Dan Harmon is right. A film lazily titled “Robocop” should be a disaster. A forgettable B-film that is best for Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But that’s not what happened, and here we are.
Re-watching the legitimate masterpiece that is Paul Verhoeven’s “Robocop”, I realize it has aged brilliantly, namely for having such profoundly deep and wide ranging satire that was absurdist at the time, where we have watched our country and culture evolve into what it skewered. It’s like we’re doing that brilliant divining of reality that science fiction seems readily capable of doing, but instead of building some prescient notion of utopia, we’re backing into the most asinine and depressing of American dystopias, proving farce to be our reality. That being said, it reminds me of how Idiocracy existed in the era it was born, a moment of pop culture that was both gluttonous, and lacked the self-awareness necessary for recognizing biting satire that hit too close to home. That film was treated with rubber gloves, like it was toxic, by the studios, and deemed both patently ridiculous and derided as wildly unreasonable. But, as it has aged, Idiocracy was born anew to a self-aware world horrified that we may be closer to that image of reality than the utopic notion of the American Dream.
Speaking to the American Dream, much of the United States’ history has been a delightful whitewashing and vanilla-izing of our culture and history, glancing over complex and nuanced aspects of our state building. In that, you’ve a true melange of travesties and complex dualities that people rather ignore, and get back to their atavistic chanting at tribal events like a football game. In that, we need intelligent narratives that build subtext and nuance into the story so that people can learn by osmosis, enjoying media while being educated about the complex realities of modern life. In that, Robocop manages to dredge up all the alternate-realities of the American dream: Greed, power, corruption, ladder climbing at all costs, ultra-violence, and that the sociopaths will be puppet-masters, while all of us “silent majority” fall into the background like non-player characters that just fill the scene; meaningless extras in the background of the “real people that matter”‘s lives: the powerful politician, the shrewd businessman, the angry union leader, or the eventual heroes of our story, still flawed and still human. In Robocop’s case, it’s fascinating that one of the most human characters ends up being the least human, of all the humans in the film. Of course, that’s not some accident, but Robocop never ceases to amaze me in how it reaches certain audiences where all the subtext flies miles over their heads. These American themes of violence, selfishness, entitlement, and even mental illness run through the greatest of American stories: Moby Dick, Invisible Man, Catcher in the Rye, Blood Meridian, etc.
Robocop and The Wire deal in the same bureacratic and infrastructural frameworks for storytelling modern city life. The former ultraviolent satire, ironically appealing to the same audience it is lampooning, and the latter a complex scaffolding that sets alite every aspect of modern city dynamics, politics, and power plays between elected officials, the workers, the citizens, and the criminals. Robocop leans heavier into the mindlessness of consumerism (I’d buy that for a dollar!), and that our plastic society has forcibly removed normal citizenry from being participants in the decline of civilization, vs passive onlookers, preoccupied with our commercials, products, and technology while others create or destroy. The Wire leans heavier into the political structure of a city, whereas Robocop has already assumed the breakdown of governance to corporate ideology, rolling-over for business interested sponsorship dollars to prop up the failing underpinnings of a city. This includes a lack of funds for the Detroit police department, and the ensuing chaos of labor unions fighting for the safety and health of officers that are being gunned down by crooks with military grade weaponry. We see the criminals causing fundamental harm to the city, and we see they’ve been given a long leash to do so as long as the power players’ interests are carried out, reminding us of Lester’s famous “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.”
Robocop, like the Wire, highlights the complex competing interests within a city’s bureaucracy. City politicians vs corporate interests. City budgets vs policing complexity. Policing duties vs union concerns. Protecting citizens vs abiding laws. Amoral power and control vs ethical governance and doing what is right. The Wire deals with criminality in a far more realistic and empathetic way, understanding the complexity in how corrupt governance creates room for criminality to thrive, and that there are shades of grey within that criminality. Robocop had very little depth to the criminality, other than Boddicker who had a modicum of nuance, namely thanks to the stellar performance by Kurtwood Smith.
Lastly, the entirety of these two realities is underpinned by the media, their reactivity, their attempt to peer through transparency to only find opaque black boxes that whittle away at the public’s confidence, feeling of participation, and further isolates the public into a secondary and incidental, impacted aspect of these stories. In fact, the public is so isolated as a non-performative or necessary background character, they are often seen consuming media, stereotypes, tropes, and entertainment as unhealthy junk food, preferring the diversion of consumerism, and the circus of faux reality drama to their own impenetrable and difficult lives of standing in the background of greater political and capitalist forces than they can control, slinking back into a role of a passive and disposable aspect of our two stories and narratives. When journalism cannot penetrate corruption or corrupt systems effectively, we become placated by modern opiates, literally, as well as addiction, vice, and media as saccharine entertainment vs meaningful discourse.
The violence shared between Robocop and The Wire also anchors their similar commentary on the American Dream, that underneath the romanticized notion of the United States is a brutal bloodlust born in “American individualism”, a proxy for narcissistic entitlement. Humans and citizens are casually and callously cast aside, as people step on one another climbing their respective ladders. Everyone’s self interest has overridden the greater good, therefore causing multi-generational instability, whether within a family, a police department, or a corporation. The “individualism” of self-interest begets an amoral and confused populace, leading to inherited violence that is learned and passed on. Both center on the righteous cause of identifying crime, no matter a drug dealer or politician, because if we can eradicate these forms of violence from society, the city can overcome societal and political failings, and focus on building a safe place where people can find stability. Although the violence in Robocop is spectacularly offensive and wildly stylized, the violence in The Wire was often more jarring in its horrific realism, and resulting impact on the players around it. Still, both regard the violence as a visceral symptom of the psychic damage done to the populace due to corrupt & self-interested governance and bureaucracy.
However, the overall abiding themes in both are that corrupt systems corrupt good people, ultimately, and the system is this own entity, almost alive, which is all controlling but broken. In that, the moral person abiding written law and social norms is not only endangering themselves, but exposing themselves as such, standing out in a way that will make them a target. Beyond all the corruption, amoral behavior, ill intent, greed, and seeking of money and power, the good are the broken, a liability for the rest who are playing by the corrupted rules of society. In America, we like to think of these people as noble, and not misfits. The “squeaky wheel gets the grease”, or the notion of the whistleblower honorably and altruistically risking their livelihoods for the greater good. In these worlds, and very possibly the real one we exist in (looking at the current administration’s laundry list of indictments and offenses), the Japanese proverb is better suited: “????????” or, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”