They Want You Shot By The Smoothest-Cheeked Stormtroopers

The warrior ethos demands troops be as sleek as baby seals

Starship Troopers / Tristar pictures, Touchstone pictures

I’ve been thinking about Casper Van Dien today. Not so much for his acting chops as his actual ones—cheeks and a bone structure which easily make Van Dien a top contender for having the sharpest jawline in cinema. Cast in Paul Verhoeven’s anti-fascist(ish) adaptation of Starship Troopers explicitly for his resemblance to the Aryan ideal of Nazi propaganda, Van Dien leads the movie chin-first, never letting the blood and guts of his insect opponents nor fellow troopers interfere with his superhuman complexion. As the main avatar for Verhoeven’s sand-dry satire of militarized fascism, Van Dien, playing the conspicuously blonde-haired, blue-eyed Argentinian Johnny Rico, survives the film’s cosmic carnage with neither pit nor pock to show for it.

So, yeah, I’ve been thinking about Van Dien’s silky smooth cheeks this morning because now I live in a country where the sleekness of a man’s cheek is a measure of his capacity for state-sanctioned violence.