NeoCop
RoboCop and the failure of satire.
BY DANNY O’BRIEN
Paul Voerhoeven’s 1987 hit RoboCop, about a “distant future” in Detroit where privatization has all but ruined the city, has a tidy narrative: a plucky rookie cop goes into a coke deal in a warehouse and is shot quite a bit by assorted baddies. After he dies, he is selected for an experiment that revives and transforms him into a robotic cop that can fight crime a lot better than other cops. Following a bunch of crime montages, RoboCop destroys a cocaine production plant, ends a lot of corporate collusion, kills his prototypical predecessor, and tramps around a power plant without his helmet.
This, at least, is the film’s surface narrative. While Voerhoeven’s later Starship Troopers (1997) attempts to tackle fascism, RoboCop seems a clear attempt at engaging fascism’s pretty-to-the-public younger brother, neoliberalism. The notion is neither new nor groundbreaking: Carrey Rickey of Criterion raves about how RoboCop “gleefully satirizes [Reagan]’s pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatization,” and Clark Collis of Empire mentions the movie’s “biting comic attack on neo-fascist corporatism.” Those who haven’t seen the film recently may feeling compelled to say, “Wait a minute, Danny—the movie’s about cops and a drug lord, yeah?” or “Nah, I’m intelligent. RoboCop’s Jesus, bro.” But the skeleton and meat of the film rests on an attempted critique of modern (at the time) capitalism. The measure of that critique’s success, though, is mostly contingent here on consistency, clarity, and conclusion.
Let’s start with OmniConsumer products, the creators of the ED-209 and RoboCop projects. In Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner’s draft of the script, the function of the corporation is described by “pictures on the wall, [showing] the many and varied divisions and subsidiaries of OmniConsumer products: Travel Concepts, Community Concepts, Entertainment Concepts, Security Concepts…the products and degrees of specialization are endless.” Actualized in the mis-en-scene of the movie, the boardroom is filled not with “pictures on the wall,” but instead rows and rows of television screens, as well as a large number of ready-to-judge and ready-to-be-judged peers crowded around a table near a window overlooking the city of “New Detroit.”
Here, not only are the entrenched abilities and frontiers of the corporation depicted in alignment with neoliberal tendencies, but a further aft-assimilating element of surveillance is introduced in the film by the wall of televisions and the overlooking view. Surveillance can rear its head in any economic system, but the subsumption of surveillance as a necessary industry is a contemporary staple of neoliberalism. If the teleological orgasm of neoliberalism is full privatization, then surveilling and collecting data on every individual and every possible market is a must. There ought to be, as Shoshanna Zuboff describes the desire, an “ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies everyday experience from toasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit.” In depictions of neoliberal society it’s common to see Argos-like cops, their heads full of eyes, flood-lights, and USB cables, writhing in underground departments and casting perverse, periscopic glances toward greater society.
But RoboCop does not depict this ubiquity. Instead, the movie seems fooled by the workings of the neoliberal structure and centers itself on an individual. It suggests that surveillance, in the hands of a strong and moral individual, should be excused, and that that individual may use their power of total surveillance with impunity. It also falsely implies that the surveillance power of one bipedal, rigid individual could even be total, tentacular surveillance.
Consider the above frame from the scene where RoboCop flips someone off for a quick gag, and then reveals that his finger is just a sharp proto-USB port that plays back a recording to achieve facial recognition and target identification. The second clause of that sentence seems almost more insulting than the first. Power, and indeed surveilling power, is placed mainly in the hands of RoboCop, with only a small linking of intervention from the disavowed CEO Dick Jones. RoboCop remains a strong individual instead of a mere cog, whereas the desired endpoint for neoliberal power structures, as Zuboff point out, “can no longer be summarized by that totalitarian symbol of centralized command and control [Big Brother].” A more effective depiction would be a whole cadre of robotic cops, each hoarding fragmented or confused clumpings of information without context, but ready to apply the information as per their differing directives. Actual cops enforcing the doctrine of hegemony under neoliberalism actively work to obscure their identities and individuality. Unlike RoboCop, they don’t want to be seen or known.
Further, in the above frame, the method by which RoboCop has mobile surveillance is revealed, and this surveillance is portrayed classically (i.e. not contemporary, rhizomatic, or integrated). There are no random, scrolling data points or linkable information, no matrices of code, but instead just a simple screen showing what is ahead and what, specifically, is being watched. This is a Fordist notion of capital surveillance, where the cameras and surveilling technologies should be quick and pragmatic, without time or money wastes on non-essential functions. It suggests the camera in RoboCop’s head was mass-produced for function only. Note the grittiness of the video quality. The naming of cross-streets instead of GPS coordinates. This is barebones and practical, whereas RoboCop’s vision under the influence of neoliberalism would be prying and probing, a tentacled mess of streaming, yet-to-be categorized information.
Obviously, one rebuttal to my nitpicking of the visualization of surveillance in the movie is that the movie was released in 1987, and surveillance had yet to reach the ubiquitous form it holds today. However, the movie takes place in a distant future—some artistic liberties could have been taken to amp up the RoboVision past the abilities of a grocery store’s CCTV unit. Indeed, contradictory to the film’s imagining of RoboCop’s vision, the script describes the process as a heady, constant flow of data in which “our own internal readouts [RoboVision] change and flash…information and more information. Take it all in.” The script calls for an ubiquity of surveillant power, but this crucial element central to the screenplay’s critique isn’t realized in the movie. The result is that these scenes don’t manage an effective satire of surveillance. Since RoboVision is presented as a novelty and an extension of RoboCop’s powers, it is effective as such, but if the movie’s creators hoped to create a serious commentary on surveillance under neoliberalism, a frame like this would need to contribute more to the overall level of satire.
In fact, this same frame also raises questions of law enforcement priorities in a city ostensibly riddled with crime. In the greater sequence in which this frame appears, the “415” is a violent public rape in a parking lot. Credit to RoboCop for responding, but it should be noted that this crime against a person is answered after a crime against property, since the preceding scene is a convenience store robbery. The film offers no further commentary about the crimes book-ending this frame, and the listing of the crime code does not include any sort of suspense or curiosity—the whole sequence is really just a montage of RoboCop’s abilities as a robotic cop. RoboCop’s vision is effective surveillance on a small scale, but doesn’t lend itself to more effective policing. RoboCop has ubiquitous crime knowledge but can only respond to one crime at a time, and therefore must act hastily and prioritize types of crime based on a personal sense of severity—he doesn’t have the excuse of “I just stop what I come across.” In a call after the rape, a gas station explodes, and we are expected somehow to weep more at the loss of valuable industry and the furthering of RoboCop’s own quest than at the violation and trauma of the rape victim. RoboCop’s priorities, it seems, coincide more with the interests of the private sector he is supposedly against rather than the state and public sectors he claims to be protecting.
Granted, the script calls for part of the secretive Directive Four (“Directive Three” in the script) that RoboCop must abide by as “not act[ing] against OCP’s best interests.” This could imply, satirically, that RoboCop’s priorities are influenced by OmniConsumer Products, and that there is an effective critique here. However, the part about the “best interests” did not find its way into the actual film, and because the actual film is the vessel of whatever critique is being attempted, the satire is again lost.
Through all of the speculating and concern about neoliberal society, the police are lauded and viewed as separate from the capital machine, instead of being vital enforcers for the state and private sector serving only the interests of the elite. Police in this movie really are the heroes, an ideology that supports, rather than offends, neoliberal society. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 have highlighted the villainy and uselessness of the police as a public service. The concept of race is wound even more tightly into the colonial and capital structure, which is why much of the outcry against the Black Live Matter protests has come in the form of concern about the damage of private property.
The issue of law enforcement budgeting has come up, but no significant changes have been made—the funding of police departments and private prisons remains mostly the same, and in some cases has even increased. Increased military and police funding is normal and necessary under neoliberalism. Many people frightened by the concept of potential ‘agitators’ or ‘anarchists’ seemed content with armed stormtroopers brutalizing the population en masse in nightly shows of force. In fact, many people seem entirely unperturbed by the appearance of militant, over-prepared, robotic cops. It’s almost as if the public has been fed this image of law enforcement long enough and often enough that they no longer recognize the brutality. Spot the similarities in the following frames:
RoboCop (top), intended as ridiculous, over-the-top satire, has been actualized as a norm.
This is another issue of the failure of RoboCop’s attempted critique. By lauding RoboCop as a strong individual within a police department, the film seeds a hope that police in real life might look that “cool” and be that effective, while also maintaining a strong individuality and moral compass. But we have seen time and again in contemporary America that while cops have adopted this look and are robotically effective, individuality and morality have been replaced with amoral collectivity.
It’s nearly an affront to the viewer that a movie attempting to critique neoliberalism places a cop as its hero. In the departmental structure police find themselves in, attempts to go against the grain result in shunning or expulsion of the problem individual. Individualism is made impossible by design. However, in the neoliberal structure of society at large, “individualism” is suggested as a norm, and collectivism as a fruitless effort. For RoboCop to emerge as an individual from a collectivist law enforcement structure in order to overthrow his enemy (who is the friend of his department) is paradoxical. His sense of heroism is a contradiction that does not address the actual relationship between cops and society. RoboCop is nearly the only cop seen interacting with citizens. Cops bark at detainees in the department and make flippant remarks to OCP officials, but are never really seen in an outside environment. For RoboCop to be effective as critique would require a clear and coherent depiction of the police and their relationship to neoliberal society at large.
All of this has the unfortunate side effect of viewers thinking of RoboCop as a “good cop,” and the further side effect of assuming such a thing can exist. These dissonant notes seems the result of other “copaganda” in pop culture from 1980 onward, and move the audience latently toward the conclusion that this robotic cop on a violent prowl is a good thing, and maybe there should be more of him. If this is the lasting effect of the movie, then its critique of neoliberalism fails yet again.
Of course pointing out that RoboCop has dissonant views of neoliberalism might lead some to point out that neoliberal regimes were still pretty nascent at the time. Perhaps the movie was aware of the sort of schizophrenia propagated by the capital real and tried to incorporate it, in which case it could be said that the movie’s dissonance is intentional, and that the message of the movie is the neoliberal schizophrenia between the private sector and the state, and the ambivalence here is part of the politics of the art. This is not the schizophrenia of mental illness, but a sociopolitical schizophrenia described by Deleuze and Guattari as “the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency.” In RoboCop, writers Miner and Neumeier and director Voerhoeven attempt to escape the bounds of capitalism but fall short, into the realm of its schizophrenia. Absolute commitment and knowledge (including foresight) would have been needed to trudge out of this realm. Voerhoeven did say, in an interview with the Film Society at Lincoln Center, that he “jumped into this movie, but was not so much aware of the political situations that were around.” But this lack of knowledge and commitment to the themes of the movie on the part of one powerful individual should not be seen as wholly responsible for its failed satire, for many of the same reasons that RoboCop himself cannot hope to dismantle neoliberalism as an individual—the Deleuzian/Guattarian schizophrenia would likely surface regardless.
But even if we try to think of the movie as an intentional depiction of this dissonance, the ending must still be explained, as it does not resolve any of these issues. RoboCop kills the CEO Jones and the kingpin Clarence Boddiger, but he does not dismantle any of the systems that bred these figures—the same system that bred him. The onus, all around, is placed on the individual. The movie suggests that, in a real-world example, killing Jeff Bezos would somehow solve the problem of monopolies and worker oppression. Killing these figures only sates RoboCop’s lust for revenge. It does nothing to the private state dystopia built throughout the movie, whose destruction the audience had silently hoped for.
While there is a clear anti-neoliberal sentiment in the movie, it doesn’t positing any sort of palatable solution to the problems of these societies. RoboCop is the lovechild of the private sector and the state sector, and even when fighting against his makers in the private sector, he is successful as their creation. So even if we do not laud him for his individualism, we laud OmniConsumer products for their innovation in creating him. The inauthenticity of surveillant structures, the prioritization of crimes against property, the “good individual cop” myth, all schizophrenia inherent: RoboCop fails to critique anything it supposedly satirizes.
This is the root of the problem. Though satire promises to make the audience think and critique to a greater degree than standard drama or comedy, it still does not assign its consumer any homework. Those that read Orwell’s 1984 weep when they see similarities between Oceania and the West, but they stay put. Those reading Huxley’s Brave New World see the implications of Fordism, but the implication is enough. To be an effective satirist in the age of the capital real and under neoliberalism, one would have to engage the system (which we have seen to be a paradox), navigate the hallucinations and delusions of a daily schizoid life, and come out with total clarity and a solution to posit. The satirical fun to be had in RoboCop is instead reduced to just that, fun, and amounts to a smirk or laugh. With the slings and arrows of all the liberal media against fascist leaders being well and prevalent, but amounting to nothing, we know RoboTrump or Bolsonarodroid will not suffice.
Danny O’Brien is from Portland, Oregon. He served in the U.S. Army for the better part of three years, and now engages in dissent. He writes about film and culture and has a penchant for watercolor that can be found on Instagram at @artforthehellofit.
