Content warning: This piece contains discussions of sexual assault.
Paul Verhoeven presented American audiences of the ‘80s and ‘90s with a rash of films filled with grisly violence, lurid sex, and an aesthetic sensibility that leaned heavily into how fucking cool all of that is. With this, however, came a reputation for Verhoeven as a gratuitous and vile pervert obsessed with excessive violence, sexual exploitation, and fascistic imagery. Films such as Starship Troopers and Showgirls were dismissed as overly indulgent black marks on the filmography of a highly competent but uncomplex action director. As we enter an incredibly brutal and vulgar reality, Verhoeven’s sensibilities and style have proven themselves to carry a much more prophetic and true-to-reality feel than works that are more reserved and less hysterical about what the future may hold.
It should be noted that film as a medium is deeply collaborative; none of these works are Verhoeven’s alone. He didn’t write every script, he didn’t come up with every idea, nor did he design every part of these films. Writers like Ed Neumeier (RoboCop, Starship Troopers), set-designers, producers, and the like are all equally important. Verhoeven is, however, responsible for these films being brought to life and conjoined into a complete and multifaceted criticism of American life.
From the technologically enforced private-security regime of RoboCop, to the screaming Fascist overtones of Starship Troopers, Verhoeven called his shots, and by God, did he have some serious hits. I’ve curated a particular section of his filmography in which Verhoeven is exercising his anxieties and vision for the direction that American society is going, and the ways in which he foresaw some of the most brutal and ridiculous turns of our culture (and why he fucked off to Europe afterward).
The first film on our list is arguably Verhoeven’s most iconic but more importantly serves as the big star on the map that says, “YOU ARE HERE.”
With a central message about how bad of an idea it would be to have highly militant, private policing structures bolstered by technological innovation, it’s pretty hard to miss how relevant it is now. Private security in America has exploded in value and prevalence, even as regular police budgets and militarization have ballooned in their own right. Tech companies have brought all kinds of new innovations to policing, from facial recognition software to cell phone tracking, and a field of robotics dedicated to security patrolling. In whatever form it takes, the companies that would make something like a real-life ED-209 or RoboCop are currently hard at work!
Verhoeven’s portrayal of the police and their corporate overlords is brutal. The police see themselves at war with their own population and besieged by a company trying to buy out their personnel. They are just as much victims of austerity and deindustrialization as anyone else, the difference being that they’re then handed a gun and told to go wrangle everyone else that’s suffering.
One of Verhoeven’s most damning criticisms of the way we handle problems in America is the reveal that the film’s true antagonist isn’t the devilish Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith), but rather the corporate bossman, Dick Jones (Ronny Cox). With the reveal that RoboCop is programmatically not allowed to harm O.C.P. executives, it becomes crystal clear what the film is truly trying to say. Corporate interests will avoid responsibility and wholly insulate themselves from any sort of consequences, all the while pulling each and every dollar out of society and the people who have to live within it. The blue-collar, violent crimes of Boddicker are motivated by the same sense of greed and exploitative inhumanity that motivate Dick Jones and every other executive at O.C.P. Trying to run and police a society is hard enough with the most benevolent of goals; put the power in the hands of people who profit off of crime and decay? Forget about it! Not a chance!
Verhoeven’s hyper-violent style brings the satirical jabs out in full, leading to one of the funniest jokes ever committed to film. (Verhoeven apparently thought this joke was so funny that it worked again in later films. He was right!) Having a corporate drone blown to pieces by the object of their own hubris is perfect, especially with Verhoeven’s sense of comedic timing.
Regardless of what should be, Verhoeven’s clear anxieties about Reaganite business policy and policing solutions were validated as austerity, privatization, and police militarization all grew unchecked. The only thing that’s still in any way fictional about RoboCop is the guy stuffed into the suit. We got all of the brutal violence and policy, but we don’t even get the cool robot guy. This shit sucks man.
Basic Instinct is far and away his least overtly political movie, shedding the sci-fi grandeur of his other films in exchange for a beleaguered San Francisco precinct facing an erotic and theatrical murder. The criticisms of policing are more subtle than RoboCop; (it would be hard to make them more overt) they’re built into Michael Douglas’s character, a cocaine cowboy pejoratively nicknamed “Shooter” for an ambiguous incident where he shot some tourists (potentially while spiked on coke). Between the sexual thrill-killing and the adrenaline-pushing, mind-gamed pursuit of the case, Verhoeven is making a clear connection between the libidinal pleasures of sex, murder, and the power afforded to the police. Michael Douglas’s Nick Curran is steered into a mental break by these thrills, abandoning whatever legitimate police work may have been piling up, breaking his sobriety, and assaulting a colleague all because his pride and libido got mixed into the case.
Much like Showgirls, Basic Instinct is fundamentally about getting off on the power afforded to unstable individuals by a policing system ripe for abuse. I mean, c’mon, he starts fucking the murder suspect and keeps his job. What sort of system is that? If you need a clear sign of what this movie is about, the scene where Nick rapes his ex-girlfriend/coworker with all of the power and emotional charge of his investigation tells you everything you need to know about what Verhoeven thinks of the police.
The blurriness of the line between murder and policing is emphasized in the third act, as the addled detective, completely wrapped around the finger of Sharon Stone’s brilliant Catherine Tremmel, becomes the subject of a murder investigation that mirrors the exact one that got him into all of this. Those interrogation scenes are chilling upon rewatch. The criticism presented isn’t purely political, the tone of the movie and Verhoeven’s personal touches drive home that this friction and contradiction causes an intense sense of unreality. As the case grows in complexity, his sense of place and understanding of his role in the system decays, bringing the question of what it is he’s really doing as a cop to the forefront. On top of all of this, who ends up being one of the most unstable characters? The internal affairs agent! Beth (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who also gets shot by a keyed-up Michael Douglas, high on the fumes of his own intelligence, is revealed to be more obsessive and unwell than everyone else in the movie, and she’s supposed to be the one making sure everyone else is mentally fit! The movie as a whole paints the police as an institution of violence, back-biting, and dysfunction, all to be covered up by fellow officers and detectives just trying to get through the day. Verhoeven’s personal style is essential to selling the story. The sex is erotic and lurid, the murders are grisly and hyper-violent, and it’s ALL horrifically identifiable and attractive to the audience.
This point serves as a perfect segway into…
Showgirls. What a picture. This work is definitely Verhoeven’s most controversial and most concerned with eroticism and sexuality, two points that are very related. Many have accused it of being sexually gratuitous, and it certainly is a lot, but to say that it’s without purpose is frankly nonsensical. There’s nothing in the film that’s any more explicit than his violent movies. It’s just about sex, which Americans are way weirder about than the most grizzly violence imaginable – I mean just look at our MPA guidelines.
Blood and guts? Fine.
You show a couple of boobs or penises?
Fuck you: R, NC-17, XXX, whatever.
This idea plays really funnily with what Verhoeven is trying to say about Americans’ attitudes toward sex. His portrayal of Las Vegas’s dancing culture is one of sordid and exploitative filth. The seedy backdrop of Las Vegas, a city uniquely embroiled in money, sex, and vice, is butted up against the story of a woman who wants nothing more than to embrace her sexuality and dancing ability without having to resort to selling herself. But, being on the run from the law and without any financial recourse, she has no choice but to become embroiled in this system of club promoters, kickbacks, and sexual favors. As she’s tossed around from club to club and boss to boss, she is exposed to the reality that that just isn’t possible without a base of structural power to draw from.
The most common criticism of the movie, and Verhoeven, is that he’s engaging in the same exploitation that he’s criticizing. There’s some evidence behind this. He is famously and undoubtedly horny and loves gruesome portrayals of such things, but how could someone present criticism of sex-work without being interested in sex? The movie wouldn’t work if he wasn’t willing and excited to be erotic and lurid, otherwise, the criticism has nothing to anchor itself to. Verhoeven’s criticism of sexuality here seems to be much more rooted in the business end. Promoters and industry veterans take advantage of naive women to satisfy clients and take a commission. Much like Basic Instinct, Showgirls is a criticism of the structures of power in this country, but with concern for how we exploit sex and spectacle rather than policing.
Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) is a tragic character, a spirited and strong-willed but hopelessly naive dancer just trying to make her way in a country that has no salvation for the people at its margins. Even as she thinks she’s advancing in the industry, the glitz and the glamour blind her to the fact that she’s just a piece of meat being passed around by sleazy businessmen of varying degrees of social status. The names and places change, but she’s never treated any better, or on the cusp of any actual power. She goes from the Cheetah, where the low-class and vulgar setting allows her to see the condition she’s in, to Stardust, the premiere dance show in Vegas. She doesn’t see that she’s being manipulated by Kyle MacLachlan’s MBA-educated show producer, Zach. Verhoeven’s criticism of spectacled sex in America is sharp and hard to argue with, but its offensiveness to audiences reinforces it. People correctly identified what happens in the film as exploitative, but that’s what he was trying to tell us! As soon as Americans were confronted by their own sex culture, they were rightfully revolted! It IS exploitative, but it’s not Verhoeven doing the exploiting. He’s criticizing anyone who would be turned on by the horrific sexual assaults and degradation that’s portrayed. It reads to me as disgust with how we treat sex, not sex itself.
Showgirls is the second-to-last movie he had complete freedom to make in America, and it’s as suffused with disgust as any of his other films. It’s just that, because it has tits and bright lights, it was taken as a trashy spectacle by critics who didn’t see what he was getting at, thus fulfilling the very point that they missed.
Ah, Starship Troopers… this one might be my personal favorite in Verhoeven’s filmography. The best movie about the Iraq war ever made, it just made the mistake of being six years early. This is probably his most victorious instance of seeing the direction things were going and managing to point out where we’d end up. This film has been called joyless, flat, and cruel, which it is, but those qualities are what make it amazing, not shitty. The skeleton key to finding the brilliance and satire of the film are viewing it as the movie that the fascist society would itself make – a propaganda piece for a stagnant and nightmarish culture that’s as brutal as it is stupid. It’s also worth pointing out that this is based on a book by the same name that has all of the same core ideas but is portrayed as a good thing. Robert A. Heinlein wrote a cruel and sadistic sci-fi novel as a reaction to Vietnam, a dreadful war that made little sense and was deeply traumatizing; so Verhoeven made a movie that predicted the next messy, deeply traumatizing, senseless American conflict.
The society portrayed in the film is one that is seemingly post-race and post-sex but still maintains class boundaries. They are a planet at war, wholly devoted and seemingly losing, to a supposedly non-sentient bug race, yet also has the utmost pride and belief in its own superiority. The film opens with the in-universe TV channel, which, if there’s one way that Americans process culture, it’s from TV. On Federation TV, we see things like televised executions, child soldiers, and nonstop military propaganda; it seems to be the only thing that their society does. Even though it’s not set specifically in America, the culture seems very obviously American-coded. References to Harvard, American accents, homes, and attitudes ensure that you have the right culture in mind as this fascist society, baying for blood, is fleshed out. Verhoeven himself, in a Guardian article he wrote titled “How we made Starship Troopers” really gets into the specifics on how he tried to make an Americanized Nazi propaganda film “but no one noticed.” This speaks to the power of the film, it was SO on the nose that much like Showgirls, the people it criticized failed to understand what was wrong with what was portrayed. They were alienated by its lack of fun, its cruelty, and the stupidity of the story, but failed to connect that to the cruel, joyless, and stupid society that they lived in. His power of prophecy really is in full force here, he predicted the conflict that saw us taking the mask off of our military empire because he was anxious about the Governor of Texas, GEORGE W. BUSH, executing too many prisoners. To go from that to accidentally portraying beat-for-beat the war that that government would prosecute is nothing short of incredible.
Aside from how weak and fascistic society is, it’s also deeply stupid and weak! They’re getting fucking OWNED by the bugs, I mean, we’re talking child soldiers and leveled cities! Every time they go to combat, they get absolutely rinsed with no sense of tactics, or OpSec. Johnny Rico (Caspar Van Dien) is going to Harvard with dogshit for grades! Every Veteran in the film is missing a limb of some sort and they’re pushing through soldiers that get their squadmates killed. This place fucking sucks!
It’s his strength as a director that sells the film as a predictive text and redeems it from being a bad film that tried something and failed. The effects are amazing; with bug monsters that are crafted with a mix of practical effects and CGI that holds up far better than similar monsters from much more contemporary films. Going back to Showgirls, I think its more than fair to say that the level of explicit content in this is about equal, it’s just because it was violence instead of sex; the vulgar and horrifying violence displayed was commended as a productive feat in a bad movie rather than a part of what makes it bad. This one, I’d say, is most evident of his anxiety and disgust with American culture, it’s no wonder that it’s the last passion project he made in the States. How could you predict Iraq, watch it happen in all of its horrible and traumatizing glory (while being pushed forward by a highly militant and fascistic culture that dehumanizes its enemy) and then stay a resident making big budget action movies?
The war in Iraq, and the way it traumatized the nation, played straight into his predictions: the valorization of veterans of a war that was lost, a bumbling and ineffective army that achieves its objectives through sheer force and barbarity, and a complete disregard for the humanity or agency of its enemy. I mean, upon discovering that the bugs think and feel, they immediately set about violating and torturing it on live TV. How many shows did we have where Muslims are violent, unreasoning animals hell-bent on destroying us, just as the bugs are portrayed? He was right on the money with what he was seeing and we didn’t want to hear any of it.
Let’s go out on a high note, yeah? We’ve already covered how Verhoeven feels about the capitalists holding the keys to society: they’ll do everything as cheaply and brutally as possible to exploit everyone in the name of profit. Total Recall is more dedicated to those ideas than any of his other films. Mars is in rebellion over their corporate governance and there’s little reason to suggest that Earth is much better. Arnold, in one of his best action roles, is Douglas Quaid, a working-class construction worker fascinated by Mars but unable to afford a trip there, and runs into an ad for Rekal, a company that offers memory implants that make you think you had a grand vacation or adventure for a much lower cost. This, being more the idea of Phillip K. Dick, who wrote the story it’s based on, questions our obsession with immersion in entertainment, a question that becomes more pertinent as things like VR become more ubiquitous, and disposable income for travel and experiences shrinks.
More to Verhoven though, I laughed my ass off when I realized that the villain of this movie is basically Elon Musk. An arrogant corporate executive who very smugly runs Mars through cheap domes and breaking the backs of poor and poisoned laborers. I think the only flaw in his prediction was that it would be Richter, the dumb, overemotional moron would be the executive, and not the cold-blooded and focused corporate shark, Vilos Coohagen as portrayed by Ronny Cox (who also portrays RoboCop’s Dick Morris!). The fear of radical change is also noteworthy as we approach climate catastrophe, and Musk personally has been incredibly vocal against the large-scale changes that could actually address it, instead opting for consumerist solutions through electric vehicles that are environmentally costly to produce and have a non-zero chance of exploding, like the Johnny Cab at the cement factory.
Verhoeven’s commitment to graphic violence and brutality not only seals in the sense of unreality that the film’s central premise demands (in the commentary, Verhoeven and Arnold talk about how Quaid is suddenly capable of advanced and bloody combat), but also enforces just how brutal corporate rule would be. Corporate goons fire into crowds, kill sex workers (remember that thing about how power exploits sex?), and mutate poor people indiscriminately, all just to stop them from achieving lives of dignity; deep and cruel levels of espionage are used to massacre these freedom fighters and even subvert the existence of Douglas Quaid after having hidden his true self. Now, all of that is if you’re taking the events of the film as they happened – the idea that all of that was manufactured and implanted into Douglas Quaid’s head for cheap kicks, creating senses of true love and deeply traumatizing life experiences – is even more horrifying. I watched the director’s commentary on this one, which also includes Arnold, and he and Verhoeven do this bit where they alternate between talking about the film like it’s real and like it’s an implanted memory at random. They are cruel in their humor. As for us, at least we can be sure about the hell we live in right now. Mostly at least. Well, less and less with every passing day. More and more it seems like people like those in QAnon live in a completely different interpretation of reality, even complete with the baroque sci-fi espionage plots.
Running through all of these works is a deep-seated disgust and revulsion with American culture and life. His works are not just the brutal and graphic action films that they’ve been often maligned as – though they do certainly work that way – but rather are a cohesive and intertwined ideological project that uses his personal perceptions and style to make and express some very significant and poignant issues with American life. His personal attention to violence and sexuality make him uniquely suited to the task, often so well that the satirical perspective is mistaken for genuine belief – an analysis that Verhoeven is absolutely bewildered by. Few directors or cultural critics are as good at recognizing the sickness at the heart of American society, even fewer can predict the near future as it is arriving. Verhoeven’s other work is just as powerful and contains just as sharp of perspectives and execution. It’s easy to see what made him want to go: to see all of this horror, and then to be misunderstood and disregarded by the people you’re trying to tell. His European films are very good, Benedetta was amazing and showcased his views on how religious belief and sexuality intertwined – it’s way weirder than it sounds but it was really incredible.
From the sands of the bug planet to the broken-down ghettos and unreality of Mars, Verhoeven called the vibes more than anything. He has a political thriller project on the horizon that I’m very excited for, maybe he can have a career renaissance. Wouldn’t that be nice?
