<
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/elon-musk-trump-starship-troopers-meme-b2649528.html>
"Elon Musk is being accused of completely missing the point of the satirical
1997 sci-fi action movie
Starship Troopers after referencing it when
celebrating his new role in Donald Trump’s administration.
The tech entrepreneur and billionaire played a major role in helping Trump win
the 2024 US election and has now been appointed as the leader of the Department
of Government Efficiency, along with Vivek Ramaswamy.
“We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest
in helping us at DOGE,” the group wrote on X on Thursday. “We don’t need more
part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government
revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.
If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top
one per cent of applicants.”
In the aftermath of the announcement, Musk shared a meme aimed at the so-called
“big government machine” claiming that “It’s afraid.”
Musk then shared an image from a climactic scene in
Starship Troopers where
Neil Patrick Harris’s character, Carl Jenkins, triumphantly claims victory over
their alien bug enemies.
On the surface, this is a fairly common cinematic trope but
Starship
Troopers, made by Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven and adapted from a novel by
Robert A Heinlein, has a very obvious twist that Musk appears to have missed
The subverted message of the film is that the supposed heroic humans, that we
have followed throughout the movie, are actually fascists and are committing
genocide against the bugs.
It’s not a hard message to miss as numerous military propaganda videos,
emulating scenes from
The Triumph of the Will, are played throughout the
film, with the humans even wearing uniforms inspired by those worn by the Nazis
and Italy’s National Fascist Party.
“I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who
understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by
all the people who don’t,” said Verhoeven, in a quote attributed to him.
Therefore, Musk comparing himself to the bad guys in Starship Troopers is
perhaps not the message that the 53-year-old was hoping to convey."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
