Communication is the art of making oneself understood. Paul Verhoeven, more than any other filmmaker I can think of, belongs in this thread. Because people miss the points of his films a lot. Because he's bad at making his point.

Starship Troopers doesn't come across as a satire of fascism to people who haven't experienced fascism; it comes across as a big over the top dumb action movie. If you have to already know the message to get the message, you haven't communicated an idea. Can you find me any evidence of Paul Verhoeven saying something on the order of "Watch, I'm going to make this movie and the Americans aren't going to get it and that's my real artistic intent"? Because if you can't, that's not the point. He set out to make the point that fascism is bad, then forgot what he was doing and made a blockbuster action movie that's way to easy to turn your brain off and enjoy unironically.

Showgirls is a beautifully shot terrible film. It's not an innovative story: Innocent young woman with stars in her eyes heads out west to seek fame, fortune and glamor in show business only to find a crass and cynical world that at first won't even talk to her, so she eeks out an existence as a waitress, auditioning for parts where she can, only finding success by compromising her own values; a topless scene here, sucking a director's dick for a bigger part there, until she's finally the star and she's just as corrupt and twisted as her environment now.

Showgirls is built on the bones of that story, by a man who doesn't know much about storytelling but a lot about exploiting young women. You don't get to tell me this movie was even intended as a satire of sexually exploitative Hollywood when they sold a special edition DVD that came with two shot glasses, a deck of cards with strip games on them, a nude poster of Elisabeth Berkley and a pair of tassels on suction cups so you could play Pin The Pastie On The Stripper. "Fresh off the back of my hit film The One With Sharon Stone's Pussy In It, I'm going to satirize sexually exploitative Hollywood by sexually exploiting harder than any Hollywood director has sexually exploited before!"

There's more to satire than making the biggest example of the thing you think you're satirizing.

[–] Juice@midwest.social 1 points 19 hours ago

Lol well said. I'm not convinced that he is just a bad story teller, and wrt ST being just another dumb action movie to Americans, nothing more, I think this is where your argument is too sweeping, because without Verhoeven there is no deeper meaning. The ST sequels were all just dumb action movies and none landed with audiences at all. Og ST resonated with Euro audiences, and the sequels were disliked by all. Imo for your argument to have real teeth, you'd see some popularity of ST sequels among USamerican audiences which supposedly can't tell the difference.

And Showgirls was beyond heavy handed. "We are critiquing decadence by giving you more of it" is a very mid- 90s take. To undercut my own argument a bit, while I don't believe at all that an artist has a responsibility to communicate a fully realized and internally consistent worldview, I think that the female form is an extremely loaded subject for artists and has been for 1000 years and more. Disregarding that gives a black eye to any work of art, even if the object of criticism is the desecration of the artful female form. I think its fair to say that Verhoeven might want to have a cake and eat one. Esp with Showgirls. I think ST is unique in that Verhoeven's perspective on fascism is actually unique. It doesn't matter what people think because it is his experience and his movie. With Showgirls, he isnt a woman and he never had to make it in Hollywood as a woman. And to an outsider maybe all you see is sleaze, and dehumanization. But pointing out sleaze and dehumanization in the negative while creating a sleazy dehumanizing work, exposes a deep cynicism that warps the point. I think you make a good point here, by the end of the move everyone is just completely vapid and meaningless, products of a machine that turns out vapid meaningless art to which there is little real alternative. You either get everything you want and it ruins you, or you get nothing or lose everything and youre still ruined. There's no humanity in it at all, and it takes some problematic liberties to make a point, that is perhaps a worse point than could have been made. I think you are definitely correct that overdoing it to make a point only gets you so far. And I think its fair to say Showgirls is a particularly egregious example.

I like the movie, I get what he is trying to do, and I think he accomplishes it. But there are things that are objectively wrong about it, even in the context of its deeper meaning, and the route it goes to tell a story. It relies on artistic license to get away with it, but ignores all of the conventions of artistry because there is supposedly no artistry in the subject so why depict it? So in that way I can agree with you about Verhoeven's storytelling