directed by Paul Verhoeven
screenplay by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner

Criterion #23.

Yeah, that’s right. This thing where I watch the Criterion Collection in order. Making great time so far!

I have postponed addressing RoboCop for many months because I’d fallen out of touch with some basics.

I knew after 10 minutes that I disliked the movie, but I was ashamed of the vulnerable, sensitive level on which I disliked it. Ashamed because the movie makes such a concerted appeal to insensitivity. To be merely disgusted by it is to miss its adult intentions, it seems to be saying, and appeals like this have a strong effect on me. I very very passionately don’t want to miss the point of things.

Only recently has it begun to occur to me that this passion for getting the point is an exploitable weakness. Missing the point of things is actually vital to self-preservation.

It seems to me that all really true and valuable responses to art have their roots in pre-articulate childhood impressions. Nothing that can be really felt waits for adulthood to make itself known. A child is sensitive to everything; no child sets aside any amount of noticing for later. All the important observations are made early, and well.

This may be obvious but it bears stating because many of these early impressions contain some component of fear, and fear is stigmatized in adults. It takes considerable conviction to cling to one’s timidity solely because it is authentic. But this is what is called for, I think, in artistic experience. (Not to mention generally.) So I could stand to keep saying it out loud: the childlike response is the one.

Anyway, of late I think I’ve straightened things out. So I’m ready to face RoboCop.

Emanating from RoboCop is a very strong, pure draft of sleaze. I could couch this in adult terms but it is not actually an adult impression; it is a warning signal from my child-antennae: Do not trust the people from whom this comes, or to whom it goes! This is the country of bad people, bad ideas, bad feelings, bad mojo. Leave the room, close your eyes. Beware.

This is the root truth, and I want to dignify and honor it, rather than just start looking beyond it. Looking beyond is very easy, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first a word on behalf of the innocence that cringes at blood squibs, recoils from existential roughhousing, feels menaced by the company of open prurience. These reactions are, I daresay, right and good. What is it to have “a moral sense” if not this? There is poison in the desensitization that generated this movie, and poison in the desensitization it engenders. My fear ultimately is not of the carnage but of the poison. My body rejects this.

And if one watches the whole movie, one inevitably begins to take in some of the poison. Yeah yeah, more squibs. Yeah yeah, that guy got a huge spike in his neck and a pint of blood sloshed onto the other guy. Yeah yeah, loveless coffin world, I can’t go on pretending I don’t know how not to mind you. It’s actually easy. Yeah, maybe that was actually a fun flick, kinda dumb, I dunno, who cares.

No. That first raw nerve is the thing. The rest is a philosophical danger zone. It’s only safe to venture there if you leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Movies like this are made by people who ran out of their own breadcrumbs long ago.

But that’s just it: The fascinating thing about my experience with RoboCop was that as soon as I went back to the beginning and turned on the commentary, my moral clarity disintegrated. These were nice-sounding men, speaking genially. My childhood alert system quieted on its own terms. Sleaze is always only in the eye of the beholder; real people all have their reasons. Behind the curtain, as usual, are just some folks.

This is the psychological truth behind all shit. I enjoyed delving into it. By the end of my time with the creators I felt, to my great surprise, sympathy for the movie. It’s a stimulating sort of dichotomy to at the same time be quite certain that it is repulsive and that I do not approve.

And ultimately my opinion ends up in the same place: these people may not be sleazes, but by not knowing better, by thinking they knew the difference between humane and inhumane but getting it quite wrong, they showed themselves to be unreliable.

During a movie, I am reliant on it. I need it to be reliable. Beware.

So what does RoboCop get wrong? It is in fact the Salo problem all over again: the medium is the message, so there’s no such thing as an insincere movie.

Actually the principle is even more obvious than that: The content is the message. If you show cruelty as comedy, you endorse the showing of cruelty as comedy. There is no amount of satirical intention that can outdo what you actually do. That’s simply how movies work.

The really grotesque thing about this one in particular is that not only does it have an untenable attitude, but it doesn’t even have it consistently. It’s genuinely not sure whether its worldview is Brazil or Superman or Dirty Harry or what, which pretty much spells philosophical doom, or at least sincerity schizophrenia. It has occasionally gotten credit (from the sort of people who enjoy giving too much credit) for a sophistication that is actually just heterogeneity born of confusion.

I know, there’s a school of criticism that doesn’t care why a movie is interesting just so long as it’s interesting. And yeah, I guess I would agree that it’s a particularly interesting specimen of what it is, which is a cruel, bad movie.

And I could talk about what makes it an interesting specimen, but that would feel dirty and would I believe be ultimately unenlightening. I’d prefer to be clear: they should all be destroyed.

Indulge me my hammering on this point once again:

The fear of awfulness cannot be exorcised by creating awfulness!

I read a profile of Michael Haneke recently in which Funny Games was explained, essentially, as what I already understood it to be: a sensitive soul responding angrily to the experience of being brutalized by trying to amp it up — so that even the insensitive masses will feel the horror he feels at ordinary movies, and comprehend the error of their ways. It is an all-stops-out attempt to elicit a shocked “Yo, man, that shit ain’t funny” from the terrible hordes who always seem to think that kind of shit is funny.

I already knew this, and yet somehow seeing his research-librarian face next to the words really crystallized the fact for me: depictions of brutality are almost always the attempted revenge of the sensitive on the insensitive. The irony of course is that the “insensitive” they so resent (fine, we so resent) are usually just like them.

The early scene of “black comedy” in RoboCop, in which an executive in a boardroom is machine-gunned to death by a malfunctioning robot, depressed and alienated me on first viewing. Why is this so proud of its callousness? I thought. Who are these awful people who must flaunt their insensitivity? Revenge begins brewing in my sensitive heart. Turns out, when you listen to the commentary, that the amiable-sounding writer came up with the scene while working in a corporate environment and finding it alienating. The murderous robot is his revenge on the suits in his psyche. (And, he makes sure we understand, on the reported horrors of American tactics in Vietnam.) Well, sure, I hear all that. But why did I have to watch it and imagine the “Yo, man, that shit is wack!” target-audience guy breathing down my neck?

The director Paul Verhoeven — the Dutch PhD in mathematics who wants to direct a life of Jesus but instead directed RoboCop and Basic Instinct, a fascinating figure to contemplate — acknowledges his psychology outright in the commentary. He describes real horrors of his childhood in occupied Holland: “growing up in a completely violent atmosphere, where you were forced to walk among dead people by the Germans because they wanted to show that hostages would be killed if there was a problem… they forced you when you came home to walk among Dutch people that were killed a couple of hours earlier. And sitting at the table and suddenly the window was blowed onto your plate because there was a bomb falling on the three or four houses next to you. And in that atmosphere of violence it’s probably quite natural that I’m really interested in violence in the movies, because for me it’s like getting even with things that happened to me at a child that I still have problems probably to accept.”

Good. You nailed it. And in that light, RoboCop and its ilk seem like a very impotent and childish form of coping indeed. I think I could find such things pitiable and sympathetic, if only they weren’t movies, which are so utterly psychologically opaque and thus intimidating. Behold the great and powerful Oz! BLAM! When the blood gets spurting, you don’t imagine a meek guy with a pen cowering next to you, snickering nervously.

(From now on I’m going to try to. But when I do, I’m just going to want to say to him, “Hey, if you don’t like this either, why don’t we just turn it off? Life doesn’t have to be this way!”)

The moral is that conceptual revenge doesn’t work. Someone must break the cycle of bullying!

I’m afraid I can’t muster the grace of a Punky Brewster and love the evil spirit away, but I can set down my machine guns.

Here as a peace offering are some things I liked about RoboCop.

1. The lighting is effective and the colors are nice and warm. At the time, nobody would have called them warm, but that’s because they hadn’t yet seen the blown-out future. Movies today rarely have nice color anymore — directors have all been spoiled on the cold thrills of computer-controlled palettes. This looked like, you know, people, in, like, rooms. And that felt like a cozy throwback.

2. I think this is the only action movie I’ve ever seen where a ridiculous room-destroying gun battle is followed by a scene with a lot of people cleaning up, sweeping up debris with brooms.

3. I may be wrong but I suspect that a not-insignificant part of the reason that people like(d) this movie is that the end credits are cards in a really big bold font, there’s booming hero music over them, and they slam in rhythmically after the last line. You go out tricked into thinking, “well, that was sure dumb, but it sort of had something!”

4. The future equivalent for a videotape is correctly depicted as a DVD. This is done so casually that on first viewing I just took it for granted. The commentary, recorded in 1995, the year the DVD was born, does not yet recognize this as the right choice; the screenwriter muses that a 3.5-inch floppy would have been a better choice than “a CD.” Wrong!

5. I enjoyed the (out-of-print) disc itself. Like I said, the commentary was shockingly pleasant, and I also got a kick out of the long illustrated article on the special effects. Strange to consider the labor that went into pseudo-computer effects, like the robot’s-eye-view where he sees picture-in-picture playback and text overlays. Nowadays this is a 20-year-old technological commonplace, so it’s hard to remember that we were just imagining it first, back when it still meant painstaking hand-measurement and multiple passes through an optical printer.

On which note, I don’t know how to wrap my mind entirely around the fact that tablet computers look exactly like — nay are — the magic-screen computer panels from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The daydreamy part of my mind that knows the latter has no idea what to do with the fact that the practical part that knows the former is willing to corroborate it. It’s sort of like my old childhood thought-experiment: what would it be like if something impossible, like ghosts or aliens or time travel or whatever, really happened? Would it feel real or fake? How would people really respond? (Sadly I’ve since learned the answer: everything begins to go equally gray. I don’t know if you guys have heard but apparently the polar ice caps are melting?)

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Two free-floating bits that I couldn’t fit into the structure above, such as it is.

1. These corrupt corporate towers of 80s movies have a tone of horror that seems extreme. Maybe it’s just that I associate them with the reckless gore of the same era, but there’s something potent in the power-claustrophobia itself. Well, not claustrophobia, some other -phobia. What’s the word for “fear of night skylines and black lucite”? It was somewhat operative in Dead Ringers, too (and much moreso in other Cronenberg, I know). The idea that glistening architecture goes hand in hand with gore and nightmare has a very obvious cultural “meaning,” but it really is its own aesthetic-conceptual package. I was aware of it and frightened of it long before I had any capacity to contemplate the actual anxieties of corporate life. Just like I encountered videogames teeming with post-Giger vagina dentata long before I encountered vaginas, and came to understand them on their own horrible terms. Damn 80s.

2. While we’re watching our hero shot literally to bloody pieces, at great length, in the commentary Verhoeven first says that the scene is so horrific because it’s supposed to be like hell and/or the crucifixion, and then adds that there’s a second reason: that killing off the protagonist so early creates a problem of dramaturgy, since we haven’t had enough time to care about him, so “that’s why his death is so gruesome. So it has two – it’s a crucifixion, but it also has the dramatic function… to implant this man forever in the brains of the audience.”

That forever is right and it’s a problem. I had never actually seen this scene before, but I already knew about it because I remember very clearly having had it described to me by my traumatized peers in 1988 or so. “He gets shot so much his arm comes off!”

Just like I vividly remember the moment when two friends gave this report: “Tell him about Indiana Jones and the heart!” “This guy pulled out a guy’s heart with his hand!” “And his chest wasn’t even open!” That is word-for-word accurate, 27 years later. Confusing, yes (when is anybody’s chest ever open?), but unforgettable. That poor guy was implanted forever in the brains of the audience, and even, in my case, the non-audience. Is this a good use of the powers of cinema? It seems more like a kid recklessly waving a magic wand and accidentally turning people into frogs, or disintegrating them. Oops! Movies are that kind of power.

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All right, and if you’ve been following along (= M, B, A, sometimes D and E, and, for sure, future me) you know that for each Criterion I am grabbing a track of music. This is your Criterion Collection track 23, a standard end credits suite. I editorially removed the words “super-stupid” and “plodding” from the mention of the theme music above, so that I could put them down here instead. This is by Basil Poledouris, who made a minor name for himself, for a while there, writing in this sort of primitivistic shadow of the Jerry Goldsmith school.

Good night, RoboCop. May you continue to age poorly.