REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

By: Carlo Rotella
April 12, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

ROBOCOP | PAUL VERHOEVEN | 1987

When I saw RoboCop in Brooklyn in the summer of 1987, there was a pack of boys maybe 10 or 11 years old sitting near me. They cheered and laughed during the movie’s many scenes of jokey mayhem and inventive cruelty but grew quiet when the titular cyborg removed the screws holding his helmet in place. After the helmet came off, revealing his face, one of them broke their awed hush to say, “It’s Murphy, but he’s ballheaded.”

Growing up on the South Side of Chicago during the golden age of audience participation, I learned that what you call out at the oblivious screen — and so, really, to fellow moviegoers — should begin by describing the action, like restating the melody when you take a solo. If the hero drops his gun, you yell, “Uh oh, you dropped your gun! What you gonna do now?” By articulating the obvious, you open up the possibility of speaking a deeper truth.

And what the kid said certainly was obvious. Nobody needed the helmet to come off to identify Robocop as Murphy, a Detroit cop shot to pieces by cackling villains and then turned into a law-enforcement machine by corporate dickbags and science-dorks. And it’s true that he didn’t have hair, since most of his head had been replaced with circuitry, so all that was left of the original was Peter Weller’s grotesquely handsome face. Still, one might reasonably have observed that Murphy’s baldness, no matter how dramatically sudden its onset, seemed insignificant compared to other changes an alert viewer might remark upon — like, say, that he was now a bulletproof monotonic machine-man.

But I do think the kid’s statement of the seemingly obvious and trivial succeeded in revealing deeper truth.

The helmet removal occurs during a brief lull, set in a ruined factory redolent of postindustrial tristesse, intended to remind us that inside Robocop is a human being with feelings and such. But RoboCop was directed by Paul Verhoeven, a specialist in hilarious suffering and bystander body count who doesn’t really do feelings other than contempt or arousal. Nor does he do ideas. The screenplay aspires to critique, offering lampoons of news, ads, stupid TV shows, and corporate dickbags (one of whom has the double-genital name Dick Jones), but Verhoeven turns these all into headfakes that don’t say much more than Everybody’s an idiot sheep.

What Verhoeven does is wreck bodies. RoboCop‘s most deeply about bodies absorbing a comically excessive number of bullets, smashing through plate glass, speed-deteriorating into monstrous deformity after a dousing in chemical waste and then exploding into slapstick hamburger when hit by a car. Such coldness requires discipline: there’s a terrible rigor in the way Verhoeven confines his interest in what’s inside people’s heads or hearts to examining how those insides splatter on the way out.

The sheer body-obviousness of “It’s Murphy, but he’s ballheaded” perfectly captures what there is to know about the character arc of a hero and a movie pitilessly stripped of inner life.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

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