“Splatter, with its screen motifs of violence and gore, knows that when capital inscribes itself into our bodies and when our bodies are hardwired into capital what we are experiencing is a protracted mutilation whose internal processes are both accelerated and destabilized in times of crisis. Splatter confirms and redoubles our very worst fears. It reminds us what capital is doing to all of us, all of the time-of how predators are consuming our life-substances; of how we are gravely vulnerable against the machinery of production and the matrices of exchange; and of how, as participants of an internecine conflict, our lives are always already precarious.”
Mark Steven, Splatter Capital
The original 1987 Robocop was a prescient film that satirized the grim corporate nihilism of 1980’s capital with a sci-fi twist. Dystopian fiction often takes the corporate world as its antagonist, being the economic version of fascism. Robocop brings us a decaying urban world filled with plenty of jackals waiting to devour the last bloody chunks of “Old Detroit”. We all live in Old Detroit now, and the Delta Cities of the near future are only a Whole Foods and a yoga studio away from leaving us blown apart in an old steel mill.
In the year 2019, it’s safe to say that Robocop is actually tame by the current reality. Killer robots, private police, Detroit in bankruptcy, mega corporations ruling over us, and a complete failure of the system to protect anyone. Sounds familiar.
A senile game show host is President in a malevolent daily gauntlet of humiliation and cruelty. Private prisons, charter schools, and military corporations are common, and at the beginning of Robocop, all of OCP’s new markets they’ve now dominated. Robocop is a dark, smirking vision of how American capitalism mutilates and commodifies everything and everyone, even down to our mortal remains. Just like how it seeks to consume Old Detroit, Murphy himself is consumed by the capitalist machine.
“And while responding to the prospect of that end, splatter nevertheless promotes an extant truth: capitalist accumulation is and always has been a nightmare of systematized bloodshed.”
Mark Steven, Splatter Capital
Robocop is one of the best depictions of splatter capital on film; the theft of a human mind and body to be made into a literal commodity. Murphy’s death is the opposite of heroic. He just gets tortured and gunned down by a group of cackling psychopaths. This is Verhoeven laughing at us, as if to say “Well, this is what you came for”, as Murphy is blown apart. Suddenly the film isn’t funny anymore, but deadly serious. Murphy is shredded, torn apart by Boddicker’s goons in grisly detail. Clarence Boddicker, played by a magnetic Kurtwood Smith, sadistically plays with Murphy right before his coup de grace, dryly stating “Okay, fun’s over.”
Mass or violent death is reacted to in the film with droll newscaster distance, annoyance, or glee. It is only us, the audience, who gets to see death as lonely and cold.
A single bullet to the head and the man we briefly knew as Murphy, a slightly dumb suburban dad, lies dead in a massive pool of his own blood. Verhoeven has repeatedly said Robocop is a Christ metaphor, one that falls apart on closer inspection, but his brutal crucifixion by bullets rings true. Except he didn’t die for our sins, he died because of budgets cuts, which meant no backup at the steel mill.
The violence of Robocop is stark, gruesome even. Murphy’s body is used as meat, his death a fortunate statistical coincidence. There’s no greater meaning to his demise, just that he was a naive wannabe hero in over his head, chewed up by the same maw that leads to his resurrection.
Robocop doesn’t shy away from the body horror of what they’ve created. Murphy is a cyborg with a disturbingly human face, including a plug for the bullet that capped his crown. He eats sludge and gets plugged in like an iPhone. He is OCP’s legal property, stamped on his helmet; a mechanical slave. How many of us feel this way? Tired and exhausted from work, sitting down just to plug in and recharge, eating slurry we can’t identify, only to do it all over again tomorrow?
“On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities…”
Karl Marx, Estranged Labour (1844)
The people of Detroit are always seen as the direct victims of organized or disorganized crime, and the perpetrators of those crimes meet equally violent retribution at Robocop’s hands. Nothing is fixed, because it was never meant to be fixed. Robocop beats down a store robber, shoots a rapist in the genitals, and blasts his way through a drug factory. His last act of revenge is a middle finger spike right through Boddicker’s neck, Murphy bathed in the killer’s blood like a baptism. This film clearly states that violence is the only common language that can be used in a world dominated by OCP, who systemic brutality dwarfs a single pair of balls getting shot off.
No wonder Boddicker and Dick Jones, his employer, clicked together: they’re cut from the same bleeding hunk of flesh. One is a street thug who enjoys sadistic action, the other a corporate shark eager to feast in his own way. The film’s brutal, uncompromising bloodshed stands in dark ironic contrast to the glitzy gentrification of Delta City, best epitomized in the scene where a “glitch” with ED-209 obliterates a man on top of a fresh white model of Delta City in OCP’s boardroom.
When shown to real police, the lapdogs of capital, their favorite scene was Robocop throwing Boddicker through plate glass while sarcastically reading him his rights. These are the same men who put the Punisher logo on their bulletproof vests while they nightstick black teens for vaping in the library.
Robocop is the ultimate capitalist creation: a state actor of violence completely under corporate programming, and even branded for mass consumption. They turned a freethinking human being into an emotionless half-man, half-machine zombie, a walking tank, an ad for Delta City’s mechanized brutality. All it took was ripping someone’s flesh apart, after they’d signed the release forms of course, and sticking him in a bullet-proof tin can with a giant gun.
The title character was recently borrowed by Kentucky Fried Chicken in 2019 as a joke to sell disgusting fried meat. He’s actually still voiced by Peter Weller, which I assume because he wanted a new patio deck or something. A very strange choice because a mutilated man selling factory-grown dead meat makes me nauseous, and the ads are truly creepy and disturbing. It feels like self-parody.
In the ad, he threatens a family to try his chicken, using a line “You have 20 seconds to comply”, which is actually a line from ED-209 before it brutally turns a corporate gladhand into hamburger. A second ad reveals him more concerned with feeding a hungry bystander than stopping a violent crime. A third ad shows him threatening a bearded Southerner with death and then laughing in weird robotic spasms. The ads appeal to the lowest common denominator, those who gawk and point at something they recognize and chuckle.
If anything, Robocop was a documentary of this future yet to arrive:
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.