my friend Steve caught this long before I did

Of course, the price Dr. Steve paid for his English-major insights into Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" was the bitter cynicism that he would have to carry around forever as a brainwashed leftist. I think a lot of people with English degrees confuse themselves for psychotherapists because, like people in the psych field, they traffic in the language of human motivation. The problem, though, is that most literary characters are at best unrealistic imitations of real people, so whatever "psych" these English majors think they've learned can apply only to the fictional world. I feel this strange pull myself when I find myself predicting the next few steps in a story, or figuring out only a third of the way through a film who the real villain is. This doesn't make me a genius about human nature: it merely means that I understand Western story beats. I watch "Starship Troopers" now, and I see nothing but Nazi Nazi, Nazi... and really bad science fiction that is nowhere to be found in Heinlein's original novel.