In Defense of Robocop Statues

Co-blogger Josh Davis lays out both some positive and negative feelings about a proposed Robocop statue in Detroit. I consider myself an authority on half-ass Robocop fandom, and am going to pick up the gauntlet that Davis has thrown down.

First, some credentials. I saw the original Robocop at a birthday party at a friend's house (my parents would never had stood for all the swearing). I can't remember where I saw the second, but I distinctly remember renting the third from a local video store as soon as it came out. I also watched the short-lived Robocop TV series that ran late at night on either Friday or Saturday nights. Finally, as a full-grown adult, I have seen all of the straight-to-video low budget Robocop sequels. There's a million of them.

I also have a "great idea" (even though I use scare quotes, I do actually think this a great idea) for a new Robocop movie. I haven't got it all worked out yet, but it goes something like this: the OCP bigwigs decide that they need to get Robocop out of Detroit and into other markets so they can start to sell more of their products nationwide. So Robocop is sent to an Indian Reservation in the Great Plains to solve a corporate crime involving the building of a casino. Somehow, a bunch of the capital that is supposed to go into construction has disappeared, and the books are all crooked. I think maybe OCP owns a stake in the casino or something. Solving white collar crime is not the kind of thing that Robocop is good at though, and he is having trouble making much headway; the Board of Directors is stonewalling him, etc.

Eventually he gets the Indian chief to agree to sit down with him. This happens in a teepee where everyone sits on the group and at the beginning of the meeting they pass around a peace pipe. I know this is a demeaning and inaccurate portrayal of modern reservation life, but I like the absurdist imagery. Anyway, the peace pipe has some kind of poison in it, and Robocop passes out after smoking it. When he is passed out, his body is completely taken apart and the pieces of him are buried in the foundation of the casino, which is now being constructed somehow.

But pretty soon ghostly apparitions start appearing around the construction site. Robocop is back, but he is Part Man, Part Machine, Part Ghost. I'm trying to invert the formula from Poltergeist. After this, I don't know exactly what happens except that Robocop solves the crime with the help of a young and dedicated Indian lawyer/accountant. His body is dug up out of the foundation and re-constituted and his soul, in a moving sequence, re-enters his body. At the end, the lawyer/accountant becomes the new chief and gives Robocop an honorary eagle feather. I guess the joke is that Robocop is an absurdly blunt instrument and that a lot of problems won't be solved by man/machines with guns.

Whew, that was a tangent!

But about the statue. No doubt that Detroit has been a national punch-line for many years. Detroit has lost population, has been forced to close half of its schools, and had to endure an ridiculous Super Bowl advertisement. The area has been inexorably torn apart by economic forces beyond any individual's control, even Roger Smith. No one thing--even one thing as amazing as a Robocop statue--is going to change all of that.

The statue is worth building though, if only because it injects a postmodern sensibility into our everyday lives. The building of the statue appeals to me in the same way that my plot for Robocop 4 does. It mixes up contexts and confounds our expectations. Public art is either supposed to be ridiculously solemn realism or incomprehensible abstraction. A Robocop statue is simultaneously solemn and incomprehensible. It treats with seriousness something which is inherently silly.

The original Robocop film is actually very cunning in its politics. It is a sly satire about privatization (the OCP Corporation with their police machines is brought in while Detroit's public police force is phased out). Officer Murphy's literal transition from human to machine in the film is representative our metaphorical transition from humans to machines that serve the always greater need for increased productivity in late-stage capitalist society. Yet the message is mixed, because of course Robocop is the hero of the film as he strives to destroy both humans and machines that conflict with his directives. Murphy's submerged humanity can make him a less efficient hero at times, yet it is what we cheer for.

So Murphy/Robocop is a product of his economic times just as the citizens of Detroit today cannot escape their own economic condition. Robocop is a pretend hero, but the relentless pressure to become machine-like that he represents is felt by any participant in our economy. Detroit knows this as well as anyone. And it doesn't hurt that the statue would be built, at least in concept, from donations rather by funds raised by the city. Finally, with no actual hero who challenged the changing economic conditions that has landed Detroit where it is today, we're forced to take heroes where we can find them. We worship a pretend hero because there is no real hero to worship.