I’d watched RoboCop once before, when I was in college and found myself on a bizarre Paul Verhoeven kick. I’m certain that I watched all of his American films at the time and several of his Dutch movies as well. Thinking back on it, though, I don’t really know why I worked my way through much of the director’s oeuvre, as there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the language or style of his filmmaking. In fact, I can barely remember most of the movies I saw now. Nevertheless, I remembered thinking that RoboCop was pretty good; I recalled it being very violent, yes, but also possibly a satire of the corporatization and militarization of law enforcement.
At the time of this writing, America has witnessed at least 10 days’ of protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while both Floyd and bystanders – who were filming the incident! – pled with him to stop. Floyd died as a result; he was murdered. This incident sparked a nationwide movement demanding justice for the many, many black men and women whose lives have been destroyed by racist policing, accountability for the murderers, and a massive change in the way law enforcement is performed in this country. It’s the biggest show of support for these issues probably in the entirety of this country’s history.
I wondered, in light of this, how RoboCop would read today. Given the prevalence of and reliance on violence as a first resort by police officers, would the movie skillfully call attention to this long-standing injustice, or would it instead read as an uncritical celebration of the use of force?
Perhaps this anecdote will help answer that question: reading about the movie after watching it, I learned that Verhoeven and the movie’s producers worried about whether police officers would recoil at the violence in the movie, thinking they would find it a distasteful and inaccurate representation of their profession. You can probably see where this is going already. As it turns out, at test screenings cops loved the movie – in particular, a scene where the title character batters a suspect by throwing him through a series of thick windows while simultaneously reciting his Miranda rights. The page where I read this information attributed this response as wish-fulfillment for police officers, who I guess dream of violently assaulting suspects like dogs dream of chasing rabbits.
The short answer, then, is that the overall message of RoboCop is valorization of the police and certainly a complete embrace of violence as a problem-solving tool. The ceaseless barrage of bullets from all sides does come across as cartoonish at times, so over the top that it feels like children pretending to be shooting at one another; as a matter of fact, there are so many times where people get dealt what ought to be killing blows but nevertheless stumble back to their feet. I half-expected somebody to whine, “No fair! You’re dead! I got you!” (Actually, come to think of it, that does in fact happen in the movie, albeit after the seemingly murdered officer Alex Murphy is reborn as the cyborg menace RoboCop.)
That said, that over-the-top aspect of the violence is also part of the problem with the movie. There was a time when I reveled in gore and thrilled at the most macabre methods of murder the silver screen could offer; I was a child then. My sentiments toward depiction of violence on-screen have hardened with time and now the slew of corpses left in the hero’s wake don’t strike me as particularly virtuous—particularly when also viewed through a contemporary lens, one in which the violence of actual police officers is at last being taken seriously.
There is an element of satire in the film, I suppose, in that the police force of Detroit in an unspecified future has been privatized by a corporation called OCP which cares about its bottom line more than it does the citizenry. Or rather, there is one specific person at the company who represents this greed-above-all philosophy. This man introduces a law enforcement robot near the beginning of the film which malfunctions and kills a flunky. That’s the cost of doing business. RoboCop is introduced as an alternative to the full-fledged robot by a second company man who is no less an asshole than the first, but is supposed to be seen as a good guy, I guess, because of the fact that he cared enough to salvage Murphy’s near-lifeless body after a run-in with a gang of cop killing hooligans and transform him into the cyborg bobby he eventually becomes.
Murphy, later RoboCop, is presented as a “good cop”, indeed the prototypical good cop. I recalled hearing, and reading about the movie after this latest viewing confirmed it, that Murphy is supposed to be a sort of Christ figure. When he is cornered by the aforementioned cop killers, he gets his hand shot off (crucifixion!) and receives a gunshot to the head (the crown of thorns!) before later being resurrected as RoboCop. All of this is an extremely tenuous connection to begin with, but the question I’m left with is: why? What purpose does that serve? Murphy is the blandest of leading characters, with a personality only vaguely hinted at. The only humanizing thing about him is literally the fact that he has a name. It’s hard not to read the Christ “symbolism” as just saying that cops generally are Christ-like.
There are no “bad cops” in the movie. The only bad guy is the guy in the suit upstairs, and of course the criminals out on the street. All criminals in future Detroit are caricatures themselves, making it very easy to root for RoboCop. He’s all good all the time! Aside from a very brief image of RoboCop being swarmed by happy schoolchildren excited to see the mechanical Frankenstein, there is no other indication that he is involved with the public beyond the guns-blazing shoot-outs he constantly has with wild-eyed bomb-makers and salivating rapists. Is RoboCop stopping speeders, people with a “busted tail light”? Though he ultimately comes for the OCP exec who is (spoiler) inexplicably bankrolling the gang of cop killers, there’s no indication that RoboCop is otherwise investigating white collar crimes. At the same time, the movie doesn’t draw attention to that. If he can’t shoot at it a thousand times with a handgun, it’s a problem too big for RoboCop to handle.
So it goes. RoboCop is ruled by a strict code: (1) Serve the public trust, (2) Protect the innocent, and (3) Uphold the law. It’s striking to me that the movie never questions whether RoboCop, or police generally, actually abide by this code. Rather, the movie’s message seems instead to be about how these rules constrain police from doing the kind of bad-ass vigilantism they’d prefer to be doing, busting skulls and shooting guys at random. The climax of the movie hinges on RoboCop being given permission to ignore his programming for the sake of blasting a guy out of a skyscraper window and watching him scream as he falls to the pavement below. Very cool! Due process is for suckers!
I read that Verhoeven, like many directors before him, initially turned down the movie on the thinking that it was a mindless action flick and little else. He was eventually convinced that the humanity of Murphy makes it something more. Hard disagree from me. Murphy is barely a person. The fact that he slowly remembers things from his life before the suit—little, pointless things with no emotional impact whatsoever—does not automatically create pathos. In any case, that tiny smudge of humanness is far overshadowed by the movie’s uncritical view of police officers as Saviors and its normalization of extreme violence as something to aspire to.
I know, I know. “It was a different time, you can’t judge this movie by today’s standards”, “this is SJW PC B.S.”, wocka wocka wocka. I get it. It was a different time, that’s for sure. And in a different time, I thought this movie was pretty good.
That time has passed.