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Bug planet
Futures, Vol. 30, No. 10, pp. 1017–1026, 1998 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0016–3287/98 $19.00 ⫹ 0.00
Pergamon
PII: S0016–3287(98)00103-7
BUG PLANET Frontier myth in Starship Troopers Jamie King This paper examines Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers against Robert A. Heinlein’s eponymous 1959 novel, arguing that both productions reinscribe the ideologies of America’s mythic frontier history in their fictional futures. The paper shows that despite the conspicuous postmodernisation of narrative in Verhoeven’s adaptation, components of the frontier mythology codified in Heinlein’s novel— expansionism, Social Darwinism and a violent relationship with the indigenous Other—remain at the film’s thematic centre. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
In 1959, the same year in which he wrote Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein spoke of science fiction as ‘realistic speculation about possible future events based solidly upon adequate knowledge of the real world, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.’1 As Alisdair Spark has pointed out, Heinlein’s comment can be seen as an oblique hint towards the potentialities of the form for studies of contemporary culture: in the science fiction narrative, ‘the concerns of the present often manifest themselves in fear or expectation of the future’,2 so that in disregard for its vulgar reputation as a forum for speculative futurism, the genre proffers an ad hoc notation of a period’s fears and desires whilst sheltering beneath ‘the generic umbrella of the fantastic’.3 ‘By this dialectic criterion,’ Spark concludes, science fiction ‘provides not future history but present historiography, revealing of the presuppositions inherent in the speculation.’4 For Peter Ley, this proposition carries across smoothly to the science fiction film, which, he has recently argued, is ‘a construction somewhat removed from everyday reality [and thus] a privileged vehicle for the presentation of ideology.’ Science fiction’s Jamie King is at King Alfred’s College of Higher Education, Winchester. He may be contacted at 2nd Floor, 135-139 Curtain Road, London, EC2A 3BX UK. (Tel.: ⫹ 44 0171 6134743; e-mail: [email protected]/ [email protected])
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distance from concerns with ‘social reality’, he argues, gives it the scope to promote ideological positions and discursive social visions. In qualification, though, Ley offers the proviso that ‘such visions cannot [...] be reduced to a simple, discursive message. Instead, the total semiotic output of a film-images, sounds, textures, relationships, is a carrier of ideology’,5 and this rejoinder betrays the fault-line in the ‘present-through-future’ schema, a weak point which is located in the limitations of structuralist semiotics: its parameters artificially delimit the interplay between fiction and reality, between past, present and future. Science fiction, with its irresponsible conflation of reactionary politics and subtle subversion, its constant slippage of temporal positioning, retains an ambivalence that can scarcely underpin such a systematisation. Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is a case in point: past feeds into present, and present into future, in ways that the film both sends up and lets go by without intervention. As an adaptation of Heinlein’s 1959 novel, it does indeed act somewhat as a ‘vehicle’ for the ideology of that era, evoking the paranoiac US politics of the 1950s in which, according to Senators Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, America was ‘in clear and imminent danger of being overwhelmed by alien forces’.6 Verhoeven’s film is haunted throughout by the same anxiety of invasion, of being overrun by the Other, as it stages its rehearsal of the period’s rabid McCarthyism in pitting Communist (‘alien’) Bugs against an elite force of human infantrymen; but here that anxiety is caricatured and exaggerated. Heinlein’s novel, it might well be argued, sets itself up for such treatment in its flagrant promulgation of right-wing ethics. Juan (‘Johnny’) Rico, our protagonist, signs up for military service just as war breaks out in the off-world outlying colonies. It’s us versus them, humankind against the ‘Bugs’, a race of ‘Pseudo-Arachnids’ who, both in terms of their monstrous physical form, (‘like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider’), and their marked socialistic bent (‘their organisation, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities [under] the ultimate dictatorship of the hive’) are very plainly ‘not like us’.7 The story has Johnny progressing through military training with the ‘Mobile Infantry’ into a series of confrontations with the Bugs on a variety of planet surfaces. The characteristic tropes of 50s science fiction, ‘a return to the frontier’, ‘alien invasion’ and a concern with ‘atomic holocaust’,8 which are conspicuously and predictably present in the original text of 1959, may remain intact in the 1998 film, but they have been thoroughly debased and reterritorialized. Verhoeven’s Buenos Aires, home of Johnny Rico and his compatriots, is now evocative of the dictatorship of Juan Pero´n, who had been displaced from power in Argentina only a few years before Heinlein published his novel: Verhoeven, who lived as a child in a Nazi-occupied town, resets Heinlein’s politics in an explicitly fascistic context, following the broadly European view of Heinlein’s work, summarised by leftist science fiction writer and critic Michael Moorcock as a ‘naı¨ve and emblematic reading of society [which] is fundamentally misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian [...] it is Reganism, it is John Wayne in Big John Macclean and The Green Berets, it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy...’9 As the director is at pains to show, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers speaks more of its present than of any possible future, acting as a rich —if unpalatable—document of contemporaneous ideologies and polity: with the benefit of hindsight, it is indeed inextricably bound up with the concerns of the 1950s. So, however is Verhoeven’s adaptation, which through its sardonic preservation of the novel’s pinko aliens, atomic detonations and frontier spaces, equally betrays its own temporality: in its self-aware posturing, its
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playing with genre and its refusal to stand behind a particular ideological message, the film situates itself firmly in the post-modern 1990s. Apprehending the promiscuous ideology often intrinsic to the form, it stages a subversion of semiotic carriage through multilevel discourses which hystericise the polemics of Heinlein’s novel into grotesques of American wartime propaganda material. In a broadcast called Why We Fight, for instance, also the title of a World War Two propaganda series produced for the US, glassy-eyed citizens enunciate slogans such as ‘I’m doing my part!’ and ‘The only good bug is a dead bug!’ So as the present-through-future thesis would suggest, the 1990s loom large in this Starship Troopers. In its claim to mastery of its material, in satirising and relativising the narratives it invokes, the film displays a conviction of its position at ‘the end of history’: not only does it lampoon earlier American ideology but, in its refusal to pass judgement, expects to guard itself against the possibility of being pulled up by any later critical analysis. However, as this paper will show, the models of analysis set out above lack the scope to address either version of Starship Troopers satisfactorily: for in their foregrounding of issues of territory, terrain and frontier space, both text and film are drawing upon and codifying a mythical ideology of the past, generated by a matrix of writers in the 1890s around the closing of the American frontier. This ‘frontier mythology’, central in a panoply of science-fiction works, has been seen as ‘basic’ to Heinlein’s writing:10 the series of Bildungsroman juvenile novels which precede Starship Troopers all focus on rites of passage which take place in off-world frontier spaces, and in three of these early books, Between Planets (1951), Tunnel In The Sky (1955) and Time For The Stars (1956), Heinlein portrays a youngster achieving true manhood through the incidental confrontation with a wilderness space. In his wider oeuvre, only eight of his twenty eight novels take place primarily on Earth: four of them concern relations between humans and extraterrestrial beings, and a fifth concludes on the Moon.11 This choice of off-world locations, writes David Samuelson in ‘Frontiers of the Future: Heinlein’s Future History Stories’, [...] places Heinlein’s characters in situations of temporal extremity, facing the unknown and having to learn to understand it, in order just to survive. Whether they are in spaceships or alien worlds, exploring or settling or righting wrongs, fighting off other species or learning to live with them, their situations parallel those of the American pioneers [...] a kind of frontier ethic is invoked [...]12
The emergence of that frontier ethic can be traced to the singular cultural influence of what is known as the ‘frontier thesis’ of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. The thesis, which could be summarised in his assertion that ‘The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development’,13 has not only proved a remarkably enduring (if regularly contested) reading of American history but has wreaked an indelible influence on American cultural identity, one that can be discerned throughout the cultural productions of the twentieth century. Historian James Malin wrote in a 1944 essay that ‘the Turner tradition wielded a tremendous influence and as such continues as a major historical force to be reckoned with in contemporary American life[...]’;14 it has since been noted on a number of occasions that Turner’s work, focused on the centrality of the frontier in American economics and culture, dominated the writing of American history for half a century;15 and many writers will go so far, as does Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation, to designate the frontier ‘the central myth—ideological trope of American culture.’16 Science fiction has drawn this mythos of America’s westward expansion, which penetrates the
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culture of each successive generation of writers, into its image of the future, substituting the Winchesters of the frontiersman for ray guns of space pioneers, their covered wagons for rocket ships, their agrarian tools for portable eco-systems. In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel Under the Moon of Mars, for example, the central character Carter is a composite of mythic frontier figures making up an archetypal frontiersman: a gold prospector, whose fortunes can form the basis for an industrial capitalist society, and the soldier whose function it is to protect that society and capital. Carter is abruptly transported to Mars from a cave where he is hiding from Indians: he arrives there naked, shorn of his earthly trappings and the past that they signify (this, as we shall see, is a classic theme of frontier mythology). As the narrative on Mars unfolds, Burroughs offers an ethnography of alien culture which readily invokes the terms of frontier narratives and colonial expansion, wherein the indigenous race, ‘green men’, are portrayed, like native American Indians for European pioneers, as warlike, primitive and intellectually inferior. Thus we witness the mythic past feeding through into the present, and on into fictional futures. Where Heinlein’s assessment of the function of science fiction has suggested that the genre stages an analysis of the present through action set in an imaginary future, the historian Turner held that ‘Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time [author’s italics]’.17 In the same way that Heinlein sought to construct the future, Turner’s writing of history sought to present the past in a way that was palatable to, and would in part explain, the culture of the present. Thus we must look to the 1890s for the conditions that brought frontier mythology to the forefront of American culture, and from there into the semantic structures of Starship Troopers. Turner’s thesis explained and justified the salient American national characteristics of the final third of the nineteenth century: amongst these the rising generational nationalism following the Civil War, a sense of individualism which was increasingly challenged by the public interest theory of governmental regulation; and a growing awareness of the principles of democracy, which the reform agitation in the early nineties had done much to promote.18 As well as appealing to the idealism of 1890s America, the frontier thesis addressed fears arising out the recent replacement of a rural society with a ‘fantastically complex urban-industrial community’,19 and offered a rationale for the key economic crisis that had ensued after 1873. Bancroft’s promise in 1865 that ‘Americans had witnessed their last historical crisis [and] that now they would dwell in timeless simplicity and harmony forever’20 had proved hopelessly naive: Turner’s frontier thesis was in good part a timely summation of the nation’s critical ‘economic, social and psychological problems’,21 problems which had led Woodrow Wilson to declare that ‘We are the first Americans to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our own institutions as compared with the systems of Europe.’22 Behind such anxieties lay chronic economic difficulty, the apparent exhaustion of the public domain, and the encroachment of capitalist industrialisation upon agrarian communities. One of Turner’s pivotal assertions, at the close of his essay, was that the closing of the frontier marked the end of an era, and that Americans must now adapt to what has been called a ‘closed-space’ context. The census report of 1891 had spelled the demise of the Jeffersonian promise of a frontier that would last into the indefinite future. Turner’s paper, positing the significance of the frontier space process in America’s inception and in its sustenance, concluded by pointing out that space’s bankruptcy; having proposed that ‘each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past’, he now pronounced the
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gate of escape closed. Science fiction, too, came of age in a period which at key points was isomorphic with the 1890s in the terms of its social rupture, and the genre can be seen as one way in which the culture attempted to make sense of these changes by resuscitating the myth of American expansionism. The 1920s and ’30s were also marked by a Great Depression and a further acceleration in the shift from an agrarian economy to one focussed in closed urban spaces and driven by technology. As Paul Edwards points out, President Truman’s 1947 speech, in which he pictures communism as global terrorism with implacable expansionist tendencies, draws upon the sense of a ‘closed-world’ which, prevalent in the 1890s, seemed no less so in the mid 1900s. He contends that the Truman doctrine of containment pivots around the central images of an enclosed space surrounded and sealed by American power, which ‘was the central metaphor of the closed-world discourse.’23 Science fiction’s deployment of frontier mythology, therefore, is can be seen as being far from incidental: whilst implicitly locating the explanation for dissatisfactory social conditions in the loss of public domain land and the closing-in of space, the genre was well placed to offer a future in which that same frontier had been opened anew on other planets. In fiction, at least, pioneering life on the frontier could begin over again. Turner’s key paper, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, was delivered in July 1893 to a meeting of American historians at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The paper’s central innovation lay precisely in drawing attention to ‘the basic dimension of the American imagination in space’24 in the course of asserting that the development of America’s democratic and economic power, as well as its national character and identity, had been intimately linked to the development of its agrarian frontier. Turner’s focus was in establishing the play of environment upon the European pioneers, and therefore the effects of the frontier upon the growth of the American nation; more broadly, as Hofstader has said,25 he sought to establish importance of the environment in history, and of the incorporation of space into the developing picture of American history. The motivations for Turner’s giving environment such primacy in his account are partly to be found in the predominance of Social Darwinism as a discourse in late nineteenth century America. Given that this revival of the concept of evolution, the most significant contribution of biology to nineteenth century thought,26 often denied the intellectual credibility of any socio-political theory failing to speak in its terms,27 the centrality of Social Darwinistic methodologies in Turner’s work is unsurprising. The historian himself said in 1883 that ‘Science has of late years revolutionised Zoology, Biology, etc. It must now take up recorded history and do the same by it. This, I would like to do my little to aid.’28 As we have seen, Turner’s frontier thesis naturally incorporated contemporary thought structures into its writing of history, and both versions of Starship Troopers, in codifying the frontier myth, are shot through with the Social Darwinistic strains that were so prevalent at the close of the nineteenth century. The assumptions accompanying this Darwinian view of social development are well documented; they are also palpably latent in Starship Troopers, where man is regarded as a fundamentally self-interested animal pursuing survival, where personal competence and competition are the norm, as is the exercise of the survival impulse: in both the Heinleinian and Turnerian paradigms, the ‘fittest’ survive and, ideally, prosper. Politics, democratic or otherwise, must be acquired: man is not ‘born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and
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a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience and hard sweat of the mind.’29 For Turner, the environment was the control in the struggle of the species, with the frontier being viewed as the key element in progressive change. Thus, he wrote, at each successive advancement of the frontier, ‘in each western area reached in the process of expansion’, there had been ‘a recurrence of the process of evolution’,30 and ‘At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions.’31 In frontier mythology, the encounter with unchecked space is a rite of passage. Heinlein, equally, dramatises the process of travelling through outer space, of reaching the frontier world, as literally a process of undressing, ‘skins peeling off’32 the troopers’ capsules as they near a planet’s surface, just as Burroughs’ Carter arrived on Mars naked and renewed. In Heinlein’s novel, the training process is also one of reconfronting nature: ‘[...]They dumped me down raw naked in a primitive area of the Canadian Rockies,’ complains Rico, ‘and I had to make my way forty miles through mountains. I made it—and hated the Army every inch of the way.’33 Turner’s thesis, in its assertions that the most significant intellectual traits of America originated from the wellspring of the frontier, that the American intellect owed its most crucial characteristics to frontier experience,34 placed such wilderness experiences squarely at the centre of American identity. Starship Troopers employs exactly the same model in its dramatisation of Johnny Rico’s physical and spiritual development. Rico is told in a letter from his mentor that You are now going through the hardest part of your service—not the hardest part physically (though physical hardship will never trouble you again; you now have its measure), but the hardest spiritually [...] the deep, soul-turning readjustments and re-evaluations necessary to metamorphize a potential citizen into one in being...
The original mythic process of the frontier is preserved right through to 1998s Starship Troopers, where the confrontation with the ‘wilderness of nature’ produces a new being, one forged into maturity by the conditions encountered there: Europeans into Americans, boys into men, civilians into citizens. In fact, the Terran foundation, the society which regulates Heinlein’s world, is ruled entirely by veterans of a machine which generates enfranchised citizens through its militarised, encoded simulation of these frontier experiences. It is this machinic assemblage, indeed, which remains the thematic heart of Starship Troopers, its components structuring elements of frontier mythology into a systematised technology of power in order to reproduce and reinscribe the mythos of expansionist culture, both in the fictional spaces of film and text and, concomitantly, in America-at-large, which looks to the cultural machine of Hollywood to rehabilitate its cultural ethos. Heinlein and Verhoeven’s construction of the Bugs (who as Rico is at pains to point out ‘are not like us’) is at the centre of this machine’s functioning: despite their blatant Otherness, despite the fact that ‘they look the way they do’35 they are far from being ‘just stupid insects’.36 In fact, crucially, ‘they co-operate even better than we do’,37 ‘don’t know how to surrender’38 and are thus a lethal enemy, exhibiting a frightful intelligence and, Heinlein intimates, the expansionist urges intrinsic to any successful race: ‘Either we spread and wipe out the Bugs, or they spread and wipe us out—because both races are tough and smart and want the same real estate.’39 The machine is thus granted a teleological grounding: it must be thus because it can only be thus: without violent
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expansionism, the human race would be annihilated, not by its own self-destructive ‘closed world’ frustrations, but by the territorial ambitions of the alien Other. This tense dialectic between Otherness and frontier space is a clear instantiation of frontier mythology. Turner’s account implies violence, just as it implies Otherness. The frontier is spoken of as ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilisation’,40 and we are reminded that ‘The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain’.41 The comprehension of the role of Otherness in this account is latent, underpinning many of the issues Turner raises, but the 1893 Columbian Exposition in which Turner presented his influential paper also hosted another popular event, one which stated the violent dynamics of the frontier rather more unequivocally. Called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, this show was said by one midwestern journalist to be a ‘Wild West Reality[...] a correct representation of life on the plains... brought to the East for the inspection and education of the public.42 Whereas Turner’s narrative sublimated the violence underlying frontier history in stressing the potent forces of wilderness’, Buffalo Bill’s story was explicitly one of violent struggle against the indigenous Indians. Where Turner emphasised agrarian living and agrarian tools as being at the heart of frontier American development, for Buffalo Bill ‘The bullet [...was] the pioneer of civilisation, for it [...had] gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest, and with the family Bible and school book.’43 In this relationship between territory and violence, the mediator is the Other, the American Indian, the Communist gook, or the hive-minded Bug, and thus it is the Other that defines the characteristics of Rico’s ‘Mobile Infantry’ corps, a force obsessed by its mastery of topological terrain. In both productions, its constituent members display a passion for razing and appropriating enemy territory: ‘I had spotted a juicy target’, Rico tells us early on in the book as he bounds across an unfamiliar frontier planet inhabited by Bug allies, ‘and I wanted to get it before somebody else noticed it—a lovely big group of what looked like public buildings on a hill. Temples, maybe... or a palace.’44 In Heinlein’s text, this mastery over terrain is augmented by servomotor-powered exoskeletons which allow the infantrymen to cover immense distances in a single bound. Fans of the film mourned the fact that Verhoeven hadn’t the budget to render such special effects cinematically, but the impression is nonetheless largely the same: the sense of preternatural mobility is foregrounded throughout, with the aerial antics of the pilots and their masterful ‘drops’ onto planet surfaces supplying the sense of the military’s preordained mastery of the territories it is fighting for. For Turner, the formation of government was critically dependent on the conditions of the frontier settlements: modern democracy had its roots in ‘early backwoods democracy’ where men burning with the expansive urge worked towards the formation of small communities and then ‘the beginnings of commonwealths’, and ‘as these commonwealths touch[ed] hands with each other [...] they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy.’45 The Other, too, has its part to play in this formation: The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important [...] The powers of the general council and the offices were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation of and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous co-operation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that date to this,
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as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.46
In Starship Troopers’ remoulding of this dynamic, state itself is now funded on the processes of cultural imperialism, constituting itself with members who are moulded through militaristic training or in action on the militaristic frontier. In this martial state citizenship, and with it the franchise, is awarded only to those who volunteer for military service. The result, Heinlein argues, is an ameliorated fighting force, since all the soldiers are volunteers, and a better state, since all those voting are responsible, ‘prepared to die’47 for their compatriots. An obvious question arises here. Spark, noting that ‘conveniently a war provides opportunities for service’ asks how Heinlein’s state operates in peace time: ‘what is such a martial system to do [...] except pick fights?’ But this, of course, is precisely the point: in Turner’s model, societal development takes place on a continuously advancing frontier, the closing of which is invoked to explain a range of contemporary problems. Heinlein’s state, therefore, does not intend to stop fighting, and incorporates a never ending, embattled frontier into its operational mechanics. Its elite military, its society ruled by veterans of the military corpus, are essential elements of a machine which creates the permanent wars necessary to fulfil the frontier-fuelled myth of ‘manifest destiny’. Heinlein’s Terran foundation demands the constant presence and constant destruction of the Other as part of its very survival; even its losses are therefore strategically necessary, part of the eternal rehabilitation of a mythic past which underpins its operational stability in the present. ‘One day this war’s going to end,’ Kilgore mourns in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, underlining the cultural functions of Vietnam intimated in Kennedy’s speech as he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on July 15, 1960 in Los Angeles, California. The speech resonated clearly with Turnerian imagery. In it, the 1960s became the ‘New Frontier [...]’, which like the mythic original, was ‘a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils’ of ‘hopes’ and, crucially, ‘threats’. Beyond that frontier, said Kennedy, were ‘the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.’ He implored the American people not to shrink from the responsibility of confronting those unconquered domains, explicitly calling upon US citizens to ‘be the new pioneers on that New Frontier.’ He pointed out the skills necessary for such a confrontation: ‘invention, innovation, imagination, decision’, the qualities needed in the fight against the Other, necessary to ‘compete with the single-minded advance of the Communist system.’48 Clearly Kennedy was deploying in this speech the myth of the Old Frontier of the 1890s to motivate the American people towards a direct confrontation with Communism. Frontier mythology was being placed deliberately at the centre of the machinery of state: the use of Turnerian terminology here denotes the intention of the Kennedy administration to make that myth the moral underpinning and justifiction of the military and economic struggles in which they were to engage.49 This appropriation of frontier myth would allow the government to request consent in terms the public would respond to, shaping the perception of the Vietnam war as a forcing open of the closed borders of Communism which would create the frontier anew in spatial terms, and extending hope to American society in the chance to re-engage, however vicariously, with its flagging mythic history. Where (as Kilgore anticipates grimly) Vietnam was destined to come to a close, Heinlein’s Bug War admits of no such circumscription: Starship Troopers is a celebration
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of war without end, of expansion as raison d’etat. Heinlein concludes his novel before the raid on the Bug planet ‘Klendathau’, conspicuously avoiding closure; his narrative withdraws in the midst of the eternal confrontation with the Other. Verhoeven, equally, fades out with the spectacle of new recruits being inculcated into the militaristic machine by the old hands, leaving us with the promise of sequels extending into infinity. The show must go on, producing new frontiers and new frontiersman, rehabilitating a state that has the frontier myth, and the ghost of the American pioneer, at the dead centre of its operation.
Notes and references 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
Parrinder, P., Science Fiction, Its Criticism and Teaching. Methuen, London, 1980, p. 16. Spark, A., The Art of Future War: Starship Troopers, The Forever War and Vietnam. In Essays and Studies, Vol. 43, Shippey T. (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 133–165, p.136. Jarvis, B., Mapping the City of the Future. In Postmodern Cartographies. Pluto, London, 1998, pp. 139– 159, p.139. Spark, A., op cit, reference 2, p. 136. Lev, P., Whose Future? Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner. Film Literature Quarterly 26(1) (1998). Goldwater, B., The Conscience of a Conservative. Victor Publishing, New York, 1960, p. 89. Heinlein, R. A., Starship Troopers. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1959, p. 163. Chapman, R. S., Science Fiction of the 1950s: Billy Graham, McCarthy and the Bomb. In Foundation, the Review of Science Fiction, Vols. 7/8, 1975, pp. 38–52, p. 39. Moorcock, M., Starship Storm Troopers. Cienfugos Press Anarchist Review, 1(4), 41–44. Samuleson, D. N., Frontiers of the Future: Heinlein’s Future History Stories. In Robert A. Heinlein, Olander J. D. and Greenberg M. H. (eds.), Paul Harris Publishing, Edinburgh, 1978, pp. 32–64, p. 32. Ibid, pp. 32–33. Ibid. Turner, F. J., The Significance of the Frontier in American History. In The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner. Dover Publications, New York, 1996, pp. 1–38, p. 1. Malin, J. C., Space and History, Reflections on the Closed-Space Doctrines of Turner and Mackinder and the challenge of those ideas by the air age. Agricultural History, 1944, 18, 74. Ibid, p. 65. Slotkin, R., Gunfighter Nation, The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Atheneum, New York, 1992, pp. 627–628. Turner, F. J., The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1938, p. 52. Malin, J., op cit, reference 14, p. 67. Noble, D. W., Historians against History, The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1965, p. 37. Ibid, p. 37. Pole, J. R., Paths To The American Past. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, p. 294. Wilson, W., Congressional Government. Boston, 1885, p. 5. Edwards, P. N., The Closed World, Computers And The Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, Cambridge, MC, 1997, p. 8. Hofstader, R., The Progressive historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York, pp. 5–6. Ibid, pp. 5–6. Freeden, M., The New Liberalism: an ideology of social reform. Oxford, 1978, p. 76. Ibid. Billington, 1982, p. 31. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 144. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 2. Ibid, pp. 9–10. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 18. Ibid, p. 76. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 37. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 164. Ibid, p. 164. Ibid, p. 166.
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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
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Ibid, p. 164. Ibid, p. 221. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 3. Ibid, pp. 9–10. Cody, W., Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Chicago, 1893, p. 9. Ibid, p. 22. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 22. Turner, ‘Middle Western Pioneer Democracy’, p. 344–345. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 15. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 156. Sorensen, T. C., (ed.), Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F. Kennedy. Delacorte Press, New York, 1988, pp. 100–102. Slotkin, op cit, reference 16, p. 3.
Pergamon
PII: S0016–3287(98)00103-7
BUG PLANET Frontier myth in Starship Troopers Jamie King This paper examines Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers against Robert A. Heinlein’s eponymous 1959 novel, arguing that both productions reinscribe the ideologies of America’s mythic frontier history in their fictional futures. The paper shows that despite the conspicuous postmodernisation of narrative in Verhoeven’s adaptation, components of the frontier mythology codified in Heinlein’s novel— expansionism, Social Darwinism and a violent relationship with the indigenous Other—remain at the film’s thematic centre. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
In 1959, the same year in which he wrote Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein spoke of science fiction as ‘realistic speculation about possible future events based solidly upon adequate knowledge of the real world, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.’1 As Alisdair Spark has pointed out, Heinlein’s comment can be seen as an oblique hint towards the potentialities of the form for studies of contemporary culture: in the science fiction narrative, ‘the concerns of the present often manifest themselves in fear or expectation of the future’,2 so that in disregard for its vulgar reputation as a forum for speculative futurism, the genre proffers an ad hoc notation of a period’s fears and desires whilst sheltering beneath ‘the generic umbrella of the fantastic’.3 ‘By this dialectic criterion,’ Spark concludes, science fiction ‘provides not future history but present historiography, revealing of the presuppositions inherent in the speculation.’4 For Peter Ley, this proposition carries across smoothly to the science fiction film, which, he has recently argued, is ‘a construction somewhat removed from everyday reality [and thus] a privileged vehicle for the presentation of ideology.’ Science fiction’s Jamie King is at King Alfred’s College of Higher Education, Winchester. He may be contacted at 2nd Floor, 135-139 Curtain Road, London, EC2A 3BX UK. (Tel.: ⫹ 44 0171 6134743; e-mail: [email protected]/ [email protected])
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distance from concerns with ‘social reality’, he argues, gives it the scope to promote ideological positions and discursive social visions. In qualification, though, Ley offers the proviso that ‘such visions cannot [...] be reduced to a simple, discursive message. Instead, the total semiotic output of a film-images, sounds, textures, relationships, is a carrier of ideology’,5 and this rejoinder betrays the fault-line in the ‘present-through-future’ schema, a weak point which is located in the limitations of structuralist semiotics: its parameters artificially delimit the interplay between fiction and reality, between past, present and future. Science fiction, with its irresponsible conflation of reactionary politics and subtle subversion, its constant slippage of temporal positioning, retains an ambivalence that can scarcely underpin such a systematisation. Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is a case in point: past feeds into present, and present into future, in ways that the film both sends up and lets go by without intervention. As an adaptation of Heinlein’s 1959 novel, it does indeed act somewhat as a ‘vehicle’ for the ideology of that era, evoking the paranoiac US politics of the 1950s in which, according to Senators Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, America was ‘in clear and imminent danger of being overwhelmed by alien forces’.6 Verhoeven’s film is haunted throughout by the same anxiety of invasion, of being overrun by the Other, as it stages its rehearsal of the period’s rabid McCarthyism in pitting Communist (‘alien’) Bugs against an elite force of human infantrymen; but here that anxiety is caricatured and exaggerated. Heinlein’s novel, it might well be argued, sets itself up for such treatment in its flagrant promulgation of right-wing ethics. Juan (‘Johnny’) Rico, our protagonist, signs up for military service just as war breaks out in the off-world outlying colonies. It’s us versus them, humankind against the ‘Bugs’, a race of ‘Pseudo-Arachnids’ who, both in terms of their monstrous physical form, (‘like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider’), and their marked socialistic bent (‘their organisation, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities [under] the ultimate dictatorship of the hive’) are very plainly ‘not like us’.7 The story has Johnny progressing through military training with the ‘Mobile Infantry’ into a series of confrontations with the Bugs on a variety of planet surfaces. The characteristic tropes of 50s science fiction, ‘a return to the frontier’, ‘alien invasion’ and a concern with ‘atomic holocaust’,8 which are conspicuously and predictably present in the original text of 1959, may remain intact in the 1998 film, but they have been thoroughly debased and reterritorialized. Verhoeven’s Buenos Aires, home of Johnny Rico and his compatriots, is now evocative of the dictatorship of Juan Pero´n, who had been displaced from power in Argentina only a few years before Heinlein published his novel: Verhoeven, who lived as a child in a Nazi-occupied town, resets Heinlein’s politics in an explicitly fascistic context, following the broadly European view of Heinlein’s work, summarised by leftist science fiction writer and critic Michael Moorcock as a ‘naı¨ve and emblematic reading of society [which] is fundamentally misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian [...] it is Reganism, it is John Wayne in Big John Macclean and The Green Berets, it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy...’9 As the director is at pains to show, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers speaks more of its present than of any possible future, acting as a rich —if unpalatable—document of contemporaneous ideologies and polity: with the benefit of hindsight, it is indeed inextricably bound up with the concerns of the 1950s. So, however is Verhoeven’s adaptation, which through its sardonic preservation of the novel’s pinko aliens, atomic detonations and frontier spaces, equally betrays its own temporality: in its self-aware posturing, its
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playing with genre and its refusal to stand behind a particular ideological message, the film situates itself firmly in the post-modern 1990s. Apprehending the promiscuous ideology often intrinsic to the form, it stages a subversion of semiotic carriage through multilevel discourses which hystericise the polemics of Heinlein’s novel into grotesques of American wartime propaganda material. In a broadcast called Why We Fight, for instance, also the title of a World War Two propaganda series produced for the US, glassy-eyed citizens enunciate slogans such as ‘I’m doing my part!’ and ‘The only good bug is a dead bug!’ So as the present-through-future thesis would suggest, the 1990s loom large in this Starship Troopers. In its claim to mastery of its material, in satirising and relativising the narratives it invokes, the film displays a conviction of its position at ‘the end of history’: not only does it lampoon earlier American ideology but, in its refusal to pass judgement, expects to guard itself against the possibility of being pulled up by any later critical analysis. However, as this paper will show, the models of analysis set out above lack the scope to address either version of Starship Troopers satisfactorily: for in their foregrounding of issues of territory, terrain and frontier space, both text and film are drawing upon and codifying a mythical ideology of the past, generated by a matrix of writers in the 1890s around the closing of the American frontier. This ‘frontier mythology’, central in a panoply of science-fiction works, has been seen as ‘basic’ to Heinlein’s writing:10 the series of Bildungsroman juvenile novels which precede Starship Troopers all focus on rites of passage which take place in off-world frontier spaces, and in three of these early books, Between Planets (1951), Tunnel In The Sky (1955) and Time For The Stars (1956), Heinlein portrays a youngster achieving true manhood through the incidental confrontation with a wilderness space. In his wider oeuvre, only eight of his twenty eight novels take place primarily on Earth: four of them concern relations between humans and extraterrestrial beings, and a fifth concludes on the Moon.11 This choice of off-world locations, writes David Samuelson in ‘Frontiers of the Future: Heinlein’s Future History Stories’, [...] places Heinlein’s characters in situations of temporal extremity, facing the unknown and having to learn to understand it, in order just to survive. Whether they are in spaceships or alien worlds, exploring or settling or righting wrongs, fighting off other species or learning to live with them, their situations parallel those of the American pioneers [...] a kind of frontier ethic is invoked [...]12
The emergence of that frontier ethic can be traced to the singular cultural influence of what is known as the ‘frontier thesis’ of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. The thesis, which could be summarised in his assertion that ‘The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development’,13 has not only proved a remarkably enduring (if regularly contested) reading of American history but has wreaked an indelible influence on American cultural identity, one that can be discerned throughout the cultural productions of the twentieth century. Historian James Malin wrote in a 1944 essay that ‘the Turner tradition wielded a tremendous influence and as such continues as a major historical force to be reckoned with in contemporary American life[...]’;14 it has since been noted on a number of occasions that Turner’s work, focused on the centrality of the frontier in American economics and culture, dominated the writing of American history for half a century;15 and many writers will go so far, as does Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation, to designate the frontier ‘the central myth—ideological trope of American culture.’16 Science fiction has drawn this mythos of America’s westward expansion, which penetrates the
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culture of each successive generation of writers, into its image of the future, substituting the Winchesters of the frontiersman for ray guns of space pioneers, their covered wagons for rocket ships, their agrarian tools for portable eco-systems. In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel Under the Moon of Mars, for example, the central character Carter is a composite of mythic frontier figures making up an archetypal frontiersman: a gold prospector, whose fortunes can form the basis for an industrial capitalist society, and the soldier whose function it is to protect that society and capital. Carter is abruptly transported to Mars from a cave where he is hiding from Indians: he arrives there naked, shorn of his earthly trappings and the past that they signify (this, as we shall see, is a classic theme of frontier mythology). As the narrative on Mars unfolds, Burroughs offers an ethnography of alien culture which readily invokes the terms of frontier narratives and colonial expansion, wherein the indigenous race, ‘green men’, are portrayed, like native American Indians for European pioneers, as warlike, primitive and intellectually inferior. Thus we witness the mythic past feeding through into the present, and on into fictional futures. Where Heinlein’s assessment of the function of science fiction has suggested that the genre stages an analysis of the present through action set in an imaginary future, the historian Turner held that ‘Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time [author’s italics]’.17 In the same way that Heinlein sought to construct the future, Turner’s writing of history sought to present the past in a way that was palatable to, and would in part explain, the culture of the present. Thus we must look to the 1890s for the conditions that brought frontier mythology to the forefront of American culture, and from there into the semantic structures of Starship Troopers. Turner’s thesis explained and justified the salient American national characteristics of the final third of the nineteenth century: amongst these the rising generational nationalism following the Civil War, a sense of individualism which was increasingly challenged by the public interest theory of governmental regulation; and a growing awareness of the principles of democracy, which the reform agitation in the early nineties had done much to promote.18 As well as appealing to the idealism of 1890s America, the frontier thesis addressed fears arising out the recent replacement of a rural society with a ‘fantastically complex urban-industrial community’,19 and offered a rationale for the key economic crisis that had ensued after 1873. Bancroft’s promise in 1865 that ‘Americans had witnessed their last historical crisis [and] that now they would dwell in timeless simplicity and harmony forever’20 had proved hopelessly naive: Turner’s frontier thesis was in good part a timely summation of the nation’s critical ‘economic, social and psychological problems’,21 problems which had led Woodrow Wilson to declare that ‘We are the first Americans to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our own institutions as compared with the systems of Europe.’22 Behind such anxieties lay chronic economic difficulty, the apparent exhaustion of the public domain, and the encroachment of capitalist industrialisation upon agrarian communities. One of Turner’s pivotal assertions, at the close of his essay, was that the closing of the frontier marked the end of an era, and that Americans must now adapt to what has been called a ‘closed-space’ context. The census report of 1891 had spelled the demise of the Jeffersonian promise of a frontier that would last into the indefinite future. Turner’s paper, positing the significance of the frontier space process in America’s inception and in its sustenance, concluded by pointing out that space’s bankruptcy; having proposed that ‘each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past’, he now pronounced the
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gate of escape closed. Science fiction, too, came of age in a period which at key points was isomorphic with the 1890s in the terms of its social rupture, and the genre can be seen as one way in which the culture attempted to make sense of these changes by resuscitating the myth of American expansionism. The 1920s and ’30s were also marked by a Great Depression and a further acceleration in the shift from an agrarian economy to one focussed in closed urban spaces and driven by technology. As Paul Edwards points out, President Truman’s 1947 speech, in which he pictures communism as global terrorism with implacable expansionist tendencies, draws upon the sense of a ‘closed-world’ which, prevalent in the 1890s, seemed no less so in the mid 1900s. He contends that the Truman doctrine of containment pivots around the central images of an enclosed space surrounded and sealed by American power, which ‘was the central metaphor of the closed-world discourse.’23 Science fiction’s deployment of frontier mythology, therefore, is can be seen as being far from incidental: whilst implicitly locating the explanation for dissatisfactory social conditions in the loss of public domain land and the closing-in of space, the genre was well placed to offer a future in which that same frontier had been opened anew on other planets. In fiction, at least, pioneering life on the frontier could begin over again. Turner’s key paper, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, was delivered in July 1893 to a meeting of American historians at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The paper’s central innovation lay precisely in drawing attention to ‘the basic dimension of the American imagination in space’24 in the course of asserting that the development of America’s democratic and economic power, as well as its national character and identity, had been intimately linked to the development of its agrarian frontier. Turner’s focus was in establishing the play of environment upon the European pioneers, and therefore the effects of the frontier upon the growth of the American nation; more broadly, as Hofstader has said,25 he sought to establish importance of the environment in history, and of the incorporation of space into the developing picture of American history. The motivations for Turner’s giving environment such primacy in his account are partly to be found in the predominance of Social Darwinism as a discourse in late nineteenth century America. Given that this revival of the concept of evolution, the most significant contribution of biology to nineteenth century thought,26 often denied the intellectual credibility of any socio-political theory failing to speak in its terms,27 the centrality of Social Darwinistic methodologies in Turner’s work is unsurprising. The historian himself said in 1883 that ‘Science has of late years revolutionised Zoology, Biology, etc. It must now take up recorded history and do the same by it. This, I would like to do my little to aid.’28 As we have seen, Turner’s frontier thesis naturally incorporated contemporary thought structures into its writing of history, and both versions of Starship Troopers, in codifying the frontier myth, are shot through with the Social Darwinistic strains that were so prevalent at the close of the nineteenth century. The assumptions accompanying this Darwinian view of social development are well documented; they are also palpably latent in Starship Troopers, where man is regarded as a fundamentally self-interested animal pursuing survival, where personal competence and competition are the norm, as is the exercise of the survival impulse: in both the Heinleinian and Turnerian paradigms, the ‘fittest’ survive and, ideally, prosper. Politics, democratic or otherwise, must be acquired: man is not ‘born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and
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a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience and hard sweat of the mind.’29 For Turner, the environment was the control in the struggle of the species, with the frontier being viewed as the key element in progressive change. Thus, he wrote, at each successive advancement of the frontier, ‘in each western area reached in the process of expansion’, there had been ‘a recurrence of the process of evolution’,30 and ‘At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions.’31 In frontier mythology, the encounter with unchecked space is a rite of passage. Heinlein, equally, dramatises the process of travelling through outer space, of reaching the frontier world, as literally a process of undressing, ‘skins peeling off’32 the troopers’ capsules as they near a planet’s surface, just as Burroughs’ Carter arrived on Mars naked and renewed. In Heinlein’s novel, the training process is also one of reconfronting nature: ‘[...]They dumped me down raw naked in a primitive area of the Canadian Rockies,’ complains Rico, ‘and I had to make my way forty miles through mountains. I made it—and hated the Army every inch of the way.’33 Turner’s thesis, in its assertions that the most significant intellectual traits of America originated from the wellspring of the frontier, that the American intellect owed its most crucial characteristics to frontier experience,34 placed such wilderness experiences squarely at the centre of American identity. Starship Troopers employs exactly the same model in its dramatisation of Johnny Rico’s physical and spiritual development. Rico is told in a letter from his mentor that You are now going through the hardest part of your service—not the hardest part physically (though physical hardship will never trouble you again; you now have its measure), but the hardest spiritually [...] the deep, soul-turning readjustments and re-evaluations necessary to metamorphize a potential citizen into one in being...
The original mythic process of the frontier is preserved right through to 1998s Starship Troopers, where the confrontation with the ‘wilderness of nature’ produces a new being, one forged into maturity by the conditions encountered there: Europeans into Americans, boys into men, civilians into citizens. In fact, the Terran foundation, the society which regulates Heinlein’s world, is ruled entirely by veterans of a machine which generates enfranchised citizens through its militarised, encoded simulation of these frontier experiences. It is this machinic assemblage, indeed, which remains the thematic heart of Starship Troopers, its components structuring elements of frontier mythology into a systematised technology of power in order to reproduce and reinscribe the mythos of expansionist culture, both in the fictional spaces of film and text and, concomitantly, in America-at-large, which looks to the cultural machine of Hollywood to rehabilitate its cultural ethos. Heinlein and Verhoeven’s construction of the Bugs (who as Rico is at pains to point out ‘are not like us’) is at the centre of this machine’s functioning: despite their blatant Otherness, despite the fact that ‘they look the way they do’35 they are far from being ‘just stupid insects’.36 In fact, crucially, ‘they co-operate even better than we do’,37 ‘don’t know how to surrender’38 and are thus a lethal enemy, exhibiting a frightful intelligence and, Heinlein intimates, the expansionist urges intrinsic to any successful race: ‘Either we spread and wipe out the Bugs, or they spread and wipe us out—because both races are tough and smart and want the same real estate.’39 The machine is thus granted a teleological grounding: it must be thus because it can only be thus: without violent
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expansionism, the human race would be annihilated, not by its own self-destructive ‘closed world’ frustrations, but by the territorial ambitions of the alien Other. This tense dialectic between Otherness and frontier space is a clear instantiation of frontier mythology. Turner’s account implies violence, just as it implies Otherness. The frontier is spoken of as ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilisation’,40 and we are reminded that ‘The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain’.41 The comprehension of the role of Otherness in this account is latent, underpinning many of the issues Turner raises, but the 1893 Columbian Exposition in which Turner presented his influential paper also hosted another popular event, one which stated the violent dynamics of the frontier rather more unequivocally. Called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, this show was said by one midwestern journalist to be a ‘Wild West Reality[...] a correct representation of life on the plains... brought to the East for the inspection and education of the public.42 Whereas Turner’s narrative sublimated the violence underlying frontier history in stressing the potent forces of wilderness’, Buffalo Bill’s story was explicitly one of violent struggle against the indigenous Indians. Where Turner emphasised agrarian living and agrarian tools as being at the heart of frontier American development, for Buffalo Bill ‘The bullet [...was] the pioneer of civilisation, for it [...had] gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest, and with the family Bible and school book.’43 In this relationship between territory and violence, the mediator is the Other, the American Indian, the Communist gook, or the hive-minded Bug, and thus it is the Other that defines the characteristics of Rico’s ‘Mobile Infantry’ corps, a force obsessed by its mastery of topological terrain. In both productions, its constituent members display a passion for razing and appropriating enemy territory: ‘I had spotted a juicy target’, Rico tells us early on in the book as he bounds across an unfamiliar frontier planet inhabited by Bug allies, ‘and I wanted to get it before somebody else noticed it—a lovely big group of what looked like public buildings on a hill. Temples, maybe... or a palace.’44 In Heinlein’s text, this mastery over terrain is augmented by servomotor-powered exoskeletons which allow the infantrymen to cover immense distances in a single bound. Fans of the film mourned the fact that Verhoeven hadn’t the budget to render such special effects cinematically, but the impression is nonetheless largely the same: the sense of preternatural mobility is foregrounded throughout, with the aerial antics of the pilots and their masterful ‘drops’ onto planet surfaces supplying the sense of the military’s preordained mastery of the territories it is fighting for. For Turner, the formation of government was critically dependent on the conditions of the frontier settlements: modern democracy had its roots in ‘early backwoods democracy’ where men burning with the expansive urge worked towards the formation of small communities and then ‘the beginnings of commonwealths’, and ‘as these commonwealths touch[ed] hands with each other [...] they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy.’45 The Other, too, has its part to play in this formation: The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important [...] The powers of the general council and the offices were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation of and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous co-operation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that date to this,
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as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.46
In Starship Troopers’ remoulding of this dynamic, state itself is now funded on the processes of cultural imperialism, constituting itself with members who are moulded through militaristic training or in action on the militaristic frontier. In this martial state citizenship, and with it the franchise, is awarded only to those who volunteer for military service. The result, Heinlein argues, is an ameliorated fighting force, since all the soldiers are volunteers, and a better state, since all those voting are responsible, ‘prepared to die’47 for their compatriots. An obvious question arises here. Spark, noting that ‘conveniently a war provides opportunities for service’ asks how Heinlein’s state operates in peace time: ‘what is such a martial system to do [...] except pick fights?’ But this, of course, is precisely the point: in Turner’s model, societal development takes place on a continuously advancing frontier, the closing of which is invoked to explain a range of contemporary problems. Heinlein’s state, therefore, does not intend to stop fighting, and incorporates a never ending, embattled frontier into its operational mechanics. Its elite military, its society ruled by veterans of the military corpus, are essential elements of a machine which creates the permanent wars necessary to fulfil the frontier-fuelled myth of ‘manifest destiny’. Heinlein’s Terran foundation demands the constant presence and constant destruction of the Other as part of its very survival; even its losses are therefore strategically necessary, part of the eternal rehabilitation of a mythic past which underpins its operational stability in the present. ‘One day this war’s going to end,’ Kilgore mourns in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, underlining the cultural functions of Vietnam intimated in Kennedy’s speech as he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on July 15, 1960 in Los Angeles, California. The speech resonated clearly with Turnerian imagery. In it, the 1960s became the ‘New Frontier [...]’, which like the mythic original, was ‘a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils’ of ‘hopes’ and, crucially, ‘threats’. Beyond that frontier, said Kennedy, were ‘the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.’ He implored the American people not to shrink from the responsibility of confronting those unconquered domains, explicitly calling upon US citizens to ‘be the new pioneers on that New Frontier.’ He pointed out the skills necessary for such a confrontation: ‘invention, innovation, imagination, decision’, the qualities needed in the fight against the Other, necessary to ‘compete with the single-minded advance of the Communist system.’48 Clearly Kennedy was deploying in this speech the myth of the Old Frontier of the 1890s to motivate the American people towards a direct confrontation with Communism. Frontier mythology was being placed deliberately at the centre of the machinery of state: the use of Turnerian terminology here denotes the intention of the Kennedy administration to make that myth the moral underpinning and justifiction of the military and economic struggles in which they were to engage.49 This appropriation of frontier myth would allow the government to request consent in terms the public would respond to, shaping the perception of the Vietnam war as a forcing open of the closed borders of Communism which would create the frontier anew in spatial terms, and extending hope to American society in the chance to re-engage, however vicariously, with its flagging mythic history. Where (as Kilgore anticipates grimly) Vietnam was destined to come to a close, Heinlein’s Bug War admits of no such circumscription: Starship Troopers is a celebration
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of war without end, of expansion as raison d’etat. Heinlein concludes his novel before the raid on the Bug planet ‘Klendathau’, conspicuously avoiding closure; his narrative withdraws in the midst of the eternal confrontation with the Other. Verhoeven, equally, fades out with the spectacle of new recruits being inculcated into the militaristic machine by the old hands, leaving us with the promise of sequels extending into infinity. The show must go on, producing new frontiers and new frontiersman, rehabilitating a state that has the frontier myth, and the ghost of the American pioneer, at the dead centre of its operation.
Notes and references 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
Parrinder, P., Science Fiction, Its Criticism and Teaching. Methuen, London, 1980, p. 16. Spark, A., The Art of Future War: Starship Troopers, The Forever War and Vietnam. In Essays and Studies, Vol. 43, Shippey T. (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 133–165, p.136. Jarvis, B., Mapping the City of the Future. In Postmodern Cartographies. Pluto, London, 1998, pp. 139– 159, p.139. Spark, A., op cit, reference 2, p. 136. Lev, P., Whose Future? Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner. Film Literature Quarterly 26(1) (1998). Goldwater, B., The Conscience of a Conservative. Victor Publishing, New York, 1960, p. 89. Heinlein, R. A., Starship Troopers. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1959, p. 163. Chapman, R. S., Science Fiction of the 1950s: Billy Graham, McCarthy and the Bomb. In Foundation, the Review of Science Fiction, Vols. 7/8, 1975, pp. 38–52, p. 39. Moorcock, M., Starship Storm Troopers. Cienfugos Press Anarchist Review, 1(4), 41–44. Samuleson, D. N., Frontiers of the Future: Heinlein’s Future History Stories. In Robert A. Heinlein, Olander J. D. and Greenberg M. H. (eds.), Paul Harris Publishing, Edinburgh, 1978, pp. 32–64, p. 32. Ibid, pp. 32–33. Ibid. Turner, F. J., The Significance of the Frontier in American History. In The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner. Dover Publications, New York, 1996, pp. 1–38, p. 1. Malin, J. C., Space and History, Reflections on the Closed-Space Doctrines of Turner and Mackinder and the challenge of those ideas by the air age. Agricultural History, 1944, 18, 74. Ibid, p. 65. Slotkin, R., Gunfighter Nation, The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Atheneum, New York, 1992, pp. 627–628. Turner, F. J., The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1938, p. 52. Malin, J., op cit, reference 14, p. 67. Noble, D. W., Historians against History, The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1965, p. 37. Ibid, p. 37. Pole, J. R., Paths To The American Past. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, p. 294. Wilson, W., Congressional Government. Boston, 1885, p. 5. Edwards, P. N., The Closed World, Computers And The Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, Cambridge, MC, 1997, p. 8. Hofstader, R., The Progressive historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York, pp. 5–6. Ibid, pp. 5–6. Freeden, M., The New Liberalism: an ideology of social reform. Oxford, 1978, p. 76. Ibid. Billington, 1982, p. 31. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 144. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 2. Ibid, pp. 9–10. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 18. Ibid, p. 76. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 37. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 164. Ibid, p. 164. Ibid, p. 166.
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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
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Ibid, p. 164. Ibid, p. 221. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 3. Ibid, pp. 9–10. Cody, W., Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Chicago, 1893, p. 9. Ibid, p. 22. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 22. Turner, ‘Middle Western Pioneer Democracy’, p. 344–345. Turner, op cit, reference 13, p. 15. Heinlein, op cit, reference 7, p. 156. Sorensen, T. C., (ed.), Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F. Kennedy. Delacorte Press, New York, 1988, pp. 100–102. Slotkin, op cit, reference 16, p. 3.