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"Nazis. We love them," professes Tony Barta, referring to Hollywood's fascination with fascism as its most beloved villain (128). Tall black leather boots, well-cut Nazi uniforms, Germanic accents, and fascist architecture have energized and sexualized the worn plots of Hollywood films and their primal conflict between good and evil for more than half a century. "The reason for all the German uniforms and everything is that the Germans made the best-looking stuff. Art directors love it," said Ed Neumeier, screenwriter for Paul Verhoeven's science fiction thriller, Starship Troopers (1997), in an interview (Svetkey 8). To be sure, the films that stage fascism's seductive powers most spectacularly are often films about our future-science fiction films. From Star Wars (1977-83) and Gattaca (1997) to Equilibrium (2002), Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow (2004), or Hellboy (2004), science fiction action-thrillers resurrect fascistic troops and fascist architecture, tinker with a master race, or evoke the archetypal evil of Nazi villains. TV classics such as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) lost much of their semantic depth if the episodes were not modeled on the quasi-Holocaust suffered by the Bajorans at the hands of the fascist Cardassians (Kapell 104-14).
The current cinematic appropriation of fascism focuses on performativity that rendered it cinema material in the first place; it is articulated by a self-referential, but historically blind system of cinematic signifiers. Fascism reappears in the popular imagination less as a historical legacy than as a reservoir of aesthetic and spectacles referring to earlier cinematic representations of Nazism rather than the political realities of the Third Reich. Michael Verhoeven's 1996 science fiction spectacle, Starship Troopers, lends itself to an exploration of how contemporary science fiction film transports the past into the future and why. Starship Troopers, like other recent sci-fi films, functions as a postmodern pastiche that exploits the "terrific" spectacle of the Third Reich without any clear moral reference point. It exemplifies how current science fiction cinema translates history into spatial registers that override temporal coordinates and how this translation is aided by advanced digital media that "transcode" cultural discourses and categories, such as history, into digitally enhanced surfaces or game options.
The big budget Starship Troopers, designed to have international appeal, turned out be a box office flop. Critics...