I joined the military because of this movie
Paul Verhoeven made movies where he shoved our stupid, tacky, murderous culture in our faces in nearly the most blunt and obvious way possible, and it's because he's entirely correct about us that we still have trouble getting it.
I highly recommend checking out the commentary track on the DVD where Verhoeven gets so riled up at the cast misstating the movie's themes that he berates them at speaker-destroying volume.
Oh I have to check this out lol
The cast really were as stupid as they looked then
even in the comments on the commentary lmao
I like how he calls it fascist but it’s not
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Exactly, Verhoeven completely misunderstood the source material. He even misunderstands the world of his own movie. A lack of universal suffrage does not equal fascism. Granted it's a militaristic society, but it functions the same as a Roman Republicanism, not remotely fascist.
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Ahahahaa. From what I understand he didn't even read the book all the way through. Just skimmed it, said "This is fascist trash" and threw it aside. Which means he was smarter than I am, I loved that book when I was a kid. : )
Casper Van Dien loved his character and reprised it a number of times in sequels. Verhoeven really nailed that one!
I would hate to be an artist and have my work be inadvertently inspiring to chuds
Me too. Jello Biafra seems to be the only artist to ever figure out the solution to this:
In a real fourth Reich you'll be the first to go
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Too bad Rock The Casbah still ended up being the unofficial theme song of US forces in the Gulf War
john carpenter has to reiterate that They Live is about rampant capitalism, not the jews + the deep state
I was actually going to start a struggle session about this. Is They Live actually reactionary because of its implication that civilization is under alien (i.e., Jewish) control, even though in reality capitalists are just as human as anyone else?
Satire is the perfect artform for liberals: simultaneously smug and impotent. When your entire artform is completely undue by people taking it at face value, maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board.
When your entire artform is completely undue by people taking it at face value, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
We're talking about people who take their anti-war principles so far they've reached insane racist levels and seem to miss the fact they're exactly what they think they hate so much. They spent the last 20 years sleeping on the Iraq and Afghan wars (and many, many other horrific incidences during, like the overthrow of Gaddafi and what it led to) and only now have discovered their anti-war stance.
they’ve reached insane racist levels and seem to miss the fact they’re exactly what they think they hate so much
russians aren't people sweaty
So do you gotta just pop the bubble at the end or something? Like just all stare at the screen and go "lol, lmao if you thought X you're a fucking moron holy shit"
What are you talking about? Warhammer 40k is proof of the heights we can reach under powerful leadership and heroic men!
I know that [screenwriter] Ed Neumeier and I were aware of elements in American society that seemed to have the possibility of a certain fascism, but I did not believe myself that the United States would be able and willing to go in that direction."
Paul Verhoeven has said it over and fucking over. It's not up for debate. Fuck you Nazi shits and fuck Roland Barthes for making this sort of debate mainstream.
They do that with everything though
Paul Verhoeven could have stepped out in front of the screen at every screening and explain what it was about and they'd still be all :so-true:
They like American History X, ffs. There's no winning. I think the only person who ever successfully pulled it off is Mel Brooks, and even he didn't manage it 100%.
Is that really true though? The Great Dictator has Chaplin ranting about the goodness of humanity for like ten minutes and pretty relentlessly mocks Nazis. AFAIK fascists don’t care for it despite the fact that it’s a banger.
some people are just truly fucking stupid. the same morons won't drink merlot anymore because of sideways. completely missing the point of everything. for starship, the satire and criticism of militarism / fascism is in every fucking scene.
from the military logos being designed like bugs themselves, to the analogy of brain bugs / smart men to worker bugs / infantry, to a super maimed recruiter* being like mobile infantry made me the man i am today. it's legit in every scene and will take too long to type it all out.
this dude, even though lib and questionable at times, has some good quick analysis of the movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auoz8XQ2gQ4
The Bugs Did Nothing Wrong (seriously). And the Federation almost certainly started the war.
Satire needs to be viciously attacked because it inevitably ends up becoming promotional propaganda for the thing it is attacking. At best it ends up useless, at worst it ends up actively harmful.
Seriously we should be vehemently anti-satire, it has proven itself to be quite awful by now.
I joined the military because of this movie
Sometimes I worry that I'm not thinking my decisions through, but I guess it could be worse
Side note: Verhoeven is about to reunite with this screenwriter for his first American film in decades.
Verhoeven is currently preparing his next film, which reunites him with RoboCop screenwriter Edward Neumeier. Young Sinner is an erotic political thriller set in Washington DC about a "young staffer who works for a powerful Senator [and] is drawn into a web of international intrigue and danger."
what did gulliver's travels normalise? giant porn? watersports?
I'm half-convinced by all the points in this thread that say that satire is useless, but then i've seen a bunch of stuff that is not satire also fail horribly, like in FF7 you play as the eco-terrorists against the corporation bleeding the planet dry for money, and nobody bats an eye, so now what? (this is not unique to gaming, pipe down) that isn't even subtext, it's text. if you turn to the camera and go "we are now doing communism, which is good" people will say "oh i get it, this is satirising stalinism, the heroes are actually the bad guys"
seems that up to some point all art is "smug and impotent", what even is the end game? that someone leaves the movie theatre going "yeah i SHOULD start a union"
Yeah I have fun with satire, and stopping all satire isn't going to stop our extremely moneyed fascists from just doing straightforward fascist art. And sometimes satire is the only way to get anti-capitalist or anti-fascist messaging to a wider audience, not because execs are just hoodwinked but because they know it will have wider appeal if the message is too cloaked for total dipshits.
"Man, I could really go for an Irish baby fricassee right about now." - These idiots, probably
