Robocop!
I used to never really get the “80s.”
It just seemed like a lot of cocaine and hair,
but then I saw Robocop, and I saw something
more, through that hair.
I saw an incredible film.
We’ve all heard about its anti-corporate
message, and its ultra-violence.
But let’s dig deeper, put on our film school
hats, and ask how the visual grammar, editing,
and pacing function in Robocop.
Now here’s a list of things I like about
Robocop!
The visual match between Lewis and Murphy.
From the first moment we meet Officer Lewis,
she’s a visual and symbolic match for Murphy:
their hair, their complexion, their build,
and especially their attitude.
They’re equals! Murphy and Lewis are two
peas in a pod.
Fast forward to the scene where Robocop starts
questioning his past, and Lewis confronts
him, we see this shot.
Lewis looks directly into the camera, directly
into Robocop’s visor, as she says “Murphy,
it’s you.”
Because Murphy is looking directly at Lewis,
who is a visual match for him as she fills
the frame, she functions as a mirror.
She is the “it” with which Murphy is identifying.
This is a key moment in Murphy’s quest to
regain his humanity, empathy and identity.
It’s incredibly rare for a male action hero
to have an equal female counterpart.
Especially because she’s acting as a mirror
for Murphy, and not a fetish object.
And does the fact that his mirror image is
a woman mean that Robocop is a trans icon?
Not necessarily, but it’s a reading opened
up by this sequence of shots!
But in any case it’s a miracle in itself
to see a male action hero identifying with
a female peer.
The board room long shot.
Special effects and cyberpunk are cool, but
this seemingly simple, single, long take--which
clocks in at just under a minute--ties the
film’s themes together in one dynamic shot.
From Bob Morton’s overly aggressive, overly
loud corporate jockeying; “Don’t mess
with Jones, man, he’ll make sushi out of
you.”
To Dick Jones describing the friction between
O.C.P. and the C-O-Ps; “They’re union’s
been bitching ever since we took over.
You know, the usual nonsense.”
To the company’s proposed plan for Delta
City which will bring those forces into violent
collision… it’s the kind of long take
that you don’t even notice because it’s
so seamless and natural.
It crams three small scenes into one fluid
shot.
I count about twenty actors, hitting complicated
marks, delivering fast paced corporate dialogue.
And to top it off, we get a sense of space
in the monochromatic, high tech boardroom.
This shot is the beating heart of the film!
Michael Bay would need fifteen different edits,
a bunch of fancy graphics, and as many as
three different crop tops to tie together
a scene like this!
Corporations can’t feel.
One weird little tick that this movie has
is the way that Robocop rattles off bizarrely
insensitive, out of touch advice when confronted
with innocent people, before he’s come to
terms with his identity.
He tells these kids “Stay out of trouble.”
Oh, great advice, robot bro.
Way to vaguely threaten children.
Or look at the way he interfaces with this
woman: “Madam, you have suffered an emotional
shock.
I will notify a crisis center.”
Not exactly the emotional support she needed
in that scenario.
But it’s a perfect analogue for the way
that soulless corporations are simply incapable
of mimicking true humanity.
Compare that to how Robocop speaks when he
actually has his mask off.
“Murphy had a wife and son.
What happened to them?”
We see this today, in even subtler ways, with
how fast food companies try to appropriate
the language of Weird Twitter.
Sure, some people find it cute.
But if you’re familiar with actual Weird
Twitter.
So next time you see a company tweet out a
meme, I hope you read it out loud, in Robocop’s
stiff, goofy voice.
Try it at home, with friends and family!
Every frame a critique of capitalism?
If there’s one shot that perfectly portrays
the in-story relationship between the average
people of Detroit, and the people who hold
the power in Detroit, it’s this one.
And it’s another example of how Verhoven
uses complicated film production techniques
to get across the movie’s complex themes
in striking, simple-to-understand visuals.
By using an attachment called a “split-field
diopter,” the subjects on both the right
and left side of frame remain in focus, even
though Emil--on the right--is way closer to
camera than the gas station attendant, on
the left.
But it’s not just a cool trick.
It also allows Verhoven to frame the attendant
on the left as small and powerless.
He’s trapped behind what looks like a cage,
imprisoned by his job, encased in machinery...
an unwitting agent of capital.
And on the right?
Emil is an imposing figure that takes up more
than half the frame.
He’s a fascist blackshirt, figuratively,
and pretty much literally, too--an agent of
the same corporate culture that imprisons
the gas station attendant.
It only lasts a moment, but what a mind-blowing
shot!
Existential question time: What is a cop?
I think the movie wants to capture what we
HOPE cops are.
What we want cops to be: morally pure, selfless,
heroic.
And time and time again, the movie challenges
that hope.
We see ED-209, who represents the complete
lack of humanity that cops are capable of.
We see it in the collaboration between OCP
executive Dick Jones and the criminals: Bodiker’s
gang basically acts like a private little
SWAT team for Jones, executing his corporate
agenda.
And those same cops who acted as the voice
of reason early on in the movie?…
“I’ll tell you what we should do.
We should strike.”
By the end of act 2, they’re lining up to
blow Robocop away.
Some of them voice their concerns.
“Hey wait a second!”
“He’s a cop, for god’s sake!”
But ultimately they cannot escape their position
as enforcers in an unjust system.
So what is a cop?
Robocop is a cop.
ED-209 is a cop.
Murphy is a cop.
These good cops are cops.
This asshole cop is a cop.
The bad guy gang members are cops.
Overall, the film complicates the idea that
“cops always equal good,” because it understands
that cops are human, and humans are historically
known to abuse power.
What’s in a name?
There’s a really interesting back and forth
in this movie where we see Murphy’s name;
we hear Murphy’s name “Murphy!
It’s you!”
But we also hear Robocop’s name:“There’s
a new guy in town, his name’s Robocop”
and see Robocop’s name.
So is he Murphy or is he Robocop?
Well, he’s both.
There’s a lot of doubles in this film: Murphy
and Lewis; Bodiker and Jones; Detroit and
Delta City; ED-209 and Robocop…
But ultimately, what the movie is saying is:
these distinctions don’t exist the way we
want them to.
And the final line in the movie, “Nice shootin,
son.
What’s your name?” “Murphy.”
Followed by the final ROBOCOP title card,
shove that idea right in our face.
Binary choices make us feel comfy, in control,
and help us organize the universe.
But in reality it’s hardly ever either or.
Robocop is trapped between binaries.
He is Murphy.
But he’s also Robocop.
He exists in a space between human and machine;
between employee of the evil corporation OCP,
and servant of the public good; constantly
navigating his own identity.
Just like you and meeeee!
But seriously, Lewis is a badass.
I would run slow motion across a field to
be wrapped up in Lewis’s arms.
It’s rare you get a well-written female-identifying
character in an action movie, and if this
movie proves anything it’s that IT’S NOT
THAT HARD TO WRITE STRONG LADIES, AND ANYONE’S
WHO FAILED SHOULD BE ASHAMED.
But really, she’s incredibly smart, capable,
funny.
She’s just like the women I see in the real
world that I look up to.
She also doesn’t ‘shed’ her femininity
like many other 80s action heroes… for example:
James Cameron’s female leads, who are his
personal, weird, fetishized ideal of a soldier-mommy.
Those characters communicate to the audience
that “femine” means “weak.”
They imply that, what a woman really needs
to do, is be more like a traditionally masculine
dude.
But not Lewis!
When Lewis sees Robocop, she knows right away
that something is up with him, because she’s
intelligent and doesn’t need a whole sequence
where we see her ‘putting the clues together.’
She knows her partner.
She follows her gut.
She’s as good a cop as anyone else.
Lewis is all lady, all powerful.
I mean, she delivers the final blow after
her body is basically ripped apart because
that’s just what a fighter would do.
Speaking of her body getting ripped apart.
This scene is clearly setting up Lewis to
be the next Robocop.
Murphy even promises her: “They’ll fix
you.
They fix everything.”
A Robocop sequel with Lewis and Murphy as
buddy-cop cyborgs would’ve been amazing!
I love Lewis.
I love their friendship.
I love it all.
The happy ending exists only because the corporation
allows it to.
Here’s a weird thing to ask yourself: who
has true agency in the final climactic scene
of the movie?
Dick Jones is a rich guy with a big gun.
That’s a lot of power.
Robocop is a superhuman robot cop with a bigger
gun.
That’s a lot of power.
And yet, without his hostage, Jones is powerless.
And as long as Directive 4 is in play, Robocop
is powerless.
“My program will not allow me to acta against
an officer of this company.”
In this moment, the CEO of OCP is both the
subject and object of power.
He is the object which is held by Jones in
order to exert power, and he is the subject
who is able to end this standoff simply by
speaking.
By the way, I had to look up what this character's
name was, because I didn’t want to just
call him “The Old Man,” but that is literally
his name in the script, because Robocop is
a movie that’s painfully aware of patriarchy.
Even at the movie’s climax, it’s not Robocop,
with his super machine body and big boy gun,
who holds the power.
If the Old Man does not will it, it cannot
happen.
Robocop kills the bad guy because in that
moment, it serves the Old Man’s agenda.
Which is pretty terrifying, since the Old
Man been running this whole show, and made
all the decisions that led to tons and tons
of people getting killed over the past hour
and 45 minutes of this narrative.
The climactic moment of the movie is not Robocop
shooting Jones.
It’s the Old Man saying “Dick, you’re
fired.”
But Seriously, Is Robocop a Trans Icon?
I mean…
If there’s one person that loves finding
different ways of reading films, it’s me.
So is there a reading of Robocop as a trans
icon?
I think Verhoeven himself would probably say,
hell yeah.
And special thanks to Carmilla Morrell for
her personal and academic insights in this
section.
Verhoeven’s cinematic grammar attempts to
produce a gaze that identifies with women,
instead of merely objectifying women.
We do see characters within the narrative
objectify women, but these acts of objectification
are contextualized to us (the audience) as
ironic, perverse, and absurd.
“And you need lots of stimulation, Bobby.”
“Yes I do.”
We are watching these men watch TV, and we
see them laugh harder than natural, as if
they’re performing that enjoyment.
They cartoonishly perform cis-normative heterosexuality.
The film satirizes gender roles over and over
and over.
“Go ahead, shake his hand.”
“Come here often?”
Showing a violent hierarchy where men aggressively
assert their masculinity on those around them--through
violence and mocking laughter, while holding
big, phallic firearms.
And amid this violent, comic, hyper-masculine
hierarchy, we meet Murphy, a cop who begins
the story desperately trying to perform cis
hetero male identity in order to convince
his family that he’s worthy of the titles
“Husband” and “Father.”
“And you don’t want to disappoint them.”
We see him spin his gun to impress his son,
whose respect Murphy hopes to earn by acting
like the famous tough guy action hero on TV.
But this desperate attempt to claim masculinity
is continually subverted by the narrative.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a duality
between Murphy and his female counterpart,
Lewis, where staring into her face seems to
be a key to reacquiring his own identity.
On top of that, at the end of act 1, when
Murphy gets murdered, he isn’t just killed.
He’s savagely attacked by a pack of men,
who penetrate his body with their long guns.
In fact, if we step back and look at the structure
of Robocop, it’s modeled after classic rape-revenge
movies like “I Spit On Your Grave,” where
the female main character is violated.
“Your ass is mine.”
Then exacts revenge on her attackers, one
after another.
“This woman will soon cut, chop, break,
and burn FIVE MEN, beyond recognition.”
In Murphy’s quest to chase an external ideal
and become the ultimate tough guy cop, he
is transformed, by external forces, into a
cyborg... a hyper-masculine ideal… a form
that the authorities have decided he should
inhabit.
“Well he signed release forms when he joined
the force.
He’s legally dead.
We can pretty much do what we want to.”
Instead of just becoming the “real man”
he thought he wanted to become, he becomes
more than a real man.
His new body is a construction of society’s
view of what Murphy’s ideal gender presentation
“should” be.
He becomes exaggeratedly masculine, as if
he’s been granted his wish, but as part
of a devil’s bargain, where he didn’t
quite get what he expected.
He’s transformed into a bizarre, shadow
version of his desired self.
In fact, he becomes comically and ironically
masculine.
The gun he fetishized earlier as a symbol
of masculinity ends up replacing his genitals.
His massive weapon is a perfect symbol of
masculinity in a society that respects hyper-violence.
As a super-masculine machine, he’s even
got a second phallus: the computer jack that
protrudes from his knuckles.
And yet, neither of these phalluses function
sexually.
They aren’t just non-sexual, but violent
instead of sexual.
Robocop’s lack of conventional genitals
is even emphasized, and played as a gag.
Murphy’s flashbacks also problematize the
masculinity he hopes to achieve.
These flashbacks show Murphy struggling with
his new hyper-masculine identity, culminating
in a visual metaphor where he passes through
a female body.
At the midpoint of the film, Murphy’s goal
changes from the desire to become this hyper-masculine
figure that his son and society wanted him
to be, to answering the question: “Who am
I?”
In the next beat on Robocop’s journey of
self discovery, we see a “WORLD CLASS HUSBAND”
mug on the counter.
But it’s shattered, as if someone has violently
rejected that title, and we never see who
shattered it.
And then we see this photograph from Halloween.
Murphy’s son is in costume, but the parents
are not.
Or are they?
Murphy is performing the role of cis, male,
hetero husband.
That IS his costume.
And floating over his shoulder?
A witch.
A grotesque female form, haunting him.
Only after we see this Polaroid do we see
the Halloween flashback, for the first time.
Murphy’s wife appears to carve a pumpkin.
Except she’s not carving it, she’s tinkering
with it, holding the carving tool like a screwdriver,
as if she is constructing something… constructing
an identity.
Out of a pumpkin!
This foreshadows the way that Robocop tinkers
with his own head at the beginning of act
3, drilling into his own mind, and coming
to terms with the loss of his past married
life.
He’s constructing his identity.
In flashbacks, we Murphy’s wife clearly
upset about something.
“I really have to tell you something.”
Something was wrong with their marriage.
It’s fairly vague in the film, but with
the themes of gender and identity so clear
elsewhere, it’s a fair reading to suggest
that maybe this fight was because of Murphy
exploring their gender or identity.
Maybe he wasn’t being “the Man” she
wanted him to be.
Before Murphy’s death, Bodiker shouts at
him: “Where’s your partner!
Where’s your partner!”
This can have two meanings.
One of course being his cop partner, Lewis.
But the other is his romantic partner.
She is no longer there.
Later, when Murphy is on the operating table,
we see an image of his wife waving “Goodbye!”
This also can have two meanings.
One being that Murphy is dying, and she is
saying goodbye.
Except, this is memory.
So it has already happened in the past.
Maybe this is his wife saying goodbye to him
as their marriage is ending.
Because Murphy has failed at living up to
her hetero-male ideals for him, just as he
failed to do so for his son earlier in the
film.
When the flashback of Murphy’s wife is repeated
at the midpoint, it’s also clearly a different
version of the memory, a different take.
She conspicuously moves her arms in a way
that’s totally different from the other
take, and her tone is softer.
“I really have to tell you something.”
Is this memory corrupted?
Or is Murphy re-writing his memory as a version
where his wife accepts him for who he is?
Then, after cutting back to Robocop’s visor--in
a series of shots that recalls the scene where
Lewis confronted Robocop about his true identity--we
see a memory we haven’t seen before.
“I love you.”
And unlike the Halloween memory, which is
prompted by a photograph, this memory is new
to us, unprompted by sensory input.
This female face fills the frame, mirroring
Robocop’s face.
She says “I love you,” softly and sweetly,
which is a pretty odd thing for a character
to say in a Paul Verhoeven movie, known for
being melodramatic, satirical, and cynical.
If--as this series of shots suggests--she
is Murphy’s mirror, then symbolically Murphy
is saying “I love you” to himself, perhaps
accepting the female identity he’s been
desperately resisting up until this point
in the narrative.
We cut back to Robocop, this masculine robot
now shrouded in darkness.
The next time we cut back to the wife, we--as
Murphy--enter her mind, and pass through her.
This female face--or head, or mind--is a passageway
into something else.
Into an empty home.
A blank slate.
A new beginning.
Then, as Robocop continues through the home,
a man’s face, on a computer screen, asks:
“Hey!
Have you thought it all over?”
Have you interrogated your own identity?
After passing through the compassionate female
face, Robocop smashes this computerized, mechanized
masculine face.
Um…
SYMBOLISM!
So is Robocop simply the story of a cop whose
body is destroyed, and then rebuilt as a machine?
Or is it the story of a person whose marriage
was already falling apart... a person whose
son was already questioning their masculinity...
a person who attempts to become the epitome
of masculinity, and ends up embracing femininity…
a person who navigates their own identity,
while society and corporate America violently
force a hyper-masculine ideal on him… a
person who, after being forced into a constructed,
metal body, rejects the product name and programming
that’s been forced on them… a person who
repeatedly identifies with women?
“It’s you!”
To wrap things up, Carmilla Morrell writes:
“Cinema is very good at expressing universal
ideas, which gender is not.
Since one's own gender is so internal, personal,
dynamic, and often not entirely understandable
or consistent... where transgender viewers
often feel the most seen is in body horror
and sci-fi films about robots and aliens.
Transness on film isn't lingering genital
shots and staring sadly at one's own nude
reflection.
It's processes: it's the horror and abjectness
of wrong-body and the turmoil and excitement
of transformation, it's the physical, mental,
and emotional complexities and contradictions
that can be plumbed much more effectively
by both filmmakers and audiences with symbolic
and allegorical means instead of literal ones.”
And honestly I wouldn’t be so adamant about
this reading if I hadn’t just watched Verhoeven’s
“Basic Instinct,” which is the story of
a woman who literally needs to hide her phallic
object to avoid persecution, because society
doesn’t approve of her personal relationships!
You don’t have to read Robocop this way,
but if Donkey Kong can say “Trans rights!
Okay!”... why not add Robocop to the mix.
Thanks for watching!
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Save Martha, and until next time: STAY OUT
OF TROUBLE.
