“Robocop”, or Crisis of Subjectivity

Steve Best

Abstract

The author makes references to the Hollywood cinema of the last decade, which makes use of technical means to concentrate on the simulation and construction of human body. Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film Robocop is in a way a precursor of the trend. Although the film seems to be a mixture of standard Hollywood plots, tinged with violence, irony and sentimentalism, it is also a bitter attack on corporate capitalism and the mass media. It is a gloomy meditation on the decaying modernity and the fate of a post-industrial and de-humanized world. In Best’s penetrating essay, Robocop is an internally contradictory and compli­cated text. It is a perfect metaphor of our post-modernist situation whose basic trait is technological mediation. Human body tends to more frequently integrate with a Walkman, computer or a robot. The fear, that men will be replaced by robots, or that they themselves will be turned into machines is part of the existence of contemporary people. But the problem is not as that simple in Robocop. Man’s mind, the subject closed in an automatic body defends itself against technological determination. It seeks to restore humanist values and meanings. In this sense, Robocop favours the conservative order and the moral status of an entity. In this sense, the film tells much of American mythology and bourgeois metaphysics in crisis.