when the previews for "Starship Troopers" began showing in theaters last summer, I felt vague stirrings of that most dread of emotions -- nostalgia.

I didn't quite understand it. While I had a vivid memory of reading the Robert Heinlein novel in sixth grade, I couldn't remember even the most garish details of it. Yet the fragments of images I saw in the previews swelled my poor stunted heart, made my eyes fill with tears and made me feel strangely guilty about not having gone to Vietnam.

Tormented, I went out, bought the book -- and by golly if it isn't one of the strangest damn things I've read in my life. It might have stirred my blood back when I was 12, theoretically, but at age 48 I must confess it scared me to death.

What the novel is, you see, is that most frightening of objects: the philosophical novel. You might even call it propaganda. Heinlein's message, hammered home throughout the book, is that boot camp is (or ought to be) an essential ingredient of basic civilization. As Utopian visions go, that's a new one on me.

Sure, it makes sense if the earth is being invaded by giant exoskeletons bent on our destruction. But in a post-Cold War environment, as a Utopian paradigm, we might want to consider instead, say, community college.

Of course the book was published in 1959. While I don't know the details of Heinlein's life, I must conclude that he not only served in World War II, he looked back on that bloody period with a peculiar fondness.

What are we to make, however, of the 1997 movie? Surprisingly, it echoes the themes of the novel closely. It's an old-fashioned war movie with big bugs substituting for Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Army. Oh, and the heroes are interchangeable stalwart young fascists, just thrilled to die and/or be mutilated for the good of the state. And it's really, really gory.

This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it enormously. It's nice to see the old clichés up on the screen again, mixed in with some brand new ones. For instance, the army of the future is completely co-ed. When the hero (or rather, the guy who gets the most camera time) receives a "Dear John" letter (and he's named John, too!), it's not from the girl back home, but the girl who became a starship pilot and now outranks him.

And when the bugs start slicing people up, burning off their appendages with plasma or sucking out their brains, you cringe a little bit, sure, but it's not like we're watching people we like being dismembered. It's just a bunch of Kens and Barbies being disemboweled. It's like watching the cast of "Friends" meet "Alien." In a sick kind of way, it was a yock-filled chuckle fest.

It's funny how pop culture changes. Remember "The FBI Story" (1959) with James Stewart? It was a seminal movie of my youth, let me tell you. For months after seeing it, I was fashioning little ID badges out of Scotch tape and cardboard, wearing white nylon shirts with clip-on neckties and staking out the neighbors with binoculars I'd fashioned from toilet paper tubes painted black.

"The FBI Story" was the same kind of movie as "Starship Troopers." A bunch of interchangeable square-jawed types go through basic FBI training, and then get shot up by gangsters. The violence was much more discreet back in the '50s, of course, but the basic idea was the same -- we are surrounded by giant bugs (communists, Mafia), and the only thing that stands between us and them are square-jawed people who dress alike.

The FBI's reputation has been tarnished in recent years (as has that of the armed forces). Poor Mulder and Scully (and Skinner, sometimes) are the only stalwart folks around, but they're working through too many personal issues to be as effective as they might. They're not even sure if the big bugs are real, or just elements in a sinister disinformation campaign by their alleged colleagues. The ratio of time spent feeling each other's pain to time spent saying, "Freeze! FBI!" is, frankly, way out of whack.

Starship troopers don't have that problem. They mope, sure, but only between bunk inspection and taps. They don't want to communicate with big bugs, they just want to blow them up. And there's no ambiguity on the big bugs' part, either; they just want to exterminate us as a species.

Maybe civilization does need flyboys and jarheads and ordinary Janes and Joes with perfect teeth more than it needs, well, me. In the face of an arachnid invasion I don't think I'd be much help. If you need somebody to cower in the basement though, I'm your guy. Munch popcorn in the darkness while watching violent revenge fantasies? Hey, I'm there for you. You watch my back, I'll watch, uh, cable.
SALON | Nov. 13, 1997

"Not Wet Yet," a selection of Ian Shoales diatribes from 1982 through 1996, is now available in your local bookstore. Please go there and buy it, or order it from 2.13.61 Publications, P.O. Box 1910, Los Angeles, CA 90078. Help get Ian wet. Thank you.

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