About half an hour into RoboCop, hotshot policemen Murphy has his hand blown off by a shot gun. Blood spurts into the air like a hose. The next shot removes his entire arm, before a gang of drug dealers shoot him to pieces. If you want to shock your audience by killing off your lead (for now), that’s how to do it.
Even by the standards of 1980s action cinema, RoboCop is extraordinarily bloody. This is largely thanks to the work of special effects guru Rob Bottin, known for his work on The Thing, and who would later collaborate with RoboCop director Paul Verhoeven on Total Recall. Following hot on the heels of bullet-fests like Rambo and Predator, Verhoeven upped the ante to preposterous levels; compared to the drab fare of modern action films, the gore is positively phantasmagorical. And yet, it is the 2014 remake of RoboCop which boasts the higher body count. Even the average Marvel film probably counts more dead bad guys. Watching RoboCop today, one is struck by how sanitised violence has become in action cinema.
Verhoeven’s approach to violence has more in common with Quentin Tarantino than Michael Bay, or even Paul Greengrass. Somehow, he manages to make us laugh – even as we flinch. In RoboCop, the villain Dick Jones demonstrates the capabilities of his military-grade robot ED-209 to a room full of businessmen. The test is a disaster: the robot malfunctions and unleashes a hail of machine-gun fire on a corporate exec. We’re horrified, but can’t help chuckling at the robot’s absurdly disproportionate response, unloading onto the man’s body until he has been cut to ribbons. Kubrick showed us the potentially horrific implications of malfunctioning AI, but Verhoeven makes it out to be absurd. It’s like that voice at the self-checkout telling you to “remove item from bagging area” again and again – even though you barely touched the thing.
And yet the scene is still repulsive, as are so many gory moments in the film. Verhoeven does not gloss over the deaths of any of the bad guys, showing in gory detail the damage inflicted on a human body by firearms. It’s worth noting here that Verhoeven originally threw the script away in disgust, until his wife convinced him there was more to the story than a vulgar shoot-em-up. This is not action for excitement’s sake. By emphasising the gore, RoboCop causes us to question the very practice of consuming violence as entertainment.
The film is intercut with lurid newsreels of a violent world, from civil war in Mexico to a malfunctioning space laser that sets California ablaze, killing two ex-presidents. The story starts to feel like it’s part of the same broadcast, roping the audience into the spectacle. Zany adverts for nuclear war-based family boardgames lead us to laugh at the savage mores of neo-Detroit, before we realise the film is holding up a mirror to our own society. By calling attention to our insatiable appetite for violent mass media, Verhoeven reveals the audience’s complicity in these images.
Commenting on the prevalence of violence in the film noir of the 1940s, Siegfried Kracauer commented that most such pictures did not require a pretext for the introduction of such sadistic horrors. The audience desires to vicariously participate in the cruelty being inflicted onscreen; this is especially prevalent in action cinema – we all imagine ourselves as the hero gunning down bad guys. Kracauer argued that these films reflected the anxiety pervading American society that we could no longer trust the people around us. The response to this was sadism, which Kracauer warned could provide the emotional readiness for fascism.
Starship Troopers sees Verhoeven make these latent tendencies within American society explicit, by linking platoon-film tropes with Riefenstahl’s fascist iconography. But there are elements of this RoboCop, which initially places the audience on the side of police brutality. RoboCop himself is a caricature of disproportionate force, throwing a would-be robber into a glass cabinet instead of arresting him. Where Starship Troopers highlights the link between filmmaking and propaganda, RoboCop shows the link between violence on screen and in society and asks – why do you want to see criminals blown away? Like Kracauer, Verhoeven realised that anxiety had spread through society, encouraged by the surge in violent crime in the 1970s and 80s.
On a satirical level RoboCop holds up remarkably well for an action film over 20 years old. Private corporations might not be using robots to patrol the streets, but policing is sometimes outsourced to companies like Palantir, with vast data surveillance resources at their disposal. The besuited business goons of the 1980s have been replaced by Silicon Valley bros – one can easily imagine Elon Musk substituting in for main antagonist Dick Jones. Questions remain over the use of AI in policing, especially over whether it could reinforce existing racial prejudices.
Discussing all these points about RoboCop has almost become cliché in itself, to the point where we forget how fun a film it is (vicarious sadism notwithstanding). The performances are deliciously cartoonish in a way rarely seen today, and it features one of the all-time great bad-guy deaths. Rather than undermine any comment about the voyeurism of action cinema, this allows RoboCop to make it’s point more clearly.. Today’s mostly dour action fare is the opposite – faux earnestness in films which only serve to vindicate our violent fantasies.
Rewatching RoboCop feels like welcome relief in a genre which at once takes itself too seriously and has nothing to say. I’d buy THAT for a dollar.
Mark It Zero 