In the Flesh: Robocop (1987)

It’s hard not to think of predator drones while watching Robocop. Those sleek white fuselages cutting air, the breathless moment as missiles detach from long, stiff wings and streak toward a distant target. Hellfire. It’s an evocative name for something meant to collapse apartment buildings and incinerate wedding guests, and just as the remnants of Alex Murphy’s (Peter Weller) human body still live within his armored chassis, so too does an attenuated nub of human conscience aim and fire the projectiles that slaughter children and civilians day after day throughout the Middle East. Verhoeven’s movie positions such extraordinary technologies not as evil entities in their own right, but as extensions of human nature which permit us to exercise our worst impulses on previously unimaginable scales.

Dreamed up in the last paranoid days of the Cold War in the shadow of technological terrors like Reagan’s Star Wars program and the earthier horrors of his domestic policing policies and unshackling of corporate greed, Robocop’s prescience is incidental to its cutting applicability to its moment. Military technology seeping down into public policing. Policies meant to fill prisons with useful labor pools rushed quietly through the House and Senate, both increasingly entwined with corporate interests. That the film is set in Detroit — a former stronghold of union labor gutted by outsourcing and police strikebreaking — is no accident, and read with an even mildly attentive eye it becomes apparent that nearly everything in Robocop which first appears heroic is in fact regressive, corrupt, and immiserating. The film’s moment of triumph is a lobotomized man-drone saving a war-profiteering CEO from a rebellious underling. At every turn we’re forcibly reminded that the police exist not to protect people but to guard the possessions of the wealthy and powerful with lethal force.

The enmeshment of organic and mechanical systems is a source of dramatic friction throughout the film. The surgical rebirth of Murphy as Robocop, the removal of his last remaining limb in favor of a computerized replacement, and even the hideously animalistic thrashing and wailing of the ED-209 pacification droid when it becomes immobilized in a stairwell. This conflation is not the future, but the grisly present highlighted by the film’s heightened reality. “You might not like what you see,” Robocop/Murphy warns his partner, Lewis (Nancy Allen), as he prepares to remove his dehumanizing facial covering. This is the genius at the heart of Robocop, and the nightmare of seeing the dimly-lit cubicle farms in which Americans point and click their fellow humans to death from hundreds or thousands of miles away: the reminder that machines of war and butchery are fundamentally and inextricably linked to human will and labor is not triumphant. Murphy reclaims his humanity as the film begins its final act, but the effect, far from offering visual reassurance, is ghoulish, his corpselike face stretched over a nightmare of servos and hydraulics. Oh good, we think, watching a line of explosions stitch their way along a road outside Kabul until, encountering a convoy of trucks, they begin shredding flesh and metal. Oh hurray, oh happy day. It’s not a robot doing this. It’s humans.