If a man’s got talent and guts to buck society, he’s obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you’ve got left are the sheep.
– Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
I’m a seamstress? That’s great. I come out of cryo-prison and I’m Betsy-fucking-Ross.
– Sylvester Stallone, Demolition Man
Who Are They?
The Demolished Man – or rather, the protagonist of Alfred Bester’s 1951 novel of that name – is Ben Reich, owner of interplanetary conglomerate Monarch Enterprises. Monarch has steadily lost business for the last decade to Reich’s rival, the D’Courtney Cartel. Already plagued by insanity, in the form of waking nightmares where a Man With No Face tries to murder him, Reich hatches a plot to murder Craye D’Courtney.
The only catch: the Espers Guild, a professional association of telepaths that occupy all levels of industrial society. No one has successfully committed a murder for over seventy years. But Reich, a man of singular genius and willpower, finds a way around their powers.
The Demolition Man is John Spartan, a cop from 1996 Los Angeles who doesn’t play by the rules but still gets results. When his takedown of longtime nemesis Simon Phoenix results in a massive number of civilian casualties, he and Phoenix are sent to the same cryo-prison. There they remain in suspended animation until 2032, when Spartan is revived to take Phoenix out.
Where Do They Come From?
The Demolished Man is set in the 24th Century. Interplanetary corporations control the solar system. A lucky few live in unimaginable opulence, throwing decadent parties at private estates. Many people live in the wreckage of an earlier nuclear war – like the West Side of Manhattan, melted into a three-dimensional maze of twisted glass and ceramics and turned into a “mega-brothel.”
The presence of Espers also transforms society. “Peepers” are used both to ferret out secrets from rivals and to protect corporations from said espionage. Espers cooperate as a secretive Guild, envied by the rest of the world. Their ubiquitous presence makes the most serious crimes – like murder – unheard of. And when they capture a criminal, they sentence him to the agonizing process of Demolition (from which the novel takes its name).
And now, some nightmare fuel.
Demolition Man takes place mostly in the year 2032. After an alluded period of anarchy in the early 21st century, Edgar Cocteau – a social utopian with unspecified authority – led the rebuilding of the ruined Los Angeles metroplex into San Angeles. Everything remotely harmful has been made illegal, including booze, caffeine, nicotine and sex. Few recognized corporations survive today, having destroyed each other in the Franchise Wars. The few police in San Angeles have little training in handling truly violent offenders.
Contrasting the blissful utopia of the surface world is the Wasteland of old Los Angeles. Its unofficial leader, Edgar Friendly, leads periodic raids on San Angeles to scavenge food and supplies. He wants to take down Cocteau’s paradise so that his followers can live on the surface world and do whatever they like: eat greasy foods, drink light beer, smoke Cuban cigars, etc.
Who Stands Against Them?
Ben Reich’s antagonist is Lincoln Powell, first class Esper and police prefect. He uncovers Reich’s guilt after a ten-minute interview, but cannot enter that telepathic evidence in court. So he relies on old-fashioned police investigation to uncover motive, opportunity and means. As Reich does, Powell conceals his own mental derangements – the alternate personality of “Dishonest Abe,” a compulsive liar. They both tread that narrow line between genius and insanity.
John Spartan was thawed out of cryo-prison to apprehend Simon Phoenix, the murderous gang warlord who brought him down forty years ago. Phoenix injects a streak of psychotic glee into everything he does. He murders casually, takes what he wants and breaks what he doesn’t. While in hibernation, he was subjected to neural reprogramming (for reasons not immediately obvious), making him an expert in explosives, computers and all variety of modern weapons. Once unleashed on 2032 San Angeles, he recruits like-minded thugs out of cryo-prison to begin a new reign of terror.
Sent to cryo-prison for tax evasion.
Who’d Win A Fight?
Set aside for the moment that The Demolished Man and Demolition Man take place in very different futures, written by very different authors in very different time periods. Presume that Ben Reich, genius industrialist of Monarch Enterprises, and John Spartan, reckless LAPD cop, had to butt heads. Who’d come out on top?
Ben Reich has the capability to commit a murder against overwhelming odds and get away with it. He has the resources of an interplanetary megacorporation at his disposal, which he uses to obtain exotic weapons and temporarily mislead the telepaths after him. And there’s nothing he won’t do to get what he wants. A man with limitless ambition, infinite resources and psychotic willpower can’t be stopped.
And yet John Spartan’s dealt with such before. Edgar Cocteau, though not as power-mad as Reich, is certainly quite nefarious. And his rule over San Angeles goes unquestioned by everyone except Edgar Friendly (a social outcast with limited power) and John Spartan. Only Spartan, an outsider with a cop’s nose for crime and a bad attitude, can ferret out the extent of Cocteau’s corruption. It’s not as if the San Angeles Police Department were investigating Cocteau before Spartan arrived.
So it seems reasonable to presume that Spartan could take Reich. At the very least, he’d make a fight out of it.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
But do The Demolished Man and Demolition Man really exist in different universes?
Both the 50s book and the 90s movie deal with men living outside of social norms. Edgar Friendly, despite being filthy, violent and played by Denis Leary, is sympathetic. The audience nods their heads at his crude libertarianism, even though the politically correct society of San Angeles is largely harmless. Spartan, the movie’s hero, empathizes with him – and since he, a man of the 90s, is the lens through which a 90s audience interacts with the film’s future, we are meant to empathize as well.
I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder – “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I want high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal?
I’ve seen the future. Do you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing “I’m an Oscar Meyer Wiener”.
And bring back the gold standard!
And yet, as harmless as Dr. Cocteau’s San Angeles claims to be, Edgar Friendly can not live in it. A culture which seeks a stable status quo cannot tolerate a loud outsider. Society rejects the iconoclast, either through laws (as in San Angeles) or through custom and ostracism (“did you smell that guy on the subway? ugh“).
Ben Reich, protagonist and villain of The Demolished Man, is similarly singular. The psychic detective tracking him, Linc Powell, makes this point himself – that Reich may be one of those rare individuals who can buck the system and threaten the entire galaxy. Reich is smart enough to:
- Get away with murder (it’s not easy);
- … of an obvious rival
- … in a society filled with telepaths
- … with the greatest psychic detective on the planet on to him.
That type of genius comes rare in 21st century America. But in the future depicted by Alfred Bester, it’s even rarer. Humanity has been lulled into complacency by savvy media moguls and the machinations of corporate enterprise. When Reich wants his employees to stop gambling in the company cafeteria, he goes to a jingle writer and pays her for a catchy jingle that’ll turn them off cards and dice. People are either clay to be manipulated or Espers – and even the telepaths have their own petty squabbles for status. A man like Ben Reich is one in a billion.
Behold, I will teach you the Demolition Man!
Both The Demolished Man and Demolition Man tell the story of how the social order reacts to people outside the status quo. John Spartan, in Demolition Man, is met with condescending politeness at first, followed by gradual hostility from Cocteau and the Powers That Be. Ben Reich, in The Demolished Man, suffers the amassed law enforcement personnel of an entire galaxy against him. Both these men are criminals: Spartan for “murdering” civilians in the 90s, then for swearing a lot in 2032; Reich for murder as well.
So the ultimate conflict isn’t between John Spartan and Ben Reich, but between each of these men and the society in which they live. In Demolition Man, thesis (Spartan) reconciles with antithesis (San Angeles) to form synthesis: a society in which Edgar Friendly can live above ground. He gets to make out with Lt. Huxley as a reward. I won’t spoil the ending of The Demolished Man – I suspect fewer people have read that than saw the Stallone movie – but things do not end well there, either.
In the end, society is the irresistible force, and few of us are truly immovable against it. We are not Demolition Men; we are Demolished ourselves.