M.A.R. Barker, author of Tekumel, also author of Neo-Nazi book?

[Umbran]

I don't remember much about it, but do remember it being bad. I don't remember finding its satire particularly scathing.

Well, there are probably two issues in the way:

1) Poe's Law.
2) Just because it is built to be satire, doesn't mean that it is entirely effective satire.

The second is a major point with Starship Troopers - these days, we strongly associate satire with comedy, and Starship Troopers is not a comedy. Much of the coding commonly used to clue the audience in to the point is missing, so it doesn't really work very well.

 

[pemerton]

Well, there are probably two issues in the way:

1) Poe's Law.
2) Just because it is built to be satire, doesn't mean that it is entirely effective satire.

The second is a major point with Starship Troopers - these days, we strongly associate satire with comedy, and Starship Troopers is not a comedy. Much of the coding commonly used to clue the audience in to the point is missing, so it doesn't really work very well.

The connection between satire and comedy seems more than contingent, insofar as satire involves, even entails, holding up to ridicule, and to ridicule something is to poke fun at it.

Trying to poke fun at something simply by portraying it, and supposing that its absurdity will speak for itself, is possible but not necessarily easy to pull off.

 

[Umbran]

The connection between satire and comedy seems more than contingent, insofar as satire involves, even entails, holding up to ridicule, and to ridicule something is to poke fun at it.

The base definition of ridicule is to subject the target to contempt. Ridicule makes the target look foolish or stupid. We often do that by way of comedy, but that's not the only form of ridicule available.

I am not, by the way, claiming it is a good movie - the fact that folks cannot generally tell if it is satire or not points to it being ineffective at whatever it is trying to do. Good movies are not ineffective.

 

[Mallus]

Starship Troopers (The Film) is a scathing satire of Fascism. Unfortunately, it has the weakness of any satire: If people are into what you are mocking, the mockery may go completely over their heads.

Was Doogie Howser in full SS-drag not clear enough?!

I'm still processing M.A.R. Barker being a Holocaust denier and Nazi fanfic author. It's just... puzzling. No end to the depths of human contradiction. How could someone who spent much of their career as a scholar of non-European cultures/languages wind up believing such ahistorical, not to mention outright evil, nonsense?

Then again, Orson Scott Card wrote a book about empathy once...

 

[Umbran]

Then again, Orson Scott Card wrote a book about empathy once...

I have no authoritative source on this, but it seems to me that Card is an example of a person changing their views over time, and having it bleed into their work, such that their early and later works have much different perspectives.

 

[Willie the Duck]

You may be able to find evidence of misogyny in Bill Cosby’s later stuff, but it would be next to impossible to point to signs of it in most of the stand-up that brought him fame, like the routines involving his brother, his the dentist, or feeding kids breakfast.

The feeding the kids breakfast routine is part of a long line of jokes casting his wife as an irrational anger machine. I certainly didn't notice it when I heard it back in the day, but after all the allegations blew up, looking back I could certainly see it. Oh, and the Spanish Fly routine.

Starship Troopers (The Film) is a scathing satire of Fascism. Unfortunately, it has the weakness of any satire: If people are into what you are mocking, the mockery may go completely over their heads.

It's strange. Every six months or so I will see an article on Reddit or a comment on a facebook page or something like that with someone kinda bragging/self-back-patting about 'getting' that Starship Troopers is a satire. Clearly some people must consider it a subtle satire.

As for the book-movie dichotomy -- they are pretty far apart. Not just in a Zack Snider's Watchmen way where the director missed/chose-to-overlook the actual primary messages, but in actual different effective story. They are the same base premise and the characters have the same names, and that's about it. The book is also a uncomfortable political allegory that undoubtedly went over many heads, but not just 'fascism is bad (you get that's what we're saying, right?).'

 

[Ravensworth]

There are lots of authors I’ve dropped over the years. I was a HUGE Piers Anthony fan way back when. Then I read his kiddy porn novel and never read anything by him again.

Same goes for David Eddings.

It’s always a choice. But you can’t choose if you don’t know.

David Eddings wrote a Kiddy Porn Novel? When? Sorry but this shocks the hell out of me.

 

[Ravensworth]

There are lots of authors I’ve dropped over the years. I was a HUGE Piers Anthony fan way back when. Then I read his kiddy porn novel and never read anything by him again.

Same goes for David Eddings.

It’s always a choice. But you can’t choose if you don’t know.

 

[Ibrandul]

I think the whole conversation about Starship Troopers isn’t very pertinent here, because that film is a case of an avowedly leftist and anti-fascist artist who had at least a passing familiarity with left intellectual theories of avant-garde art (Brecht) making a work of art that’s too easily understood as conveying the opposite message from the one he intended. As others have pointed out, there are innumerable other examples of this dilemma throughout at least the past 100 years.

My own view is that ST is a fantastic example of not-at-all-subtle pop-Brechtian art (in contrast to the overly subtle Brechtianism of early Kathryn Bigelow, for example), but that the last lingering shreds of any potential efficacy of a Brechtian approach had vanished at least fifteen years before ST was released. Thomas Elsaesser already recognized in 1990 that Brechtian techniques had become totally defunct due to transformations in cultural codes and audience expectations. ST is one of the best films of its kind—the elements that people are saying are "just bad," such as the non-naturalistic acting style, are precise executions of Brecht's original prescriptions—but it nonetheless arrived DOA in the context of the late 1990s; by that time, it was simply no longer possible to produce an "alienation effect" (pun intended) in the way ST attempts to do.

But Barker's is essentially the precise opposite to this situation: rather than a leftist artist producing a work that seems to be right-wing, but is actually legible as left-wing, in this case an artist we now know to have embraced far-right politics created a work that seems on its face, at least in the context of its 1970s origins, to have some merit from a left perspective (non-European cultural influences assigned to more than just Orientalist villain socieities, gender politics more complex than the classic fantasy approach that casts women as distressed damsels and/or chain-bikini babes, etc.), and now people are searching within it for right-wing content. Or at any rate some of the people posting in this thread seem to be fearful that right-wing content might be latent within the work.

 

[RealAlHazred]

There are lots of authors I’ve dropped over the years. I was a HUGE Piers Anthony fan way back when. Then I read his kiddy porn novel and never read anything by him again.

When I was a teenager, the Public Library was practically my second home. I read a lot of books, mostly fantasy and science-fiction. I eventually decided there was a spectrum of, let's say, sex-heaviness in books. Isaac Asimov sits at one end of that see-saw, for example; I'd be hard-pressed to point to a single incident of human reproduction mentioned in any of his books or short stories I have read. Sitting just on the other side of the mid-point line is Piers Anthony; his Xanth novels have a lot of men trying to get a glimpse teenage girls' underwear, for example, and the Bio of a Space Tyrant series is extremely rough. Sitting closer to the middle of that side of the line is Jack Chalker, whose GOD, Inc. series is, uh, full of questionable content. Anchoring the line at that end is John Norman. I can think of reasons to reread GOD, Inc. or Xanth; nothing will compel me to take Bio of a Space Tyrant or the Gor books off the shelf again.

Same goes for David Eddings.

Eddings and his wife didn't do child pornography, they physically and mentally abused their adopted son and daughter. Which, I don't know, I'm not about to sit here and try to figure out which reprehensible action is worse on some completely subjective scale, I'll just conclude the Eddings' are terrible people and leave it at that.