We watch actors doing burpees or shaking ropes with expensive personal trainers. The promotional cycles for blockbuster movies now include detailed descriptions of the performers’ fitness regimens. It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction. Skinny celebrities confessed their love of burgers and fries in magazines models undergoing profile interviews engaged in public consumption of pasta leading ladies joked about how little they exercised and how much they hated it. In the early 2000s, there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural, almost accidental. No one flirts.Ī room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.

Another talks about how badly he wants to kill the enemy. Another joined in the hopes of receiving her breeding license. One joined for the sake of her political career. The topic of conversation? Military service, of course. On the surface, it is idyllic: racial harmony, gender equality, unity behind a common goal-and firm, perky asses and tits.Īnd then the characters speak. It is, of course, the shower scene, in which our heroic servicemen and -women enjoy a communal grooming ritual. When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up?īut the scene that left perhaps the greatest impact on the minds of Nineties kids-and the scene that anticipated our current cinematic age the best-does not feature bugs or guns.

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it.

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