The American Tragic Hero #2: Robocop

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

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“The spirit of enterprise, which characterizes the commercial part of America, has left no occasion of displaying itself unimproved.”

— Alexander Hamilton

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“Excuse me, I have to go. Somewhere there is a crime happening.”

— Robocop

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I had always intended for the second installment of this oldest and most waited-for (if not awaited) Overthinking It series to be about a character I have often described as the Quintessential American Tragic Hero: Alex Murphy, a.k.a. Robocop from the truly excellent Paul Verhoeven film of the same name. Then, of course, other things happened.

Well, this is VerhOeverthinking It week, and as Darren Aronofsky will hopefully showcase for us Robocop’s durability — both as a cinematic subject and as a cybernetic apparatus — so will I persevere in hewing to one of my earliest intentions on this site.

Let us venture into the glory, the flaws, the fall and the suffering of that bechromed bulwark of semivoluntary justice — the American who is Half Jeffersonian, Half Hamiltonian, All Cop.

Do you want to learn more? Well, dead or alive, you are coming with me —

Robocop’s tragic flaw

Every tragic hero has a hamartia — generally referred to as a “tragic flaw.” More accurately hamartia refers not to a quality of character or chance, but to a choice a character makes that carries with it often distant, often eventual, but still inexorable and dire consequences.

Alex Murphy was a happy, healthy husband and father living the American Dream in a beautiful home, far removed on its pleasant cul-de-sac from the city’s old-world indigence and desperation. He was humble, decent, smart, capable, handsome — everything you might expect from an American square-jawed hero, past, present or dystopian future. He was at once living the dream and achieving a great height from which to fall.

But Alex Murphy had a hamartia, a tragic flaw — he committed himself to the Old Detroit police force. He saw the injustice and evil in the world, he saw the abuse that Old Detriot was suffering at the hands of its criminals, and he felt the need to do something about it. He was going to make Detroit safe. Talk about hubris!

Every day, Murphy left his home and involved himself in the problems of others. Every day, he served as the teeth of the grinding gears of power. Not-quite unbeknownst to our hero, the giant institutions that paid his salary ostensibly sought, to make the city a better place, but below the depths, themselves through inadequacy, dysfunction and corruption, mired themselves in the problems and worsening them for their own benefit.

And for this commitment, Alex Murphy suffers dire punishment from Cruel Fate. While attempting to break up an organized crime ring financed by and in cooperation with the same institutions that pay his salary and own his city, Alex Murphy is gunned down as a man — and resuscitated as a cyborg. Wired to a nearly indestructible body that whirs audibly whenever he walks, all that remains of him is the virtue, talent and skill — along with the his tragic choice — that he brought with him and cultivated on the force. His memories, his name, his home, his beloved wife and child, all are taken from him as he is made “half man, half machine, all cop” — a soulless avatar of his commitment to protecting that which for him no longer exists.

Just as the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings speak to a British national experience, intentionally or no, in their retreat from matters imperial to their shire after learning their own courage and capability, or Goethe’s Faust speaks to the self-destructive spirit and legacy of German ingenuity and passion — so does Robocop speak to America’s great Pyrrhic victory: the doughboy going “over there” to defeat the enemies of homeland and liberty with talent, strength, ingenuity and the fruits of prosperity — only to find himself enmeshed overseas in body and spirit, never to truly go home, never to be truly free again to choose to stay or go.

Look for musket balls recast from family pewter in the sites of Revolutionary War battles, and you will find an America that starts with plowshares and beats them into swords.

And what is Robocop but the fusion of scrap tin for the war effort with the Boy Scout who knocked on doors and scoured the town to collect it?

The American Dream: “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

Much like Stokes wrote about Verhoeven’s work being a study in “good movies” vs. “bad movies,” Robocop is a study in duality — public/private, city/suburbs, partner/friend, civilized/savage, man/machine, drug dealer/corporate raider, progress/decline, stop-motion animation/guy wearing a suit.

The movie hybridizes most of these distinctions — shows us one folding inside the other. What is it like when a government institution is a private corporation and a private corporation is a government institution? What is it like when apparent technological and social progress are the same as systemic failure and grand barbarism? What happens when a man hooked into a sophisticated computer system with perfect recall who can access mainframes in his mind with a flick of the wrist can’t remember his own name? Verhoeven even puts the men and the women in the same locker room — a trick he uses to challenge and excite the audience in Starship Troopers as well.

Years ago, I identified Robocop, minus the specific robotic cops (which seemed impractically designed), as the portrayal of the future from 80s science fiction most likely to turn out to be accurate. With the decay of Detroit, the continued meshing of private and public, the widening gap between rich and poor, the heightening divide between the clean, corporate, orderly America and the dirty world of the declining American city, the ever-building corporate control of American government in general and city planning in particular, the rise of mediocre, oversexualized schlub/hotty entertainments, and even the development of automated military and law enforcement capabilities, it seems pretty close to the mark.

Part of why it is so insightful is because it breaks down these dichotomies, which, to an extent, are illusions that we force on reality in order to make sense of it. We misidentify the march of history when we insist it makes more sense or stays more within the lines than it actually does — when we carve out dualities and presume they will be at some point distinct. In truth, not only do such bifurcations almost always collapse, but the clean lines are rarely there in the first place.

Well, America is also a study in collapsed duality: from its very birth and beforehand, two callings — two promises have vied for the soul and intentions of American culture, as they have persisted in the souls of many nations older and younger:

The call to homeland — The promise of a new continent where regular people can live, raise their families, and practice their ways of life freely, justly, humbly, and with dignity.
The call to prosperity — The promise of vast resources and free enterprise to build wealth, solve problems, alleviate suffering, better the world, bring pleasure and happiness, and defeat our enemies.

The duality that folds within itself? Move to America for a simple, humble life away from the mischief of the rest of the world, and also have opportunity to make massive amounts of money by getting all up in everybody else’s business. The two promises live in symbiosis with one another.

The call to homeland brings us citizen soldiers, the Bill of Rights, Quaker Oats, the white picket fence and the Square Deal. The call to prosperity brings us the arsenal of democracy, the sea-to-shining-sea, the boostrapping millionaire, summer blockbusters and Silicon Valley.

Over the centuries, this divide has promoted many other dichotomies — the “homeland” antifederalists vs. the “prosperity” federalists, the “homeland” articles of confederation vs. the “prosperity” Constitution, the “homeland” agrarian South vs. the “prosperity” industrial North, the “homeland” free silver movement vs. the “prosperity” gold standard status quo — all the way to the “homeland” anti-deficit hawks vs. the “prosperity” economic interventionalists, or, cutting the other way, the “homeland” healthcare reform movement vs. the “prosperity” resistance from insurance companies and their allies.

The deep and ironic divide tends to cut both ways whenever it exists. The Union sees itself as protecting the basic rights of southern slaves and the integrity of the country while attacking the plantation fat cats who seek to dominate them and tear it apart, while the Confederacy sees itself as protecting the basic rights of southern farmers and independent states while attacking factory fat cats who seek to dominate them and bring the whole country under unconstitutional oligarchy. Republicans seek to break the greedy stranglehold of government on regular Americans, while Democrats seek to break the greedy stranglehold of business interests on regular Americans, and business and government practically have a joint checking account.

Or to step away from politics, take the pot-and-kettling of independent and mainstream film. Corporations compromise the dignity, independence and character of everyday Americans by manufacturing and cheapening the culture, while indie filmmakers compromise the dignity, independence and character of everyday Americans by spreading self-aggrandizing product that slanders regular people for their taste and has nothing but contempt for a vibrant zeitgeist upon which it subsists but never thrives — ever the self-loathing parasite.

The way conflicts like these tend to be articulated show us more of what we have in common than what splits us. At the core of most arguments that cut along this warp and woof: the belief that, if you are good, you will rise to greatness, but that if you seize greatness, you will cease being good.

Leave home to get an education and more income, and you lose your small-town values. Work hard all your life to follow your dreams, and the money you make will assure you never find them. Set out for Washington to get elected and solve the problems the country faces, and the system will ensnare you with privilege and graft until others depart your home to pursue you and bring you down (and become you). Be fooled by the rocks that you’ve got, and you will forget you were Jenny from the Block, losing all the honor and respect that the title confers (and despite the fact that, were it not for the rocks, nobody would know who Jenny from the Block is in the first place).

The saddest most difficult situations are those where a threatened homeland can be saved from external corruption by self-corruption — cut off Darth Vader’s head, and you will see your own face behind his mask.

Most literary traditions have this dichotomy somewhere in their culture, and the way their great works of literature address it tends to inform the national character (to the extent that one exists and is not a trick of the light).

And for those who would say Paul Verhoeven is not American, I would say most of the most compelling critics of the American mind and American experiment have come from overseas, and Verhoeven is among them. He’s like De Tocqueville with brief nudity and a higher body count.

Your move, creep

So, we’ve established Robocop is American. Let’s go further into how he is tragic.

Verhoeven rarely hits his subject matter right on the nose. There’s always a heavy note of irony jerking the characters away from the real point of the story. So, let’s look at the structure. The elements of Aristotelian tragedy are all found in Robocop —

Mythos (story) — Dead cop brought back as cyborg must fight an unjust system and recovery his memories
Ethos (character) — This is of course what drives Robocop, and what is much weaker in Robocops 2 and 3.
Melos (music) — I could hum the Robocop theme music, but you wouldn’t be able to hear me. It’s pretty good. Underrated.

Lexis (words) — Even ED-209 gets cool things to say in this movie. This is a flick where appliances get finely crafted one-liners with fun, deliberately prosodic rhythms.
Opsis (spectacle) — This part is pretty obvious. Why else set that gunfight in that gas station?
Dianoia (ideas) — See above

Peripateia (Reversal) — Robocop has several major moments of reversal. The central one is the start-and-stop montage where it seems as if he is dying, but he is really being rebuilt into Robocop. Most of what follows is not peripateia, but

Anagnoresis (Recognition) — The bulk of the plot movement in the movie Robocop enduring and coping with intense moments of recognition as to what has happened to him as a consequence of his tragic choice to dedicate himself to the police. The two most major ones are when he freaks out in his old house because he can’t handle his memories and when he can’t kill Jim Jones, because he has been programmed not to.

You can tell when anagnoresis is happening in Robocop because Peter Weller (the guy who plays Robocop) has this intensely sincere physicality when he is performing Robocop’s pathos (suffering). The jerky lunges, the painful-looking, gnarled contortion of his mechanical limbs, the intense facial expressions (which are extremely rare in the performance of the character of Robocop) — it all screams “O, me miserable! O, me Robocop! Cursed I am among half-men, half-machine, all-cops! Why shalt these scanners see infrared human body temperature signatures, that have seen nothing but darkness!”

One note on the “opsis” of Robocop — the film was notable in its day for having the highest visible body count of a theatrically released film (probably excluding things like All Quiet on the Western Front, where a whole lot of guys just run and fall down and historial footage of real-life atrocities). Verhoeven seems to love these gruesome displays, and they are quite affecting, as is evidenced by the fact that people get uppity about them. The intention and reaction is the same with the sexual content of Verhoeven’s pieces.

It is often cited as a mark that they are cheap, frivolous, morally bankrupt entertainments. But Aristotle himself calls for stories that arouse horror, pity and fear as among the highest forms of literary art. Of course, the relationship of Greek drama to the salacious is the opposite of that of our own theatre and art — to the Greeks, the salacious plays were the most religious, and the intellectual ones were the artistically crafted entertainments.

But, our own surface association of a clean conservatism with high art — that in order for a drama to be morally useful, its moral statements must agree with our own creeds; that in order for a play to be good to watch, or good for us, it must be agreeable — is, for the most part, a sham. There is a whole realm of tragedy where we can enrich ourselves as moral agents by watching the imitations of the horrible, the terrifying, the gruesome — because, even if you don’t believe in catharsis, they bring us together as community to face aspect of our realities and challenge us with them, force us to confront them morally.

So, there is something to be said for the moral worth of looking at awful things in the sort of context Verhoeven displays them — one that challenges the audience, appeals to their sense of pity, appeals to their sense of horror, and unites them behind a tragic story.

I would say this is also true of Verhoeven’s other films to one degree or another. There is a lot of awfulness, but because of the human quality of the stories, because of the structure of the storytelling, because of the way it imitates humanity (not the same as reproducing it) and makes connections, I am not convinced that because the movies imitate awfulness and inspire horror that they are morally the worse for it. They are not necessarily pedantic, they don’t necessarily teach good lessons in a systematic, intellectual sense, but the way they appeal to emotions functions in a way that is morally useful to a society that looks to strengthen its own ability to confront reality and make robust ethical choices.

Maybe someday I will write How Watching Basic Instinct Can Make You a Better Person, but I haven’t solidified by ideas on the subject yet.

A word on catharsis, the purging that supposedly happens at the end of a tragedy and makes it all worthwhile — Alex Murphy certainly goes through it, as his own suffering and recognition helps him purge the morally problematic parts of himself and make him a better Robocop.

And a further note on these forms, patterns and characteristics — when I say these things are present in Robocop, that is an understatement. Robocop hammers on these elements of tragedy. The recognitions are huge. The reversals are huge. The spectacle is huge. The acts of mimesis are powerful in their representative quality, even if they are not hyperrealistic.

It’s a tremendously theatrical movie, done in a very high style. A Grand Tragedy.

Somewhere, there is a crime happening

In the first article in The American Tragic Hero series, I wrote:

“Above all else, America is dedicated to the proposition that ‘what happened to other countries isn’t going to happen to us.’ As such, our variations on the tragic hero struggle to buck free of their core restrictions, often with startling results.”

I still think this is true — American culture in general is not very good at contextualizing or coping with death or futility – “doom” has an adversarial place in the American mind, not something you cannot avoid as much as something you must outsmart or outlast. “Doom” is not a reason to cry — “Doom” is a crazy time-traveling scientist with a metal face and robot clones, or a thrilling gun battle carving its way through a demon-infested colony on Mars.

To connect with some of my previous writings, the American vampire is not like Dracula or Nosferatu, weighed down by futility, vendetta, or torturous hunger the American vampire is like Blade, drinking Capri Sun pouches from the blood bank while facing down infinite, inky darkness and stabbing it with a gas-powered stake gun while doing a flying jump kick — or Edward Cullen, bound, slowly but surely, by integrity, by discipline, by hope, and by faith in the fiction that he is still young and will always be young — to the comforting notion that love conquers all.

So, the American tragic hero takes many analogous forms. In #1, I identified John Rambo as a Reverse Tragic Hero, a hero who has his catharsis and suffering at the beginning of the story, and is driven by recognition of his tragic flaw to ascend to great heights.

Here I will identify Robocop as the Indestructible Tragic Hero — a hero who treads the emotional and representative path of tragedy, who recognizes, who suffers, who loses something very precious to himself as he realizes what he has done to be punished so by fate — who leads the audience along a path of horror, pity and fear and prompts a purging of their collective moral selves with the intensity of the experience — and then who doesn’t have the good sense to die at the end or fade to a shade of his formal self. A tragic hero who goes through all these things that are his own fault, fairly or unfairly, but who still must pick himself up and go to work the next day, and who does not so much have to “come to terms” with his situation he persists by his very nature.

Picture this: Ajax the Great, upon rousing himself from madness and discovering he had killed a flock of sheep he thought were his friends and comrades, is crushed with guilt. In the Greek tragedy, he kills himself in shame. In the American story of the Indestructible Tragic Hero, we all share that horror with Ajax, we purge ourselves thanks to it, and then Ajax strolls down to the port to hop on the next trireme to a new tour of duty. He’s not happy about it. He feels pretty cruddy, in fact, and that cruddiness is never going to totally go away. But he has to do what he has to do.

Part of this is the convention of the Western, developed as it was in connection with various Italian and Japanese cultural mavens. Part is Hollywood’s eternal, bizarre demand for endings that can be seen as happy. Part of it is manifest destiny and a cultural work ethic — the belief that you can and you must keep going until you conquer the continent or pacify the world or any of that stuff — the march of America is unstoppable, and therefore, so must be the American.

In America, Sisyphus is admired for his hardcore lifting regimen, and Tantalus for his low body fat percentage.

But part of it, I think, also comes from a young civilization that derives much of how it feels about humanity from its own experience rather than from ancestral stories, which carry with them a certain false, overdramatic perspective. In real life, this is generally how it goes down. Suicide is not nearly as common response to great moral failings or causal coincidences as it is in ancient tragedies. It’s pretty rare, in fact.

In reality, suicide is more commonly the result of a combination of bad luck, diseases, biochemical depressive states, opportunity, abuse, drugs, bad habits, and a host of other factors, few of which even approach the explanation “because it was necessary” or “because somebody deserved it.” In real life, you would rarely, rarely agree with the statement, “Yeah, I guess that person had no choice but to kill themselves.” (especially because of the poor pronoun/antecedent agreement) But this is a common expectation in old-style tragedies, as perhaps it was a more common belief in other civilizations.

In real life, seen through the lens of a single generation, people have to live with their mistakes. In real life, you don’t get the kindness of the story ending after you’ve realized you’ve done something terrible. As Chris Rock said, “People say life is short. Life ain’t short. Life is long.”

You may be struggling with whether you are a real person or whether the relationships in your life are meaningful or the work you do really improves the world around you or is instead in service to a giant evil corporation, but one thing remains true:

“Somewhere, there is a crime happening.”

And that means, if you are Robocop, you have your little tragedy, sure, but then you walk, like the half-robot you are; legs and arms whirring audibly, to your Ford Taurus, cue the theme music, cut to shot from the rig in front of the car, framing Robocop’s steel-solid face behind the windshield as the lights of Detroit flash by, and move on to Robocop 2*.

I leave you with this, which I found on the Internet, and which probably requires an introduction, but which I am not going to give, because I think it’s better when it comes up just short of making sense (with credit to The Zollie):

Oh, and just to be perfectly clear, Robocop is an awesome, wonderful movie. A masterwork. If you have never seen Robocop, you owe it to yourself to do so. As a bonus, except for the stop-motion ED-209, even the special effects hold up remarkably well.

* This, if you ask me, is the real tragedy.