How Robocop Predicted The Present| Weekender Teaser
*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender*
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Jared and Nick watched Paul Verhoeven's seminal '80s action flick "Robocop" to trace the subversive political statements throughout the film. Set in the Reagan era, Robocop was incredibly prescient as it predicted the militarization and privatization of our police forces, while capturing the evil corporate ethos that has been super charged in the subsequent decades.
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I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday.
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So if you are interested in hearing this whole show—and by the way, Spoiler, today we are talking about the 1987 classic, RoboCop.
And we are using RoboCop, like all people do, to talk about hyper-capitalistic markets, exploitation, and the privatization of public resources, and the state's monopoly on violence.
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You are wonderful, and you're here, and you're wonderful, and great, and unfortunately, Nick, we are taping this episode.
Just go ahead and pull the curtain back.
I'm running out of town for a couple days, so we are taping this on Tuesday, July 20th.
And I think it's only fitting before we talk about a future dystopia where corporations and the wealthy have taken over the public functions of life, that we talk about the fact that fucking Jeff Bezos went into quote-unquote near space for five minutes, came back, wore a stupid cowboy hat, and I'm just, I'm pissed off in 15 different ways about this thing.
You know, it's funny.
I don't care.
Like, you know what I mean?
And I don't care that you're pissed off.
That makes me feel bad.
I don't want you to be pissed off.
Oh, I appreciate that.
Yes, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
I saw the picture of Bezos with the cowboy hat and people making fun of him, like Homer Simpson, whatever.
But, like, I don't know.
The guy's got... I mean, he can afford it.
I mean, are you pissed because he should be using that money, like, on better things or what?
He shouldn't have the money.
Oh, uh-oh.
It's a complete failure of the system that somebody like a Jeff Bezos exists.
Like, as he's lifting off in his giant phallic rocket, just pointing that out, as he's lifting off, basically every second, and by the way, he's just adding more and more carbon into the environment the entire time.
I love, by the way, did you see his quote about needing to take care of the Earth after he got back?
No, tell me.
He said we need to take the pollution around the Earth and take it into space, which dynamite idea there, Jeff.
That's great.
Wonderful.
I mean, what are you worried about, like a Superman 2 situation here?
No, I was thinking more like Spaceballs, where they like, you know, they open up the thing and they put the vacuum in and they just suck it all out.
Like, obviously, it's that easy.
Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.
Yeah, the difficulty of that.
But hey, I mean, listen, it's better than throwing it into the oceans, which we do now anyway, I guess.
Oh my God.
So, so he, uh, every moment that he's like blasting off and throwing off all this rocket fuel, and by the way, it's not even that impressive.
He just kind of got off the ground a little bit and like they got weightless for two seconds and then his dumb ass came back to the earth.
Right.
I was surprised about that, by the way.
I thought, like, he was literally going to go into space, like, you know, pass by some satellites and whatever, you know?
But no, not even that, right?
Like, didn't get that high.
He got as high as, like, Chuck Yeager did in, like, the right stuff.
Wonderful.
Great work, Jeff.
So, Jeff goes up into quote-unquote near space, comes back down.
Meanwhile, the entire time he's going up, I'm just like, oh, every inch that he goes up is like a neighborhood that he destroyed, or a market that he destroyed, or lives that he destroyed.
By the way, I would love if our media covered how many schools that could have built.
How much healthcare that could have provided.
Meanwhile, they are just slobbering all over themselves.
Like, if you need to understand how corporatized American media is, all of them are like, this is about the wonder of space, everybody.
It's like, not even space!
It's near space!
It's not even really space!
And meanwhile, it's a megalomaniac who shouldn't have the money to do this thing.
And I'm sorry, I'm pissed.
I'm hot.
Well, you know, this mirrors the feelings that many people had in the 60s, right?
I think that NASA engendered a lot of ill will because people felt like, especially at that time, that money should have been spent on domestic issues that would have really ameliorated people's lives.
And instead, you know, we're spending all this money and we're going out to space for what?
Like, what is the purpose of going to the moon anyway?
Well, we know what it was in the 1960s.
We know what the purpose was then.
It was the Cold War.
It was about projecting American hegemony.
It was about getting there before the Russians got there.
That was the entire purpose.
It was about making a better film of somebody landing on the moon.
I don't know.
Anyway, we won't talk about the lunar landing hoax in this episode.
We don't need to talk about the lunar landing, but I just want to say this very, very quickly.
There's a massive difference between a public agency that does this shit, and that would be all for space exploration, you know, Experiments, I would be all for that stuff.
By the way, if you could take out the military element, that'd be fantastic.
If we could take out that Cold War idea.
Because one of the reasons it happened is because Russia got into space before us with satellites.
And we were afraid constantly that Sputnik was just going to drop, you know, bombs or weapons on us as it floated over.
And eventually it turned into another facet of the arms race.
If we could get the militarism out of it and turn it into exploration for humanity, I'm all for it.
But when these assholes, and for the record, Jeff Bezos, what are his interests to?
He's interested in going up to the moon and taking the minerals out of it that he can find.
He wants to resource farm there.
He wants to go to Mars, possibly to mine there or create colonies.
By the way, his other hobby is immortality.
So... I'm just putting that on everyone's radar.
It's too much money for a person whose only talent was hacking the supply line in the United States of America and undermining every other like independent business that Walmart hadn't already destroyed.
Wow.
Why do you hate America?
Why do I hate Americans so much?
That's ingenuity right there, Jared.
It's capitalism at its finest.
I don't know.
I don't harbor as much ill will toward Jeff Bezos for some weird reason.
Oh, you should.
I mean, we'll ignore that a woman miscarried because they wouldn't give her compensation for being pregnant on the line at the Amazon warehouse, which I don't know if you saw or not.
Because I'll say, well, hey, he went to $15 an hour minimum wage before anybody else did.
But at what cost?
We already talked about the last working conditions of the Frito-Lay factory.
It sounds like it's worse at Amazon.
Oh, my God, it's terrible.
And these people have been completely and utterly exploited.
And on top of that, like this is a guy who gets his jollies like holding up municipalities in order to get tax breaks, in order to get all these cuts, in order to do that.
Meanwhile, doesn't pay his fair share of taxes.
It's an abomination.
It really, truly is.
And I think if we have a history, And God knows that people like him are making almost certain that we're not going to have a history.
But if we have a history, this is going to be one of those moments.
You know what I mean?
When in school you turn the page and there's like a picture and you're like, oh, look at that extremely phallic rocket ship going into space.
Well, here's a paragraph where it talks about how the oligarchs of this moment were creating their own space programs.
And it's just absolutely absurd.
It's a total abomination and an absolute shame.
And I'm so glad that last night, to prepare for this moment, I watched 1987's Robocop by Paul Verhoeven, which is an absolute satirical look at Hyper capitalism in this exact same vein and just real quick a hat tip You and I have talked about what movie we were gonna do for the muckrake movie series to talk about We'd bandied about
we might still do Ghostbusters even though our disagreement about Bill Murray might keep us from that a little bit good But I had tip to heckatron who brought it up to me and I was like immediately.
Yes, we have to talk about Robocop I'm going to talk a little bit about what this movie meant to me before I came into political understanding, but what's your relationship with 1987's RoboCop?
Because the remake doesn't exist to me.
I never saw it.
I have no idea.
And by the way, it was weird because I was looking under IMDb and I got to that remake and I was like, wait, what?
They didn't even change the name?
Although Robocop has to be, it's probably one of the greatest names for a movie of all time.
What does it mean to me?
Well, it comes out in the middle of... I was in high school, okay?
And so the idea of watching these movies that were exploitive, you know, blow them up, gory, but, you know, but hyper-stylized, right?
I mean, this is what Quentin Tarantino ended up imitating, like, in... What's the one with the slavery?
Django Unchained.
You know there's that whole scene where they're blowing limbs off or whatever and the sound effects whatever that's like right out of Robocop and what they were doing here with the in the beginning with the assassination scene of Peter Weller.
So you know it was a I had forgotten just how often we quoted this movie.
I think that was a big one and as I was going through it I'm like I was calling the lines out before from some primordial space I had didn't know still existed in my body and that was a that was a real fun you know trip down memory lane.
So for me, I was a kid when RoboCop came out.
And so the first time I watched RoboCop, so I've mentioned this before on the podcast, I was in a family that allowed me to watch movies that I should not have been watching.
I mean, RoboCop came out when I was six.
And I bet I watched it when I was seven.
Wow.
And, well, I mean, here's the thing about it.
It's called RoboCop.
There's like a robot on the cover, and like, you go to a Cole House video with your grandpa on a Friday, and he says, what do you want?
And you see RoboCop, and it sounds like a great way to spend an evening.
And it was!
Do not get me wrong, but I have to tell you that my family immediately was like, ooh, this, uh, this movie's pretty rough.
And then instead of turning it off, They just let it run, right?
So eventually with RoboCop, and I don't know how many of our listeners have experienced this, RoboCop was spun off into a lot of different things.
There was an animated series for RoboCop.
There were a lot of video games of RoboCop.
There were multiple sequels.
One of my memories as a child was watching World Championship Wrestling with the wrestler Sting.
Who had a match where Robocop came out and helped him, which was really weird when you didn't know the difference between reality and fiction.
That was a strange thing to see the robot come out of your movie and then move around in there.
Of course, though, I did not understand the politics of Robocop.
I did not understand that it was a satire.
It was a criticism of a certain mindset of the moment.
And actually, so Paul Verhoeven, who is the director of Robocop and the director also of movies like Showgirls and also Basic Instinct.
Paul Verhoeven in his career has done a lot of movies that are incredibly critical of capitalism.
The one that I was thinking of in particular was Starship Troopers which is a satirization of fascism that I don't think most people understood.
I certainly don't.
I think I never finished the movie because I thought it was like it was just so in your face bad but I think that was that I didn't get it.
I don't and I think a lot of people didn't get it right.
You got to hit that right note in the very beginning I think to get people in on it and if you don't quite do it then you think that you're just watching the movie they're satirizing.
Well that's exactly right.
It was actually one of those things where it was such like a dead on satirization that it was kind of hard to sort of to parse things.
And Starship Troopers came out in 1997.
Nineteen ninety seven.
And I have to tell you I didn't understand it until 2003 with the Iraq War, where all of a sudden you see American jingoism and chauvinism and all this shit, and it becomes very, very clear what he's satirizing.
And then, of course, Total Recall.
And so Total Recall holds up, by the way.
I don't know if people have watched it recently, but it does hold up.
Arnold's a lot of fun, but to go ahead and put it in the terms of what we've started today talking about, Total Recall is about a privatized Mars colony where people are worked almost to death by corporate overlords and basically have to do all this just to continue breathing and they're oppressed up there.
And so Verhoeven is a really, really staunch critic of these ideas.
And Robocop follows in those exact same steps.
And I think it has a really good criticism at the heart of it.
You know, the biggest thing in the middle of the movie that kind of shocked me because of the style that they're trying to tap into, there's no nudity.
Like you would have thought because Starship Troopers cut to 1997 and they establish that as gratuitous.
If I'm remembering this correctly, right?
There's a lot of like just boobs and whatever in the shower, like that kind of scene.
Actually, you know, it's funny you mention that because Starship Troopers is almost sexless because it's almost like there is nudity in the movie, right?
But it's very much in a way like so it's for those who haven't seen it, Starship Troopers, there's like this fascistic, militaristic society where humanity, weirdly enough, now that we're talking about it, society in Starship Troopers, world society, has come under like a worldwide dictatorship.
And and humanity is one sort of like dictatorial society.
And, like, it's kind of sexless.
Like, people have girlfriends or whatever, but they're also, like, in boot camp together.
They're sort of showering together.
And, like, their, like, relationships are sort of tinged with, like, this deference between, like, patriotism and sexuality.
And, to be honest, like, that's sort of kind of what Verhoeven does in most of his movies.
I mean, Showgirls is supposed to be a sexual movie and it is really disturbing in the way you trace that stuff.
And "Total Recall" basically shows like human sexual relationships as like a battle.
You know, like Sharon Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger do battle in that movie. - Yeah, yeah, I agree.
And by the way, the thing with Starship Troopers is when they do show you those shots, they're telling you, like, okay, this is the gratuitous nude scene that we're going to give you 10 minutes into the movie, like we're supposed to, whatever.
They almost said that on screen, basically.
So I found that interesting.
In fact, the only nudity I think we see, maybe this is where I was reminded of, is a very quick shot in the showers of a male, maybe the back of him, as the camera quickly pans by while they're complaining about, you know, unionizing the police force.
So, uh, that, that's what, that kind of struck me overall when I pulled back on this and thought that was, you know, that's an interesting choice because, um, you know, that would have been to me, one of those signals they would have put in there to let us know like where we are and what this, what this kind of movie is going to be.
But, um, interesting.
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