Paul Verhoeven Made the Blueprint for Neo-Totalitarianism 

Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi films are like how-to manuals for neo-totalitarianism, which doesn’t rely on coups, martial law, violent suppression of the opposition press, or paramilitary factions roaming the streets to instill our obedience.

Paul Verhoeven’s late-20th-century satirical sci-fi filmic trilogy – Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997) – goes beyond simply lampooning fascist aesthetics or corporate excess. Read alongside the political texture of the 2020s, these parodic films map the operating principles of a contemporary neo-totalitarianism.

Indeed, in pop culture, the most durable political allegories rarely arrive under polemical banners. They smuggle their arguments through form and feeling, through camera angles, running gags, and textures of sound. Paul Verhoeven’s Hollywood trilogy was initially filed under “ultraviolent, pop cult”, a cabinet where satire is tolerated but rarely reread as theory.

Of course, the expected critical reappraisal of these films has already taken place, often interpreting them through the lens of the political and cultural climate of the 1980s-‘90s. Yet, the 2020s have imbued them with renewed urgency, making them appear less like provocations and more as instruction manuals for a contemporary, subtle form of totalitarianism; one that doesn’t rely on coups, martial law, violent suppression of the opposition press, or paramilitary factions roaming the streets. In other words, the brave new world we now inhabit.

Hollywood Cinema as Prophet of Our Era of Neo-Totalitarianism

The cohesion in Paul Verhoeven’s trilogy lies in how each entry examines a distinct mechanism for generating political consent inside consumption-oriented societies. Robocop stages privatized sovereignty, where corporate logic annexes the state. Total Recall anatomizes manufactured social reality, where memory, truth and personality are formatted by marketable simulations. Starship Troopers parades militarized belonging, where citizenship fuses with war and propaganda until obedience feels like elation.

The classical 20th-century totalitarianism theorized by Hannah Arendt achieved total domination of a society through monopolizing a single mass party, communications (press/media), police terror, and permanent mass mobilization.

Verhoeven’s 21st-century premonition suggests a modular version for achieving a subtler form of complete domination, suitable for largely depoliticized citizens: governance by boardroom, algorithm, and battalion, each sold as common sense, while the formal electoral and constitutional apparatus of parliamentary republics remains in place, but is in effect hollowed out. In short, Paul Verhoeven didn’t predict events, but specified procedures that we can now witness everywhere around us.

Robocop‘s Privatized Sovereignty as a Market-State Alloy

In Robocop, Paul Verhoeven’s futuristic Detroit is less a backdrop than a co-protagonist. The city is a laboratory where the multinational conglomerate OCP pilots an experiment in urban gentrification – a gleaming “Delta City” – that publicly promises renewal, while on the sly converting public life into a revenue stream and doubling as racketeering.

Robocop‘s satirical staging is meticulous. Between set-pieces, newsbreaks and infomercials splice in fragments of global disorder: orbital weapons sold as “peacekeepers”, apartheid brinkmanship, riots smoothed into banter by lacquered TV anchors. In this world, violence and profiteering are naturalized as corporate programming.

Inside OCP’s boardrooms, ethics collapse into product roadmaps. Two competing platforms for “public order” – the glitch-ridden, purely mechanical robot ED-209 and the necro-cyborg initiative that yields Robocop – are pitched not as public policy, but as vertically integrated prototypes that promise to bring in military contracts.

The corporate satire is sprinkled everywhere across Robocop: a grenade in a living room, a handshake with a kingpin, a city hall hostage-taker listing demands that constitute a shopping spree. Or an OCP executive snorting coke sourced from the very criminal gang the firm covertly sponsors, while supposedly tasking the Detroit Police to fight against.

It is not just pulp garnish, meant to parody competition among consumption-oriented yuppies and the neoliberal era’s Reaganomics. This has been done elsewhere in a much more focused manner; Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) immediately spring to mind, but even Robert Bierman’s dark comedy, Vampire’s Kiss (1989) might be considered in this category.

In Robocop, this satire fuses state, firm, and crime syndicate into a single circuit, where budget spreadsheets and body counts are negotiable tools. This isn’t the old totalitarianism of interwar Germany, where willing private corporations were minor partners in crime, under the government’s strict, centralized planning and guidance, as historians like Adam Tooze and Richard Overy have noted.

Now, instead, any boundaries between the state and the major market players have been completely torn apart in all but façade.

When OCP essentially buys out the Detroit Police Department, Robocop goes beyond simply winking at mass privatization as a political choice to indirectly redistribute wealth upwards in the name of efficiency. It depicts sovereignty migrating – from law to logistics, or from constitution to business contract.

Buried beneath Robocop’s postmodern surface and cyberpunk aesthetics, one can find a reverse Oresteia: social institutions transferred from organized political bodies to the private hands of vengeful, 21st-century gods that walk among us in search of love and pleasure; corporations seeking profit.

Robocop’s imagery matches the argument. OCP constructs Robocop by resurrecting Murphy (Peter Weller), a policeman killed on duty, while erasing his memories. The cyborg’s metallic body is lit like a devotional object, revealed with ritual slowness as he is being turned on, while his POV offers computerized HUD overlays in clipped, bureaucratic syntax.

Paul Verhoeven stages the hero’s “resurrection” as a corporate miracle evoking Jesus Christ, then proceeds to soil it with camp interludes: a board game ad called “NUKEM”, a talk show catchphrase everyone reflexively repeats, a malfunctioning ED-209 murdering an executive in conference room daylight.

Meanwhile, Robocop’s firmware “directives” – a legal code embedded as machine policy – prefigure contemporary fights over what automated systems may do by design. This tonal whiplash isn’t juvenile: spectacle, controversy, and atrocity share each frame, with the laugh track baked into the evening news. In this world, ED-209’s lethal malfunction is a business risk, rather than a moral failure.

The social anatomy around OCP is equally precise: a police strike that functions as a privatization accelerator, or street crime and narcotics violence being virtually tolerated and secretly fed by OCP, because they raise the “need” for its security products.

Even mixed-gender police locker rooms filmed without erotic charge, while company executives objectify women and mistreat employees in every other scene, function as commentary. It might be a quiet jab at “progressive” social liberal identity politics that replace institutional surfaces, as informal hierarchies remain firmly in place.

Though the plot skeleton flirts with the vigilante cop formula, Paul Verhoeven undermines it by escalating the violence into the grotesque. Robocop‘s most splatter-filled gags – Murphy’s violent and cold-blooded execution, acid melting a henchman to pulp before a speeding car shears him apart – read as emblems: bodies are treated as fungible inputs in a market that promises miracles and manufactures waste.

If political theory needed a heuristic for what political theorist Sheldon Wolin later called “inverted totalitarianism” – a corporate-managed polity that retains the formal rituals of negative freedoms and democratic legitimization, while subtly relocating real power – Robocop supplies the storyboard.

The 2020s context clarifies the fit. Across the West, the institutional outsourcing has become ordinary: public services run by vendors; carceral and border regimes interlaced with private contractors; municipal surveillance procured as turnkey platforms.

Government cabinets directly stocked with business magnates in the US and the UK – following Italy’s prototypical experience with Silvio Berlusconi during the 1990s and 2000s – have simply given this authoritarian market-state alloy its vulgar outward expression. A form clearer and more direct than the well-known phenomenon of “revolving doors” between government and the companies they regulate.

Meanwhile, the strange tonal blend of the 24-hour news cycle emitted by the media – catastrophe as bumper, uplift as palate cleanser – has completed its evolution into permanent mood board. In such a context, Paul Verhoeven’s message is evident: when sovereignty is transferred to Enterprise Resource Planning systems, accountability becomes customer support.

Yet Robocop is not nihilistic. It gives Murphy a second birth: a human face recovered from the product shell, a half-erased memory of a son that the cyborg reclaims as authentic via a hand gesture borrowed from a TV cop show. The film’s tenderness is reserved for this counter-movement – the stubborn return of personhood amidst code and contract – but of course, it is mediated by corporate mass media, through the aforementioned TV show.

Put in theoretical terms, Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreal simulations”, where cultural signs precede and overwrite reality, are what salvage, or construct, Murphy’s human personality from repressed fragments within Robocop’s computerized mind. Subject formation, or psychoanalytic therapy, is mediated by TV entertainment.

This derivation of authenticity from corporate-controlled artificiality, which can no longer be distinguished from any “real thing” it supposedly represents, has been magnificently demonstrated in the 2020s through the infamous “Trump Gaza” video: a viral, AI-generated, satirical, and vulgar spectacle, shared in February 2025 by a head of state as a vision for the future.

Still, in Robocop, the cyborg is shot like a high-tech knight: low-angle framings, hard reflections, and that unforgettable visor POV that literalizes the fusion of screen and world. Basil Poledouris’ music theme blends synth with brass so the score mirrors the cyborg’s ontology; metallic surface, human core.

The finalé’s surface optimism (corruption excised, order restored) reads today as knowing compromise: studio cinema reconciles what the allegory cannot. The deeper invitation persists: resist the conflation of efficiency with authority and treat every Public-Private Partnership as a constitutional event.

Total Recall and Manufactured Reality as an Echo Chamber

If Robocop traced how business interests merge with state power in the 21st century, Total Recall asked how they annex reality. Philip K. Dick’s short story seed – memory as commodity, identity as counterfeit – meets Paul Verhoeven’s sensibility for media ecosystems. Filming a script by the screenwriters of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), the Dutch director swaps Detroit for Mars and trades police spectacle for ontological suspense in his film centered on a double allegory: social class and media.

Total Recall opens on earthbound banality: a construction worker, Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), anesthetized by routine and a marriage staged as a lifestyle brochure. He dreams of Mars. He purchases Mars.

The firm “Rekall, Inc.” sells implanted holiday memories. It packages identity, stitching the consumer’s desire to a spy thriller script in which he gets the girl, kills the tyrant, and saves the planet. The purchase misfires, or, perhaps, it succeeds too well.

The rest of Total Recall toggles expertly between two truths: either Quaid has awakened mid-procedure to his old, artificially suppressed life as a ruthless intelligence agent, named Hauser of the totalitarian, colonial Mars government, or he never wakes up at all and the entire insurgency on Mars is the implanted adventurous holiday package he bought; nothing more than a hallucination we experience from his perspective. Paul Verhoeven’s direction refuses to arbitrate. The point isn’t to settle the question, but to force the audience to occupy a position where authentication is always a process, never given.

He insists instead on the politics of ambiguity. In a media environment where images curate emotion at an industrial scale, verification becomes mood. In-world television screens and billboards mediate nearly every truth claim, with propaganda being acknowledged even by those immersed in it. In this environment, the viewer, like Quaid, simply chooses a reality and then arranges evidence to match it.

Total Recall’s exquisite sets serve the ambiguity. Ron Cobb’s worn, brutalist Earth and grimy frontier Mars make the “real” feel tactile. Rob Bottin’s practical effects – mutants, the telescoping nose-bug, the dome decompression set-pieces – favor weight and texture over sleek futurism, as if to deny the viewer obvious seams between dream and “reality”.

Mars, meanwhile, is the visible world of power. Its tyrant, Cohaagen, rations oxygen to discipline labor; the ultimate form of privatization that literalizes scarcity politics. The colony is a class system in domes: a corporate elite whose comfort depends on a laboring underclass, scarred into mutation by exposure to infrastructural risk.

In this world, information flow is fully mediated. When a rebellion of the oppressed mutants hacks TV signals, this is framed and promulgated to Earth as terrorism. The mechanics are familiar: scarcity fabricated to monetize dependence, security invoked to police dissent, and spectacle enlisted to normalize both.

If Robocop articulates inverted totalitarianism, Total Recall converses more openly with Jean Baudrillard’s theory under the guise of a postmodern, self-conscious sci-fi action film. Paul Verhoeven reproduces his protagonists and villains as screen-within-screen images, scripts a sequence in which a corporate psychiatrist knocks at Quaid’s mind to argue that what he feels is a delusion, and has Arnold Schwarzenegger – an avatar of 1980s invulnerability – play an action hero whose “authenticity” is perpetually in question.

Thus, Total Recall eats the action movie while it is serving it, turning clichés – the one-liner, the chase – into subtle metafictional evidence that what we’re watching is a pre-fabricated fantasy, the “Blue Skies on Mars” holiday package: heroic masculinity, exotic brunette, planet-saving climax. The fantasy does for us exactly what it promised to Quaid when he bought it: it creates a studio-generated “vacation” the audience consumes for two hours. Total Recall doubles as a satire of the very Hollywood blockbuster it incarnates.

In Total Recall‘s final fade-to-white scene, you can see either a dreaming Quaid’s lobotomy in Rekall, or a credits roll after a happy ending. Both readings belong to the same economy of mediated experience.

The 2020s resonance requires little translation. Societies now inhabit stacked realities produced by partisan media, platform algorithms, and the soft inventions of personal feeds. The question “What happened?” often yields two incompatible answers that are serviced by two compatible business models. Conspiracy and counter-conspiracy circulate with equal velocity, with persuasion thriving on repetition and affect.

AI deep-fake technology literalizes what Paul Verhoeven intuited: the audiovisual record, once a gold standard of proof, is an editable layer. Political legitimacy in such a regime is less about evidence than about narrative residence; which story feels like home.

Events like the 2021 US Capitol Riot or the 2023 Brasília attacks showcase how contemporary neo-totalitarianism exploits this to assert its grip through media manipulation, extending itself to the point of mass epistemic paralysis. Paul Verhoeven’s moral hinge is decisive.

Total Recall’s Quaid ultimately rejects the “return” to Hauser, raising his own “fake” personality to an authentic one on the basis of empathy. Whether he is awake or dreaming, he takes responsibility for the life his actions make in the present. He chooses solidarity with the subjugated and triggers an alien reactor that terraforms Mars, dissolving Cohaagen’s private market monopoly on air.

In the key of philosophy, Total Recall relocates authenticity from an origin story to an ethical stance. It suggests that in an age of curated memory, civic adulthood begins when one stops outsourcing reality to corporate media platforms and picks a position on the side of breathable life. In other words, people in the 21st century truly become citizens only when they wake up to the surrounding neo-totalitarian apparatus and view the world through the twin lenses of empathy and democracy.

Starship Troopers: When Militarized Belonging Becomes Culture

Where the first two films anatomize society’s capture by contract (privatized force) and capture by narrative (synthetic realities), Starship Troopers studies capture by feeling; the fascist thrill of collective purpose. By directing a script from one of the screenwriters of Robocop, Paul Verhoeven does something rare in cinema. He mounts a near-perfect facsimile of a fascist recruitment film and resists the reflex to signal our superiority. Instead, he risks misreading to teach us how misreading works.

The United Citizen Federation is a stratocracy: the organizing principle is war, and only veterans receive full citizenship. Schools preach social Darwinism with classroom calm, while punishments are corporal and televised. Between scenes, “interactive” newsbreaks punctuate the plot like pop-ups, inviting us to click, cheer, and enlist.

The Federation’s violent values are presented with glossy sincerity. However, Starship Trooper‘s main structural joke is that a teen soap opera – square-jawed romances, competitive tryouts – slides into a war movie. The cast is anodyne and photogenic, its whiteness sharpened into Aryan sheen despite the nominal Latin American setting.

A sadistic drill sergeant is played by Clancy Brown at a pitch just shy of caricature. The mobile infantry assaults planetary beaches with tactics that are obviously suicidal. It is funny, then it isn’t, then it is again. The tone is an ethics exam: How much charisma are you willing to forgive?

The Enemy – the giant insectoid alien Arachnids – arrive as nature’s alibi for implementing extermination policies. They are repulsive and lethal; their civilization (to the extent the film reveals it) is legible in war terms only. They are staged as an unassimilable Other, so that extermination reads as common sense.

Late in the story, a captured “Brain Bug” exhibits fear, and the human crowd rejoices. That moment is the trilogy’s coldest mirror. Spectatorship, propaganda, and cruelty fuse into euphoria. War becomes a mass participation ritual, structured around inflicting pain on the Enemy.

Starship Troopers denies the viewer any safe, external vantage. We never leave the propaganda frame, and even the apparent “news” is a diegetic spectacle. Thus, the audience’s complicity becomes the critique itself.

Indeed, Paul Verhoeven’s bootcamp scenes turn discipline into entertainment, while a mixed-gender shower room – an idea borrowed from Robocop – suggests here a society that has nationalized libido, folding desire into career ladders and patriotic hatred. More importantly, the intertextuality is explicit: Triumph of the Will-like framing, flag-waving and low-angle hero shots, WWII propaganda newsreel cadence, and the iconography of Tony Scott’s 1986 action film, Top Gun, rerouted to a grimmer register.

Stylistically, Starship Trooper weaponizes brightness and clarity, with a deliberately overlit palette and a monotony of infantry tactics: blaze away at endless swarms of “bugs”, as if strategic incompetence were part of the recruitment pitch. Phil Tippett’s creature work (and Tippett Studio’s CG pipeline) makes the bugs mass and skitter with memorable physicality, while Basil Poledouris’ march locks the affect to triumphalism, a hymn to a war the film codes as both futile and addictive.

Critics have long argued that subtler notes complicate this triumphalism. Hints that humanity in fact provoked the conflict via expansionist colonization; the implied suggestion that a catastrophic meteor strike might have been shepherded into Buenos Aires’ path to catalyze popular rage; a closing loop in which surviving heroes appear inside the very propaganda apparatus that authored their desires.

With Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven ties the knot that the other films provided the rope for: media does not accompany policy; media is policy. Read against the 2020s, Starship Troopers is less satire than a cautionary tale.

Since 2001, Western audiences have repeatedly been invited to experience politics as existential combat; not merely disagreement over privatizations, tax rates, or zoning, but civilization-scale, identity-defining confrontation with an Enemy. This securitization framing is nothing new: it revives and builds on the polemical conception of politics as the friend/enemy distinction, which was promoted by the authoritarian conservative theorist Carl Schmitt, whose political theory proved extremely influential in interwar Germany.

In the 21st century, this imagined Enemy has repeatedly mutated over time: Islamists, terrorists, immigrants, cosmopolitans, identity politics activists, China, Russia, etc. And then there are the additional local variants: in Israel it is Palestinians, in Greece, it is Turkey, in Turkey, it is the US, and so on.

After decades of this rhetoric flooding the West, it doesn’t come as a surprise that, as of 2025, NATO and AUKUS countries seem to be preparing for large-scale war, amid rising international tensions and revived arms races. Thus, as the state’s imaginary or real adversaries are advertised as threats to society, security language migrates from exceptional to everyday: violent fantasies leak from fringe forums into campaign stump speeches and paramilitary aesthetics – camouflage, insignia, tactical kits – circulate as lifestyle.

Starship Troopers‘ key insight is that fascism need not return as a single party with a single leader. It can congeal as an everyday culture, promoted by mass media: the normalization of force as clarity, of cruelty as entertainment, of permanent mobilization as meaningful life.

Over time, the critical consensus caught up: film isn’t cosplay for jackboots, but an instructional diagram of how fascist spectacle turns citizens into obedient fans. And because Starship Troopers insists on the seductions, it also shows where resistance might begin. Unlike Robocop and Total Recall, the film denies viewers a safety valve. There is no liberation sequence, no recovered autonomy, no breathable air rushing in.

The absence is didactic. In cultures where propaganda confers the pleasures of team and transcendence, the first civic virtue is a temperament: suspicion of Holy Causes packaged in glossy production. The second is a practice: refuse to outsource citizenship to uniforms.

Paul Verhoeven’s Trilogy of Political Procedures

Placed side by side, the films compose a triptych of synergistic procedures, rather than predictions. A privatized security regime (Robocop) requires compliant information ecologies (Total Recall), while both profit from a culture primed to treat politics as war (Starship Troopers).

The 2020s offer numerous illustrations of this pattern. Where judicial constraints weaken and policing adopts a war posture, where media ecosystems split into self-affirming worlds, and where parliamentary parties campaign on a permanent state of exception, Paul Verhoeven’s composite map lights up.

Taken together, the three films paint the picture of contemporary neo-totalitarianism, which ostensibly operates through parliamentary mechanisms that guarantee individual freedoms and separation of powers. These mechanisms, however, have been trimmed to their bones, to the point of becoming mere façades.

No wonder, then, that there have been clear signs of backsliding in human rights, individual freedoms, and the rule of law in many Western countries during the past 25 years. In other parts of the world, the decline has been even harsher, but autocratic and illiberal pressures have been growing even in liberal regimes.

A broad Western pattern is that core civil liberties and institutional constraints are weakening, even if electoral processes remain nominally intact. Academic studies note that many Western countries fell back roughly 40 years (by historical standards) during the 2010s, amid a global political regression.

Moreover, there has been a global spike in harassment of journalists and activists, with only a handful of places in the West fully escaping media freedom deterioration. Civil society groups warn that privacy protections have lagged far behind state surveillance capabilities, with a chilling effect on association and free speech. Civil liberties are also increasingly constrained by surveillance, law enforcement practices, and opacity in government, eroding the “public square” needed for democratic oversight, while the separation of powers has been gradually declining.

Furthermore, there has been an increase in flawed or non-competitive parliamentary elections, often tied to media bias and intimidation, or hyper-polarized election environments that distort representation and reduce public trust in political institutions; seeing them as “instruments of the elite” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This pervasive regression is seen through specific developments: entrenched executive powers (emergency laws, surveillance mandates), politicized judiciaries (in Central or Southern Europe and elsewhere), shrinking press and civic space (through censorship and disinformation), and contested elections (with reduced fairness and trust).

Of course, the above phenomena emerged through a sequence of consecutive 21st-century crises that obviously influenced them: 9/11 and the Patriot Act, the War on Terror, 2008’s Great Recession, the Arab Spring, the Eurozone Debt Crisis, Trump and the Alt-Right, Brexit, COVID, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These events go hand-in-hand with a widening of social inequalities across the West, on average, in terms of income and wealth distribution. Given the evidence and the temporal correlation, it is not hard to trace the root of this to the Washington Consensus policy package – in the term’s broad sense – of the 1980s-‘90s.

Yet, economic reductionism is the easy answer that misses the point, and Robocop makes this clear. The fictional OCP is a de facto private government, a corporate monolith running city services and law enforcement, while monopolizing violence on both sides of the law. This extreme merger far exceeds the decentralized, competition‐based privatization envisioned by neoliberal economic theory, as developed from the foundational works of economists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.

Although OCP is clearly a far-fetched exaggeration for storytelling purposes, it is not difficult to find real-world parallels that, jointly, imply non-economic factors at play. Such factors result in state and regulatory capture under the pretext of free-market reforms.

These are instances of corruption, and Paul Verhoeven knows best: corruption is a symptom, not a cause. His filmic trilogy artistically shows us an underlying, unifying political explanation, complementary and parallel to the neoliberal turn: though never explicitly named, it is the process that led to today’s neo-totalitarianism.

The three films also share a method: laughter as cognitive estrangement. Paul Verhoeven floods the frame with camp, kitsch, and vulgarity not to undercut seriousness but to expose the obscene as mundane; despite their power and influence, the authors of this political regression are, in all ways that matter, utterly trite.

The commercials in Robocop, the psychic aptitude TV spots, and mixed-gender showers in Starship Troopers, the repeated screens-within-screens in Total Recall – every gag is a warning flare. When we laugh and then realize what we’re laughing at, we have been taught a muscle memory: double vision. It is a scarce civic skill in decades when spectacle insists on single takes.

Philosophically, the trilogy stands at a confluence. From Hannah Arendt, an attention to the lonely subject whom propaganda rescues with mythic belonging; from Guy Debord, the spectacle’s domination of social life by images; from Jean Baudrillard, the simulacrum’s cheerful indifference to truth; from Sheldon Wolin, the soft eclipse of democratic oversight by managerial power.

Powered by concepts and ideas drawn from a late-20th-century context, Paul Verhoeven translates these insights into images that have never been timelier than now. In the 2020s, we are already living inside his satirical Hollywood worlds.

We, the Human Remainder

If these films were merely corrosive, they would feel dated; another entry in the 1990s’ love affair with metafiction. They endure because each one preserves a human remainder that resists the machine:

• In Robocop, the visor lifts. Murphy looks. He remembers a hand on a television, a child’s mimicry of a cowboy holster. The gesture is both silly and salvific: it overrides the corporate priorities through a micro-history no spreadsheet can price.
• In Total Recall, Quaid existentially chooses the identity he can live with, not the one he was told he “is”. The film’s last image – kiss, sun, whiteout – resolves nothing ontologically, yet resolves the politics. He sides with air.
• In Starship Troopers, the remainder is the void itself: the absence of a redemptive endpoint that forces viewers to confront their own appetite for rousing finales. Discomfort is pedagogical.

This remainder suggests a politics that is pressing in our times. Resist reforms that replace democratic accountability and oversight with executive or economic efficiency. Demand changes that will diminish the power of oligarchic structures. Cultivate epistemic humility by interrogating the pleasures that keep you lodged in a favored reality. Decline the exhilaration of (civil) war fantasies, online or off.

When confronted with crises, real or manufactured, demand that “oxygen” remain common.

Paul Verhoeven’s trilogy doesn’t just tell us that capitalist corporations are ethically compromised on the basis of profit-seeking, or that state power is oppressing, or that propaganda exists, or that memory is unreliable. They show how systems feel from the inside: how jokes anesthetize and how uniforms glamourize, how gleaming interfaces seduce and how media entertainment annexes ethics.

That quality – the intimacy of the diagnosis – explains why the trilogy has aged into utility. It reads as a user’s guide for citizens who would like to analyze and resist neo-totalitarianism, whatever form it might take.

Paul Verhoeven’s greatest achievement with this trilogy, then, is not that he “predicted” anything, but that he captured how totalitarianism comes to be. The rest is merely implementation details and dazzling spectacle.