RoboCop (Orion Pictures, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a couple of movies “live” on Turner Classic Movies – including one, RoboCop, from 1987. It still strikes me to hear a film described as “classic” when I was already alive during its initial release, especially a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey (my choice for the greatest film ever made; with the possible exception of Citizen Kane) which I actually saw ini a theatre during its initial release. My husband Charles had mentioned the last time we watched the film They Live that it was one of three movies made and set during the late 1980’s that he hadn’t seen at the time, and he still hasn’t seen RoboCop and the third one he mentioned, Steven Spielberg’s The Goonies (Richard Donner was the actual director, but Spielberg wrote the original story and got an executive producer and “presented by” credit), he hadn’t seen since its initial theatrical release and I’ve still not seen it at all. I wish he’d been home to watch RoboCop with me because it turned out to be a quite different film from what I’d always assumed it was. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz in his introduction, RoboCop came about as a result of co-writer Edward Neumeier as an assistant on the film Blade Runner – also a movie about a sinister capitalist firm creating robots that turn on their creators. He and his script collaborator, Michael Miner, intended RoboCop (that’s how the title is spelled in the opening credits: one word but with a capital letter in the middle the way computer programs are generally named, or at least were then) as a political satire on the Reagan administration and in particular the exaltation of “the Market,” the privatization of services that had previously been provided by the government, the carefully nurtured fear of crime among the general public and the resulting political support for vigilante-style law enforcement and an impatience with Constitutional protections and the rights of due process.

But when the script was sent to director Paul Verhoeven (a Dutch émigré who hadn’t made aq film in the U.S. until this one), he rejected it twice because he didn’t like the politics. Verhoeven read the script as an endorsement of vigilante crime-fighting and privatization, and it wasn’t until Verhoeven’s wife read the script herself and urged him to take another look at it that he reversed himself and agreed to direct the film. The irony was that RoboCop became a huge hit in Reaganite America because millions of moviegoers read it the way Verhoeven had read it at first: as an endorsement of vigilante justice and an attack on the whole notion of due process. It spawned two sequelae as well as a remake in 2014,and for years the image of its helmeted hero became a cultural icon. The title even got referenced in a Fanfare magazine review of a recording of Verdi’s opera Otello featuring Luciano Pavarotti, whose light, lyrical voice was all wrong for the part but was boosted by the recording engineers to become, as the Fanfare critic put it, “RobOtello.”

RoboCop takes place in the near future in Detroit, where a super-corporation called Omni Consumer Products (OCP) had won a contract with the city to take over its police department and run it as a for-profit business. As I’ve written before, it’s impossible for a private company to provide public services for less money than the government and still make a profit without doing one of two things – either reduce the pay of the workers or lower the quality of the services – and in real-world privatizations they usually do both. OCP’s CEO, referred to only as “The Old Man” (Daniel O’Herlihy, 40 years after his performance as Macduff in the Orson Welles Macbeth, another story about murderous thugs taking over a community and doing just about anything to hold on to power), appoints his second-in-command, Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), to develop the perfect crime-fighting robot, ED-209. Unfortunately, the first test of ED-209 is a disaster; when Jones tells one of the staff members to hold a gun on ED-209 in a threatening manner, the robot orders the “vonulteer” to drop the gun. He does so, but since they’re in a carpeted room the gun makes no sound when he drops it, so the robot blasts away at the poor guy and kills him. It reminded me of the scene in Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler parody The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel, the Fuhi of Ptomania, tests a new suit of body armor which is supposed to stop all bullets. When the man falls down dead, Hynkel casually and expressionlessly says, “Far from perfect.”

Another OCP executive, Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), offers an alternative: RoboCop, a combined human and robot which he wants to build on the chassis of a mortally wounded police officer who won’t be able to say no when he’s operated on to turn him into a cyborg. The mortally wounded officer is Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), who has just been reassigned from the South Side to the much nastier West Side and teamed up with a new partner, policewoman Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen). There’s the expected gamesmanship between the macho Murphy and the woman he’s been assigned to work with, including arguments over who gets to drive the patrol car. All that becomes academic when Murphy is ambushed by a gang led by super-villain Clarence Boddicker (Kirkwood Smith), who shoots him and leaves him for dead after his gang members torture him. Murphy is reconstructed as RoboCop, and besides some of the traveling shots that have become de rigueur in films about super-surgeries since John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), in which we get a point of-view shot from the patient’s eyes as he’s wheeled into the O.R. (an image I thought of when I was going through open-heart surgery myself and recall looking up at the ceiling watching the lights go by), there’s a grimly funny sequence in which one of the doctors wants to save Murphy’s left arm, which has survived the experience intact and in working order. Theyter doctor overrules him and says all four limbs have to go to be replaced by the robotic ones.

RoboCop is programmed with three directives – serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law (obviously writers Neumeier and Miner were thinking of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics here) plus a fourth directive which is classified. Otherwise RoboCop has no independent consciousness, and no memory of his past life, including a wife and son who he was living with before his near-fatal injury and have since moved out of town. The idea behind building RoboCop as a human-robot hybrid is so the creature will have some human consciousness and not make the mistake ED-209 did, but it works too well: RoboCop has a dream in which he relives the attack on him by Boddicker and his gang, and that triggers his desire to recover his own memories of his past existence, including the home where he used to live with his wife and son. In fact, the Frankenstein-like sequences in which RoboCop is trying to confront his dual nature and realize who and what he really is are the best parts of the film, surprisingly moving portions of what is otherwise a pretty nonstop action movie filled with extreme violence. Meanwhile,.the success of RoboCop and the failure of ED-209 has triggered a power struggle within OCP between Jones and Morton; at one point Morton gets the key to the higher-status executive washroom in a scene cribbed from Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Apartment – and he sets his sights on the number two position Jones already holds. Jones and Morton both have skeletons in their closets: Jones has cut a secret deal with Boddicker to control the gambling, prostitution and other commercial vices that will come when OCP goes through with its plan to demolish the entire city of Detroit and build a new version, “Delta City,” in its place, while Morton has a fondness for cocaine and hookers.

Jones sends a hit squad, including an ED-209, to take out Morton during one of his nighttime cavorts with two “ladies of the evening” off of whose chests he’s snorting coke. RoboCop learns that Jones is behind Morton’s murder and even records him confessing to it, but can’t do anything about it because that secret, ciassifled fourth directive prevents him from arresting any executive with OCP and immobilizes him if he tries. Jones has ED-209 attack RoboCop, who is nursed to health by Officer Lewis (ya remember Officer Lewis?). At one point he tells Lewis, “You’re not going to like what you’re going to see,” and I was expecting his face to be hideously scarred like Lon Chaney, Sr.’s in the original 1925 The Phantom of the Opera or Lionel Atwill’s in Mystery of the Wax Museum – but no-o-o-o-o, he’s just bald and with his hair (what’s left of it) in corn-row braids but otherwise he looks pretty much the way he did pre-roboticization. In the final scene he crashes the board room of OCP and plays Jones’s confession tape; Jones ridicules them and says RoboCop can’t do anything to him because he’s an OCP executive, but the CEO fires him on the spot and, now that Jones isn’t an executive anymore, RoboCop can aod does push him out the window to his death several stories below. (There are so many sequences involving people getting pushed through windows the people who make prop windows out of spun sugar were probably working overtime on this production.)

Seen today, RoboCop is an oddly schizoid movie; it’s easy to see the satirical intent Neumeier and Miner brought to the script, but it’s also the sort of fascistic propaganda I had avoided seeing it when it was new precisely because I didn’t want to experience it.The film oscillates between an uncritical portrayal of RoboCop as the law-enforcement superhero – essentially Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character in a really cool cyber-suit (one expects at any moment to hear Peter Weller asking one of the crooks, “Do you feel lucky today?”) – and the more nuanced character the writers clearly intended. Certainly enough people in the audience regarded RoboCop as an unambiguous hero they paid money to see this movie and bought enough tickets the folks at Orion Studios greenlighted two sequelae! One other thing about RoboCop that might have helped keep me away from it when it was new was my confusion as to the identity of its star. Given how many rock stars of the time were trying for film careers as actors, including Sting in the original Dune and a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein called simply The Bride, I assumed the Peter Weller who starred in this movie was the same person as the Peter Weller who had led the British rock bands The Jam and Style Council. It took me a while to realize they were two different Peter Wellers.