The Human at the Heart of "RoboCop" - How the Story of Alex Murphy Uplifts this Sci-Fi Cult Classic to Greater Heights
A Sci-Friday essay examining an underrated hero in a movie better known for its memes than its shockingly effective pathos.
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Paul Verhoeven seems like a very strange but interesting guy to me.
I’ll admit to not knowing the most about him other than the fact he’s got some wonky political views, which is hardly a massive shock, but his rather wild filmography paints quite the image. Between Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Hollowman, and Showgirls, you’ve got a gamut of films ranging from cult classics to downright infamous. That’s not even touching on Starship Troopers, which could be argued is his best known film nowadays and has been the subject of a pretty considerable amount of discussion in the last decade or so. At the time of writing this, fellow Substacker and successful independent author M.S. Olney published an article earlier today discussing why some people defend the genocidal bugs in Starship Troopers.
There’s myriad reasons why Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers has come and gone as a topic of discussion over the last ten years, with one of them of course being the success of the game Helldivers 2, which draws a lot of clear inspiration from the film. However, Verhoeven made another movie in the late 80’s that could also be argued to hold the top spot as the film he’s best known for. Naturally I speak of RoboCop, his 1987 near-future sci-fi action film starring Peter Weller in the titular role.
I doubt that I need to give this movie much of an introduction, but for those among you who haven’t seen it before, RoboCop takes place in a near-apocalypse Detroit that is so overrun with crime and corruption that the city is on the verge of complete collapse.1 Police are stretched thin, barely able to do their jobs at all, much less put a proper dent in the daily issues of extremely violent organized crime. This is only made worse by the involvement of the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products, or OCP for short, which has such a stranglehold on the city that they’ve actually bought out not only the prison system, but Detroit’s various metro PDs. You see, OCP has big plans for Detroit, plans which include rebuilding the old city into a gleaming futurist metropolis with their company at the heart of it all. Problem is that before they can bring in the over two million workers they need to see the project through, they need some way of getting crime under control.
Given that this film was made in 1987, it’s of little surprise that there’s a lot of C-suite level boardroom backstabbing going on in regards to how this will be handled. We see this played out in the interactions between two higher level executives. The first is Dick Jones, played by Ronny Cox. Older and more experienced, he’s one of the men in consideration to take over OCP once the current CEO steps down, and he plans to secure that position with his plan to provide a fully automated robotic police force for their new city. Enter one of the movie’s most iconic plot devices, the bipedal combat robot ED-209, and the disastrous demonstration that not only puts Dick on the back foot, but highlights his particular brand of unscrupulousness.
Yeah, not a great sign when the police robot you’ve been overseeing R&D on ends up gunning down one of your fellow board executives during a demonstration because of a glitch, something we learn has been a recurring problem with the ED’s program.
This is the moment where our second sleazy C-suite suit comes into play, the young upstart Bob Morton. After this colossal disaster blows up in Dick Jones’ face, Bob sweeps in as his higher ranking fellow exec is getting a thorough dressing down by the CEO to let his boss know that he’s got a workable solution: the RoboCop program. The plan, as he explains it, will rely on the use of cybernetics to bring back police officers who were mortally wounded in the line of duty to act as fully programmable and easy to control super cops. Best yet, Bob promises they can get a prototype up and running within six weeks, and that suitable candidates have already been shifted around to the most dangerous precincts via company mandate.
The rest of the story builds off of this conflict between executives, and it’s from this introduction that we’re then introduced to Officer Alex Murphy, the man who will eventually become RoboCop and the subject I wish to talk about at length today. Over the weekend I had the pleasure of watching the movie for the first time in decades. My wife, who’d never seen it before, expressed interest in it because she was in the mood for something a bit goofy and over-the-top, and Paul Verhoeven came to mind. Thus, since we’d already watched Total Recall last year, she opted for RoboCop.
One of the things that quickly struck me about RoboCop compared to the other cult classic Verhoeven films is how much more down to earth it is in comparison. I know that’s a bit of a silly thing to say considering the subject matter. RoboCop is still a wild movie, no doubt about that. The action is gritty and over-the-top in its violence, the satire and sleaze are very in-your-face, and the movie doesn’t shy away from being raunchy at times. Total Recall and Starship Troopers both showcase these same sorts of elements, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees. However, for all the quotable bits of pop culture lingo that came from this movie -
- there’s a certain level of heart at the core of RoboCop that goes beyond what you’d expect from a Paul Verhoeven 80’s action flick. A human element to the story that’s shockingly effective, and one which I’d entirely forgotten was present at all. That element is Alex Murphy, and it’s also his actor, Peter Weller.
Before I can properly explain what I’m getting at, I need to make sure everyone here is up to speed on who Murphy is and what happens to him. A beat cop who was recently transferred by OCP to one of the stations overseeing the warzone that is old Detroit, Murphy is first and foremost, a good man. When we’re first introduced to him on his first day at his new precinct, he feels out of place compared to the rest of his fellow officers. The police chief for that precinct is exhausted and irritable, furious with how OCP’s forcible financial takeover of their department has basically left them as little more than corporate puppets barely permitted to do their jobs at all. In a way, he reflects the sort of man Murphy might turn into in a place like this, someone who does want to do his duty as an officer of the law, who wants to protect and serve, but who is hamstrung every step of the way.
The rest of the cops in the precinct aren’t much better. They’re all pretty buddy-buddy with each other, and they don’t mistreat Murphy or anything like that though they do look at him as green, but you can tell from how blunt they are in their jokes and how violent they are anytime criminals in their custody get out of line that these men and women haven’t just been struggling to police, they’ve been struggling to survive. The criminals they bring in aren’t seen as lawbreakers by these people, they’re more akin to captured enemy forces. This is most notably shown in the introduction of Officer Anne Lewis, an experienced beat cop in her own right that has Murphy assigned as her new partner. When he first meets her, she’s laying haymakers into the gut of a guy who escaped her hold and tried to make a break for it, an early sign of how utterly ruthless and socially decayed old Detroit has become.
However, we see a different side to Lewis once she and Murphy are out on patrol. Stopping by a little coffee stand to treat him to his first drink and bite as an Old Detroit cop, she walks in on Murphy standing outside their squad car as he practices twirling and holstering his pistol like he’s some cowboy from an old Western. Snickering a bit, Lewis asks him why he’s doing that. Murphy answers that his son, James, likes to watch an action hero show called T.J. Laser. When James saw T.J. do that move, he asked his dad if he could do that, too. Murphy decided to start practicing as a way to impress his son, stating that he wants to be a good role model for him and help him understand the right way to do things. So now we know that not only is Murphy a good and honest cop, he’s also a family man; someone who genuinely cares not only about doing the right thing, but raising his son the same way. Through a series of flashbacks that we get our first glimpses of soon after this scene, we learn that his marriage was also very strong and that he and his wife not only had a nice home together, but a loving relationship.
Taken on their own, we can see exactly what these traits are. These are setup to make Murphy’s eventual and inevitable death in the first act feel more tragic. After all, we already know that he’s going to become RoboCop. The film clearly sets this up, so it’s not a surprise that we see him gunned down as he and Lewis end up pursuing one of old Detroit’s most infamous and violent criminal gang leaders, Clarence Boddicker, played by That 70’s Show’s own Kurtwood Smith.2 After chasing Boddicker and his gang into an abandoned steelworks they’ve been hiding out in, Murphy and Lewis have a choice to make: either they wait for backup which likely won’t arrive for over 20 minutes if it does at all, or they risk going in on their own and attempt to arrest as many as they can.
They opt for the latter, and unfortunately, it doesn’t go well for them. Lewis gets the drop on Joe Cox, played by Jesse D. Goins, as he’s in the middle of taking a leak over the railing of one of the steelworks’ walkways. Unfortunately for her, he manages to distract her just long enough to knock her gun out of her hand and throw her over the edge, knocking her out as she lands on an old pallet of supplies that was never unpacked. Murphy, on the other hand, encounters Emil Antonowski, a particularly skeevy member of Boddicker’s gang played to great effect by Paul McCrane. In this case Murphy seems to have Antonowski dead to rights. He caught him sitting down and distracted, firmly in the sights of his handgun while Antonowski’s shotgun was out of hand. When Antonowski grabs the weapon, Murphy’s already set to fire before Antonowski can and tells him to drop it. Then he delivers a line that will prove pivotal later in the film: “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”
Unfortunately, Murphy’s mistaken today. As he tries to hail the unconscious Lewis, he gets jumped and disarmed by Leon Nash (Ray Wise). Then, one by one, the other members of the gang show up, ready to kill him right up until Boddicker comes in and stops them. He wants a word with Murphy first, wants to determine if he’s someone that can be bribed into usefulness. Sticking firm to his principles, and possibly thinking that Lewis might be somewhere nearby where she could get the jump on them and help, (he wasn’t aware she was unconscious) he admits to his honesty and tries to keep them talking. If he’d known his partner was knocked out perhaps he’d have made a different choice, if only to live and fight another day. Alas, the choice he did make ended with brutal consequences for him.
Murphy’s death scene is well known as one of the most violent and bloody around. Beginning with having his hand blown off by Boddicker’s shotgun, he doesn’t initially react with pain. I’m not sure if this was something that Weller decided to improvise or if it was part of the script, but it’s an intelligent choice. As I understand it, injuries like that tend to be very late in registering pain because the body goes into something of a state of shock in response. Peter Weller showcases this well in this first moment of the scene, but the screaming agony is soon to begin as Boddicker and the other four men in his gang all start unloading their shotguns into Murphy’s body.
It’s from here that we see the creation of RoboCop from Murphy’s perspective. After backup finally arrives, Lewis manages to get the barely alive Murphy to the hospital, where he unfortunately dies of his injuries as emergency room doctors attempt resuscitation. By the by, this was another moment my wife and I really appreciated for its accuracy. While the goal was doubtless to show the doctors as being hardened and heartless in their approach, the calm but urgent way in which they handle attempting to revive Murphy is quite accurate to how real doctors are expected to behave in situations like that. It was an unexpected but welcome detail for us.
Murphy doesn’t make it, though, and is quickly pronounced dead. Then, presumably within just a few minutes of his legal death, Bob Morton and other OCP employees working on the RoboCop program swoop in to claim his body and begin the process of rebuilding and reviving him. They also begin the process of attempting to wipe all his memories, but it’s not long after the introduction of RoboCop to Murphy’s old precinct that we see that process wasn’t fully effective. It’s also during the procedure that changes him to RoboCop that we first see some of the flashbacks that showcase the kinds of relationships he had with his wife and son.
The rest of the movie plays out with two primary plotlines. One involves Murphy going after the people who murdered him, which means Boddicker and his gang, as well as certain individuals within OCP who have ties to the gang. The other is the recollection of his memories and personality, which are the things I want to focus on in this essay. This was an aspect of RoboCop that I was always aware was important to the film. Murphy’s slow recovery of his memories, which soon leads to him fighting against his OCP programming, is a key aspect of him meting out the justice he’s owed for his own murder and every loss and violation he endured after that fact.
What I’d forgotten was just how well portrayed this part of the story was. After being fully brought online and sent out to serve his first few days, Murphy begins dreaming while he’s supposed to be powered down and recharging inside the monitoring chair that OCP built expressly for him. At this point he still doesn’t remember who he is, but fragments are coming back to him after a brief encounter with Lewis back at the precinct. The dreams he starts having are of his death, as well as glimpses of the family he left behind. The two OCP employees meant to be keeping an eye on him are too busy goofing off to notice that his brain function readings are going haywire. It’s not until he wakes of his own volition and leaves, something he’s not supposed to be able to do, that they check the readings and realize what happened. Assured though they were that his memory would be wiped, it appears as though that process wasn’t nearly so complete or effective as they thought.
As Murphy is leaving he has another encounter with Lewis in the halls. OCP agents are chasing after him, demanding that she stop him from leaving, but after having seen him on the firing range twirling and holstering the specialized pistol he uses just like T.J. Laser, she takes a chance and whispers his name to him. “Murphy,” she says. “You’re Murphy!”
This is the first domino to fall. The second comes after he enters his squad car and leaves to patrol the city again, wherein he comes to a gas station being robbed by the familiar face of Emil Antonowski. Emerging from his squad car he tells the uzi toting gangster to drop his weapon. Then, as he approaches, he repeats that important line he said when he was still alive:
Antonowski remembers that line. Panicking, he starts repeating, “Your dead! We killed you!” Just like that, the second domino falls.
Antonowski escapes. As the memories start to flood back into Murphy’s mind, distracting him, Antonowski blows up the gas station by cutting the line to the pump he was using and tossing a lit cigarette into the leaking fuel. It’s not enough to stop RoboCop. Hell, it doesn’t even scratch him, really, but the encounter begins triggering more and more memories that were locked away inside him. His wife. His son. Where they used to live, including an address, 548 Primrose Lane.
Murphy goes to the house. His house. His home, but it’s been abandoned. The flowers his wife kept have withered and died in their planters. Pictures, books, toys, all the things that would make a house a home for their family, are gone. Only a few pieces of furniture and screens with a digital realtor discussing the specs, history, and price of the house remain.
This is one of two scenes which are highly effective in showcasing the pathos baked into the story of RoboCop. As Murphy walks through the empty home, we see his memories overlaid on top of them, as if he’s actively reliving the experiences. Those memories are the brief flashbacks we saw as he was dying, but this time they’re more complete, showcasing all of the context which we’d missed. We see his son James watching what’s presumably the first episode of T.J. Laser he’s watched, as he’s hooked on it with boyish excitement. As it ends and the hero shoots down the villain in the show, spinning and holstering his gun, James excitedly says, “Wow! Hey, can you do that too, Dad?!”
Next we see son and wife sitting in the front room as Murphy surprises them by setting up a camera on a timer. Hurrying over with them, we see it snap the polaroid that he kept in the pocket of his uniform when he was still alive. After that, we see what originally looked like the start of an argument between Murphy and his wife. She grabs him. Pulling him toward the bedroom she sternly tells him they need to talk, only to smile warmly once they step out of sight of James, tell him she loves him, and kiss him as they presumably prepare to share an intimate moment together. She is wearing a silk nightgown in that shot, after all.
As these memories wash over Murphy, he’s brought back to the present by the speaker from the automated realtor asking if he’s interested in buying. Overcome with grief and anger, he punches through the screen of the machine and leaves to start hunting down the men who murdered him and destroyed his life. Yet while this is a personal vendetta, this isn’t vengeance he’s seeking, but justice. He’s determined to bring these men in alive, though he’s not shy about brutally beating down on Boddicker when he gets the chance to. It’s only once he realizes the system has been rigged against him, that Boddicker has ties with high ranking OCP executives, that he determines to kill the gangsters, arrest whoever is funding them, and end their reign of terror for good.
Yet much like when he was a fully flesh and blood man, this doesn’t go well for him at first. Murphy does bring Boddicker in, but it’s not long before his bail is paid and the precinct is forced to let him go. To make matters worse, when Murphy goes to OCP to confront the executive involved with Boddicker, he discovers a secret fourth directive that’s been implanted in his programming which prevents him from arresting or interfering with any members of company leadership at the top level. He may be called RoboCop, but as Bob Morton frequently makes clear, he’s really just another piece of OCP company property.
This incident almost leads to Murphy’s destruction. While the other cops in his own precinct are unwilling to fight him even though OCP has given them direct orders to, and while his old partner, Lewis, goes out of her way to help him escape, multiple squads of Detroit PD Officers descend on OCP HQ and begin unloading on RoboCop in an effort to destroy him. Some of them are even men he worked with in the field earlier in the movie, men who now believe him to be nothing more than an insane and malfunctioning killing machine.
Luckily, thanks to Lewis’ help, Murphy does escape to fight another day. Returning to the industrial sector of Old Detroit, Lewis does what she can to help Murphy with his repairs. More importantly, she helps him to discover something he’s been needing to find ever since those dreams of his murder first roused him from his shutdown state: his identity. After helping him remove his faceplate, she holds up a partly polished steel scrap for him to look into. Now able to see his own face, Murphy is finally sure of who he is again, but it sadly comes with the realization of what he lost. A realization that’s confirmed when he asks Lewis what happened to his wife and son.
Lewis confirms for Murphy that his family is still alive, but that they also left Detroit after his death. While the time he spent drifting in and out of consciousness made his reconstruction feel like hardly any time at all had passed, in reality he’d been gone for months by then. With nothing to keep them there, and not wanting to stay in a city so dangerous that it claimed the life of the man his family loved, they moved away.
Upon this revelation, Murphy gives what I believe is the most heart wrenching line of the movie: “I can feel them, but I can’t remember them.”
I really have to give it to Peter Weller in this scene. While maintaining that touch of robotic monotone to his voice, he still manages to convey the depths of the loneliness Alex Murphy would’ve felt in that moment. Knowing that he only had glimpses of memories and the general feeling of having had a loving family left, he’s now forced to process the reality of his new life. It’s the sort of all consuming burden that would be difficult for anyone to understand, to have your life fundamentally altered in almost every single way. Peter Weller sells this feeling very well in this scene, adding a level of depth and pathos to the film that isn’t expected from a Paul Verhoeven movie.
In the end, after a lengthy and violent struggle against Boddicker’s gang that comes not long after this scene, Murphy is successful in bringing justice to the men responsible for ending his life. I want to stress the importance of that word here, too; justice. This isn’t simple revenge that Murphy is after. While this is certainly personal for him, it’s made clear throughout the film that he’s not going after these men strictly for those personal reasons. Murphy is still a good and honest cop. If Boddicker’s gang weren’t the ones that killed him he would still pursue them due to the simple fact that they are genuine menaces upon the society around them. Murphy’s ideals are laid bare in the first act of the film. He values honesty and family, wants to be a good role model for his son, and wants to do good for the city in which he lives. Those ideals ended up costing him his life, but through the second chance he was given he found an opportunity to begin cleaning up Detroit in the way he’d always strived to.
The character of Alex Murphy is a genuine hero, there’s no question in my mind about that. He’s also a very relatable and human character, despite the fact that most of his body is mechanical now. We sympathize with what he’s lost and recognize the awful injustice that had been done to him. He didn’t deserve to die in the horrible way that he did, nor did he deserve to be made the plaything for a megacorp who was only interested in using his body to further their own profits. In the face of everything Murphy endured, he very easily could’ve turned his back on it all. He easily could’ve become corrupted, or chosen to give up. Yet he doesn’t. Even when faced with the horrible reality of what his life has become, that his wife and son are going to be beyond his reach forever, that the company that turned him into a cyborg and stole his memories from him was responsible for his death in the first place, he still makes the difficult choice to do the right thing.
I think this is the real reason why RoboCop remains such an enduring and beloved movie among its fans. I think this is the real reason why it reached cult classic status, as opposed to the far more ridiculous Total Recall or the more political Starship Troopers. Paul Verhoeven hit on something special in this movie, a unique blend of his usual over-the-top filmmaking wildness with a personal story that has a core of genuine pathos and heroism at the heart of it. Personally, I think this firmly cements RoboCop as Paul Verhoeven at his absolute best.
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Insert obligatory joke about how realistic that is here.
Kurtwood Smith is arguably best known for his role as Red Forman, the father of main character Eric Forman, who was played by Topher Grace.
I have to wonder how much of the current assessment of the real city of Detroit as a beleaguered and almost apocalyptic place is this movie's fault. Granted, it was sliding into socioeconomic decline long before the release of the film, but the portrayal of it here surely couldn't have been good PR for it.
You've convinced me. Never watched it before, but now I'm going to have to.