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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ibrandul" data-source="post: 8581748" data-attributes="member: 6871736">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.</blockquote>

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