Sometimes we haven’t seen movies everyone has seen. We pretend we’ve seen them, laugh along at jokes about them, and use Simpsons parodies of them to skirt by in casual conversation. But there comes a time where you say to yourself ‘man. maybe I Should watch [insert movie].’ And today’s inserted movie? Robocop.
I was so ready to be a bitch about Robocop. I really really was. I was so convinced that this was a classic because a bunch of teen boys saw it in the 80s and then never grew up. I love it when I’m wrong about these things. Because Robocop isn’t the dumb, fun bullshit I was assuming it would be. It’s an insanely clever movie dressed up as dumb, fun genre shit.
Very rarely does a movie have such a clear thesis of ‘becoming a tool of state violence only perpetuates your own dehumanization’ while also having a guy turn into a grotesque mutant after falling into a vat of toxic waste. Robocop threads that needle. This is a movie that understands that over the top gore and violence is very, very funny. This is also a movie that is really concerned about the direction corporate involvement in policing is going.
The thing about Robocop is like, they were right. We talk a lot about 80s sci-fi and comedy ‘predicting’ things, but it really didn’t. It’s just that 40 years on, their exaggerated versions of contemporary social problems are just. Pretty close to our current problems. Half an hour into Robocop I noted the most unrealistic aspect thus far was not the corporate buy out of the police department, the tv ads for ‘sports hearts’, or the plans to bulldoze Detroit to build a futuristic City Of Tomorrow in an attempt to bring jobs to the area, but the fact that the corporate shareholders saw the completely inhuman police robot prototype killing an unarmed civilian (one of their coworkers to boot) as a liability and not a selling point. In some ways, we’re worse off.
It’s the satirical aspects that really shine here. Especially the news footage and tv commercials. It’s a clever device used to anchor us in the 15 minutes into the future setting, sure, but it’s also a delicious skewering of contemporary politics in a way that makes you cringe at the current state of things. Sure South Africa threatening its population with nuclear bombs is a little outdated, but then you get to an offhand mention that America is at war with ‘Mexican rebels.’ One of the women on the robocop science team even mentions being disappointed because a resort she was going to go to got blown up. Between ads for nuclear war themed video games and an expensive vehicle called the SUX 6000, by the time you get to the news reports of a laser gun defense satellite starting a wildfire in California and killing two former presidents in the process, in what might be the funniest joke in the whole movie, the portrait of American apathy in the face of violence is fully painted.
And so too, is the inseparability of said violence from the corporate power structure. The same corporation that owns the cops owns the criminals the cops are fighting. Even if they didn’t, they’re still buying the cocaine the fuels the entire seedy underworld. This movie is not subtle. It hits you with the ‘it’s all the same system!!!’ stick over and over. And a lesser movie would piss you off doing that. But Robocop is never preachy in it, either. It’s hard to be, when you have a scene that’s just a bunch of guys blowing up cars because the police department went on strike.
I saved Robocop himself for last because I’m still grappling with him. The POV shots when he is being turned into Robocop is some of the most compelling stuff I’ve seen in a movie in a while. “We saved his arm’ the lead scientist says as the corporate blowhard who’s in charge of the Robocop project argues he should cut it off. ‘He signed his release forms. He’s legally dead. We can do what we want with him.’ He says. And so the arm goes.
And that’s really the key to the whole movie. Murphy, Robocop, whoever, agreed to be part of the System, and so he has forfeit his humanity. And I don’t think he really ever gets it back. He gets some of his memories, sure, but when he follows up on them he only finds an empty house with a digital realtor that drones on about the neighborhood’s growth factor. The only person who engages him like a human being is his former partner, and even then, he bonds with her by stacking up jars of baby food and letting her help him recalibrate his targeting mechanism, ending in the smiling baby faces explode into glass and mush.
You could read the ending as Robocop getting his humanity back. You could see him smile at the head of the company that owns him when he asks for his name and answer ‘Murphy’ instead of Robocop and see it as a reclamation of identity. You could. But I don’t. Because he’s still within the system. Robocop is never able to transcend his programming. He doesn’t kill the big bad executive because of his own human strength overcoming his masters, he does it because the guy gets fired and is no longer protected by the ‘don’t kill your boss’ code. Robocop might have his identity back, but not his humanity. He can’t. He’s part of the system. And just because some of the cogs are gone doesn’t mean the system doesn’t grind on.
All in all, I’m shocked I’ve never seen this. It’s so many of my favorite things, over the top violent, meanly funny, secretly clever. 15 minutes into the future nonsense. Cool ass practical effects. If you, like me, have put this one off because you kind of assumed it couldn’t live up to the hype let me assure you: the hype undersells it, if anything. Go watch Robocop. It’s a good time.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 