Last night, Watson completed his route of Jeopardy competitors Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, ushering in our new “computer overlords.” 1 Appropriately enough, this comes roughly a week after a Massachusetts man tweeted a message to Detroit Mayor David Bing: “Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit,” to which Bing tweeted “There are no plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.” 2
However, the initial tweet spread epidemically through the internet and soon birthed www.detroitneedsrobocop.com, a site dedicated to raising enough funds to construct a Robocop statue. Originally, the cost of this project was estimated to be around $50, 000, which seemed a rather lofty goal for a city mired in poverty and crime while fighting heartily against the recent recession; however, as of this morning, there are 1,860 people backing this project, and cumulatively, they have donated $55,750, surpassing their planned budget with an additional 37 days to go before this donation-web-athon ceases.3
The response to the initial tweet is a testament to how interconnected our society has become through Twitter and proof that almost anything can be accomplished through the power of suggest. At the same time, there is a wealth of irony in the decision to place the protagonist of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi cult classic about a dystopian, dilapidated, crime-infested city whose only recourse is a virtually indestructible machine.
Don’t misunderstand me. Robocop is a great flick with a wealth of discourse about the boundary between humanity and machine, and people and products. The first is a given since part of Robocop is human – but really only the face; everything else was torn apart by a barrage of bullets, leading to “total body prosthesis.” The gray area between people and products is a bit subtler in that Robocop’s production is pragmatically a way to prevent the number of murdered cops from rising, but at the same time, he’s also the vehicle that Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) needs to obtain the Vice-Presidency at OCP, the recent purchaser of the Detroit Police Force. Morton’s opportunity to implement this project doesn’t present itself until his fiercest competitor, Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), introduces ED 209, “the future of law enforcement,” but his prototype fails miserably when it riddles a board member with a dozen bullets during a demonstration.
Clearly, OCP can’t move forward with a dangerous, bunk product, so Morton is able to “pick up the ball”; however, the board member’s life is negated and serves as the impetus for production which illustrates a rather nefarious view on human life in “Old Detroit,” but it offers the opportunity for Morton to present his “contingency sort of thing” to illuminate his talent and undermine Jones. While Jones’ demeanor and threatening attitude fashion him as the overall bad guy in the film, his motives are strikingly similar to Morton’s in that they both want credit for manufacturing “An efficient police force […] a cop that doesn’t need to eat or sleep; a cop with superior firepower.” All that Morton needs is “a schmuck to volunteer,” or rather, die in the line of duty.
Enter Alex J. Murphy (Peter Weller), who is promptly introduced and the led into a dangerous situation where he is eviscerated by five machine-gun toting maniacs. Upon his death, Morton has his opening, and OCP can “do whatever we want with him” because “he signed a release form when he joined the force,” giving birth to the future of law enforcement. But in here lies the subtext of Robocop that is often overshadowed by the awesomeness of the movie and the badassness of the protagonist: Robocop is a more cost-effective way for OCP to manage the police force in that their future product requires no food, no benefits, no retirement, no wage increases to compensate for cost of living, no overtime, and not loss of man power through pesky death. Subsequently, money and manpower will not have to be funneled into new recruits during training. Instead, all future officers will not “have a name.” Instead, “[they will have] a program” and be “a product.”
Moreover, within this subtext resides the irony of wanting to build a statue to Robocop in Detroit: the symbol residing in Roosevelt Park represents additional loss of jobs and higher unemployment rates in a struggling city. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in Detroit surpasses the national average and resides at 14.1%,4 so imposing a symbol of additional unemployment seems a bit ill-advised, particularly since the first reaction from a handful of police officers to Robocop on the firing range is “What’re they going to do, replace us?”
Granted, its construction might also serve to encourage citizens to fight against the unjust and the corrupt, but in the end, Robocop nearly meets his demise because the corrupt he was seeking were his creators, so the fictitious character also symbolizes the precarious trust between the corporate world and private citizens. In other words, if Robocop is programmed to be incapable of cracking down on authoritative corruption if such corruption comes from their superiors, then Robocop, by default, perpetuates corruption.
The deeper social comment being limned by the construction of this statue is the misguided philanthropy in the city of Detroit. Right now, the number of foreclosures is at an all time high, and one could conceivably purchase 15-20 homes5 with the $55, 750 that has been raised for this project, which would be a much more noble endeavor given that there are “at least 3700 people in need of emergency shelter on any given night” – and this doesn’t include the homeless that have been lucky enough to find their way into shelters and the “2000 people that live on the street each night in abandoned buildings.”6
While Detroit might rival Philadelphia on the “Awesome Statues of Fictional Characters” scale, the truth is that the money pouring in to fund this project will probably not mean much to those impoverished, hungry, unemployed, and destitute families and children that position their cardboard boxes and blankets of tents just right so they might catch a glimpse of the morning sun cascading off Robocop’s metal visor.
1http://www.pcworld.com/article/219900/ibm_watson_wins_jeopardy_humans_rally_back.html
2http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/imaginationstation/detroit-needs-a-statue-of-robocop
3 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/imaginationstation/detroit-needs-a-statue-of-robocop
4 http://www.bls.gov/lau/lacilg05.htm
6http://dsimmer.com/2008/04/21/detroit-homelessness