As a child, it’s your parents’ responsibility to determine what’s best for you. To protect you from any negative influences from the world around you. It’s one of the most agreed positions that parents should exercise caution and forward-thinking when determining what they should and shouldn’t expose their children to. This applies to both the real world and fiction. I guess that’s why it often comes as such a surprise to people when I say that my earliest film-viewing memory comes from when I was about three years old and my parents let me watch RoboCop (1987).
I was born in the late eighties and the home video explosion meant that my parents had access to all sorts of films. I didn’t get to see all of them, but there were plenty stashed around the house (When I was a bit older and was snooping through cupboards I came across The Exorcist 3 (1990), Carrie (1976), and The Exorcist (1973) which, at the time, wasn’t available on home video as it had been refused a BBFC certificate). I don’t recall the specifics of it, but my Dad borrowed RoboCop from one of his workmates and somehow I wound up watching it. The most likely situation is that I refused to go to bed or claimed I couldn’t sleep, so they let me stay up and watch it with them. Probably under the assumption I would find it too much or not pay attention and doze off on the sofa. I remember my Mum trying this method when I was a bit older, she told my Dad ‘Oh, just let him watch it [Predator (1987)] he’ll get scared and go to bed.’ I didn’t. Irrespective of the journey, the destination was a three-year-old boy watching one of the most hyper-violent mainstream films of that era.
I loved every fucking minute of it.
Everything about RoboCop is hyper. It’s hyper-violent. Hyper-real. Hyper-stylish. And, most importantly, hyper-cool. It’s no wonder that three-year-old me fell in love with it. The sheer sensory overload I must have experienced watching it at that age switched something in my brain and I became obsessed with the film. Watching it over and over, mimicking elements of Peter Weller’s physical performance. To this day, whenever the subject of RoboCop comes up, my mother recounts how I used to be able to do the walk perfectly. Despite this, I don’t recall remembering how violent the film was at the time of watching. None of it affected me. I didn’t feel shaken, scared, or excited by it. All I remember is the robot with the cool walk who could spin his gun on his finger. It was a sad day for me when Dad had to take the film back to his friend. It opened my eyes to what visual entertainment could be, and not just cartoons at 3 pm on a weekday.
I didn’t see RoboCop again until I was ten years old. I had some spare pocket money and I wanted to buy The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) on VHS (DVD was still a long way off!). As we walked through the door, I spotted, right next to The Muppet Christmas Carol, on the shelf, RoboCop. It felt like fate. I hadn’t been able to see the film for about seven years and here it was, right next to the film I wanted to buy. The machinations of the ten-year-old mind. After a brief bit of resistance from my mother, she brought me the film. She even knew the woman who was working behind the counter at the time, and the woman made it clear she thought it was disgusting that my mother was buying me the film. Luckily, my mother didn’t really care.
It was this second experience of RoboCop when I realised just how violent the film was. I had seen a lot of action films by this point and I had a greater understanding of screen violence and how it worked (A cinematic education consisting of Canon films helped with that, but more about that in another post). It’s important to remember that, at this point, the film was still heavily cut for home viewing. The Director of the BBFC was under a lot of pressure to meet the strict guidelines issued by the Home Office at the time and would make cuts to films to ensure they met these guidelines. Despite this, RoboCop remained one of the most violent experiences I had seen up until that point in my film-watching experience. This time, I felt every impact as they blasted Alex Murphy apart. I felt it when Alex Murphy was almost torn apart by the ED-209. I especially felt it when Murphy blew the would-be rapist’s dick off (I’m not saying I related to the would-be rapist, but I certainly related the pain associated with one’s dick and balls). This was a film that didn’t shy away from violence. It revelled in it. You were expected to feel Murphy’s pain in a bid to help you sympathise with him and his plight through the rest of the film. For the first time when watching a film, I understood this. At this point in my cinematic education, I hadn’t seen many other Paul Verhoeven films and didn’t understand the concept of a director’s voice. I had no idea that hyper-stylised, hyper-violence was Paul Verhoeven’s thing. That would come much later when I realised that RoboCop, Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997) were all directed by the same man. Regardless of this, my second experience of RoboCop was a significantly different experience from the first. If my first experience was cool, this one was pain. Something clicked subconsciously and for the first time, I realised that movies could have more than one watching experience. We now know this as subtext, and whilst the violence in RoboCop clearly isn’t its subtext, this realisation opened my eyes and expanded my viewing experience.
Interesting side-note about Paul Verhoeven films, around this same time my mother had recorded Showgirls (1995) for me off of Sky Movies without fully understanding what it was (I didn’t tell her what film I wanted to record, just gave her a time and a channel). When she caught me watching it, she went absolutely berserk. It would appear that my mother’s liberal views on-screen violence did not extend to nudity and sex.
After the PlayStation 2 was released and my viewing habits transitioned to DVDs instead of VHS, RoboCop fell off my radar. I had reached a point in my life where I found asking my mother to go and buy films I wasn’t old enough to buy a bit embarrassing. It probably didn’t help that I could pass for 18 from about the age of 16 and so bought a lot of them myself. As soon as I found a copy of RoboCop on DVD, I snapped it up. One of the benefits of releasing a film on a new media was that it could be resubmitted to the BBFC for reclassification, and the BBFC guidelines had been significantly relaxed by this point. RoboCop on DVD was like an entirely different film. The image was crisp and clear, the sound had been remastered for surround sound, and most importantly, all the biting satire and violence was represented on screen, reinstated by a far more liberal BBFC. By this time I was also studying film studies and had a proper understanding of semiotics and subtext.
Needless to say, my third experience of RoboCop was another eye-opening experience. My first experience revealed how cool RoboCop and action/sci-fi cinema in general are. My second, how violent it is. My third experience brought into focus just how funny RoboCop is. And it is. It’s really funny. When you understand capitalism, Marxism, satire, and semiotics, RoboCop becomes quite possibly one of the funniest dark comedies of the era, wrapped up in hyper-violence. And this was always the intention. If you watch Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us episode about RoboCop, you hear writers Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner discuss their joy when the test audiences found it funny.
In her excellent book, Cyborg Cinema, Sue Short tries to place the entire RoboCop series (not the remake, that wasn’t out at the time of publication) into a Marxist cinema framework. This is far too straightforward an attempt to dissect RoboCop and its messages. Realistically, trying to put a film made by a minor Hollywood studio (and at the time Orion was one of the biggest minors) into a Marxist framework is never going to work. You can’t try and break a system that provides for you. You can, however, make fun of that system and in doing so highlight the potential dangers within. This is where, in my opinion, RoboCop succeeds the most.
Rather than warn against the dangers of capitalism and offer a revolutionary alternative within its story (although it is worth noting that Murphy does join the revolution in RoboCop 3 (1993)), RoboCop offers a stark look at the dangers of privatisatising public services and corporate America overreaching its bounds to satisfy its greed. RoboCop is not a film framed in Marxist theory. RoboCop is a post-modern film. Reflected in its central and sub-plots, the film revolves around the destruction of the old, or the modern, and replacing it with the new, sleek, and shiny vision for the future. We see this not only in the design of the new, metal Murphy after he’s been destroyed by Clarence Boddicker and his criminal gang, but also in the ultimate goal of OCP to tear down the city of old Detroit and replace it with Delta City. The choice of Detroit as the setting should come as no surprise, not only is it reflective of crime statistics at the time (crime in Detroit was on an upward trend at this time, peaking in 1991), most likely a result of the destruction of the dismantling of Detroit’s automotive industry. This dismantling of the production line model of car factories is inherently post-modern in itself. A smaller, more connected world that allowed American capitalism to boom by shipping jobs overseas where labour was cheaper. RoboCop both examines and pokes fun at this as the global conglomerate that is OCP intends to destroy the city of old and all it represents about modern America and replace it with the sleek, glass skyscrapers of the future in Delta City (delta itself commonly means change).
The role of the Police in RoboCop equally lends itself to the post-modern reading. In Short’s Marxist analysis, she believes that the Police are impossible to fit into the framework because they are arm of the state, even if they plan to go on strike. But, when reframed in the post-modern context, the Police can easily represent the working classes of Detroit. Recently privatised by OCP and starved of funds, the Detroit Police Department are threatening to go on strike to secure their jobs and stop the murders of their colleagues caused by poor funding, understaffing, and faulty equipment. OCP plans to provoke this strike to justify replacing the Police with their own private, automated security system - the ED209. The gloriously violent sequence in which Mr. Kinney is torn apart by the ED209, rendering it useless for the role demonstrates the film’s willingness to poke fun at automation, which is the greatest threat to job security in the modern world. This failure prompts the creation of the RoboCop by Bob Morton, who understands that there needs to be a human element to the machine to ensure quality. However, Morton is no saint, he requires the human element to be stripped of everything personal and only the Police element remains. The argument here is that there is no compassionate element to global capitalism and it instead requires us to be reduced to nothing but our job identity. This sentiment is beautifully illustrated the first time Murphy goes on patrol as RoboCop.
During this sequence, we are shown Murphy’s intervention in three very different crimes. Upon first viewing this sequence, I found the way Murphy bent the thief’s gun barrel during the store robbery cool. I was too young to understand rape, but it was cool to see someone shot in the dick. In the final sequence, Murphy busts through a wall to capture the hostage taker and save the Mayor. This sequence is so fucking cool and establishes Murphy as the ultimate crime-fighting tool. He can do anything the Police can do and more, with an efficiency they don’t have. And that’s the problem. Murphy is a tool, his sole responsibility is to stop crime. Like any machine designed to fulfil a specific task, Murphy possesses none of the human traits that a job like policing requires. Whilst stopping the store robbery, Murphy pays no mind to the cost of the damage he causes during his intervention. It may have been more financially prudent for the store owners if they had let the thief escape with the money in the safe (it’s not a very big safe after all). When intervening in the hostage situation, Murphy undermines the experienced Lt. Hedgecock, who is leading the SWAT team and the hostage negotiations, and punches through the wall to get to the hostage taker. There is no regard for the lives of the Mayor or any of the other hostages. The hostage taker lets rip with his gun as he’s dragged through the wall. We don’t see if he injures anyone. It doesn’t matter if he does. Murphy has done what he was designed to do. He’s eliminated the threat.
Possibly the most telling example from this sequence, however, is the attempted rape scene. Once you look past the inherent humour and poetic justice of a rapist being shot in the dick, Murphy’s reaction to the distraught woman is quite chilling. In the moments after his intervention, when the woman is at her most vulnerable, the moment when a human Police Officer would take the time to comfort the woman and make her feel safe, Murphy coldly states “Madam, you have suffered an emotional shock. I will notify a rape crisis centre.” And then he’s off to the next crime. The next figure. The next number. Despite having the human element that Bob Morton believes is necessary to make the perfect cyborg cop, Murphy displays no human traits during his first forays as RoboCop.
Not that any of this matters to OCP. Murphy stops the crime and clears the way for Delta City. The rate at which Police Officers are dying, they can recreate RoboCop as many times as they require. The replacement of working-class roles with more white-collar jobs is another facet of post-modernism. As economies evolve and jobs are outsourced, this replacement seems almost inevitable. We’ve seen it increasingly in Western economies since the 1980s. OCP represents the zenith of this, the ultimate representation of global capitalism, where one vertically integrated company controls everything. Omni, after all, means all. RoboCop even crushes the modernist tradition of clearly defined heroes and villains. When notorious cop-killer and bank robber, Clarence Boddicker (the man who murdered Murphy), arrives at OCP in a suit and is offered the keys to the crime kingdom that will exist during the construction of Delta City, it further blurs the line between good and evil.
I may not have developed this deep appreciation for RoboCop’s themes and ideas had it not left an indelible mark on me at such a young age. Like an onion, it’s a film that reveals more each time I revisit it. The same can’t be said of the sequels or the remake, which I must briefly touch up here. I do this because whilst I may believe the sequels and remake are nowhere near as nuanced or well thought out as the original 1987 film, I do believe each has its merits. I will confidently say that there is more good in the RoboCop franchise than bad and that even the much-maligned RoboCop 3 has likeable elements. Tom Noonan continues his reputation as one of the creepiest actors in Hollywood, starring as drug dealer Kane in RoboCop 2 (1990). RoboCop 2 doesn’t shy away from the grit and violence of the original either, but its comedy comes from a place of screwball as opposed to satire. When the newly appointed executive at OCP re-programmes Murphy in a bid to make him obsolete so that her own RoboCop 2 plans can accelerate offers some moments of humour, but nothing as dark or twisted as the original. Seeing Murphy play chicken with Kane on a motorcycle may appear funny, but it doesn’t feel right. The film also fails to capitalise on one of the biggest points it raises - the large corporations feel no obligation to take responsibility when they cause disasters - instead hoping that the audience will be happy with the traditional sequel fodder of bigger, tougher bad guys fighting the hero. By the time we get to RoboCop 3, the franchise has settled into the domain of toys. I had the RoboCop figurine with the attachable jetpack, and let’s be realistic, there’s no way a RoboCop toy should be marketable to children (not that my parents seemed to care). The film bets the house on pushing the humour and pulling back on the violence. It’s not a great movie, especially compared to the first two, but there are moments of fun to be found throughout and with Director Fred Dekker’s history-making films such as The Monster Squad (1987) and Night of the Creeps (1986) this should come as no surprise. There are hidden gems in the casting of John Castle and Rip Torn, who both know exactly what movie they’re in and play it accordingly (John Castle delivering “Well, if we’d let him live, we’d have had to have paid him.” About the death of his informant Coontz, elicits a proper laugh from me each time). It’s no coincidence in my mind that the two sequels pull back on the satire of post-modern America because they are directed by American filmmakers. The eyes of a European filmmaker like the Dutch Paul Verhoeven would be far more critical of the American conglomerates and their approach to capitalism, especially after his experience making his first American film, Flesh + Blood (1985). An experience where he allegedly proclaim that the American production company, Orion, was trying to ‘fuck his movie.’
The remake RoboCop (2014) tries to pull back to many of the criticisms the first film had, most obviously Omnicorp rebuilds Murphy as a cyborg in China before shipping him back to Detroit. It also tries to balance the ideas of corporate control and humanity by having Murphy remember everything from the very start of his journey, but Omnicorp can intervene and force him to fight crimes they want him to fight. Samuel L. Jackson makes a brilliant, but far too brief appearance as a Fox News-style TV host who pushes conspiracy theories, but nothing comes of it. Ultimately, RoboCop (2014) tries to spin too many plates and it never really develops any of its ideas. There’s a good movie in there, but it’s hampered by its PG-13 rating and inability to truly let loose. It does include an incredible use of the track ‘Hocus Pocus’ by the band Focus during the field test sequence.
RoboCop means a lot of things to a lot of people and the release of a new video game based on the IP will only serve to introduce the character to yet another audience. For me, it will always be the film that a slightly hyperactive three-year-old boy found fucking cool. This was one of three films that laid the foundations of who I am today. The other two? There’ll be another article about them.
References:
The Movies That Made Us (RoboCop) - Netflix Show.
Science Fiction Film - J.P Telotte (I haven’t quoted it in this text, but there’s an excellent essay about RoboCop in this book).