Both “Starship Troopers” and “Robocop” are frequently misunderstood by their audiences. A few more films that might mean more than you think.
Casablanca. D: Michael Curtiz (1943). Try to stay dry-eyed at this movies end as Humphrey Bogart gives up his true love (Ingrid Bergman!) for her good and the good of this hill of beans. Wait, this’ll help – almost up to that point he was willing to turn over a heroic resistance fighter to the Nazis. He didn’t, but this metaphor for the end of American neutrality also proves the (maybe apocryphal) Churchill quote: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
Wall Street. D: Oliver Stone. (1987). When Gordon Gekko said “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good” Stone meant to set him up as the face of irresponsible brokerage. Instead, the movie, which made trading seem like the most exciting of all possible rides (especially with a little inside info to grease the wheels) became the go-to movie for a generation of unscrupulous yuppies.
American Psycho. D: Mary Harron (2000). Speaking of unscrupulous yuppies, this blacker-than-black comedy might make you think all of the violent acts that Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) commits are in his head. But it might also mean that (since everybody in the movie is constantly being mistaken for somebody else) that the killing’s occurred but nobody knows what happened and nobody cared. It all depends on how nihilistic you’re feeling.
Natural Born Killers. D: Oliver Stone (1994). Speaking of feeling nihilistic, Stone’s bad-acid-trip of a movie means to satirize celebrity culture, as serial killers Mickey and Mallory (Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson) are turned into antiheroes by a tabloid journalist (Robert Downey Jr.). At the end though, when the couple, having gotten all that violence out of their system, live happily ever after, we realize Stone has fallen into what he meant to ridicule.
Fight Club. D: David Fincher (1999). Fincher’s film of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel involves dispirited yuppy Edward Norton depressed by his passive consumerism who is taken under his wing by charismatic alpha male Brad Pitt who has formed “fight clubs” to help men find their masculinity by beating each other up. When we find the truth about the two men’s connection it’s clear that the fight between quiet morality and virile anarchy is one that all men are fighting. But that didn’t keep real-life fight clubs from appearing.
