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Dec. 21, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
01:04:19
The Politics of Demolition Man
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Welcome to California in the year 2032.
Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara have merged into a megacity called San Angeles.
This sprawling metropolitan area has become the birthplace of a progressive new society, engineered by the founder and CEO of Cocteau Industries, Dr. Raymond Cocteau.
The world he created is a tolerant and technocratic paradise.
It is almost perfect.
All people are monitored at all times.
The entire city is blanketed in advanced security cameras that are watched by the San Angeles Police Department, who enforce the city's curfew and register crimes the moment they happen.
People in positions of authority routinely listen into the phone calls of their inferiors.
Speech is heavily regulated.
Every room has wall-mounted sensors that monitor everything said, and anyone who violates the strict speech codes is fined.
All narcotics, as well as fatty foods, alcohol and tobacco, are illegal, as is anything that is viewed as being detrimental to human health.
Prisoners are no longer kept in traditional prisons, but in cryo-prisons, which are considered more humane.
Convicts are frozen for decades, and during their sentence, they are mentally reprogrammed to become more conformable to society and given skills that match their genetic dispositions.
Everyone wears monotone, loose-fitting and nearly unisex outfits, except on special occasions, such as a night out at a restaurant, which like the rest of the world is a corporate monopoly.
An interesting side effect of universal corporate monopolies is that commercials have become obsolete, and now people listen to them for entertainment.
Cash no longer exists and all transactions are done digitally via a credit chip in the back of one's hand.
People completely refrain from physical contact.
They do not shake hands or high-five.
They do not kiss.
Life is so highly regulated that physical contact is not even made during sex.
Abortion is illegal, but so is pregnancy.
Humans are conceived and grown artificially.
Personal interactions have become formalized and front-loaded with affirmations designed to put each party most at their ease and validate their sense of being.
Anyone who does not follow this ritualistic social order is considered low and brutish.
San Angeles has become so safe that there has not been a murder in over 15 years, and the worst crime that afflicts the city is occasional graffiti.
Civil unrest is a thing of the past and is also likely to render you a wanted criminal.
The primary struggle that faces the people of San Angeles is mental health.
A loss of meaning is a common affliction among the docile citizenry.
Street corners have high-tech booths that dole out automated ego boosts, provide access to a public psychiatrist and allow citizens confessionals.
However, the graffiti that reads, Life is Hell, reveals that the progressive utopia is not as universally beloved as it might first appear.
Beneath the perfectly crafted city of Dr. Cocteau is a criminal underbelly that flouts the rules of this brave new world.
Led by a rebel called Edgar Friendly, they are charged with civil unrest activity such as graffiti liable, incitement to riot, slander speech, food thieving, disorderly conduct, and moral disquietude.
The tranquil order of the surface world cannot bear such offenses, and they've driven these thought criminals, collectively known as the scraps, out of society and into the sewers where they survive by eating vermin and stealing from the surface world.
Even this oppression is not enough, however.
The existence of Edgar Friendly in the scraps is in fact so egregious to Dr. Cocteau's vision that Cocteau himself must devise a final solution to exterminate this revolutionary terrorist threat.
Dr. Cocteau is a successful revolutionary technocrat.
Although we are not told how he achieved it, during the breakdown of civil society in the late 1990s, according to the movie's timeline, Cocteau somehow led his faction to establish the current bureaucratic regime as presented in the film.
Cocteau's new order is completely systematized, tightly structured and closely regulated.
Advanced technology allows the government to keep track of all citizens at all times and the expectation of personal privacy has been abolished.
Censors all over the city can zero in on anyone at any time.
I can't even conceive a visual of what you police officers did before it was developed.
We work for a living as fashion crap makes you want to puke.
They consider themselves a science-based society of peace, loving and understanding, as Huxley describes it, where bad things simply do not happen anymore.
The excessive restrictions placed on the behavior of the individual are designed to ensure that their behavior falls within closely prescribed boundaries in order to preserve the austere moral standards Cocteau's new society now expects and enforces.
John Spartan, you are fined one critic for a violation of the verbal morality statute.
San Angeles is predicated on order and conformity.
Social interactions are formalized and ritualized to protect each person's personal boundaries.
People dress in an extremely conservative and near-gender neutral fashion, with long flowing robes hiding their body shape.
The obsession with science has become an integral part of social interaction in San Angeles.
It is skillfully embedded in the dialogue throughout the film, so the people in Cocteau's utopia appeal to science as justification for their own human impulses.
There is, of course, a well-known and documented connection between sex and violence.
Not so much a causal effect, but a general state of neurological arousal.
And after having observed your behavior this evening and my resultant condition, um I was wondering if you would like to have sex.
When Spartan objects to the new technological method of making love, Huxley reprimands him again by appealing to scientific studies that prove that this way of making love is in fact better than the old way.
First sex has been proven to produce higher orders of alpha waves during digitized transference of sexual energy.
Alright, Huxley, what do you say we just do it the old-fashioned way?
Disgusting!
The people of San Angeles hold a systemic view of society and view each individual as a replaceable part in the whole.
An example of this is displayed in Police Chief Earl's method for locating and capturing Simon Phoenix.
It is unclear where Phoenix is and instead of proactively searching for him, the police chief states that they will sit back and wait for another murder-death kill in order to locate him.
John Spartan is naturally disgusted by this lack of concern for a human life that the police chief is unthinkingly willing to sacrifice and replies with a sarcastic retort, which goes unnoticed because sarcasm has also been abolished.
We can just wait for another code to go red.
And when Phoenix performs another murder-death kill, we'll know exactly where to pounce.
Great plan.
Thank you.
He likes your plan, Chief.
Cocteau's solution to the crisis of the scraps is deeply irresponsible.
Releasing Simon Phoenix would inevitably kill many people, but Cocteau's callous attitude towards these deaths shows that he genuinely believes that the ends justify the means.
After all, it would surely not be Cocteau himself that will be murdered by the psychopaths that he's released.
The social elite of Cocteau's society are also the moral elite, as displayed in the attitude exhibited towards John Spartan.
Many times throughout the film, Spartan's boorish nature is remarked upon disdainfully, and he is treated with disgust at his lack of manners.
What would you say if I called you a brutish fossil, symbolic of a decayed era, gratefully forgotten?
I don't know.
Thanks.
The message is very clear.
They are better than him, much better than him.
He is garbage, and they want him to know it.
They do not consider that it is unreasonable to expect someone who is not raised in such a system to understand the formalized social environment of that system, nor understand technology that did not exist in his own time.
It is these expressions of ignorance and privilege that determine who is and who is not an accepted member of Cocteau's regime, and those that fall outside of these limits are little more than moral vermin.
And if they oppose the regime, there is no reason why they should be tolerated.
This is justified through an appeal to the civilized nature of San Angeles.
After all, there hasn't been a death in 16 years, isn't this a good thing?
How can safety be oppressive?
Edgar Friendly is the unofficial leader of the Scraps, a title that Friendly himself rejects, and Dr. Cocteau considers him to be a counter-revolutionary.
his very existence is a threat to the moral order of San Angeles.
You tell Cocteau he can kiss my ass.
Yeah, that's right.
You tell Cocteau it's going to take an army of assholes to get rid of me, because I don't give a shit, I got nothing to lose.
The Scraps are a diverse collection of people who live beneath the megacity, driven there because of their ideological rejection of Cocteau's revolution.
To the Scraps, Cocteau's order is not a representation of the good.
His extreme restrictions on personal liberty constitute an unbearable lifestyle, and it is this desire for individual autonomy and a resistance to Cocteau's overbearing authority that has forced them into the sewers.
I guess you weren't part of the Cocteau plan.
Greed?
Deception?
Abuse of power, that's no plan.
That's why everybody's down here?
You got that right.
See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy.
Because I like to think.
I like to read.
I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice.
I'm the kind of guy that's just sitting in a greasy spoon and wonder, gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecue ribs with the side-order gravy fries?
I want high cholesterol.
I want to eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, okay?
I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section.
I want to run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine.
Why?
Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal?
I've seen this.
Do you know what it is?
It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana broccoli shake, singing, I'm an Oscar Meyer wiener.
You live up top, you live Cocteau's way.
What he wants, when he wants, how he wants.
Your other choice?
Come down here, maybe starve to death.
Dr. Cocteau does not consider that his perfectly ordered city could be, in fact, not perfect, if it does not account for the energetic and self-reliant side of human nature.
And that he must actively suppress this segment of the population surely undermines his own moral claims.
As much as any other society throughout history, Cocteau's own handcrafted civilization of tolerance is built on the oppression of others.
The question is not one of how to eradicate suffering.
It is instead a question of choosing which group must suffer.
The Scraps underground civilization is predicated on freedom, which is naturally anathema to Cocteau's technocratic utopia.
The Scraps society is disorderly and plagued by material deprivation, but unlike the citizens of San Angeles, the Scraps are not suffering from a loss of purpose.
They want to be left to make their own decisions in life.
Even if those decisions have negative consequences that could have otherwise been prevented, this is eminently preferable to Cocteau's nanny-state monoculture of conformity.
Cocteau, however, is forced to recognize the Scraps as an appealing alternative to his beloved utopia.
Despite being persecuted, dispossessed, and starving, Cocteau considers the worldview of the Scraps so destructive to his own project that he would break his own laws and commit murder in order to preserve his creation.
For a sadly extended period of time, we in San Angeles have been plagued by a pack of subterranean hooligans.
You will come to know them as scraps.
Men and women who have left the comfort of our society only to spew hostility at the very bosom that they have relinquished.
There was a time when we used to look upon these scraps as rather pathetic and relatively harmless.
Now they have a leader.
Mr. Friendly seems relentless in his ambition to infect our harmony with his venom.
He must, of course, be stopped.
This radical terrorist behavior led by Mr. Friendly must not be allowed to undermine our safety.
The scraps fight back against their oppressors by means of psychological warfare.
They construct intricate gadgets that they can use to vandalize the surface world with pithy messages such as life is hell, designed to wake people to the fact that there is something wrong with life in San Angeles.
Ever the good censor, however, this graffiti is removed almost immediately and automatically, so the message cannot spread.
It is Edgar Friendly's ideas alone that are the threat to the technocratic surface order, as experienced by politically correct police officer Alfredo Garcia.
Tell me something, Garcia.
Don't you get bored co-chasing perps who break curfew and tell dirty jokes?
Actually, no, I find my job deeply fulfilling.
When we first meet Garcia, he is the model of conformity.
Don't you ever want something to happen?
Goodness, no.
I knew you're going to say that.
But after sustaining his first physical assault, he embraces Friendly's worldview and revolution.
Look at you.
You get a bump on the nagging and you think you're part of here.
Who?
San Angeles is an austere place, and the desire for thrill-seeking must be curtailed by suppressing the chances for experiences that get the heart pumping.
Garcia seems to have discovered a rough side to life that the soft tyranny of San Angeles had denied him, and he appears to find it intoxicating.
Fucking A.
The general opinion of Dr. Cocteau among those raised in San Angeles is one of a benevolent father figure, a mask that Cocteau himself is careful to wear to cover his Machiavellian tendencies.
The people seem to be emotionally dependent on him for structure and order in their lives, the consequence of decades of Cocteau's behavioral engineering.
Oh, John Spartan, civilization as we know it will come to an end.
I don't know, but trust me, this is better for you.
Dr. Cocteau is also a complete zealot.
When we are first introduced to him, he is explaining why the murders and explosions caused by Simon Phoenix are, actually, not the city's real problems.
The real problem lies with the ideological enemy, Edgar Friendly.
This radical terrorist behavior led by Mr. Friendly must not be allowed to undermine our safety.
Not only did John Spartan and Simon Phoenix have more in common with Edgar Friendly than Dr. Cocteau, they both separately come to work against him.
John Spartan's comparatively liberal nature makes him the perfect fish out of water for such a society, and his circumstances are the backbone of much of the humor of the film.
He loathes the smothering and unnatural customs of San Angeles, and as these are the invention of Dr. Cocteau, he takes an unfavorable view of Cocteau from the start.
Spartan dislikes the amount society has changed since he was frozen in the 1990s.
He is surprised to find that there is no longer market competition.
The government is downright Orwellian, but the populace have been pacified to such a great extent that they don't even understand why one would object.
As far as Spartan is concerned, Cocteau is running a totalitarian state.
After apparently saving Cocteau from Simon Phoenix, Spartan and Cocteau clash during the dinner at Taco Bell, or if you're in Europe, Pizza Hut, the high-end restaurant, over the intrusive and oppressive nature of this society, even down to the point that the cryo-prisons are not as humane as Cocteau would like one to believe.
It would have been more humane to stake me down and lead me to the fucking crows.
Spartan expresses his dissatisfaction with the status quo in no uncertain terms, in a way that causes the other guests to regard him with clear revulsion.
Maybe you can book me a flight out of here when these sermons are over.
Cocteau justifies his technocratic paradise by appealing to the chaos he witnessed during the collapse of democracy.
You weren't here when the real disturbances began.
Civilization tried to destroy itself.
The city degenerated into a total fear zone.
The citizenry cocooning in their homes afraid to go out.
People just wanted the madness over.
So when I saw the chance to make things right, I seized it.
When John Spartan first meets Edgar Friendly, Friendly presumes that Spartan is just another politically correct San Angeles cop.
But to his surprise, he is actually capable of holding a dialogue.
Friendly explains his views on personal freedom, and John Spartan wholeheartedly agrees and then proceeds to join the scraps in their revolution against Dr. Cocteau's totalitarian regime.
Spartan had experienced enough from Cocteau's utopia and heard enough of a cry for freedom from Friendly that he knew on which side he found himself.
Simon Phoenix, the psychotic villain of the film, seems to reject all other authority than his own.
He is essentially some kind of radical anarcho-capitalist.
In the 1990s, he ran a drug empire that operated as a semi-independent gang state in Los Angeles, and the San Angeles police believe he'll attempt to recreate the same model after being defrosted.
Our computer has already examined every feasible scenario resulting from the appearance of Simon Phoenix.
It is determined he will attempt to set up a new drug lab and form a crime syndicate.
That is correct, Chief George Earl.
Look, I hate to interrupt you two lovebirds, but that's really fucking stupid.
Do you think he wants to start a business?
He probably actually does, though, although Spartan was right that his initial plan would be to arm himself.
Simon Phoenix is the polar opposite of Dr. Cocteau.
Where Cocteau rules using morality and deception, Simon Phoenix rules using violence and intimidation.
Phoenix is a barbarian chieftain who rewards his close followers for their brutality much in the same way that Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan must have done.
However, Cocteau has the whip hand and Phoenix knows it, and his inability to harm Cocteau forces the pair to negotiate.
Just get it over with.
You're beginning to be more trouble than you're worth.
Oh, Raymond, don't say that.
Phoenix agrees to go along with Cocteau's plan in order to receive a large, independent territory as a reward.
And what do I get out of all of this?
What do you want?
Santa Monica!
Hell, what about all the coastal cities?
Well, I'll bear it in mind.
Good, I'll send you a memo.
Just do your jump!
During the course of the film, the pair have several conversations about the political nature of what it is exactly that Cocteau is trying to do, and why he is trying to do it.
He even explains it in depth to Simon Phoenix.
I'll have carte blanche to create the perfect society.
San Angeles will be a beacon of order with the purity of an ant colony and the beauty of a flawless pearl.
Yet, even the villainous Simon Phoenix thinks Raymond Cocteau is awful, as his tyranny is too far, even for a warlord who takes sadistic pleasure in violence.
As far as Phoenix is concerned, the scope and the methods Cocteau would employ are on another level.
I hadn't counted on this, but I must say you've worked out beautifully.
What's new?
People have always been terrified of me.
Yes, but this time they're really intimidating.
Simon Phoenix's violence is immediate, demonstrable, and escapable.
It is at the very least, honest.
Cocteau's violence is subtle, manipulative, and pervasive.
He is deceptive.
He is a liar.
Simon Phoenix doesn't pretend to be a good guy while doing evil, and you can always keep out of his territory if you don't want to be killed.
you have options.
See, I told the city, I said, look, nobody comes down here.
Postmen figured it out, policemen figured it out, but the goddamn bus drivers just wouldn't listen.
But Cocteau's plan seems evil even to Simon Phoenix.
Cocteau plans to take over every aspect of people's entire lives.
He is going to engineer the behavior of not only all of the people in San Angeles, but of all of the people that will be in San Angeles.
For all intents and purposes, he intends to make slaves out of everyone.
For Simon Phoenix's brand of radical freedom, one that gives him license to do unto others whatever the hell he likes, Cocteau's plan violates the one value he holds, a person's right to choose.
Look, you can't take away people's right to be assholes.
An evil Mr. Rogers.
Phoenix is an awful human being, and part of the kick he gets from hurting others is forcing them to choose to do something they despise or get hurt.
Phoenix's worldview, while not compassionate to the suffering of others, at least recognizes the agency of others.
Being a man of action, this is a necessity for survival.
Phoenix does not win most of his fights with John Spartan, if any actually, and must regularly flee to fight another day.
Phoenix has no particular interest in Edgar Friendly beyond his cryo-programming, and his conflict with John Spartan is a personal one that stems from Spartan ruining his empire.
But his disagreement with Dr. Cocteau is existential, and he clearly begins to loathe Cocteau in a manner similar to that of Spartan and Friendly.
And since he cannot murder the old tyrant himself, he orders one of his henchmen to do it instead.
Cocteau is shocked that he failed to predict this outcome, the fatal flaw of planned societies everywhere, because no plan survives contact with the enemy, which in this case is reality.
There are a few key themes that run through the film and intertwine to create a narrative that shows what happens to a society if our respect for personal autonomy and our inherited social norms are neglected.
Dr. Cocteau's scientific technocracy is a revolutionary product of reason.
In a bout of utter prescience, writers Peter M. Lenkov and Robert Renault predicted with surprising accuracy what a high-tech future would look like, both technologically and morally.
Dr. Cocteau is the most important man in San Angeles.
He practically created our whole way of life, savage.
Reason is used to restrict personal behavior across the spectrum by setting intricate rules for all aspects of life.
This has created a mental health crisis because it's being applied to creatures who are not themselves created by reason.
Inherent in this is the denial of the evolutionary animal nature of man, most evident in the sanitization of courtship and reproduction.
These are things that are at their least appealing when they are at their most heavily regulated.
You are a savage creature, John Spartan, and I wish you to leave my domicile now.
We are not beings of pure reason, and Cocteau's system is tyrannical because it fails to account for that.
A lot of what people do is spontaneous and not well thought out, including indulging in what are considered to be sinful impulses.
This is not to say that the other side of the argument is not addressed.
The film is based on the collapse of the liberal democratic order of the 90s, where personal freedom extended too far.
For a society to function on a level above what Simon Phoenix might be happy with, there must indeed be a rules-based order enforced by laws.
During the chaos of the collapse, Dr. Cocteau exploited that desire for order to create his fascist progressive state and sought to expunge the animalistic side of human nature entirely through a eugenicist program of social engineering.
And one of the first things that Dr. Cocteau was able to do was to outlaw and behaviorally engineer all fluid transfer of societally acceptable behavior.
Not even, not even mouth transfers condoned.
Demolition Man is a story about freedom getting out of control and then order getting out of control in its turn.
To a certain percentage of the population, such restrictive social rules become unbearable, and even ostracism, exile, and revolution are preferable options.
So after Cocteau's death, the film ends with the collapse of his regime.
The people of San Angelina's do not know what to do without him, and Edgar Friendly intends to use his successful revolution to create a libertarian paradise, but John Spartan restrains him and demands that there is a synthesis of chaos and order to create a new system that will better reflect and account for these two sides of human nature.
Spartan does not even give prescriptions.
He assumes that they can take responsibility for it themselves, and presumably, they'll make reasonable compromises along the way.
Why don't you get a little turkey?
You will like Cleo.
And somewhere in the middle, I don't think you'll figure it out.
John Spartan's hands-off approach is actually an appeal to return to the politics of personal decision-making and compromise, as adopting a totalizing worldview that regards itself as the one true solution has ended in disaster.
Any idea taken to its extreme will inevitably become oppressive due to the conflicting nature of human desires that preclude a one-size-fits-all system.
Even if we have the knowledge to design a closed society in which we have the ability to regulate all aspects of life, do we have the competence to be sure that we can do it sufficiently well?
Those in agreement with Edgar Friendly were driven underground purely because of the things they think and say and not the actions that they have taken.
If they had been murderous thugs that presented a real danger to others, taking action against them would be understandable, but the scraps are not violent or destructive people.
The problem is not the physical damage they might do to San Angeles, the problem is that they represent a different way of ordering the world.
Cocteau's system is conceptual and idealized.
It exists only in Plato's realm of forms.
For San Angeles to more accurately represent Cocteau's perfect ideal, everyone must be in agreement with his social rules, which means as long as the scraps exist, Cocteau's system is never actually complete.
It is not true Cocteauism.
True Cocteauism has never existed.
Real Cocteauism would not collapse because of counter-revolutionary forces.
Real Cocteauism would be a success.
Prior to Cocteau, society was one that emerged from spontaneous behavior.
It was not planned in advance to fit a particular model.
It is the result of a near-infinite number of negotiations with reality, consisting of compromises and rules set to deal with immediate human desires or problems.
Cocteau's system is the opposite of this.
It is engineered to create a specific kind of society with expected outcomes.
It exposes those points at which it fails to achieve its goals, and these must be vigilantly expunged until the system is flawless and everyone is in their place.
This is why the scraps are the foremost issue on Dr. Cocteau's mind.
Their very existence is like an itch he can't scratch.
It gives him license to persecute and exterminate the scraps, because they are the thing standing between him and perfection.
It might have first seemed like the sewer gulag was the answer, but what Cocteauism needs is a final solution for the scrap question.
San Angeles
is the paradise of low-T Buzzfeed Soyboys.
Physically uncompetitive, it cannot even stop the revolution of the starving scraps, which is why Simon Phoenix was released in the first place.
While the beefcake action hero's frozen in carbonite is a silly contrivance of the plot, the underlying point remains clear.
The physical ability to overcome danger becomes important when you least expect it.
Although for the framing of the film Spartan and Phoenix come from the past, there's no particular reason that they couldn't have come from a part of the world that simply wasn't run, according to Dr. Cocteau's plan.
Even in the most Orwellian police state, the police cannot be at all places in all times.
Perfect safety would mean the complete sacrifice of personal freedom, and it is unreasonable for us to even desire it.
Being human means existing as a physical being to whom there is always the possibility of violence being done.
The rule of law and an ever-watching police force do not prevent the deaths caused by Simon Phoenix.
All nearby units, protects!
To the bureaucratic mind that devises such a system, however, the individual is but a number that is fed into a database and assessed in aggregate.
Protectserve in place. Four minutes, 15 seconds lapsed. The lives of individuals don't matter, but the statistics do.
If overall murders are down, then there is little further concern.
In general, the system works, even though it is at those points of failure that matter the most, at least, to those people to whom the failure is occurring.
Severe eye trauma, ruptured spleen, punctured lung, broken ribs, internal bleeding, condition critical, vital signs failing, imminent death.
Subject deceased.
But this is just an immediate and personal concern.
The deeper concern is about the nature of the rule of law.
Simon Phoenix has no respect for the rule of law.
He does not consent to live by rules imposed on him from without, whether in 1990s Los Angeles or in 2032's San Angeles.
In the 1990s, John Spartan and the police department spent two years to bring Phoenix into custody to impose the rule of law upon him.
The state holds a monopoly of the initiation of violence and anyone who does unwarranted harm to another is breaking the law.
The enforcement branch of the state is used to arrest criminals and is allowed to use up-to-deadly force to bring them to justice.
In 2032, San Angeles is focused around a culture of consent taken to an extreme in all facets of life.
And naturally, this extends to the idea of policing by consent.
F*** you!
The repeated violation of the verbal morality statute has caused me to notify the San Angeles Police.
Please remain where you are, where you are at the plan.
The justified, lawful agents of the state expect one's compliance when one is being arrested so due process can take place.
The book is a fast, too.
You are the one credit.
When sent to apprehend Simon Phoenix, the police officers expect that Phoenix will follow their commands and force will not be necessary.
After all, they are the police and citizens will consent to being placed under arrest.
The police will issue orders and if the suspect does not follow these orders, then he will be touched with a glowrod and rendered unconscious.
It is the most effete form of violence that it is possible to do, and it is also how the monopoly of violence is expressed by the San Angeles police.
When the police attempt to arrest Simon Phoenix and take him into custody, he does not take them seriously.
Oh, I'm so scared.
What, you guys don't have sarcasm anymore.
He has such little respect for their power and authority that he simply ignores them.
They cannot and will not do anything.
Phoenix has realized that this whole society revolves around the avoidance of force.
The world has become a pussy-whipped Rady Bunch version of itself, and by a bunch of roped sissies.
As far as Simon Phoenix is concerned, he's arrived in Ankapistan, population one.
He has free reign to do whatever he likes because there is simply nobody who can stop him, and any challenge to this dominance is going to be settled by force.
When he refuses to relent, the officer addresses him again.
Simon Phoenix, lie down on the ground, or else.
Or else what?
There is, of course, only one answer.
Or else I will force you.
A threat of violence is implicit in the statement, and as an ego-driven maniac, Simon Phoenix can't let that go.
The smug, self-congratulatory atmosphere of the police station turns to panic as Simon Phoenix comedically beats the police officers unconscious and blows up a police car before shorting out the local surveillance cameras.
We're police officers.
We're not trying to handle this kind of violence.
This is, after all, what makes the defrosting of John Spartan necessary, and also shows us that if we were to create the perfect utopia of buzzfeed low testosterone manlets, one single outsider who was not made within this system would be able to wreak havoc because nobody would have the stones to stop him.
Of course, Sylvester Stallone's portrayal of self-reliant masculinity in Demolition Man is the typical caricature of the heroic ideal, common in the early 1990s.
Following on from the 80s trend of the ultra-buff, practically indestructible action heroes, the macho confidence of Sylvester Stallone's character, John Spartan, is comical on the face of it, but played straight.
No one would actually enter the lair of a heavily armed drug gang alone by helicopter, would they?
But John Spartan is just that kind of guy.
The takeaway from this is that a certain degree of self-reliance is not only necessary, but desirable for one's own self-confidence, if nothing else.
Better demonstrated by the scraps, the inevitable revolution from below simply cannot be stopped by the feeble and cowardly security forces of San Angeles.
A pampered life of safety and luxury do not prepare you for disaster, and a disaster can strike at any time and without warning.
And if the structures put in place to protect and mollycoddle you ever fail, what do you do next?
You'd better have a plan, because nothing lasts forever.
When Demonstration Man was first released in 1993, the world proposed by the film appeared to be absurd.
Part of the charm of Demolition Man was that we did not live in such a world, and by contrast, the stifling nature of a formalized, corporatized society was beyond the technological and social capacity of what was possible at the time.
Demolition Man used to be science fiction.
In 2032, the residents of San Angeles have a wide array of advanced technology at their disposal, creating the kind of dystopian surveillance state that is virtually the same as the one that is in existence today.
Demolition Man featured tablets, video conference calls, self-driving electric cars, voice activation, retinal scanners, automated spray paint machines, automated phone systems, citywide CCTV cameras, in-card GPS,
public internet consoles, internet video, subdermal microchips, contactless transactions, virtual reality, and a record of all information that is transmitted via the internet, to name a few of the technological predictions that it made, correctly.
Even the technology that is still science fiction is not far beyond the reach of what we have today.
Already inroads are being made into suspended animation and directed energy weapons, and surely Elon Musk is working on whatever it is the three seashells are.
Compared to the ultra-sleek gadgets available to us today, this technology looks clunky and outdated, but it does represent with a surprising degree of accuracy not only the kind of tech we do have now, but also the way we use it.
From the vantage point of 1993, this was all surprisingly forward-thinking.
It is the technology that makes the all-seeing, all-knowing government possible, and the population of San Angeles accepted as normal.
And this is the future that we have walked into, because we were not careful.
In Demolition Man, these technologies have all been centralized in corporate monopolies that are directed by the strict moral order enshrined in Cocteau's government, to create what is the totalitarian state of San Angeles.
The difference is that the centers of technological power today are more broadly distributed across the free markets, although even now these are being purchased up by Google and other tech giants, so our world of 2019 increasingly resembles their world of 2032.
Although it's unclear exactly what Cocteau Industries does, it's interesting to note that Raymond Cocteau was probably some kind of foreign celebrity tech billionaire, in much the same vein as Elon Musk.
Although, when the collapse comes and Elon embarks on his revolutionary technocracy, it's bound to take on a completely different character, presumably involving more flamethrowers, retro tanks and genetically engineered cat girls, and less hyper-stringent ethicist moralizing.
Amusingly, the film depicts Arnold Schwarzenegger as having become president after a constitutional amendment allowed for non-native citizens to achieve the highest office.
Almost 10 years to the day after the release of the film, Schwarzenegger was elected as Governor of California.
In July 2003, the Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment was proposed by Utah Senator Arin Hatch, but failed to pass.
And it was widely seen at the time to be a method by which the famous actor could run for the presidency and was dubbed the Arnold Amendment just for that reason.
Fast forward to 2019 and Demolition Man does not look so outlandish.
We actually do live in a world in which vast data gathering operations aggregate information on your behaviour as a matter of course, only it's done by Silicon Valley to be sold to advertisers and not the government.
CCTV cameras give authorities a nearly omniscient view of most cities.
All communications are monitored by government institutions that were essentially kept secret until brave whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning went public with proof of their activities, and now everyone knows it's happening and it's just taken as a feature of online communication.
The advent of Alexa and other voice-activated in-home service technology effectively puts a listening device in every room that will pick up everything that is said.
Actually, you are fined one half credited for a sottoboche violation of the verbal morality statute.
Thank you.
Sexual behaviour is tightly regulated both now and in the film, although it's taken to its logical conclusion in San Angeles.
If biological sex is eventually outlawed, then all products of it would be too.
We have artificial wombs already.
Eventually we'll have artificially created children.
It is not absurd to think that one day, lovemaking and reproduction could indeed move entirely to the world of the technological and leave the biological experience behind.
There is already a general trend away from rough housing, which must finally conclude in a general lack of physical contact, something that will be likely much easier to achieve if all of our interactions are heavily policed either by the authorities or wider society.
Common language and informal conversations are now subject to policing to adhere to the moral standards set by the state.
In Demolition Man this is called the Verbal Morality Statute.
We know them as hate speech laws.
Although we do not yet get fined for every prescribed word, over a thousand people a year in the United Kingdom are prosecuted for offensive posts made on social media.
There are also examples of very peculiar personal interactions which have been criminalised.
On the 23rd of October 2019, a shy and awkward 19-year-old student called Jamie Griffiths was ordered to serve 200 hours of unpaid community service and pay a £250 fine to a young woman with whom he had attempted to strike up a conversation.
He had made the mistake of touching her on the arm and after attempting to talk to her again, touched her on the side.
He claimed that the words just didn't come out because he was nervous.
The then 17 year old quote victim said that I felt very unsafe even in my own home and couldn't walk to school for a couple of weeks.
I wouldn't leave the house myself.
Even today, walking down the street, it just makes everything a little bit scarier if there is a guy walking towards me by himself, I start to panic.
It's just part of everyday life.
Given this young woman's level of absurd sensitivity, coupled with the young man's apparent fear of approaching a woman, it no longer seems ridiculous to see the necessity of a set of formalized social rules that can be strictly applied to ensure that awkward young men don't accidentally terrify young women because they are too intimidated to strike up a conversation.
And as technology progresses and the relationship between governments and social media becomes more apparent, we head towards the Demolition Man scenario more swiftly with each passing day.
In the case of San Angeles, Dr. Cocteau's hyper-conservative social standards are not so terribly different from the hyper-liberal social standards of California Now.
Both are concerned with the policing of thought, speech, behaviour and sexuality.
Neither are concerned with the reasonable limits of their respective philosophies because both are comparing what society is now to what society could be, instead of comparing what society is now with what society was then.
Though they approach the problem from different perspectives, the end result is roughly the same.
In the film, those people who object to this order are driven out of society and into the sewers, tarred with a demeaning name and spat upon, doomed to scratch for survival at the margins.
And the same happens now in the age of social media, where a digital gulag has been created that is inhabited by many different kinds of dissidents, from various alt-right and neo-Nazi figures to free speech advocates to left-wingers who happen to believe politically incorrect opinions about the connection between biology and gendered behavior.
A fuller understanding of these parallels is probably best saved for a different format, but recently relevant authors have published detailed books about these subjects that I ought to recommend.
The first is Google Archipelago by Professor Michael Rechtenwald, in which he discusses how advances in digital technology have fundamentally changed modern life and present a worrying fusion of state power and digital reach.
The methods and consequences of a restrictive social order are covered with much finesse in Douglas Murray's new book, The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity.
The reason that Demolition Man's worldbuilding is so relevant to today is that we are in a position where the practically unlimited reach of government power is actually possible, and there exists a large number of staggeringly ideological political actors who would seize the opportunity to take this power in order to reshape society to create their vision of a utopia.
All the parts are in place, and all we are missing is the dictator.
As John Spartan put it, I hate this fascist crap.
Demolition Man was a popular and profitable movie when it was released, but it never really won over the critics.
The current Metacritic score is an 88% favourable rating from viewers, with a 34% favourable rating from professional reviews.
The negative critical reaction appears to be the result of Demolition Man's over-the-top action aesthetics, which seems to have overloaded the senses of the delicate intellectuals given the task of reviewing the movie.
The subtleties of the commentary on the oppressive potential of political correctness and the energetic nature of liberty are buried beneath the critics' disdain for the crowd-pleasing but low-brow action and comedy that gave the film such a broad appeal.
As Time magazine put it, Demolition Man's sharp social satire is almost undermined by excessive explosions.
This was a far more charitable examination than given by Rolling Stone, who described it as sleek and empty, as well as brutal and pointless.
It feels computer engineered, untouched by human hands.
However, it was Variety Magazine who missed the point hardest, calling it a noisy, soulless, self-conscious pastiche.
I disagree.
I think the reason why this film is still a pleasure to watch is not because of the action sequences that in and of themselves have aged fairly poorly, it is the detailed and philosophical worldbuilding around a strong and clearly told and fast-flowing plot that gives the film depth and charm.
Demolition Man's humour is also well thought out to fit within the universe.
Throughout the film, Lelina Huxley demonstrates a bookworm's knowledge of the 20th century by flubbing one-liners in an endearing attempt to culturally connect with John Spartan.
When they travel into the sewers, Spartan smells a burger cooking for the first time in 30 years.
Halfway into said burger, he discovers that it's made of rat.
The scene then cuts to the trio walking away from the burger vendor and John Spartan casually pushing the last of the burger into his mouth.
The humour is woven into the narrative in a relevant way.
John Spartan doesn't know how to use the three seashells to clean himself after using the bathroom, but he does know how to swear at the dystopian language policing unit on the wall, which produces a paper slip.
There is a significant amount done to build the interpersonal relationships of the characters.
After John Spartan and Lelina Huxley's date goes poorly, he discovers an urge to knit.
Overnight, he knits her a sweater for reasons he can't explain and gives it to her as an apology present the next day.
It turns out he had a genetic predisposition towards knitting, and during cryo sleep, he was programmed with knowledge on how to knit.
I'm a seamstress?
Oh, that's just great.
The action sequences are, of course, flashy and full of explosions, hence the name of the film, and although dated, are well-structured in and of themselves to add to the plot.
John Spartan and Simon Phoenix have been fighting one another for years, and now in a strange time and place to which they both have to adjust.
They find themselves in a position where they know each other better than they know anyone else, and exchange banter that moves the plot along, such as Phoenix revealing to Spartan that he had been falsely convicted.
All in all, each aspect of the film is woven together with remarkable care and proficiency.
The jokes, the action scenes, the love interests, they are all internally consistent and add to the texture of San Angeles.
It's a believable place, filled with believable people.
The characters have defined motivations and goals, and represent a philosophical conflict on how society should be structured from several different perspectives.
Dr. Cocteau and Simon Phoenix represent the two extremes of the human desire for safety and order against freedom and chaos.
Edgar Friendly and Police Chief Earl represent two more moderate positions of libertarianism and conservatism, and John Spartan represents the liberal compromise between them both.
Demolition Man was, almost unwittingly, a warning that has very nearly come to pass.
A combination of high technology and overbearing moralism can create a dystopia of which there is no obvious escape.
Whereas in Orwell's 1984, Ingsock were concerned at the maintenance of their own power by any cost, in Demolition Man, it is done for strictly moral reasons.
Dr. Cocteau is a manifestation of C.S. Lewis's authoritarian moral busybody, who persecutes without end because he is compelled to do so by his own conscience.
Inside the velvet glove is an iron fist, as Edgar Friendly discovered.
The perfect ethical society of peace and tolerance can only come into being by ruthlessly stamping out its competition.
To be tolerant requires one to live side by side with those one might otherwise revile, and this would destroy his vision of perfection.
Already we see this inevitable dynamic of utopian projects being played out on social media.
The activists cheer when one of their political opponents gets demonetized or deplatformed by a corporate entity that wields total decision-making power, with the individual having very little way of holding them to account.
If possible, these activists would indeed censor even more such individuals for their dangerous ideas, and they would probably be driven out of society altogether to live in the sewers, assuming even that would be enough for our tolerant and morally superior overlords.
Dr. Cocteau created a world that falls in line with many fascist ideals, primarily the idea of sculpting the individual to serve the system in the very manner of their existence.
If one is not a product of said system, the constricting nature of it would indeed be enough to drive one to rebel.
It explains why it only took John Spartan one argument with Dr. Cocteau and one conversation with Edgar Friendly to convince him that Friendly was the right guy to run civilization, or at least deserve to have a say in it.
Is it justified to persecute someone and drive them to live in filth because they think differently to you?
Is it justified to regulate almost all human activity to prevent something bad happening to someone?
Is it justified to force people to be nice to one another?
For John Spartan, it is not the ends that justify the means, but the means that justify the ends.
If the method by which we can achieve our utopia is oppressive and violates the human rights of others, can we even call it a utopia?
Cocteau's regime is illegitimate not because of the things it wants, but because of the things it does.
Spartan can most likely agree with the idea of trying to prevent harm.
He was a cop, after all, and spent his life presumably trying to do just that.
It is the way that Cocteau goes about this that makes him, well, evil.
It's the reason that Spartan, Friendly, and even Simon Phoenix all end up considering him to be the most present threat that has to be addressed first.
After all.
Look, you can't take away people's right to be assholes.
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