In addition to being a
brilliantly-crafted action and sci-fi movie, the 1987 Paul Verhoeven film
RoboCop has also proven itself a forward-looking and trenchant satire of
(some) American values in the late 20th and early 21st century.
The film's use of humor and exaggeration to ridicule contemporary politics is not uncontroversial, either.
To wit, RoboCop
is set in a future in which Big Business has finally had its way with the rest of us.
The police force has
been privatized.
A corporate media announces
to the world the news that its overlords want disseminated, true or not.
And raiders in the board
room are just as dangerous -- and criminal -- as the thugs prowling the streets by night.
On the last front, the
film makes a clever association. Robocop very explicitly connects two forms of “crook” or criminal. Both an OCP executive Dick Jones (Ronnie Cox)
and drug-dealing, gun-toting murderer Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) recite
an identical line of dialogue in the film, thus forging an indelible link
between them.
That line?
“Good business is where you find it.”
RoboCop thus asks a significant question about the direction of our country, which was then in the grip of an economic revolution:
What gets lost in a society when the
accumulation of wealth becomes the ultimate moral value?
The answer?
Human life becomes cheap, and everything in
society is about selling a product, and about making money.
Verhoeven creates an
intriguing and effective tension in the film in order to effectively deliver his satirical points. Now-and-again,
he cuts to funny TV commercials that are emblematic of the film’s corporate
culture and media, and to TV programs that reveal how the masses are distracted
by bread and circuses.
One of those programs
involves a well-dressed white man surrounded by beautiful, scantily-clad models
quipping “I’d buy that for a dollar!”
The insipid joke is itself an
indictment of the culture. Everything and everyone is but a product, or for sale.
Everyone has his or her price.
Verhoeven next contrasts
these moments of high but illuminative comedy with RoboCop’s serious attempts
to regain his human identity…to reconnect with the qualities that made him Alex
Murphy, a loving family man and a dedicated police officer.
In other words, what RoboCop
truly concerns is a machine trying to be a human being in a culture that is
inhumane, and unbelievably violent.
The film’s violence has
often been criticized by moral watch-guards as somehow being over-the-top or representative of bad taste…and yet I would argue it is entirely appropriate to the film and its
thesis.
In RoboCop’s world, human
life is disposable -- bought and sold for a dollar -- and so the film's violence is
extreme enough (and oddly, funny enough too…) to make that point.
Life is cheap, baby! (Unless you're rich and powerful...).
“He doesn’t have a name.
He has a program. He’s a product.”
In advance of a major
initiative to re-boot Detroit as ultra-modern Delta City, OCP (Omni Consumer Products) prepares to
unroll its new product line: an urban pacification system called ED-209,
created by Senior V.P. Richard Jones (Cox).
But when the droid fails,
killing a corporate employee in cold blood, a back-up plan is required. An up-and-comer at OCP named Bob Morton (Miguel
Ferrer), proposes to the CEO (Dan O’Herlihy) his own law enforcement system:
RoboCop.
But for it to work, the
plan needs a good “human” candidate…a cop with a sense of duty.
When family man and cop,
Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is murdered by Clarence Boddicker (Smith) and his
gang, he becomes that perfect candidate. He is rebooted as the mind of RoboCop, a cyborg police officer possessing at
least some of Murphy’s instincts and memories.
Murphy and his partner,
Lewis (Nancy Allen) attempt to bring Boddicker to justice, but eventually learn
of his criminal connection to Dick Jones. Both are attempting to make a financial killing
on the construction of Delta City.
As RoboCop,Murphy
attempts to confront Jones and arrest him, but learns that he boass a secret
directive that marks him not as a man, but as the property of OCP…
“There’s no better way to
steal money than free enterprise.”
RoboCop was crafted in the mid-1980s and it's important that we understand
that history, that context, as we consider the film’s satire.
During that span, many
big American cities were suffering. Crime was on the rise due to the crack
cocaine epidemic. The crime rate peaked in the early 1990s.
And government wasn’t helping
much to alleviate the suffering. Here are some statistics to back that up
assertion: First, the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban
Development was cut from 32.2 billion dollars in 1981 to 7.5 billion in
1987-1988, meaning that government aid was less available for the indigent.
Secondly, the number of
Americans living beneath the Federal poverty line rose from 24.5 million to
over 32 million in the late eighties.
Additionally, more than
two million American citizens were homeless by the latter part of the decade.
While the poor grew
poorer, the rich grew richer, and often unethically so. Lest we forget, this was the era of Ivan
Boesky, and Michael Milken, businessmen who stole millions of dollars through an
unethical business practice: insider trading. In movies, these figures were synthesized as Gordon Gekko (Michael
Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), a corporate raider who believed
that “greed is good.”
Meanwhile, the same
politicians who cut budgets for social help programs in the 1980s cravenly exploited the average citizen's fear of increased violent crime to win high
office, notably with the highly divisive (and highly-effective) Willie Horton
TV advertisement in Campaign '88, which made note of a criminal
African-American convict robbing, raping and killing a white woman during a
prison furlough. First these candidates made life harder for the poor, and then they ran as "tough on crime" candidates, and imposed stiff sentences for first time drug offenders.
In 1986, Hollywood responded to the prevailing Zeitgeist of rising crime, and increased fear about it. A new
kind of superhero film gazed closely at all these societal ills. The result was
not only a blockbuster action film, but the creation of a popular character
that has not yet disappeared from the pop culture terrain, appearing across the
decades in films, TV series, cartoons, comic books, and even in a 2014 reboot.
RoboCop was shot in thirteen weeks in the late summer of 1986 on a
budget of just ten million dollars, and Verhoeven was reportedly attracted to
the material because of its comic-book type of "origin story" as well
as the comedic atmosphere and content. The thrust of the satire involved poking fun
at American culture and politics, and the course both seemed to be taking
during the eighties.
Indeed, RoboCop accurately and comedically predicted two important facets of our contemporary American life: the
corporatization of American culture and the coarsening of the mainstream media.
In terms of its commentary
on corporations, RoboCop depicts a company, OCP (Omni Consumer Products)
strutting over the whole of Detroit. It has “bought” and privatized the police
force, and now its vice-president hopes to introduce military grade equipment
for “urban pacification” of the
streets.
This equipment, specifically, involves a giant droid called ED-209. The only problem is that ED-209 has been already
bought and sold...and yet it doesn’t work at all. As Dick Jones points out. “Who
cares if it works or not?” because he’s already got a contract for it. The idea underlining all this is that
unregulated business, committed to laissez-faire principles, can’t and won't effectively police
itself.
The same point is
hammered home with the creation of RoboCop. OCP scientists program a police officer -- a cyborg sentry who should protect and
serve -- with a secret or classified directive.
The meat of this directive is that RoboCop will shut-down if he attempts
to arrest a high-ranking officer in the company.
In other words, OCP has “privatized” RoboCop so that the members
of the OCP board are above the law. He can
police others, but not them. “We can’t very well have our product turning
against us, can we?” Jones asks.
Meanwhile, Jones is
secretly allied with a street criminal Clarence Boddicker, with the goal of
turning the “gentrified” Detroit, Delta City, into a drug-riddled
hellhole. And the reason? Again, profit. It’s all for money. Human suffering isn't even in the picture for these men.
What may be most
disturbing about Dick Jones’s behavior in RoboCop is not his sense of
entitlement because he is rich and powerful, but his absolute disregard for the
life of other human beings. A man is
killed in the board room demonstration of ED-209, and Jones says, simply, that
it is “just a glitch” that caused
this (bloody death).
Later, he murders his rival, Bob (Ferrer), because Bob
dared to attempt to be successful himself, at Dick’s expense.
And finally, Jones sees himself as above the law,
reprogramming a police officer (RoboCop), and announcing that he is (“practically”) an extension of the U.S.
military.
Pretty clearly then, RoboCop deliberately paints an unflattering picture of big business. Dick Jones and Clarence
Boddicker are defined in the film as two sides of the same coin: men who know
how to “open new markets” and exploit
the free enterprise system, no matter who gets hurt.
Sadly, such men as Dick
Jones are considered heroes in the universe of RoboCop and one of the
more wicked jokes in the film involves “Lee
Iococca Elementary High School,” a name which represents the elevation of a
businessman (and one who was bailed out by the U.S. taxpayer, to boot…) to the
role of national hero and role model.
RoboCop doesn’t go any easier on the corporate media, or television
programming. The heavily made-up, perfectly-coiffed glib newscasters of “Media Break” report,
without irony, about the “Star Wars
Orbiting Peace Platform” as the film starts.
The conjunction of the
words “wars” and “peace” in one title goes unremarked upon. And really, how could it be missed? Quite simply, these aren't journalists, but news readers, reciting talking points to support the agenda of their employers.
In terms of the TV
commercials featured in RoboCop, many are quite funny, and yet they deliver the same point about the blasé inhumanity of the culture that the film's violence does.
One advert concerns a
family electronic game glorifying nuclear war (based on Milton Bradley's Battleship), called Nuke'Em!
The game’s motto: “Get them before they get you!”
'
As you can see in the
commercial, every foreign policy challenge is met with the threat of absolute
over-kill, a tribute to the blood-thirstiness of the populace, and an example,
as noted above, of this future’s society’s inhumanity.
Why a game called Nuke’Em
in 1987? Well, again, one must consider context. The film was made in a
time in which President Reagan had made a cavalier joke about outlawing "Russia forever" and even threatened
that "we begin bombing in five minutes."
(August 11, 1984). He also made the erroneous claim in a presidential debate
with Walter Mondale that nuclear missiles fired from a submarine could be
recalled after launch. So the idea here of a future America where nuclear bombardment
was part of the accepted military landscape didn't seem terribly far-fetched.
Even America's endless
propensity to drive gas-guzzling, gigantic automobiles (when we know better) is satirized in the
prescient RoboCop. Commercials depicted in RoboCop advertise
a new vehicle, the 6000 SUX. The 6000 SUX offers a whopping eighteen miles to
the gallon, meaning it literally "sucks” gas.
My car, today, in 2015,
gets exactly eighteen miles to the gallon.
RoboCop also accurately predicts our nation’s relentless push towards the
privatization of municipal and government programs, the wholesale dismantling
of the social safety net. Particularly, much of RoboCop involves
OCP's funding and running of the Detroit Police Department "as a
business" - designed to make money and worried, therefore, only
about the bottom line. Is the company in the red? Or is it in the black?
Of course, the police
force should protect and serve the community, not serve the financial
interest of a particular corporate interest. Instead, we see with ED-209, how
business, police, and military interests all combine to create a fearsome face
for law enforcement.
And again, RoboCop
must be considered prescient for making this point. Today, many localities literally have war machines patrolling the streets.
OCP’s irresponsibility
towards the police and the protection of the community is contrasted, strongly,
by the value system of the police officers actually depicted in the film. A sergeant, at one point, makes an important
point when the idea of a strike is broached, noting that they are all police,
not “plumbers.” He feels a responsibility to the community, a
sense that is wholly alien to OCP.
Contrasted with this cruel, heartless, money-obsessed society is the human and
personal journey of Alex Murphy. He is
transformed from a person into a product by OCP, but still possesses the
feelings and memories of a person.
Murphy’s triumph is that
he manages to hold onto his humanity through everything (even death), and acts
in accordance with his three good and moral directives: serve the public trust,
protect the innocent, uphold the law.
And at film’s end, he
reveals his victory aloud, suggesting that he should be referred to by his human
name, Murphy, and not by his product name, RoboCop.
At least in this case,
humanity has beaten the corporate culture. The "heart" of RoboCop rests in Weller's performance, and in the character's development. He re-discovers his humanity after losing it, and ekes out a victory over OCP, at least temporarily.
RoboCop is a splendidly shot, acted, and designed film. Critic Michael
Wilmington noted in his review that RoboCop has been
"assembled with ferocious, gleeful
expertise, crammed with human cynicism and jolts of energy. In many ways it's
the best action movie of the year."
In New Statesman,
Judith Williamson praised the film because the "pace is zippy, the script is witty and the political satire is acute."
The film tells an
exciting human story, but this is one cinematic effort in which audiences truly
can’t separate the satirical message from the narrative details or content. The
monster in RoboCop inescapably, is one of man’s own making.
Intriguingly, the Frankenstein Monster depicted here is not RoboCop, a half-man, half-machine individual, but rather OCP, an organization
that has been given legal permission to loot the culture, and determine its direction
and health.
As I’ve written before,
science fiction films can lean left or right, and get their points across
effectively. I’ve reviewed films positively that espouse each world view if they do so consistently and with wisdom. RoboCop
absolutely leans left, and worries about what could happen to a decent, moral
culture that allows a money-making organization to become more important than
the community itself.
Today, we seldom get
movies with such sharp -- nay scorching -- social criticism embedded in their
cinematic DNA. Why? Because the same corporations that lobby our politicians
for favors also control the news media and entertainment conglomerates.
So in many ways, we're
living in an iteration of RoboCop's world, getting the movies that big
business want us to see, or thinks we would like.
And that, quite simply,
SUX.
