Philosopher
Roland Barthes once explained why Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Salo’ was such a
shocking picture to watch when he wrote: “it’s bad to make De Sade real and
wrong to make fascism unreal”. It’s still a concise description of that film’s
uneasy power, due to its rather unsavory combination of elements. By
translating the twisted fantasies of the Marquis De Sade from paper to
celluloid, Pasolini made them more palpable and therefore real; yet, at the
same time, by applying these grotesqueries to fascism, he also made the real
horrors of that regime almost comic and with it committed one of the ultimate
transgressions. The satirist point beyond all this should be obvious to anyone
with half a brain, yet as Pasolini himself only too well experienced, the
majority of the public simply wasn’t ready or able to look behind its surface.
Quite a similar technique was employed by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven in most
of his films, especially his American output. Where Pasolini went the explicit
uneasy way by rubbing the feeling of queasiness into the viewer’s face and
never offering any way out, Verhoeven did the opposite by ostensibly
sugarcoating his similar uneasy message with the very escapist tools Hollywood
cinema built its entertainment on: violence and sex. But by combining real, horrific
violence with a burlesque comic book mentality, Verhoeven exposed the horrors
of society and its media and proceeded to demolish the Hollywood system from
within, until its tolerance reached the breaking point.
This
point was arguably met when he made ‘Showgirls’, which is both probably
Verhoeven’s masterpiece as well as his ultimate transgression and, like all bad
boys who do wicked things, he was punished accordingly. Seen this way,
‘Showgirls’ is his ‘Salo’, but all that would still be some years into the
future when he made his American debut with ‘RoboCop’. I may be one of the few
perhaps, but I’ll have to admit here that even though I’ve always admired the
film, I’ve also found it a difficult, almost nauseating films to watch – even
as a little boy I remember feeling a bit depressed after seeing it. I can’t
quite shake the feeling that despite its obvious qualities the balance of ‘RoboCop’
isn’t quite right, although watching an awful film like ‘Watchmen’ makes you
realize how skilled Verhoeven’s balancing act even here already was. Still, I
can’t seem to lose the idea that the film in the end lacks a real human core,
which prevents the films from becoming a true masterpiece. It’s not the film
doesn’t try, as it surely does, but with Nancy Allen seemingly categorically
unable to project any feeling and also Peter Weller not quite an easy guy to
like, these attempts are almost doomed from the start. Which leaves us only
with all the hatred, nastiness and violence that even Verhoeven’s high-octane
visual style can’t quite camouflage.
All this
begs the question of course, what exactly are the moral responsibilities of an
artist? Does he have to imagine a way out of all this malaise, or is it enough
to just show the problems itself? The answer to this would be highly dependent
on one’s own moral make-up, and it is a conundrum that the profoundly
humanistic critic Robin Wood has grappled with extensively. He has often admitted
his outright hatred for the films of both David Cronenberg and David Lynch, for
what he perceives as an utter disgust for humanity. Although deeply influenced
by his writings, I’ve always parted ways with Wood on this point, as I deeply
respect both directors and in some ways one is grateful Wood didn’t live long
enough to see ‘Cosmopolis’, as I shudder to think how he would have perceived
it. But even as I don’t agree, it’s interesting to look a little closer at his
thinking; Wood once compared Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986) with Hitchcock’s
‘Shadow of a Doubt’ (1943), as both films share a similar tactic by exposing
the dark underbelly lurking underneath the cheeriness of small-town America.
Hitchcock has the seemingly benign uncle Joseph Cotton infiltrate his typical
American family and by linking him closely to the eternally innocent Teresa
Wright, Hitch rather shockingly suggests that she would also be capable of the
same horrible actions as her uncle. And anyway, with her father and his friend
Hume Cronyn only concerned with the most gruesome of murder plots, the horror
beneath the facade is never far away. The famous opening of ‘Blue Velvet’ has
Lynch setting up similar concerns of course, when the shot of the white picket
fence and impossibly smiling town folk, is suddenly undercut when the camera
dives underground to show the wriggling worms. Robin Wood’s argument is that
Lynch, unlike Hitchcock, isn’t able to provide us with any alternative and is
already satisfied by showing this combination of light and dark forces. Trapped
between exaggerated sweetness and intolerable darkness, Kyle MacLachlan and Laura
Dern have nowhere to go, which is what Woods sees as the crucial flaw of
negativity in Lynch. Although his points are well-taken, it’s funny my own
reaction to both ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ and ‘Blue Velvet’ are almost the opposite to
those of Wood: although I don’t dislike ‘Shadow’ and in fact quite like it, I
still don’t really understand why Hitchcock himself would invariably cite this
as his own favorite amongst his own films, as I am always put off somewhat by a
certain coldness and almost callousness towards its characters. Lynch’s
attitude has always seemed much warmer by contrast, as he does display the
affection for his characters that Hitchcock seems to lack in ‘Shadow’. Lynch
may not imagine any place to hide for MacLachlan and Dern, but to me that has
always been the point, as they are hopelessly lost in the twilight zone between
darkness and light, not fitting in either one of them as they are too pure for
the darkness, yet too depraved for the light. And not fitting in either society’s
upper- nor underworld they basically have to create a society for themselves,
which is something that I personally can relate to very much and which seems
more than Hitchcock is able to imagine for his protagonist Teresa Wright –
whose only salvation is her loss of innocence.
Even
though I disagree with Wood on both Lynch and Cronenberg, it would be all too
easy to dismiss his entire position for this reason, as I recognize for
instance that my own hatred for the films of Brian De Palma is rooted in
objections that are very similar to Wood’s (who, ironically, seemed to like De
Palma well enough). As this illustrates, it’s impossible (and of course quite
unwelcome) to make some blanket statements about complicated matters like this,
as every case has to be judged on its own terms. I’ve often wondered why my
reaction to ‘RoboCop’ would be quite different as to some other Verhoeven films
and the only answer I can come up with is the already mentioned idea of
balance. Someone once described Verhoeven’s films as trying to survive in a
world full of assholes, which is an accurate enough assessment, but it already
points to the dangers this method involves. Even though he obviously doesn’t
shy away from confrontational material, I do feel he usually tries to stress
the positive, surviving aspects instead of all the nastiness surrounding them,
which is I suppose where ‘RoboCop’ partially fails. Perhaps it misses the
biting wit Gerard Soeteman provided for his Dutch films and the similar role
Joe Eszterhas would play in his later American ones, as it was this ability to
laugh that would not only lighten up the general mood of these pictures, but
was indeed the very way these people could survive in the first place. These
protagonists were decidedly human with all their foibles and mistakes, but it
was also what made them warm and likeable and a similar core seems to be
lacking in ‘RoboCop’, with only a cyborg and the robot-like Nancy Allen to root
for. The net result is that instead of emphasizing the astonishing human
ability to get through even the hardest of circumstances, Verhoeven ended up
showing mostly only these deadening surroundings – with the humor relegated to
the sidelines.
Verhoeven
paints a picture of contemporary disguised as slightly futuristic America where
there is nowhere to run and no place to hide. The extreme nastiness of city
life should be obvious enough, but unfortunately the portrait of the supposedly
happy family life in the suburbs that Weller was supposed to have had before he
returned as robot, is also much too blasé to be believable. In a manner that
surely recalls the late Douglas Sirk, Verhoeven uses the imagery of
stereotypical small-town America to destroy its myth of homeliness by sheer
exaggeration, to the point where even the name ‘Primrose Lane’ seems designed
for maximum satiric impact. It’s of course his prerogative to do so, but by
also undermining the safe haven where Weller should remember his human past,
Verhoeven does exactly that what Robin Wood found so disgusting in ‘Blue
Velvet’. On the surface it looks like the answer to the horrors of city life,
as even the color schemes are clearly meant to convey this: Primrose Lane is
the only moment in the entire film we see the soothing color green, in stark
contrast to the rest of the film that’s all glass, steel, concrete and rust,
with the depressing surroundings of its industrial ending being as far removed
from the comfort of Primrose Lane as possible. But this comfort is clearly only
an illusion, as it is already infiltrated by the violence and commerce of city
life, as the whole housing accommodation is nothing but one giant commercial
venture. Sirk used the idea of television to make one of his satiric points in
‘All That Heaven Allows’, where her estranged children force a TV on Jane Wyman
and the director emphasized its alien presence by making a camera movement
towards it, with Wyman’s face reflected ghostly in its screen to emphasize the
divisive influence of TV on family life. Verhoeven similarly uses the TV as a
destructive presence for family life, by having Weller’s kid watching violent
TV shows that even have him trying to live up to the rather unrealistic
expectations set up by media, as when he is seen twirling his gun like his
son’s TV hero.
This critique
of how everyday media invades our homes and lives and grossly distorts our
human reality is also reinforced by the ubiquitous presence of TV screens in
the film. Of course, ‘RoboCop’ ain’t exactly the only film to make these points,
as it is one of the chief philosophical arguments against modern society, one
that was started by Marshall McLuhan back in the late fifties and is still
going strong today. It was given provocative form by Jean Beaudrillard when he
coined the term ‘hyper-realism’ by which he meant that the mediated world often
feels more ‘real’ to us than the world outside and the distinction between
reality and fantasy has become blurred. To give proof of his thesis, Beaudrillard
could then claim the Gulf War had never taken place, by which he didn’t want to
deny the horrors of it, but merely that the mediated image was inherently
manipulated. The war did take place, but not in the one-sided and distorted way
it was presented in the media, and since we can only know it through these
media, our knowledge of it is necessarily false even though it doesn’t feel so.
When Verhoeven moved to America, he seems to have taken these issues very much
to heart, as it also markedly shifted his style: in Holland he used something
that perhaps could be described as realistic exaggeration, as he would always
lay it on thick while invariably staying within the boundaries of realism. But
as the influence and control of media came to the forefront of his cinema, Verhoeven
crossed over from exaggerated realism into Beaudrillard’s hyper-realism.
As
always, the director himself is excruciatingly frank about all this, in the
moment when RoboCop is surrounded by little children and the news cast says the
children now meet something their parents only read about in comic books. In
this way, RoboCop is explicitly presented as a comic book character come to
(robotic) life, which presents a similar conflation of realism and fantasy as
the hyper-realistic mediated environment. When he moved from sober Holland to
wild America, Verhoeven continued the long tradition of European directors who
started working in Hollywood and who were able to bring their outsider position
to the American system. But in Verhoeven’s case it presented also the ultimate
transgression, as he immediately started out to turn the Hollywood system
against itself, as virtually all these films became critiques not only on
American society but also its entertainment, which resulted in the ‘Salo’-like
wedding of unholy elements. In ‘RoboCop’, right out of the gate, in his very
first American scene, Verhoeven proved his point when the defense robot goes
out of control and kills one of the staff members. But he is not only shot
down, he is quite literally shot to pieces in what would become a trademark
Verhoeven sequence. It would be easy to dismiss it as over the top, but that is
obviously also its point: if people really want bloodshed and sex for their
entertainment, Verhoeven is going to give it to them in spades. But by
presenting violence in such an exaggeration fashion, it also becomes somewhat
unreal, almost surrealistic. It’s one thing to see such violence as a drawing
in a comic book, as it is quite easy to distance yourself from it as it doesn’t
‘look’ real. But presented so life-like in a film, it’s quite another thing as
the distancing becomes highly problematic and it’s suddenly not so easy
anymore. Verhoeven must have delighted in the quickly developing special
effects departments that he had so much access to now, as they often almost
become his protagonists. And it really doesn’t matter if they look ‘dated’ now,
as the conflation of realism and fantasy would even be its point – it’s their
status as mediated experience that gives them their power.
Although
this subtext of hyper-realism is clearly running through ‘RoboCop’, the
filmmakers were even more concerned with the notion of control. Although
control has always played a part in Verhoeven’s films, it became much more
pronounced when he moved to America where it clearly became the structuring
principle of all his movies. One could say that if his Dutch films are about
“trying to survive in a world full of assholes”, in America it became “trying
to survive in a world full of assholes being controlled by media”. Whether or
not people control the media or they control us, has of course been the debate
for decades now and can be summarized by its two poles: McLuhan’s technological
determinism versus Raymond Williams’ social constructivism. Without going into
that now, it should be clear that Verhoeven believes more in McLuhan’s notion,
as he consistently paints a portrait of a society that’s strongly controlled by
the same media it has created. In a way this would be quite logical, since our
entire society has been built on control, something that ‘RoboCop’ pulls no
punches in telling us, as it is an entire movie about control. There’s a small
but significant moment when Miguel Ferrer is reaping the fruits of his
new-found success of control, as he is now able to have sex with a couple of
models. When he is busy with one of them, the other one immediately feels left
out and is trying to capture his attention again by putting some cocaine
between her tits for him to sniff. Even though her ploy works well enough, it
also makes the other broad feel unwanted! So, what could have been a perhaps
somewhat empty, but nevertheless fine physical experience is now entirely destroyed
by egocentric control. How utterly disgusting and far-reaching this craving for
control really is, is something I experienced firsthand not too long ago when I
got fired from my job. Not because I didn’t do my work good enough, but because
I had the nerve to think! It wasn’t enough for my boss that I did the things he
asked, he also wanted to control how I thought about them, and when he noticed
he couldn’t quite accomplish this, he became mad and fired me. That is to say,
he wanted to, as there are laws in my country that prevent firing without good
reason. But even when I entered into mediation conversations with the company,
these representatives too were more or less annoyed they couldn’t quite control
me and they even started using words like ‘respect’, even though nobody in the
entire company had treated me with any respect in the first place. So the world
of backstabbing, control and lack of respect in ‘RoboCop’ has really become
commonplace.
If we
were to try to discover when these notions of control and the resulting
distorted relations between human beings began, we would have to go back
millions of years. Because it already went wrong when our ancestors made the
transition from hunter/gatherers to a sedimentary existence and the development
of animal husbandry. The keeping of animals presented the first separation of
humans from the natural world around them and started the ridiculous notion
that earth’s resources are only there to be used by humans. But with it also
came the concept of property and thus the notion of control: instead of a equal
division between the hunting of the men and the gathering of the women, man
began to dominate: first women and eventually other men as much as they could.
And the frightening thing of course is that no one wants to acknowledge this;
because when I looked at my boss who tried to abuse his authority in a
desperate attempt to control my thoughts, I couldn’t really shake the image in
my head that he was nothing but a caveman bent on petty control. Yet had I
brought this up in the mediation, these people very probably would have looked
at me as if I were stark raving mad (as it was they already came close). Most
people have internalized these quite arbitrary power relations to such a degree
they never really question them anymore and just assume that all this is
somehow the natural way of life. But the idiocy of this can be gleaned from a
story Chellis Glendinning recounts in her book ‘My Name is Chellis and I'm in
Recovery from Western Civilization’. In it, a Native American chief was taken
to a large city for the first time and as they passed a bank with armed guards,
the chief was kind of puzzled as to what it could possibly mean. Faced with the
difficulty of explaining the concept of a bank to him, the guide simply said it
was a place where the riches of the tribe’s leader are kept, an answer that
made the chief laugh heartily. Because as he said, ‘he can’t be a very good
leader when he needs so much protection”!
It’s one
of those stories that has the ability to throw so much that we take for granted
into serious question. We automatically assume that power and protection go
together, like hand in glove, because we
are used to the idea that leadership is always based on control of others. But
as so many indigenous have proven for millions of years and some of them still
prove to this very day, if there is a hierarchy to be had, it needn’t
necessarily be based on the wielding of power, but can be attained by the twin
components of respect and responsibility. As I recently noticed, the bosses of
my company really automatically assumed they should be treated with respect,
just because they hold a superior position and get a bigger paycheck. It
obviously never occurred to them that they confused respect with fear, because
control by force of power can only result in fear and never in respect. Respect
for a leader can only be earned when he can prove he is charismatic enough to
be a leader who doesn’t desperately want to control others, but merely govern
them – with their help and encouragement. It may sound almost grotesque to
modern ears and is in sharp contrast to the picture of murdering savages that
modern society likes to paint of so-called ‘primitive’ people, but criminality
has virtually been non-existent within such cultures. It’s not there is no
conflict, because obviously there will always be conflict as long as they are
humans, but these conflicts are always resolved within the community itself and
were based on mutual understanding and respect. Respect for others can only
exist when first you have respect for yourself, which of course also means
responsibility because having respect for yourself isn’t really as easy as it
should be. People who deep down hate themselves will always take it out on
others, even if they’re not conscious of their self-hatred.
What ‘RoboCop’
excels in, is showing that all this control and lack of (self)respect will lead
to extreme violence and cruelty. In a suffocating atmosphere that feels like a
mesh-up of ‘Chopping Mall’ and ‘Head Office’, people are treated like product: RoboCop
himself is categorized as such, and in the beginning a criminal is thrown out
of the van when he’s outlived his usefulness. There is a lot of talk about a
possible police strike, which some people suggest is impossible because “without
police control this city is going to tear itself apart”. This may very well be
quite realistic, but at the same time totally absurd, as the idea that a
society needs to be protected against itself is really too frightening to truly
contemplate. Again, everything is presented as a chain of control: citizens are
controlled by police, police is controlled by the company, the members of the
company are controlled by their superior until we come to the top executive who
controls all, who, by having ulterior motives, corrupts the whole system (like
it needed corrupting). In an attempt to make things easier (read: make more
money), a machine is then introduced to replace human police agents, but as the
opening makes so clear, these machines are not so easy to control. For reasons
that are never fully explained, some combination of man and machine is then
introduced, the RoboCop of the title, with probably the suggestion being that
the easy controllability of humans can be combined with the effectiveness of
the machine. This works like a charm of course, until, ironically, the machine
starts remembering his human roots and the moment the man-machine goes out of
control he is to be destroyed.
Verhoeven
himself has often pointed to the parallels between RoboCop and Jesus Christ,
which shouldn’t be really surprising, as the director seems still obsessed with
the making of a film about the real life of Jesus instead of the myths as
handed down in the Bible. Besides this, the whole Jesus story is explicitly
about control, as he’s usually described as a rebel, which is something that could
explain Verhoeven’s fascination with the topic. Because although in his
authorized biography he said he wanted to ‘go with the flow’ of Hollywood, this
is the one thing he never seemed able to do (or want), as he’s always been
something of a rebel who refused to compromise and who obviously delighted in
exposing the flaws in American culture by sheer exaggeration. When I saw the
restored version of ‘Spetters’ premiered, cast and crew were also present
including Verhoeven himself, who recounted the familiar story of how he was
considered by George Lucas to direct ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ from the ‘Star
Wars’ saga. Lucas’ friend Steven Spielberg had seen ‘Soldaat van Oranje’ and
was much impressed by it, so suggested Verhoeven to Lucas but when they saw the
rather abrasive ‘Spetters’ they apparently recoiled and as Verhoeven said with
a big smile ‘I’m still waiting for that phone call”. It was a pattern that
would repeat itself when he did go to Hollywood some time later, where he made
few friends and many enemies, by virtue of his refusal to be controlled. What
all this illustrates is how universal the notion of control really is and how
it seeped into every aspect of our lives. Which is to say, that despite their
extreme nature, all of Verhoeven’s American films are morality tales really,
that expose the need to control that Western civilization is build upon and the
havoc such structures wreaks upon others. So in this respect, I hope I may be
forgiven to leave the last word to something completely different – but on the
surface only. In the Shirley Temple film of ‘The Blue Bird’ (1940), which was
the second film I saw after ‘RoboCop’, she asks why her father must go off to
war, to which he answers:
“The
same thing that makes trouble everywhere: greed, selfishness, those not content
with what they have. You can’t be unhappy inside yourself, without making
others unhappy too”.
Perhaps
I should have shown it to my boss.
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