The fact that Starship Trooper can accidentally work as an actual join-the-army propaganda makes no doubt : the same happens with yuppies actually having Wall Street's Gordon Gecko as a model, or thugs (or just cretins) inspired by Al Pacino's Scarface because he is sooo cool. In both cases, the film directors have been facedesking noisily in front of the medias, but, heck, that's how the public functions. I even have issues with fanboys considering that the retarded Marines from Aliens are the heroes of the movies, and with all the by-products (comics, etc) focusing on how super total badass they are. So, of course Starship Troopers would offer material for that.

But my point is, I don't think there's just a duality between "enjoy it with the characters" vs "laughing about them". I think that most of the WH40000 and Starship Trooper public (and I think it's the point) are in a third position, inbetween. Some sort of playing-along without being-fooled. Genuinely enjoying the over-the-top thrill for itself without discarding the 'meta' awareness of its dubious required premise.

Something like the self-aware rule-of-cool of a Dr McNinja comic or a Burrito Revenge flash game. Some way to conciliate both the will to live/re-live the thrill of old naive adventurous bombastic epics, and the loss of its required naivety (once you realised how much they depended on nationalist, sexist, militarist, colonialist, racialist, values and worldviews, for instance). In our postmodern world, some narratives don't function anymore (to many of us), because we lack the bliss of their required uncritical ignorance. It's a whole range of entertainment we have lost, because of the underlying ideology making us shake our heads. Fascism functions because fascism is cool, because there is an aesthetic of might, of clear-cut worldviews, of order and discipline, of unanimous collectivities, of trance-inducing rousing speeches and crowds feedback, etc. We know that these pleasures are nocive.

A certain brand of ironical distanciation allows us to have the cake and eat it too. To enjoy it with a "yeah yeah, I know, but, still...". And I think this is what WH40000 and Starship Troopers aim for (and achieve). Not simply denouncing one kind of narrative, but allowing us to indulge in it with an ironical dissociation. While poking fun at ourselves for enjoying it. I think that is the thin line, that makes it different from a production that divides the viewers between endorsement and chastizing. These secific products encourage some sort of "roleplayed endorsement" with over-the-top winks that keep our feet on the ground.

It is a subtle-ish position, and as such, I'm not sure I manage to express it clearly. Another way to describe it is maybe through the 'hommage' angle (hommage to a genre, or to an epoch in individual lives). It reminds me of a leftist friend who adores Conan the Barbarian, and describes it as an openly fascist pleasure, enjoyable precisely because of its clear shameless relaxing fascist undertones. Maybe the "meta" movies oif Tarantino play a bit with this too : is Kill Bill a parody of saber revenge flicks, or is it one itself, or is it both.

How would someone make an enjoyable cheezy spaggheti westen nowadays, without making it as accidentally bad as all these clumsy post-Leone copies, yet capturing their flavor and interest for people who outgrew them, that its, without turning them into a comedy ?