Claire Waddingham

‘What is your prime directive?’ How Robocop (1987) defined an era

Posted on July 27, 2021July 27, 2021 by Claire Waddingham

A couple of years ago, my parents came to stay for a few days. One evening we had dinner, and I suggested we watch a film. After a bit of discussion, the choice was Robocop – the 1987 Director’s Cut. So we settled down to watch it. At the end, my father made this comment:

“Well. They certainly don’t make them like that anymore!”

To quote Clarence Boddicker – give the man a hand. He is absolutely correct. The combination of violent mayhem, religious allegory, social satire and dark humour, along with stop-start motion effects and a central performance that is essentially mime is not something I think will happen again in this era of glossy superhero fantasies. It was also released in 1987, the year of Superman IV: A Quest for Peace and Jaws: The Revenge – two films that were so laughably bad they killed their franchises and nearly tanked the summer blockbuster, full stop. It’s also quite amazing to think that a film which spawned two sequels, a cartoon series for kids, a TV series, and an unnecessary 2014 re-make (which not even the acting talent of Gary Oldman and shapely form of Joel Kinnaman could save) very nearly did not get made. Famed Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has admitted that when he was sent the script in 1986, he dismissed it as a silly little B-movie. (From the man who made Showgirls? Yes. Quite. ) It was his wife who picked it up, read it, and encouraged him to film it. But I will always forgive Verhoeven Showgirls for the fact he did direct it, and it is steady, uncynical eye which arguably makes it so good. Its a film about 1980s America, that could only come from a non-American. In an interview on his approach to Robocop, Verhoeven later stated “I do not condemn America. I do not celebrate it. I merely present it.”

Robocop is indeed a statement on America – one that inverts Oscar Wilde’s famous quote that life imitates art. This is a case of art imitating life – and that life is the Regan-era. The 1980s, that decade of decadence, with money-grubbing corporations and cocaine-snorting yuppies having to uncomfortably co-exist with spiralling rates of crime and poverty. The war that seethes between these two sides is distilled down to the fate of one of the cops: Alex Murphy, in a career-defining turn from Peter Weller. A gentle-mannered, polite, good looking family man, Murphy is a beat cop assigned to the violent and near-lawless Metro Precinct. After being given short shrift by Robert DoQui’s world-weary Sergeant Reed (“We work for a living here, Murphy”) and introduced to his tough, loyal partner Anne Lewis, the audience is settling in for what appears to be a standard action film. Except this is a world where the cops are a commodity. And an audacious twist is taken when Murphy is gunned down after a mere 25 minutes.

Murphy’s death at the hands of Kurtwood Smith’s Clarence Boddicker, arguably one of the greatest villains in film, is one of the most violent and shocking on celluloid. Boddicker is a psychopath in lumberjack shirts with the demeanour of a Wal-Mart store manager who sits and calmly smokes a cigarette whilst his gang taunt and then shoot the vulnerable Murphy, and casually chews gum whilst putting a live grenade in someone’s house. Verhoeven has stated that Murphy’s death – which starts with his hand being blown off and ends with his body being virtually destroyed – had to be exceptionally violent. Because it’s a modern-day crucifixion. In Verhoeven’s words, “it is Satan killing Jesus”. The religious allegory is underscored with an eerie arial shot of a distraught Lewis seemingly praying over Murphy’s body. What was looking like a violent action flick is suddenly humanised. Horror gives way to grief. There’s a sense of shock and outrage amongst the audience – a man who was simply going to work ends up getting killed, and now there’s a desire to see Murphy return and take revenge on those who did this to him. At the end, he is practically walking on water towards Boddicker in the abandoned steel mill where he met his original fate, stating he is not going to arrest him. He will kill him instead. If Robocop is an “American Jesus”, he is one who does not see himself as a saviour of all.

But the violence of this film is not confined to the criminal street gangs. The glossy boardrooms of OCP are awash with blood as well – both literally and metaphorically. Reflecting an era when businessmen spoke of “hostile takeovers” and making a killing, Robocop ramps it up until they are actually killing each other to get ahead, a powerful comment on the corporate greed of the 80s. The most darkly comical moment of this is when Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), a designer-suited shark of a man, introduces ED-209 – a big, powerful robotic law enforcement machine – to an obsequious pack of executives. Except – it doesn’t work. When it malfunctions and sprays the gathering with yuppie gore, the battle is set between Jones and self-interested young upstart Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer). But there’s an extremely dark underside – OCP doesn’t care that a young man is lying dead in the boardroom, they’re just irritated that their multi-million dollar investment failed to come to fruition. And Jones is even more annoyed when Morton’s Robocop suddenly starts cleaning up Old Detroit due to his programmed prime directives, defending elderly couples, women, and becoming a hero for children. A wicked duel of wits begins, ending with a planned cocaine-fuelled threesome ending in carnage. It’s all about money and power, and who has the most of it. Relevant to Reagan – or is it also Trump?

But just as the film threatens to tip into mayhem, it reveals a battle for Murphy’s identity, and who owns it. Murphy is a quintessentially human protagonist. He’s not a machine that was once a man – he’s a man who is inside a machine. As Robocop starts to remember his all-human past, and starts to act outside the parameters set by OCP programming, his former partner, Anne Lewis, and the rest of Detroit police become sucked in. It’s a question of loyalty – can someone be owned? It’s also a point where the film shows echoes of that great horror literary classic – Frankenstein. The created turns on the creator, and reveals who is the real monster. The film builds to a crescendo with a very traditional outcome – the good guys win. But this is subverted by the violent mayhem that leads to that final scene. Good triumphs over Evil, but there is always a price.

And price is a strong element. Ownership looms large in this film. In a projected dystopia where human hearts are made by electronic companies and available for those who can pay for them, and board games depicting nuclear war are sold to families, Robocop depicts consumerism taken to its logical conclusion – companies own people, they own law enforcement. And as Dick Jones cheerfully informs Boddicker, OCP are practically the military. Think back to the sinister-looking black-clad figures standing outside the White House in 2020 – Jones’ vision of a militarised police does not seem like a fantasy. But the vision it portrays of a media where everything is reduced to a two-second soundbite presented by grinning loons that barely scratch the surface of an important event is spot on with our own. News is now just a string of Twitter notifications and shrieking headlines, all of which only serve to rile people up. Intercut with the mindless news flashes are even more mindless game shows – reality TV, anyone?

There is one element to this film that also makes it more than just another action film– the role of women. Nancy Allen’s Anne Lewis is tough, loyal, funny, prepared to put herself in dangerous situations, and knows how to handle a gun. She just happens to be a woman, joining those other sci-fi icons of the 1980s, Aliens‘ Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and Terminator’s Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. It’s also worth noting that the cyberneticist responsible for creating Robocop is Dr Tyler – played by French actress Sage Parker, who casually dismisses Morton’s clumsy overtures towards her. Contrast this with the 2014 re-make, when women are reduced to being slimy CEO Michael Keaton’s assistant (a waste of Jennifer Ehle), or a standard blub role for Abbie Cornish as Murphy’s wife. Even the female scientists in the Robocop sequels got better treatment – at least Belinda Bauer’s villainous Julia Faxx was allowed to pretend to be clever.

Religion, feminism, a mediation on humanity, social satire, and a lot of blowing stuff up. Robocop can never be dismissed as just another action flick. And it’s safe to say that cinema would be a lot poorer if it could.

References:

Flesh and Steel: The Making of Robocop documentary

Paul Verhoeven Calls Robocop an American Jesus by Mark Rosenberg.

The Mad Death: an 80s obsession with relevance today

Posted on June 21, 2021June 21, 2021 by Claire Waddingham

Picture the scene. A fatal disease starts to spread across Britain, forcing the government into making difficult decisions that curtail civil liberties and also into relying on a team of scientists whose data crunching and knowledge is wheeled out to placate the public. Fear starts to take hold, which transmutes into anger, which transmutes into aggression. Ordinary, law-abiding citizens are turning into desperate vigilantes, searching to restore what they feel they have lost. Then someone goes too far, committing an act that seems certain to bring spiralling rates of death and despair upon the country…

Sound familiar? I’m not writing about Britain being hip-deep in thr global pandemic of 2020-21, and people who might want to nip off for a fortnight in Spain, but rather about an excellent, and only recently resurfaced 1980s mini-series The Mad Death, that looked at what could happen if Rabies suddenly took root in Britain. Rabies has now been designated by WHO as a “neglected tropical disease”, and the only way you can catch it here is, according to Public Health England, through bat bites. But, in the 1980s, Rabies, along with the existential threat of a looming nuclear war due to the madness of Ronnie Reagan, was a very big fear. The BBC managed to terrify the public with its brilliant chilling docu-drams Threads in 1983, but in the same year, it had ramped up the tension with The Mad Death.

The Mad Death is an adaption of Nigel Slater’s novel by Sean Hignett. The series was repeated once more on BBC in 1985, then received a limited VHS release in the late 1980s, before finally surfacing on DVD in 2018. Its a piece of television that covers at least four genres – medical drama, political thriller, BBC Budget action flick, and finally, gothic horror. The key plot point is the“mad death” was the terrifying fate that awaited Rabies sufferers, tapping into a very genuine fear from the 1970s onwards that this disease could spread from its European origins into a raging pandemic across Britain.

As a child of the 1980s, I do remember seeing rather scary posters at seaside towns – “RABIES MEANS DEATH!” DON’T SMUGGLE RABIES”, often illustrated with a dog that had mad staring eyes and lots of spittle dripping from its jaws. Lovely. Just what you want to see when queuing on Walton-On-The-Naze pier for your Mr Whippy cone and turn at the slot machine. However, these were not as scary as some utterly brutal PIFs (Public Information Films) that were broadcast during the Children’s TV Hour on ITV. You would find your blissful enjoyment of Inspector Gadget and Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It suddenly destroyed by a PIF featuring a stern-faced Customs Officer, and a slightly deranged looking elderly woman in a floppy hat, who seemed to think no-one would notice her travel bag was moving of its own accord down the desk. The result? I became a little scared of dogs. However, I accept that as there is still a high number of dog owners in the British Isles, I am clearly just a wuss.

Contextually, the 1980s is a curious time for a historian to examine. It’s often falsely romanticised in popular culture as a time of bubble perms, red braces, yuppies and New Romantics, but it’s worth remembering that the early 80s were characterised by strikes, poverty, a seemingly heartless Conservative government, and an unstable international situation. And this is crucial to the Mad Death, as Rabies is seemingly inflicted on Britain by the thoughtless, stupid behaviour of the rich. And that thoughtless behaviour starts to inflict damage upon an area that is dependent upon animals for livelihoods – rural Scotland. Farmland. Hunting. Acts that are quite unthinkable to urbanites, but part of daily life if you’re a farmer or animal breeder. The divide between urban and rural has never seemed so stark.

The Mad Death starts –quite literally – when a wealthy Frenchwoman arrives in Scotland for a holiday, with her precious Siamese Cat zipped inside the lining of her fur coat. What she does not realise is that the cat got into a fight with a rabid fox in the grounds of her home, and is already succumbing to the virus. The cat goes missing, and there’s a rather gruesome shot of it being feasted on by a fox. The fox is now infected, and that is when the virus starts to sink its teeth into the human population.

The fox is found by the side of the road by a well-heeled American, Tom Siegler (Ed Bishop) – who does not realise that the animal’s seeming docility is the second stage of the disease. His ignorance and sappiness towards a wild creature proves to be his downfall. He takes it home with him, then manages to get the animal’s saliva into his system. And it is at this point, as a viewer, when a sense of dread starts to creep in. It’s the feeling that makes you shout “what are you doing, you idiot?!” at the screen. Especially when he also infects his mistress due to some particularly rough foreplay, condemning the poor woman to death. (Which almost feels like a little bit of New Right Conservatism – cheat with a married man, you will die, you harlot.) But as the fox, held in Siegler’s garage, becomes more aggressive in the morning, Siegler lets it go, letting it run into the woods to infect more animals.

No-one realises what is going on, until Siegler ends up in hospital after being involved in a car crash. At first the staff think he’s suffering from shock, or flu, until a hideous and terrifying sequence of symptoms begin – the rejection of water, foaming at the mouth, and some truly disturbing hallucination scenes. As this was filmed in the early 80s, well before CGI, it’s an incredible piece of television. No-one can pinpoint a diagnosis, until an highly intelligent nurse informs a doctor that it’s Rabies, as she witnessed similar symptoms when working in Jamaica. Then, it’s pandemonium. The government is informed, rabies vaccines are distributed, and there’s an uneasy feeling of “keep calm and carry on” merging with “oh God, what now?”

What now is the appearance of the experts – Michael Hilliard, a vet (played by Richard Heffer) and Dr Anne Maitland (Barbara Kellerman). Hilliard feels the only way to deal with this is swiftly and harshly, with animals impounded, stray animals rounded up, all pets forcibly vaccinated ,and infected animals killed. Not surprisingly, the animal-loving British public finds this hard to accept, and the extreme example of this is Miss Stonecroft (Barbara Bruce), an animal lover whose menagerie of cats and dogs at her decaying gothic house signposts her becoming the key villain by the third part.

But, here’s the thing – she isn’t really a villain, as neither is Seigler, or even the woman who smuggles in the infected cat. They are just ordinary people – selfish, self-absorbed, and unwilling to move past their own beliefs. Like everyone, frankly. The experts are frustrated by the seeming intransigence of the public – the public feel bullied and dislike being treated as children. It’s the classic case of what happens when the need to protect forces the need to make hard decisions that are difficult to take, with a good dose of poor communication added in.

What makes the public’s suspicion and mistrust easy to understand is that the experts are not saints – Hilliard incurs the wrath of the landed gentry by shooting a horse, after refusing to even quarantine it. Maitland takes the decision to vaccinate Miss Stonecroft by herself, leading to some genuinely chilling scenes which have a real touch of Hitchcock about them. There is plenty to scare in The Mad Death – from a rabid dog terrorising a shopping mall full of people, to an army sergeant being savaged as tries to take down a few dogs in the rural areas of Scotland. If there is a message to The Mad Death, its that life is so much easier and nicer if people – and that is all people – just follow a simple instruction to begin with. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

One major thing noticed about this series is how difficult it was to co-ordinate a response to a crisis in the 1980s. No mobile phones, no emails – everything is done by landline, or letter. But, I do wonder if that would make things easier – no doomscrolling, no shaming people on social media who are seen petting a dog. Yes, some of the effects do look dated, and there is no denying that this is a very “BBC represents the middle classes” production. But in showing how ill-prepared the country is, or indeed anyone is, to deal with a massive crisis until it hits them, The Mad Death has eerie resonance for today.