Culture

Robocop's Detroit

Clayton Trutor

One of the most memorable scenes in Michael Moore’s Roger & Me features a 1987 visit by then-President Reagan to Flint, Michigan. Reagan tries to comfort a handful of the city’s newly unemployed autoworkers by taking them out for pizza. Over supper, the President offers them encouragement. He tells the workers to stay optimistic and consider moving out west to find employment. One of the President’s supper guests took a different course of action. He walked off with the cash register.

An hour south on I-75, the city of Detroit faced many of the same problems as Flint: crime, poverty, segregation, blight, abandonment. The problems faced by both cities sprung from a systematic divestment from each community by the major automakers, or so it would seem. Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop hit theatres the same summer as Reagan’s visit with a far different interpretation of Detroit’s decline. Set in the Motor City, Robocop puts on the backburner the idea that Detroit’s problems are the result of deindustrialization. Instead, it argues that the deterioration of Detroit’s inner city is the result of human corruption. Public servants, union members, politicians, and the poor have turned the city of Henry Ford into a dangerous cesspool populated by an ignorant citizenry that sits around watching a Benny Hill-style television program rather than seeking out job training for the new economy. The only solution to the city’s problems is automation. This technological transformation will reshape the city’s economy as well as its police force.

Before delving into the details of Robocop’s Detroit, it is important to remember how much buzz this film generated upon its initial release. The media ate up the news that Verhoeven had to recut the gore-filled Robocop to avoid an X rating. Dancing this fine line became the much lauded Dutch director’s trademark over the next decade, as he produced similarly graphic films like Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls. Critics applauded Robocop for its depiction of a nihilistic "cyberpunk" future and its Academy Award winning special effects. Audiences proved just as enthusiastic. They flocked to Robocop, making it one of the summer’s biggest hits.

The widespread acclaim garnered by Robocop revealed the indifference of many critics, as well as the film’s general audience, to the depiction of social reality in films with urban settings. Robocop purports to be set in the "near future," implying that the world portrayed in the film should bear some resemblance to the then-present. Unless moviegoers anticipated “near future” Detroit looking like Blade Runner on a cloudy day, Robocop fails to bear much resemblance to its intended setting. In a decade dominated by science fiction and action-adventure films, directors like Verhoeven took increasing license in their depiction of American cities, transforming them into cartoonish landscapes like the Detroit depicted in Robocop.

Robocop begins in crime-ridden "Old Detroit," a metropolis in need of a facelift before a public-private urban renewal project called "Delta City" will transform the industrial center into a hotbed of the tech sector. Omni Consumer Products (OCP), the multi-national corporation overseeing the project, predicts that “Delta City” will bring two million jobs to Detroit, a rather optimistic estimate for a city whose population peaked at around 1.8 million in 1950. God knows where a city with a plummeting tax base like Detroit would get the money for the “Delta City” project in Reagan-Era America. Economic realities aside, the only thing in the way of these plans is the city’s crime wave. A gang led by the father from That 70’s Show, known in the film as Clarence Boddicker, is running amok. Boddicker’s gang traffics cocaine, murders police officers by the dozen, and blows up random storefronts with howitzers. OCP’s Security Division planned to address the crime problem by mechanizing the police force. They developed a line of crime-fighting robots called “24 Hour Cops,” dumpster –sized machines which failed to make the cut for Short Circuit. The coming out party for the “24 Hour Cop” failed miserably. The experimental robot Gatling gunned one of the OCP big wigs to death after his peers put him up to pointing a pistol at the machine. Fortunately for OCP and the city of Detroit, one of the Security Division’s underlings devised an alternate Robocop, one designed to arm a man with the features of OCP’s original robot. The only problem was finding a police officer willing to be permanently fitted with the device. This problem disappears when a freshly murdered police officer named Alex Murphy becomes the guinea pig for the project.

While the police force and the city’s government cower in fear, Robocop obliterates much of the city’s criminal element. OCP predicts that Robocop will eliminate crime in “Old Detroit” within forty days. Rivalries within OCP’s Security Division threaten to derail this goal, as the executive who pioneered the “24 Hour Cop” project colludes with the gangster Boddicker to murder the creator of Robocop. This rogue element within OCP aims to destroy Robocop by forming a permanent alliance with Boddicker’s gang and using “24 Hour Cop” against him. A police strike aides the bad guys’ takeover of the city. While the striking cops complain about their unsafe working conditions and the fact that Robocop renders them economically obsolete, Boddicker’s gang goes on a rampage, enacting Looney Tunes style violence on anything left standing in the blighted old city. In the midst of this turmoil, Robocop has himself an epiphany about his previous life as Alex Murphy, a beat cop in the western district who dies at the hands of Boddicker’s gang. He regroups with his former partner, Officer Anne Lewis, in the shell of an abandoned factory. Together, they take back the city from Boddicker’s gang in a battle at the factory. They finish off the bad guys in a decidedly anticlimactic fight with the “24 Hour Cop” in the OCP Towers. The film ends with evil vanquished, the striking cops rendered irrelevant by Robocop’s apparent monopoly on the legitimate use of force in the city, and the pathway to urban renewal set forth by the pacification of “Old Detroit.”

Robocop serves as an allegory for the decaying of Detroit. The decline of the Motor City is not a product of its evident economic devastation. It is the result of a generalized human corruption. Robocop reestablishes the moral order of the city by taking surveillance and coercion out of human hands. Automation is the only solution to the city’s security problems and its economic problems. As we see in Robocop himself, this process must incorporate humans to some extent. The goals of the “Delta City” project mirror this mentality. The transformation of Detroit from a blue collar center to a white collar center will bring unprecedented prosperity to the city. Man will make use of new technologies to perfect his world. In contrast, labor friendly post-war Detroit created an unsustainable, inefficient behemoth bound for a collapse once outside sources of capital mobilized a more pliable workforce elsewhere. As we see in the film, the automakers in “Old Detroit” make an inferior product. They spend all of their advertising dollars promoting the “6000 SUX,” a gas guzzling lemon with a big engine and leather seats. The only successful factory viewers see in “Old Detroit” packages cocaine for distribution by the Boddicker gang. To compete in the new economy, “Old Detroit” is in need of a good old fashioned purge. Robocop is just the man for the job. He cleanses the city of its filth with a purifying violence more characteristic of an action-adventure film than a cop movie.

Verhoeven took his vision for the future of Detroit and applied it to his cast. Robocop, as a cultural production, has a distinctly automated quality to it. Special effects drive the narrative, not the film’s stilted dialogue. Verhoeven made the choice to rely on technological wizardry rather than an all-star cast to tell his story. Robocop describes a world saved by technocracy rather than human know-how, hence the devaluing of actor’s resumes follows quite logically. This isn’t to say that Verhoeven’s casting decisions reflected Hollywood’s common sense at the time. Few 1980s big budget blockbusters relied on such minimal star power. It’s hard to believe such an expensive film would have been green-lighted with such a pedestrian cast unless it was overseen by a director as highly regarded as Verhoeven. At the time of the film’s production, Ronny Cox, best known as the lieutenant in Beverly Hills Cop, was the most famous person in the cast. Robocop’s success did not result in any kind of transcendent stardom for any of the actors. Many of them reprised their roles in the much-hyped, little watched 1990 sequel, but outside of That 70s Show’s Kurtwood Smith, none of them found long-term success in Hollywood. Robocop offers the first inkling of a trend away from hiring A-listers to star in big budget, summer bang-bang shoot ‘em ups. Films like Robert Emmerich’s Godzilla or Michael Bay’s Transformers films exemplify this shift in priorities. After relying on the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone in his early 90s films, Verhoeven followed suit, casting primarily nobodies and has-beens in his next two projects, Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997).

Even more striking than the film’s pedestrian cast is the way Verhoeven depicts the racial makeup of Detroit. The long-term post-war divestment from Detroit’s inner-city left it a profoundly segregated urban center. The well-chronicled dismantling of Detroit’s economic base fostered a wide range of social problems, all of which were compounded by the segregation of its urban core. Detroit’s reputation as one of America’s most violent cities long preceded its depiction in Robocop. What’s new about Robocop is the way it makes use of that reputation without any regard for the particular material circumstances of Detroit. At the time of Robocop’s filming, more than eighty percent of the city’s population identified as black. However, only three characters of note in the film, one of OCP’s boardroom sycophants, the police chief in the western district, and one of Boddicker’s henchmen, were black. Robocop’s Detroit is an overwhelmingly white city. Crime in Detroit does not appear to be a product of poverty. Involvement in the drug trade seems completely unconnected to the lack of economic opportunities for urban youth. Most criminals in “Old Detroit” bear a greater resemblance to the gang members in The Road Warrior than those in Menace II Society. Young, thrill seeking wild-men who dress like Lyle Alzado commit crime in “Old Detroit.” Urban combat in “Old Detroit” focuses less on turf than on sheer destruction. Young Detroiters do a lot of rioting, but they aren’t engaging in ritualized mob activity as a means of challenging pre-existing social hierarchies. They blow things up just for the hell of it.

Robocop has quite the legacy for a film so profoundly out of touch with the location it employed as its setting. More than two decades after the film’s initial release, Robocop continues to inspire spinoffs. A short-lived late 80s cartoon series made the franchise available to children like myself, kids who were far too young to watch the actual film. The Robocop cartoon inspired a wide array of action figures which looked like a cross between He-Man and Transformers toys. Two Verhoeven-less sequels, Robocop 2 (1990) and Robocop 3 (1993) milked the original’s success for another fifty million dollars. The Frank Miller/Walt Simonson crossover comic Robocop Versus Terminator (1992) developed a devoted cult following, like much of their work. Director Darren Arnofsky is working on a “reimagining” of Robocop, which is currently slated for a fall 2010 release. If anyone is capable of depicting a living, breathing Detroit, it’s Arnofsky. His use of Brooklyn in Requiem for a Dream (2000) and northern New Jersey in The Wrestler (2008) demonstrate an understanding of the ways in which a setting shapes a character’s life. If nothing else, I am confident that Arnofsky’s Robocop will be set in a city made up of people and places.