RoboCop
[director’s cut]
by far the most affecting image here, for me, was the wide shot after <PERSON>’s death, cloaked in silence, lingering on dozens of simultaneous emotions & nonsensical reactions in the face of absurdity. <PERSON> insists on that sequence as black comedy. fair enough; <PERSON> was an executive, and so’s everyone else left alive in that room. but i can’t read <PERSON>’s emotional arc as similarly arch. with every step along his recovery i couldn’t help but think: he’s still a cop. i wanted to cheer so much for this person who’d had awful things done to him. 61
but he remained a cop, someone who eagerly threw himself into violently enforcing the awful institutions whose awfulness <PERSON> wants us to acknowledge. and by the end of the film, he’s still a cop, willing to kill one executive, but be on friendly terms with another. the most insidious copaganda’s the kind that passes itself off as institutional critique while skating by on individual, the kind that says the problem is corrupt capitalism not friendly capitalism, militarised police not the police as a monolith. wow! this film acknowledges gentrification! reaganomics! privatised police forces! yes, and still wants you to cheer for an individual cop.
well, maybe it doesn’t! maybe all that heart-tugging cinematic language through which we experience <PERSON>’s flashbacks & determination to regain his prior identity is meant to be a test, meant to force the viewer to acknowledge how manipulative the director’s being, meant to bring them to the understanding of how they can’t cheer for an allegedly upstanding individual enforcing the repressive state apparatus. i wouldn’t put it past <PERSON>. but i don’t like the faun in <PERSON>’s labyrinth. and i like his tricks even less when they’re played on me by a human. 698