Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then so are the works of Jane Austen and Noel Coward. If Seinfeld seems trivial, it is only because manners have so devolved over the course of our century. Like the rest of us, the show's overly analytic foursome must pick their way through an increasingly chaotic social battlefield, forced to write their own etiquette for even the most insignificant encounters. And then there are the big questions, like what do you do when your girlfriend suggests sharing a toothbrush...
...need not apply. The protein-packed health bars that Sears peddles as ideal between-meal snacks taste like candy bars laced with sawdust. When Sears sat down with a TIME reporter last week to a lunch of a grilled salmon sandwich and vegetables, he treated his plate like a battlefield. "We're going to start plotting our strategy like Patton getting ready to cross the Rhine with the Third Army," he announced, discarding his French fries and all but a scrap of bread. It's no surprise that Zone disciples tend to congregate on the coasts. Sears says Middle America...
Here Hogue takes one too many liberties: "Beasts ferocious, with hunger will cross the rivers, the greater part of the battlefield will be against Histler. Into a cage of iron will the great one be drawn, when the child of Germany observes nothing." But "Hister" or "Ister" is simply the Latin name for the Danube; all the second line says is "the greater part of the field will be against (or along) the Hister." But facts don't get in Hogue's way--just slap the "L" in to make "Histler" and you're cooking...
Essentially, however, it's business as usual in Starship Troopers. Basic training is still brutal. The platoon we follow from the first day of enlistment to battlefield apotheosis contains many familiar types--supermacho drill sergeant, dopey yokel and, at its center, Johnny (Casper Van Dien, a newcomer with a useful, uncanny resemblance to the old B-picture star John Agar), who is the traditional spoiled and aimless kid. He has--need one say?--joined up for the wrong, selfish reasons, but when his hometown is destroyed, Pearl Harbor-style, he embraces the right, vengeful-idealistic rationales for merciless slaughter...
Yeah, but not in Sam's case--unless you thought of him as a sort of Charles Ives, drawing on the vernacular only to subvert it with a big, blatting off-key note. Like the brave soldier who spreads his battlefield picnic on a fallen foe's body; the beautiful blond whose wig falls off in a fight to reveal a perfectly bald pate; the western hero who coolly plugs his lover when the bad guy tries to use her as a shield in a gun fight. Sam didn't strain for these bold, indelible moments. They just came naturally...