Remember Robocop? Not the mostly awful sequels, just that first one. People loved it back in the day. Of course, most people didn’t really get what it was saying. They loved it, but they didn’t appreciate the subtle nuances of the film.
This is understandable. Most people don’t look for hidden subtleties in the massive explosions, buckets of blood and acres of shattered glass found in wholesome modern cinema. It was an action movie, right?
While it can be enjoyed as a straightforward action movie, certain elements of Robocop are so cartoonishly amplified it can’t be seen as anything other than satire. It was violent and over the top, the various scenes often punctuated by clips of news programs and commercials that lampooned American culture, politics and consumerism.
More than satire, it was also prophetic. Robocop predicted the blurry line between the military and an increasingly militarized police. It predicted autonomous robots for use in both military and police. It also predicted the takeover of civil services and governmental functions by for-profit corporations. In the film, this corporation is Omni Consumer Products or OCP.
The hero is a dead cop named Murphy. Due to the fine print in his contract with the corporate-run police of Detroit, OCP can do whatever they like with his body. Taking what’s left of him, mostly his head and upper torso, they turn him into a cyborg dubbed Robocop.
Initially, Robocop is the perfect, emotionless law enforcement drone, comically square and totally bland. As he begins to recover his memories, the movie becomes something of a revenge flick with Robocop going after the gang of thugs that literally took him apart in a barrage of gunfire.
Things take a turn when it is revealed the gang of thugs work for evil executive Dick Jones. He wants crime out of control. How else can he sell his ED-209 machines to the police and the military? ED is like a small dinosaur with machine guns for arms. Robocop is a rival product and an impediment to the executive’s plans.
While never explicitly stated, part of the problem with Robocop is he is still partly human. Unlike ED, Robocop has memories and emotions, no matter how deeply buried. ED would mow down a crowd of protesters without hesitation. Robocop might have second thoughts.
The other problem is Robocop actually works. ED is buggy. He kills an executive during a demo for OCP. But Jones doesn’t care. OCP had a contract ready to supply the government with parts and maintenance on ED drones for the next decade. Jones growls to Robocop’s creator, “Who cares it if works?”
So, we have a company deliberately allowing social conditions to worsen, profiting from war, creating inferior products they can patch and upgrade for a price, treating people as disposable assets, even killing people, all in the name of the almighty dollar. Good thing our government regulates corporations! What’s that you say? Deregulation is the only way to ensure profits for the corporate masters? Oh dear.
I’m sorry, I thought Robocop was supposed to be fiction, a dystopian near-future warning— not a road map of where our society should be going. Of course, I did say it was prophetic.
