In part two John Cribbs of
The Pink Smoke delves deeper into the cinematic world of Paul Verhoeven (seriously this one is for Verhoeven scholars so you should get familiar with
part one before you go any further)
THE DISEMBODIED
The subconscious elements can be very powerful, and if one isn’t careful, they can take over the conscious parts of your brain...The physical self, the cruelty of the world, to recognize that and put it on screen was my means of warding off my subconscious. - Paul Verhoeven
If Verhoeven's amazing science fiction trilogy could be pared down to one big linked moral tale, the lesson would be "don't lose yourself." Whether the heroes of these films are quite literally removed from their body - Murphy receiving his "whole body prostheses" and Doug Quaid flying off to become the savior of Mars while his physical form remains comatose at Rekall (possibly) - and/or have allowed themselves to become anonymous automatons in the cogs of an oppressive republic like Robo and the soldiers of Starship Troopers, they are their only true liberator. Even in his earlier films, forces outside the body (or planted inside the mind) threaten the individual. The director allows his characters to disconnect from their bodies in more ways than one, but holds them by a tenuous tether that just barely keeps them from reeling into the dark abyss of total psychosis. There's redemption to be found in the realm immaterial, but true liberation derives from returning to that original world, that original reality, that original self, in some form or another (and in rejecting the false offers to return, re: Total Recall).
CHRIST FIGURES & CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM
In my opinion, Christianity is nothing more than one of many interpretations of reality, neither more nor less. - Paul Verhoeven
Verhoeven is an outspoken atheist, yet religious imagery remains one of the most recognizable aspects of his work. Another contradiction, especially considering his parallels to the story of Christ in which the individual lives, dies and is reborn. He's clearly drawn to the story of the crucifixion for its blood and guts catharsis, but even moreso its theme of being removed from the earthly body only to return to it. Most famously, Verhoeven stated in various interviews and the Criterion commentary track that Robocop is his "Jesus movie" and a recently re-Murphyed Robocop walking across a large puddle of water to stop ultimate sinner Clarence Boddiker is intentionally symbolic of Christ walking across the Sea of Galilee. The idea of resurrection in Robocop is perverse, scientific rather than magical, and the real miracle is Murphy being able to remove the inhuman face of which crooks and cops alike have stood in awe and reconnect with his human identity, which Verhoeven finds to be the more sacred. While he's staunchly anti-religious, Verhoeven definitely has a spiritual side - it's just steeped in realism. Gleefully blasphemous imagery, such as Gerard sucking on the feet of his nude lover posing as the savior in a church, abounds in 4th Man, but the movie ends with the indication that Gerard has been saved by a reincarnation of the Holy Mother. Flesh + Blood seems to acknowledge that blind religious fools end badly yet the flawed false-martyr can rise from the flames, while Showgirls marks the fleeting eminence of "goddesses" anointed under the cheap lights of Las Vegas.
SURREALISM & OTHER REALITIES
Something that doesn't get brought up often enough in discussions about Verhoeven is the high level of surrealism in this films. Weird stuff happens in his movies, to the point that they're easily the most Bunuelian of mainstream genre films. Glimpses of the afterlife (Turks Fruit), psycho-sexual symbolism (The Fourth Man) and otherworldly grotesqueries (Total Recall) all become unlikely doors to exploring various interpretations of reality.
PREMONITIONS
I have, in my own life, had the most terrible dreams about my death. The essence of the dream is the tangible feeling of being in hell. It is the complete isolation of the soul. Complete aloneness. - Paul Verhoeven
Of course death is the ultimate corporeal concern, and Verhoeven's characters are haunted by it. Ominous portents like the burning noose in Flesh + Blood, the worms on Olga's chest when Erik lifts the flowers in Turks Fruit and foreboding hallucinations in The 4th Man set the tone for a journey that will ultimately end in annihilation (at least for some). The beginning of Total Recall is one long premonition of the rest of the movie, the face of a girl Quaid's never seen but will meet later popping up on the screen at Rekall.
MEDIA & THE SINISTER SCREEN
Verhoeven's mistrust of media was apparent from the beginning, when the manipulative mother of Turks Fruit is introduced as the overlord of a TV shop. While representatives of the media continued to be portrayed as suspicious in Verhoeven's later work (Jeroen Krabbe's shifty reporter in Spetters, the ominous eyes of the news team in Robocop), it's really the image on the screen he finds most untrustworthy. Dick Jones' murderous side reveals itself on Bob Morton's multiple television sets - the menacing omnipresence of media is signified in Verhoeven's films by figures appearing on several TVs at once. Later, yet another infinite image of Dick Jones will betray Jones himself, just as the "double" onscreen presence of Hauser that's led Quaid through his adventures on Earth and Mars will betray him. For Verhoeven, what people see on television isn't merely unreliable - those images confound the barrier between the real and the simulated.
COMMERCE & SELLING OUT
Sooner or later, you're going to have to sell it. - Showgirls
Selling out, Verhoeven sadly recognizes, is a form of survival - the only way some people can exist in a capitalist world. Early in his career, Verhoeven seemed to have a romantic notion of the artist as the purest character, like Keetje Tippel's savior (the one guy who has no interest in sleeping with her). But even back then he acknowledged that the purest of these types were certainly not immune to hustling themselves, as Erik in Turks Fruit accepts a commission to design a sculpture for the local hospital and sells an intimate drawing of his wife to a fancy pants pervo. More recently, in Black Book, the artist among the resistance fighters is depicted as unrealistic, ultimately forced to compromise his belief in poetic humanity by executing a turncoat. Often he's incredibly cynical about the consequence: no sooner has Spetters' Fientje gotten Rien to sign himself up with Japanese sponsers who gift him a set of slick new motorbikes, Rien is involved in a horrible accident that ends his career and Fientje's personal dreams of independent success. Obviously, Showgirls is Verhoeven's neon-tinted dissertation on selling out, in which the artist arrives in Vegas to dance but finds herself becoming increasingly corrupted by the prominent backbiting graft all around her. And if the outcome wasn't harsh enough under normal circumstances, Soldier of Orange and Black Book show that in wartime situations selling out your own side is a sure way to a quick grave.
WAR AND FASCISM
Growing up in The Hague under German occupation, Verhoeven experienced the war through a young boy's eyes, seeing it as a kind of exciting game. Said perception informed the way the director shoots his war films. Whether he's filming thrilling survival melodramas with complicated moral overtones or comic book-like adventures that reflect America's callous, aloof, salable approach to armed conflict, he takes the same approach. For the conquered citizens of Soldier of Orange and Black Book, wartime is one long perilous trek across a minefield where one false move means the end of the game. Verhoeven also cheekily has us rooting for the invaders in Flesh + Blood and Starship Troopers, impulsive war-mongerers who pride themselves in bullshit causes and vacant slogans. Despite this discrepancy of moral positions, all of Verhoeven's war movies are in equal measure satirical, exciting, romantic and vulgar. They're set almost entirely behind the scenes without giant glorious battle stagings and they're all played absolutely straight. Two things of which the director is assured: war is miserable to experience, but fun to watch.
IDENTITY
Most Verhoeven characters lose themselves early and spend the rest of the film trying to return to some semblance of their former self. In the cases of Keetje Tippel and Showgirls, the transformation is temporary: the women we meet at the beginning of the film and the end of the film are basically the same person (Nomi's even wearing the same kind of outfit and literally leaves Las Vegas the same way she entered, miraculously flagging down the exact same driver). In Robocop, Murphy has to come to terms with his more permanent tranformation from man to machine. There's an obvious duality in many of the films: Gerard Reve the writer v.s. Gerard Reve the character, Martin v.s. St. Martin, Quaid v.s. Hauser, Rachel Stein v.s. Ellis de Vries, with one dominant personality typically cancelling out the other.
In a more conventional disconnect from the body than the science of memory implants, Verhoeven characters find themselves detached by their own image in mirrors, as if they've suddenly become a spectator in their own story. Most notably there's the scene where Keetje Tippel agrees to prostitute herself for the first time at the urging of her sister, removing herself by looking directly up and viewing the scene from a mirror on the ceiling. The ceiling mirror returned in Basic Instinct, in which Nick Curran is seduced by the femme fatale who's turned him into a character in her own story and for a moment actually sees himself playing out the scene exactly as Catherine has planned it: literally manipulated to the point of having no control over his own fate. Similarly, The 4th Man's Gerard Reve and Total Recall's maneuvered Doug Quaid find themselves doubled, seeing a second version play the part that was written for them. Gazing into the mirror and seeing nothing, Hollow Man's Sebastian Caine discovers the ultimate disconnect: being absent from the narrative, he finds that he's capable of anything.
I think perhaps people felt that, in some way, the ambiguity that's in the script [for Black Book], the moral ambiguity - let's say the fact that you cannot discern really quite well if a good person is really good or if a bad person really bad - might have something to do with the political situation in the world, especially provoked by American politics. - Paul Verhoeven
Some people are better than you think and others are much worse than you think. - Paul Verhoeven
Are the starship troopers earth defenders or alien invaders? Is Doug Quaid the liberator of Mars or its oppressor? Is 4th Man's Christine a she-devil who draws men to their deaths and, in a more straightforward scenario, is Catherine Tramell a seductive ice pick murderess? Verhoeven leaves lots of questions of moral character open, gleaning the possibility that characters can be more complicated than typical movies make them out to be, even if it means they're less than virtuous overall. Especially in wartime, when moral lines are greyest - is Van der Zanden a traitor in Soldier of Orange? who in Black Book's inner-circle is allied with the evil Nazi? - the simple act of raising a single finger can reveal the more dubious side of a someone's personality.***
*** I guess I should explain that fuller: in Soldier of Orange, the British army attache is making time with Jeroen Krabbe's Guus but really wants to spend time with Rutger Hauer's Erik. When they're about to head back to Holland to take part in a counterespionage mission, she recommends they leave it to chance which of the two men gets the more dangerous job of remaining in the country to set up the operation from within. She has them guess how many fingers she's holding up, and changes it to make sure Erik is the one who stays in England. Seemingly harmless, but she's rather callously putting Guus' life in danger just so she can mess around with Erik! (Sure enough, although it isn't directly her fault, Erik comes back and Guus doesn't.)
RAGTAG SQUADS
A professed fan of Seven Samurai, Verhoeven loves a good gang of comrades in arms, old friends who go through tough times together and change: some for the better, others not so much. The motley crew of anti-heroes in Flesh + Blood was directly inspired by The Wild Bunch and like Peckinpah's team the audience can follow them even when their activities are less than righteous. There's a sense of wartime camaraderie that makes them symphathetic; even in the case of Robocop, where the gang are a bunch of depraved criminal anarchists, you can't help but smile as they giddily nuke an entire block together. Verhoeven's squads typically start out poor and/or inexperienced, share ambitious goals, briefly become rich and/or successful only to take the inevitable plunge. At least one of them ends up dead (in the case of Solider, Flesh + Blood, Robocop and Black Book, all or nearly all of them are ultimately wiped out).
RUTGER HAUER: VERHOEVEN'S KINSKI
As Paul Cooney correctly pointed out to me recently, while Verhoeven's leading ladies only got more attractive the more movies he made, the director never really found another Rutger Hauer. Not to disparage Casper Van Dien and Kevin Bacon, but they make poor substitutes for the animal magnetism of the blonde beefcake from Turks Fruit and Soldier of Orange. The pairing of passionate director and unpredictable star resembled the prosperous collaboration between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski - they also made five feature films together, Hauer became internationally recognized thanks to Verhoeven's films, and their work covers roughly the same era (Herzog/Kinski was '72 to '87, Verhoeven/Hauer '73 to '85). And like Herzog and Kinski, Verhoeven and Hauer were two powerful personalities who often clashed with one another, leading to a sad but inevitable falling out. Hauer remains Verhoeven's most prominent actor, although he made four with Dolf de Vries, three films with Jeroen Krabbé and worked twice with Monique van de Ven, Carry Tefsen, Andrea Domburg, Derek de Lint, Hannah de Leeuwe, Renée Soutendijk, Thom Hoffman, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, William Shockley, Sharon Stone, Jack McGee, Ungela Brockman, Marshall Bell, Michael Gregory, Mark Carlton, Dean Norris, Greg Travis and Christian Berkel.
THE FAIRY TALE PRINCE
In one of the more fairy tale-oriented of Verhoeven's favorite plot designs, his princesses find temporary happiness with a rich, cultured hunk who turns out to be disappointing in the best case scenario (Keetje Tippel) or downright evil in the worst (Showgirls). The exception is Flesh + Blood's progessive-thinker of a monarch, notably the only one of this bunch who is actually a true-born prince. (Also there's the second non-Rutger Hauer rich guy Keetje Tippel ends up with, in an ending that kind of ruins the whole movie even though that's apparently what really happened to the woman whose autobiography the film is based on.)
PARTIES & CLUBS
Verhoeven loves grinding bodies and orgiastic celebration. Even in his period films, he can't help having a night club where everyone's having a good time. The only appearance he's ever made in one of his own films is in a split second-shot as a dancing fool in Robocop (he claims Jost Vacano tricked him into doing it and snuck the shot into the film). Aside from the occasional knee-to-crotch injury, spastic stalker dance, random flying gun or rhythmless white guy getting served, nothing bad ever happens in these anonymous social hang-outs.
Animals pop up in several Verhoeven movies, many times as the target of human mistreatment: a plague dog hacked to bits in Flesh + Blood, the lab gorillas driven insane in Hollow Man, the poor monkey with the lipstick in Showgirls. Insects in particular are frequently crushed, the god complex of Hollow Man's Sebastian Caine at its least subtle when he thoughtfully holds a fly between his invisible fingers (the bugs get their revenge on petty humans in Starship Troopers). Their torment is equated to the suffering of Verhoeven's heroes - other than the slab of dead cow being cut up while Keetje Tippel entertains her first lascivious client, there's the bird Erik nurses back to health in Turks Fruit and the shot of the suffocating fish as the population of Mars breathes the last remaining oxygen in Total Recall. Even Robocop, which has no animals, has ED-209 roaring like an angry leopard then screeching like a frightened cat once he's immobilized.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PAUL VERHOEVEN