Friday 27 April 2012

Stop using the word "awesome" - you're a grown man

Notes from Bryan's ongoing attempt to make sense of Robocop 2, a film he enjoys but is also deeply troubled by:
There's a bit after Robocop's been put back together again and in order to destroy people's faith in him the evil corporation depower him in the worst way possible - they ask the people what they want of Robocop.  Loaded down with hundreds of new directives such as "pool opinions before expressing your own" and "avoid interpersonal conflict", Robocop is of course now effectively neutralised as a force of  order, making effeminate compliments about his partner's hair and expressing to his male colleagues that he is touched by their concern for his welfare and what lovely weather they seem to be having.  After a disastrous patrol in which he fails to kill anyone, lets lawless children run wild in the streets and only flirts with being firm when confronted with someone daring to smoke in public, his maintenance crew are looking over these new directives and lamenting that such blatant new age socialist hippy feminism must surely be driving Robo insane, and that they cannot remove these directives because the only way to do so would be to shock him with so much electricity in the hope of wiping his computer that he would probably die.  Robocop hears this and marches out to the nearest electrical substation and electrocutes himself, because a choice between letting the people have a say in how they are policed or a violent, unyielding, effectively indestructible overman deciding for himself is no choice at all - the risk of death is worth it if the alternative is to let the the faceless, politically correct mobs have their say.
So, yes, I think it's safe to say Frank Miller wrote this, if only because one of the earliest sightings of Robocop is of him crossing a picket line of placard-waving, venom-spewing rabble.

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