35 years of 'RoboCop': An unforgettable vision of techno-fascist America

Don't forget to check out Total Recall. Guy was on a roll. Only Cameron can rival his mastery

Did you enjoy the female cop catching that guy peeing? And what happens next? Still gets me every time.

RoboCop is the greatest stunt anyone pulled on Hollywood.

It was supposed to be a movie about someone "part man, part machine, all cop" but it was in fact one of the most anti capitalistic movie Hollywood ever produced.

Verhoeven is a true genius.

Verhoeven is a true genius. His ability to make truly deep serious movies camouflaged as popcorn movies is absolutely mind blowing. I love everything he has done.

If by "WW3" you imply "nuclear war", there will be no rebuilding of anything.

The Terminator (1984) was pretty good too.

I wasn't alive during the 80s but I have a hard time reconciling your view that Hollywood vigilante justice movies were the purview of the right-wing when the moral majoritarians that made up the Republican party of the 80s and 90s would lambast those same over-the-top action movies for "excessive" violence, general disrespect towards society, and "poisoning" the minds of the children. Most of the movies you're talking about came at a time when the MPAA and the FCC began loosening its grip on the content shown on the big and small screens and when the Comics Code was no longer enforced.

You're correct that Dirty Harry was an explicitly right wing, and borderline fascist, movie. It was originally offered to Paul Newman who passed because it wasn't a good fit for him, but he suggested his friend Eastwood (a Republican) would be better for the role. The bad guy is a "dirty hippie" type, who's played very effeminate as a contrast to Eastwood's hyper masculine Harry.

I don't think that Serpico fits in that tradition at all. It's a story about a whistleblower fighting corruption within the police, and is directed by Sidney Lumet (not exactly a right wing director, thematically). The institution is corrupt, but Serpico is trying to uphold the law not take it into his own hands.

I think RoboCop is taking aim at techno-enabled state power and the military-industrial complex, not celebrating it.

prototypes benchmark I recall

I haven't watched this in years, but it's hard to forget the you know what scene. So much blasted junk! Absolutely hilarious.

The cardboard ED-209 was great too.

No love for Blade Runner?

> first true Cyberpunk movie

Tron, Brazil, Videodrome, Metropolis, Terminus, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, etc etc etc

Yeah, I don't even remember there being any allusions to government in the film.

Yeah if we’re going down the Fascism route(and particularly military Fascism), look at Starship Troopers, another Paul Verhoeven classic.

>Wouldn't call it fascism though

If you focus more on the kind of world Robocop occurs in rather than the plot, it's easier to see elements of it. Robocop is celebrated in-world for his violence (see, those normal cops weren't able to be violent enough without head-to-toe bulletproof armor and full-auto pistols) as a solution to social frustrations (high crime and corporate greed) and reinforces their hero culture through his sacrifice. There's even a secret conspiracy/plot between those two frustrations and a sub-plot about labor organizing.

But, at the end of the day, it's hard to have an action-focused cop movie without some of these things so we're sort of desensitized to it.

Starship Troopers (also directed by Paul Verhoeven) is even more on the nose about it. The plot itself is just a goofy sci-fi military movie but the human culture in it is absolutely terrifying.

That's a big part of real historical Fascism too, and even in contemporary satires of it, like It Can't Happen Here:

> Windrip's administration, known as the Corpo government, curtails women's and minority rights, and eliminates individual states by subdividing the country into administrative sectors. The government of these sectors is managed by Corpo authorities, usually prominent businessmen

So would we say that the state in Robocop is too weak to meet the totalitarian requirement for fascism?

It is not fascism, because while fascism is inconsistently and vaguely defined it generally involves idealization of the state as guardian and embodiment of the nation, which is a collective identity held to possess greater value than the self. In Robocop, the state is impotent and people are directionless, and no sense of national identity is depicted at all. OCP seems entirely unconcerned with what people do or think or what values they have, as long as they continue to spend and be exploitable.

Nevertheless, by the time Robocop starts, that fictional US is no longer capitalist in my opinion. It clearly WAS a market economy, and that’s why OCP is there, but now the government has suffered state capture… and while that can happen from free market capitalism, it’s very much a post-capitalist condition. The market is no longer functional, because OCP has acquired such unchecked power to exert coercive force that they replace the government that is supposed to monopolize such things. The government of Robocop’s Detroit is so broken it can’t run its own police force, so it turns the job over to OCP which has all kinds of weapons and killer robots. Capitalism requires private property rights, which is failing in Robocop - no one can feel secure in anything. They can get robbed in their stores, at home, or walking down the street — and anyway, no matter how good a job Robocop does, OCP is still going to forcibly acquire all the land, knock down the old city and displace everyone to build a new town where OCP is the landlord of everything. This is more reminiscent of feudalism — OCP is the crown, and the crown owns all the land, but it delegates responsibility to nobles, who extract value for their own interests (like the corporate bad guy selling the right to operate drug monopoly in the new city to the criminal bad guy).

Obviously, Robocop is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to real persons or events is entirely coincidental… right? :)