Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film “RoboCop” is a dystopic masterpiece. Set in a (then) near future deindustrialized Detroit, Peter Weller's character Alex Murphy is a police officer who is brutally killed while on duty and then resurrected as the cyborg RoboCop to end crime in the city. Murphy must struggle to regain his humanity in the face of the cruelty of the megacorporation (Omni Consumer Products) that de facto owns Detroit (and by implication America), the police department and most other aspects of public and private life. RoboCop is no longer viewed as human. He is a product with a serial number, an object of capitalist technological “innovation” and a sociopathic ethos where profits are more important than people and life itself.
“RoboCop” is a direct indictment of Ronald Reagan's America and its 1980s ethos of unrepentant greed, spectacle and violence. 40 years later, in the Age of Trump, those hegemonic forces are even more powerful, to the extent that they are viewed by many as common sense and permanent features of American life and culture. Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” is now more of a documentary than science fiction and genre entertainment.
