoted asking whether the USA is a nation of ‘steel or mush’? This paper explores how Paul Verhoeven’s three Action/Sci-Fi films, Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997), explore, expose and critique the concept of the Hard Body and the idea of the revitalised, re-masculinized body of the Reagan era. Across three films Verhoeven unpicks the normative action body, exploring its distinctive boundaries and satirising its impermeable and impenetrable conception. In Robocop the male body is literally deconstructed, with the ‘mush’ beneath repeatedly exposed – not only in the narrative of the protagonist (reduced to a castrated corporate product haunted by memories of his previous, fully male, life) but also through the fates of the various antagonists in the film. In Total Recall Verhoeven casts one of the archetypal 1980s Hard Bodies, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and repeatedly pulls, stretches, and manipulates his body, testing the limits of its hardness. This reaches its apotheosis in the final moments of the film as the screen whites out, suggesting that Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger’s character) has been lobotomized, his brain turned to mush – a tacit acknowledgement of the fantastic and impossible nature of the Hard Body hero. Finally, Starship Troopers imagines a future where a desexualised Hard Body predominates, but is repeatedly penetrated by an alternative, alien, Hard Body – the carapaced ‘Bugs’. The film culminates in the reveal of the soft-bodied, psycho-sexually loaded, Brain Bug, which sucks the mushy brains out of the Hard Bodied marines. Drawing on Jeffords’ work, and psycho-sexual concepts, this paper argues that Verhoeven’s three films uncover and explore the masculine phallic anxieties at the heart of the Hard Body film.

 

Flesh Seduces. Passion Kills

Chair: Elizabeth Miller (Bangor University)

 

Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Central Connecticut State University)

Paul Verhoeven and Sexuality: Isabelle Huppert in Verhoeven’s Elle and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher

 

The award-winning French Actress Isabelle Huppert has played numerous roles that require her to depict women in situations of extreme sexual violence who experience assault. In Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) as well as in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), Huppert is the protagonist who is willingly participating in debasing and abusive erotic relationships with men, she knows. While Haneke depicts a single woman who is trained as a classical pianist in Vienna and embraces a sadomasochistic relationship with a younger male student (Benoit Magime), Verhoeven describes an equally twisted and complicated plot that relies on female consent to allow sexual violence. The promotional poster of Elle shows Huppert as Michèle Leblanc, an attractive middle-aged woman who gazes through a sliding door that is being held open by a gloved hand from the outside. While her assailant is initially masked and thereby remains anonymous during a rape scene, Leblanc later demasks her attacker and recognizes that he is her neighbour’s husband; he has deviant sexual desires that his wife is unwilling to submit to. Leblanc starts an affair with him that seems to be based on violent role play outside a heteronormative relationship, she can control. This is similar to Haneke’s Piano Teacher. 

 

Leblanc is familiar with excessive male predators: her father is a convicted mass murderer who has been incarcerated for a longer period of time and is awaiting a parole hearing. This is the main reason for her not getting involved with the police and being distrustful of state institutions throughout the movie. Verhoeven makes a point that violence is used as a form of entertainment in popular culture. Leblanc runs a video game company as the female owner and has to face humiliation by her younger employees: one game developer designs an animated rape scene that involves Leblanc and a fictional monster that is circulated in the office to bully the boss. Despite being financially independent and living alone in her apartment, Leblanc is vulnerable to representational as well as physical violence in a male-driven social sphere and work environment. 

 

This paper will contrast the two female leads in Verhoeven’s and Haneke’s films to discuss the differences in the ways transgressive sexuality is displayed in these erotic thrillers. 

 

Rita Dutta (Maharaja Manindra Chandra College, Calcutta University)

Paul Verhoeven and His Vision: Subversion, Transgressions and the Femme Fatales

 

This paper delves deeply into the female characters Paul Verhoeven portrayed in his films with particular reference to the immensely controversial Basic Instinct, Elle, and his latest Benedetta (2021), of which sex and violence are predominant themes. It will explore the psyche of the auteur via the inner world of these three protagonists.

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Mateja Djedovic (Director and Independent Film Scholar)

Forget Rugrats - Paul Verhoeven and the Erotic Thriller

 

In 1992, Paul Verhoeven directed Basic Instinct, arguably the most successful and iconic example of the erotic thriller genre. However, this is not his first foray into the territory. Almost a decade before, he toyed with the genre in The Fourth Man and elements of erotic thriller recur throughout his career in films such as Showgirls, Hollow Man, and even Turkish Delight. In 2016, he finally returned to the genre full-time when he made Elle, one of the most transgressive erotic thrillers of all time, redefining the genre for a newer audience. This paper seeks to compare his approach to genre elements, stereotypes, and style in these films as well as compare Verhoeven to his genre contemporaries most notable of which is, of course, Brian De Palma.

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