Maybe the Audience is Fascist: In Defense of Paul Verhoeven
By Eric Allen Hatch

Buy Verhoeven films NOW!

Mounting a defense of Paul Verhoeven’s work could not come at a more inopportune moment. At this writing, on the heals of the monumentally indefensible Hollow Man, it is tempting to take as truisms every ill word every written about this man. For if any film merits the adjectives usually hurled at Verhoeven - irresponsible, sexist, cynical, amoral - it is the Dutch director’s latest, no better and in many ways worse than all the other Hollywood turds of the last few years that relied on computer generated effects and multiple faux endings to seduce and sedate its viewers. Indeed, as several of its more graphic scenes were excised to receive an R rating, Hollow Man even failed to deliver excess, a quality no other Verhoeven film could be accused of lacking, and one which, admittedly, accounts for much of his films’ surface entertainment value. In short, excepting its use in making Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon slightly easier, Hollow Man’s contributions to our culture are nil. And yet if we zoom in on a few of the legitimate complaints leveled at this film - particularly its moral emptiness and atmosphere of unpredictable psychological and sexual violence - we stumble upon, remarkably, the language that will enable us to decode and appreciate some of Verhoeven’s earlier, unjustly despised features.

Many criticize Verhoeven from a position of aggravating stupidity. Most press responses to his masterful (I’ll defend this adjective later, have no fear) Starship Troopers characterized the film as “fascistic” or “reactionary,” some even specifically terming it a “Neo-Nazi” work. Even several of those few reviews that correctly identified the film as a potentially devastating anti-fascist, anti-militaristic tract suggested that the film’s progressive political potential was either despite Verhoeven’s original (presumably fascistic?) intentions, or a completely accidental result of a film designed as a purely entertaining (and therefore irresponsible?) project.

Using these words to describe Verhoeven must presuppose a complete ignorance of both Verhoeven’s past and his Dutch film work. Once confronted with the simple fact that Verhoeven grew up in the warstruck Hague, his impoverished family reduced under Nazi occupation to boiling flowers for food, terming his work fascistic becomes an offensive assault that must be - and cannot be - academically supported. All these unkind reviewers also presumably overlooked the extremely loud Verhoeven’s passionate descriptions of his own films as, for instance, “being made with Chomsky’s ideas about media in mind.”

But we get ahead of ourselves. If we look at even the most cursory details of Verhoeven’s childhood, Verhoeven the fascist becomes as unlikely a persona as the African-American Klansman in Fuller’s Shock Corridor. Born an only child in Amsterdam in the late 1930s, Verhoeven first encountered mass warfare on May 14, 1940. This was the German leveling of Rotterdam, a city to which the Verhoeven family had just resettled. One can easily imagine this bombing coming as a particular affront to one’s burgeoning notions of morality; a strike with extreme civilian casualties that obliterated an estimated 20,000 structures, it also occurred after the Dutch had stopped resisting Nazi encroachment.

However, Verhoeven’s childhood was also marred by some violence of more complex moral strokes. By 1943, his family had relocated to an area nearby the Hague, and had the misfortune to live adjacent to an air field that became a Nazi launching pad for V-1 rockets. This meant that Verhoeven often saw houses and yards on his street destroyed by falling bombs - bombs dropped by Allied forces. In numerous interviews over his career, Verhoeven has described these nightmares with a chilling mixture of horror and bemused detachment; he describes regularly seeing severed limbs and corpses lining his path to school, and seems to have acclimated himself to extreme, unpredictable violence at a very early age.

Given the extreme bloodshed and evisceration he witnessed in his early years, it follows that he would so matter-of-factly dispatch such content in his films; human debris has always been part of his human landscape. People accuse Verhoeven of inuring his audience to grotesqueries, when indeed he was forced to know life to be a dispassionate meatgrinder from the get-go. That, coupled with the greater degree of sexual permissiveness present in post-’60s Dutch culture, has created the Verhoeven sensibility: a world far more sexual, violent, and animalistic - and more unpredictably so - than even most American films.

What’s more, given Verhoeven’s upbringing in an environment of constant bloodshed and ambiguous morality, it follows that his work would again and again gravitate to narratives that seem to depict good and evil in sharply drawn, instantly recognizable archetypes - only to subvert that paradigm by magnifying the brutality of his protagonists and the humanity of their adversaries. Many of his films also allow for multiple interpretations of culpability: do his protagonists encounter pure evil, or are they victims of their own hyperactive imaginations and persecution complexes?

Their excess, then, and the complex perspective from which they spring, helps distinguish Verhoeven’s films from other big box office directors. However, we cannot deny that said excess is also coupled with heightened psychological acuity, and a political agenda: as much as Verhoeven has striven to assimilate himself into American culture and make American movies, he on some level remains an outsider working within the system, an astute sociological mind armed with mountains of money with which to vocalize his ambivalence for our society. Films like Basic Instinct and Robocop, dismissed by many as strictly vacuous entertainments, became much more than that by magnifying their pop culture excesses - that is, taking their levels of sex and (particularly) violence far beyond the audience’s comfort levels. These works also rarely succumb to endings either happy or morally unambiguous, therefore offering even unpoliticized audiences the opportunity to ponder the real world ramifications of these otherworldly fantasies. Put another way, they flirt with political dogma by giving lascivious American audiences too much of what we want.

The arguments over Verhoeven’s stature as a director and the seriousness of his work precede his move to the United States. Beginning a pattern that would resume in the U.S. with Robocop in 1987, Verhoeven’s Dutch films of the ‘70s and early ‘80s were generally largely successful at the box office but critically panned (many of these films were better received here, as post-’60s economics have mandated that foreign language films must be released in the U.S. as serious works to the art house market, and not as popular entertainments to mass crowds).

By far the most popular of these films remains 1973’s Turkish Delight. On the commentary track to the just-issued Anchor Bay DVD for this title, Verhoeven proudly cites a recent nationwide Dutch poll that named Turkish Delight the best film of all time. A surprisingly frank story of young love with a tragic ending, Turkish Delight presages Showgirls with its completely unembarrassed nudity and highly varied, highly banal sexual groping, and specifically its depiction of sex as a passionate but nihilistic endeavor that modern humans pursue relentlessly to no end other than itself. The film has always enjoyed disproportionate popularity among the young, and its graphic content must play some part in this. However, we must also account for cultural differences, and remember that Dutch society is less repressed about sex than our own; Turkish Delight could probably not play uncut even on Showtime in the U.S., yet Verhoeven says it has played regularly on primetime Dutch tv ever since its initial theatrical run.

Turkish Delight has remained relevant largely because of its honest depiction of the unfettered energy of youth. Rutger Hauer, as a self-obsessed, sex-obsessed young artist, and his young life’s obsession, Monique Van de Ven, pursue their pleasure with an anarchic energy that is liberating, but ultimately narcissistic. The swirling passion and rebellious behavior of these characters bridges aspects of the hippie, punk, and raver subcultures that have dominated the last 50 years of European youth culture. Verhoeven observes dispassionately as the lovers determine that disapproving parents, car crashes, and their own unpredictable tempers cannot damper their love - only to discover that a brain tumor can. However, Verhoeven uses relentless foreshadowing (of infidelity, of fading passion, of death by cancer) not to damn these characters, but perhaps to commend them for their passion; with death around any corner in this post-Nazi world, who can condemn these lovers for trying to steal whatever pleasure they can before the inevitable catches up with them? Modern society has obliterated love in the name of sex - but even sex is more meaningful to these disaffected youths than the boring capitalist middle-class lives of their parents.
Verhoeven has less enthusiastic words for The 4th Man, a taut, claustrophobic thriller that Dutch critics loved, but the auteur himself sees as an effective but slight genre piece. In this film, Verhoeven says, he and his art director made sure that even the most casual viewer could not miss the film’s overbearing symbolism and foreshadowing - a move initially intended to make the film a hyperactive spoof of Hollywood thrillers, but one in retrospect he feels dumbed the film down enough for contemporary critics to understand it and mistake it for deep. It is certainly a luxuriously composed film, and it is a pleasure (again on the Anchor Bay DVD commentary track) to hear Verhoeven point out aspects of his film indebted to the paintings of Hopper, the narrative themes of Stravinsky, and the film language of Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.

That said, 4th Man has become most prescient of Verhoeven’s American films in that it works fantastically both as an entertainment and as a blueprint for future ventures into excessive content and ambiguous morality. Star Jeroen Krabbe plays an author more successful in his professional life than in his personal, an alcoholic gay man living with his lover in what has become a mutually unsatisfying relationship. He becomes involved with a beautiful hairdresser, partly succumbing to her charms, and partly hoping to parlay their liaison into sex with her studly young boyfriend. However, evidence begins to mount that she may be a black widow of sorts, a woman with three dead husbands eager to sink her fangs into her next victim.

Replete with nudity - both romanticized and decidedly blemished at varying moments - and a final, devastating moment of abrupt violence, the 4th Man allows us to interpret its excesses in varying manners. We can believe in the leading lady as the spider woman, thus accepting conventional notions of good and evil and viewing the film simply as a solid neo-noir; we can see the deaths of her husbands as entirely accidental, and believe the entire storyline either a fabrication or exaggeration of a paranoid, alcohol-drenched imagination (with a misogynistic homosexual twist); or, most provocatively, we can see the film as a statement that final truth cannot be known, and that whatever the causation, brutality and mistrust will be permanent elements in human history.

Many of these issues are thrust even further to the forefront in Verhoeven’s two American masterpieces (and his two collaborations with screenwriter Ed Neumeier), Robocop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997). The former film, originally much-maligned and poorly served by two crass sequels, is now well on its way to complete critical rehabilitation, abetted greatly by a fantastic Criterion Collection DVD issued last year. Let us then focus on the latter, a classic work of modern American dissent that perfectly highlights the ideological strengths and misunderstandings associated with Verhoeven’s canon.

The premise of the film, adapted from a mediocre Robert Heinlein pulp sci-fi novel, reads like so much box office tripe: in the near future, gigantic bugs attack the earth, and the world’s government strikes back. Based on the film’s trailer, you would expect the film to deliver eye-popping special effects, a glossy class of All-American actors, and lots of bloodshed. Indeed, it delivers much too much of all these qualities. In a movie which pits humans against oversized insects, one would expect little room for moral ambiguity; surely our human heroes here have been given free license to kill at will?

Far from it, for this is a Paul Verhoeven film. The film begins typically, showing humans at combat with the bugs on some far away planet, the humans outnumbered and brutally torn to shreds by their merciless adversaries. Later (in a moment now eerily prescient of the World Trade Center disaster) we learn that the bugs have dispatched an asteroid to Earth, destroying an urban center - and our hero’s parents to boot! Early on, we are given no reason to think of the bugs in anthropomorphic terms, and every reason to lust for their blood.

Yet from the first frame reasons exist to be suspicious of these sharply drawn moral lines. Perhaps foremost are the news reports that periodically interrupt and frame the film’s narrative. Presented as web pages accessed by an unseen hand pointing and clicking, these news reports are overtly fascistic in their tenor. They depict Nazi-like military troop formations with pride, denounce bugs as pure evil and suggest that parents should train their children to become killing machine by encouraging them to stomp on insects and to play with soldier’s firearms. These clearly ironic interruptions spoof in content and format both the hyper-patriotic, xenophobic American newsreels of the second world war, as well as several of our current simplistic/jingoistic online news sources (AOL, MSNBC, etc.).

Eventually, we learn information about the bugs that forces us to rethink our initial hatred. The film begins with the assumption that their violence against Earth was unprovoked, yet later it is casually dropped that we entered their sphere of influence first and began to violently meddle with their affairs. Compounding this, we’re given reason to think of the bugs as mindless killing machines (somehow, wrongly, not reading the human characters in the same terms), and then late in the film learn that we have seen only a small portion of the bug world: their soldiers. Tragically, it turns out the bugs are motivated by highly intelligent, highly spiritual leaders - leaders for whom our “heroes” reserve their most violent, most inhuman inflictions of violence and humiliation.

By the end of the film, audiences reactions are likely to be varied, and highly confused. To be sure, a small portion of the audience - that is, the truly psychotic - will find unfettered pleasure in its unbridled violence and use of attractive human bodies as disposable hunks of flesh. Acknowledging that this portion of the audience exists, and that their psychoses might be exacerbated by seeing such films, makes some sort of case for Verhoeven as an irresponsible filmmaker. And yet, without Verhoeven, these American Psychos would always have films like Rambo, Commando, the Terminator, and all their irresponsible, reactionary brethren to feed their baser urges.

Instead, let’s give our audiences credit for at least a modicum of morality and deductive reasoning. After viewing Starship Troopers, even if one enjoyed the spectacle, one would have to come to terms with both its extremity, and its failure to completely ratify the politics of the government it depicts - a world government geographically grounded in the current United States, and clearly drawn as a magnification of current trends in American political thought. If the unprecedentedly bloody combat scenes did not make this point, the film’s closing on the gruesome torture of one of the leader bugs, followed by a tongue-in-cheek trooper recruitment film (which anticipated several U.S. army ads of the last few years), definitely would.

On the commentary track, Verhoeven at one point poses to his audience the critical question behind Starship Troopers: “are you aware that this is happening in your own society?” By magnifying our militaristic and xenophobic tendencies to a Spartan degree, Verhoeven has painted an American future where patriotic cheers could produce only an empty feeling. The society of Starship Troopers has made military spending its number one priority, even to the point that military service is a mandatory precursor to full citizenship. In a typical Verhoeven twist, we cannot view this future state entirely as a dystopia. Some social advances have occurred: racial tensions seem nonexistent, and equality of the sexes has been attained (as demonstrated by a completely de-sexed, fully, frontally nude shower scene with soldiers of both genders). Yet even with these worthy goals attained, our society is still hellbent on colonialism and warmongering, to the point that we don’t even stop to know our “enemies” before we exterminate them. When the film shows a bug, substitute an Arab or a Russian, and you begin to see the magnitude of the statement Verhoeven is making.

Indeed, while the film works best as an indictment of American foreign policy as we move into the new millennia, the same plot points can also be read as detailed, earnest critiques of European colonialism in the 1600s, the creation of the Southern slave economy in the 1700s, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the U.S.’ demonization of the Japanese in the 1940s, the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the reemergence of McCarthyism in the 1980s, and the proliferation of firearms in the U.S. in the 20th century; the commonality of Verhoeven’s critique says as much about the repetitiveness of human atrocities as it does about Verhoeven’s abilities. Overshadowing all of these, we must also view Starship Troopers as an indictment (reminiscent of the televised asides in Robocop) of the control and currency of communication, the media-mediated manners in which many of these modern monstrosities were packaged and sold to the general populace of the United States. Verhoeven manages to say all these things not-so-subtlely; indeed, perhaps his strokes are too broad for some of us to notice. At another point on the Starship Troopers commentary track, the screenwriter expresses his fear that audiences enjoyed this film and Robocop as pure entertainments, to which Verhoeven replies in mock-surprise. “But Ed! We cannot say that! That would mean the audience is fascist!”

In the end, that is the decision we are left with. We can dismiss Verhoeven’s films as excessive, which is to miss the message for the method; we can enjoy them sadistically, which is to label ourselves fascists and psychopaths; or we can view them as outrageous wake-up-calls, a (perhaps only slightly) distorted prism turned on ourselves by one of our most gifted insider/outsiders. His recent execrable misstep aside, Paul Verhoeven will one day be recognized as a major world director even by Americans; in his day, however, as an auteur who makes liberal films for a borderline fascist audience, his hypergraphic tracts seem to cut too close to the bone.