One of the few pleasant things about getting older is
finding that some entertainment grows up with you. Re-watching a film that you
haven’t seen since childhood and discovering layers of sub-text and irony that
were invisible to you as a child is a wonderfully happy surprise. That’s my experience with many of the films
of the 80s, but especially today’s entry, Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 action/satire Robocop.
My eight year old self understood RoboCop to be a film about a cop who became a Robocop and shot a
bunch of bad guys before having a sweet robo-fight with a giant scary robot in
the end. That’s essentially correct, but
RoboCop is also a dark comedy about
the corporatization of America as well as a sly satire on movie violence
itself.
Robocop is set in
a near future Detroit that is collapsing under the weight of economic
depression and skyrocketing crime. In desperation the government has turned
over control of the city’s police department to giant evil corporation Omni
Consumer Products. The crime problem is so bad, and OCP has mismanaged the
police department to the point that the police officers are contemplating a
strike. Desperate to do something to take a bite out of crime without dealing
with pesky police officers, OCP rushes a bunch of crazy robots into production,
like ED 209 here:
That scene shows off a lot of what is great about RoboCop- note the total disregard for
human life by the corporate types, the over the top violence of the executive
getting shot up, and the extreme dark humor of the whole scene. The older that
I get the funnier this movie gets, which probably reveals me for the horrible
person I am.
After the failure of the first robot, a villainous OCP
executive hatches a plan to build the perfect police-bot by taking the brain of
recently murdered Officer Murphy (Peter Weller of Buckaroo Bonzai fame) and putting it in a badass robot body. Murphy
is the perfect cop at first, but eventually he begins to remember his past and
goes on a quest to regain his identity and take vengeance on his murderers.
All of that serious business (IDENTITY! VENGEANCE!) is undercut
throughout the film with a consistent dark comic tone, letting us know that
nothing is supposed to be taken too seriously. This is especially apparent in
the frequent looks we get at TV shows and commercials in this society.
Verhoeven would use this trick of giving us information about what makes a
world tick through a look at its news and entertainment ten years later in Starship Troopers (a film that shares a
lot of action/comedy DNA with RoboCop)
I don’t even remember those TV sequences from when I was a
kid, much less any of the other dark comic subtext this movie has. It’s pretty
much the gift that keeps on giving. So if you have a kid who is about ten years
old (and you are horribly irresponsible I guess) make sure to sit them down in
front of RoboCop. They’ll thank you
in fifteen years or so.
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