RoboCop

It was strange to see people in the movie repeatedly laughing at the Benny Hillesque "I'd buy that for a dollar" scenes strewn throughout the film. The punchline is just a formula, there is no real humor on the television screen (perhaps it had been funny the first time, but the repetition of an old joke that keeps getting laughs is grating). The director shows us a world where even laughter, a uniquely human response, has become a mechanical knee jerk response to some television show's formula. The viewer is constantly reminded that in this future society, where a company "owns" a person, it is harder and harder to find something we would cling to as human. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of Murphy's transformation is not the villains shooting him, but the fact that not one of the company's men or women that starts putting him into the machine even pauses for a moment to ever question if what they are doing to this man is moral. The viewer is left feeling that the paradigm of a society structured not around man but on the machine, once set in motion, must logically follow the course of subverting the human to the machine.

Also, the over-the-top violence as well as the television news and "commercials" we see in between the network news are on one level funny in their absurdity, but also shocking in depiction of a future that seems devoid of humanity. On first viewing of the film I felt perhaps the director went the wrong way with the over the top violence and comic book style. The ending, especially when the CEO asks Robocop "what's your name" and he responds with a smile, "Murphy" seemed too jokey. I thought the subject matter would have been better served with a more serious tone, as the dehumanization that a mechanized future may bring didn't seem to fit with the tone of the movie. After all, Murphy has lost his family and most of his body and memories and even though he killed "Dick" the CEO was still moving forward with Delta City, and there were of course many more soulless people in this future society that could fill the role of Dick and Bob Morton.

Upon reflection however, I was struck by how the comic tone and the final scene when the Old Man asks RoboCop for his name ultimately leaves a more uneasy feeling in the viewer. Murphy has been stripped of most of his body, his family, most of his memories, etc. All he has left is a few memories, a face and his name. The comic tone seems to project that this is simply the way the future is going to be. This feeling of a predetermined mechanical future, a moral vacuum where no vision of hope is provided, is all the more disturbing in its comic almost celebration of the grotesque. We see people being shot to where they are more holes than person, toxic waste reduce a man to mush, and a hero being crucified with bullets, yet the scenes are presented with the energy and absurdity of a comic book (interestingly, the writer of the movie is a comic book writer by the name of Frank Miller). Perhaps the most famous scene is when we witness the executive being sacrificed on the alter of Delta City, transformed into the meat that he in essence truly is to the machine, with a level of gratuitous violence which makes you at first laugh, then pause as the violence moves past the comic and into the X-rating due to violence that the scene garnered from censors. I still think the subject matter could have made a great movie with a more somber tone, but I have to admit in the end the comic tone of Robocop finally adds to the moral emptiness and feeling of inevitability of the world of Delta City.

Perhaps that is also part of the appeal of the comic in horror. The viewer laughs at the initial shock and over-the-top gore, but then is perhaps a little disturbed as he catches himself laughing at the horrific. As if this awareness that even within himself, not just the ax welding maniac or the out-of-control monster, there exists (repressed perhaps?) a least something of the horror being witness on the screen.