RoboCop (1987)

USA, 102 minutes

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Writers: Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner

Photography: Jost Vacano, Sol Negrin

Music: Basil Poledouris

Editor: Frank J. Urioste

Cast: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith, Dan O’Herlihy, Miguel Ferrer, Robert DoQui, Ray Wise, Jesse D. Goins

People seem to have some problems categorizing RoboCop. I have always thought of it as a slightly tongue-in-cheek (because patently ludicrous) crime / action show. Wikipedia calls it “science fiction action,” Amazon classes it with the labels “action,” “drama,” and (of all things) “serious,” and IMDb lets loose with a torrent of labels: “cop drama,” “cyberpunk,” “dark comedy,” “dystopian sci-fi,” “gangster,” “one-person army action” (good grief, this is a genre?), “superhero,” “tragedy,” “action,” and “crime.” I was happy to see at least a “dark” comedy in the mix, but I think it’s a real stretch in this perfectly cartoony setting to go for “serious” (never mind “tragedy”).

It’s formally a tragedy and serious because a human being cop, Murphy (Peter Weller), is killed in the line of duty and then surreptitiously and implausibly reanimated as a cyborg with no memory of his humanity. But he is a super-excellent cop, the hope for the near-future Detroit envisioned in the ‘80s to eradicate crime altogether. Director Paul Verhoeven is playing it for laughs all over the place. The lifts from Terminator are obvious, intentionally so. Robocop’s triangle-shaped body is an exaggeration of the ripped male ideal. His thudding footsteps are heard constantly in the sound design when he is on the move. (Note that the subtitles spell it without the capital C for the character and I am following suit.) The fights go on too long and they are too extreme, verging on slapstick. And the fact, in this near-future sci-fi tale—certainly it is science fiction, I’m not sure why I resist that label too—the fact that corporations can steal a man’s body with impunity and do what they want with it is rushed past so willfully it comes to feel like another joke.

Elle (2016)

Director Paul Verhoeven's first movie in 10 years is unsurprising in its themes—it's the kind of provocateur gesture he's chased for much of his career (think Basic Instinct, Showgirls, or even Total Recall). But, given those themes, it's surprising in its ability to engage, befuddle, and provoke. Nothing here is like a slice of life any way I know yet it's impossible to stop watching. Isabelle Huppert, who is doing her own reprisal of career-long themes (think White Material, Amour, and especially The Piano Teacher), is casually astonishing, which is typical for her. In many ways Verhoeven and Huppert is a dream team that could have happened long ago. Huppert is Michele Leblanc, a complicated woman—head of a successful video game company, serial philanderer, daughter of a reviled serial killer. This background emerges slowly—the picture is a character study of Leblanc and that's something that requires a lot of unpacking. The screenplay effectively lures and hooks us by doling out the vital information about her piecemeal even as it moves relentlessly forward. Her actions in front of us fill the rest of the picture out, though there's a lot of erasing and rewriting of impressions as we go. Sexual assault is the essential medium this movie travels in. The first scene is a home invasion rape suffered by Leblanc, and then it turns out the creep is stalking her. She has her reasons for not going to the police, connected to her experience with her father. She's ice cold dealing with the rape—orders takeout food on the phone, goes to the hospital for medical screening, casually spoils a get-together with friends by telling them and then worrying them further by her apparent indifference. At about the halfway point of the movie, a good handful of the people around her are likely candidates to be the culprit. They are also great characters, all of them, sharply etched. For a flavor of horror (not really necessary, thanks), the picture is full of shock cuts and surprise images. You may be impatient to know certain things, but the movie is always giving you important information. It goes to places that may be hard to believe, but again, even in your disbelief, it never lost its grip. Among other things, Verhoeven's previous picture, Black Book, demonstrated his command of distraction with narrative force, and in Elle, if anything, it's even better. Brace yourself.

"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966)

Philip K. Dick's 1966 short story provides the source material for the 1990 Schwarzenegger picture directed by Paul Verhoeven, Total Recall. Perhaps because of its brevity the story feels less Dickian than either "The Minority Report" (half again bigger) or the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (He sure could pack the words into some of these titles!) What's interesting to me is that, of the three movies that originally came of these properties, Total Recall comes closest to sustaining the way a Dick story moves. Blade Runner and Minority Report, by comparison, feel more like the work of their directors (Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg, respectively) fitted out with "Dick touches." It may not really be so surprising that producer Ronald Shusett and screenwriter Dan O'Bannon had fastened on the story so long ago they purchased the rights while Dick was still alive. Shusett and O'Bannon were also principals on the original Alien movie. The Dick story is a simple riff on false memory medical procedures around which a slightly unsavory cottage industry has sprung, like tanning salons in strip malls, offering "realistic" memories of nice vacations, which is both less expensive than the cost of traveling and also saves time for convenience. The medical procedure is reminiscent of the one in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. To make this story a blockbuster movie they riffed on a theme Dick only suggests in the story, turning it into an elaborate and bewildering spy / adventure / paranoid / surreal tale that barely makes sense even when you're keeping up. Lots of things, such as the Johnny Cab, feel like Dick but are not—the Johnny Cab is also extraordinarily prescient even for 1990. This suggests to me that Shusett and O'Bannon brought a sense of Dick with remarkable clarity to the picture. It couldn't have hurt that they were able to work with one of the largest budgets yet at the time for a movie. The thing thrills with money—spectacular effects and very big explosions. Way too much violence and gore, in fact, or "action," would have to count as one of the picture's weaknesses. But a lot of thought went into spinning this little story into a full-blown feature movie that was true to Dick—"inspired by" Dick and his story, as they put it in the titles. If it veers dangerously close to meat-headed action—the money, again, which among other things paid for Arnold Schwarzenegger—it's always so full of tricks and surprises that it never really lets you go. Which is equally true for Dick literary properties, come to think of it, except the "meat-headed action," for which swap in ... I don't know. Time travel slipstream alternate-reality paradoxes? It's a good blend. Go directly to the movie.

In case it's not at the library (and in other anthologies).