RoboCop (1987)

Most people who watched RoboCop in 1987 saw a violent sci-fi action movie about a robot cop shooting criminals in Detroit. That's exactly what Paul Verhoeven wanted them to see. The other film — the one running underneath it — he was happy for them to miss.

Verhoeven was Dutch. He came to Hollywood as an outsider and looked at Reagan's America the way a field researcher looks at a particularly strange organism. What he found was a country in the process of privatising everything it used to consider public — healthcare, infrastructure, law enforcement — and dressing that process up as progress. He made a film about it and titled it something that sounded like a cheap toy.

The villain isn't Clarence Boddicker, though Kurtwood Smith makes him memorable. The villain is Omni Consumer Products — a conglomerate that sells you everything, owns the city's police force, and is quietly manoeuvring to demolish Old Detroit and replace it with Delta City, a gleaming private development built on the displacement of everyone currently living there. OCP doesn't commit crimes. It contracts them out, manages liability, and holds board meetings. The criminals are just a tool for accelerating the conditions that justify the company's expansion.

Murphy — Alex Murphy, before he becomes RoboCop — is transferred into the worst precinct in the city deliberately. OCP's contracts specify that officers killed on duty become company property. He's not recruited. He's harvested. And this is where the film stops being just a satire and starts being something closer to a Marxist case study.

What happens to Murphy is alienation in its most literal possible form. Marx described alienated labour as the process by which a worker is separated from the product of their work, from the act of working itself, and ultimately from their own humanity — reduced from a person to a unit of production. Verhoeven takes that abstraction and makes it physical. Murphy is shot to pieces, rebuilt as company property, stripped of his name, his memories, his family, his body, and his legal personhood — all in one efficient corporate procedure. He isn't given rights. He's given directives. One of them, Directive 4, exists specifically to prevent him from acting against OCP executives. The clause his handlers assume he'll never find, and which tells you everything about how the company views its assets.

He is, as one reading of the film puts it, the perfect capitalist subject — what any corporation would prefer its workforce to be. Not a person. A product. Rebuilt from a dead man, loyal by programming, incapable of dissent by design. The film even reinforces this visually: we see Murphy through his own targeting systems, data overlays, readouts — the point-of-view of a machine that processes the world rather than experiencing it. The humanity has to claw its way back through the hardware. It costs him something every time.

The scene where he finds his old house is quietly devastating in this context. It's up for sale. His wife and son left after his death — which is, legally, what it was. A real estate agent plays on the television inside, advertising the property's virtues to nobody. Murphy punches the screen. Screens, consumption, the reduction of everything — including a home, including a life — to a transaction. The film puts it all in one image without stopping to explain itself.

The world around him runs on the same logic. The news breaks are delivered by grinning anchors who report nuclear near-misses and mass atrocities with the cadence of car commercials. The adverts sell board games about hostile takeovers. The violence is cartoonish and relentless. Verhoeven shoots all of it in the same register — equally glossy, equally disposable — because that is the point. The satire isn't hidden. It's fluorescent. The joke is that enough people took it at face value anyway.

The ending lands differently once you've been watching Murphy try to reclaim his own existence for ninety minutes. The Old Man asks him his name and he says "Murphy" — not RoboCop, not Unit One, not the product designation OCP assigned him. 

It's a small word and Verhoeven treats it as a victory, which is either hopeful or deeply bleak depending on how you look at it. He's still wearing the suit. He's still OCP property on paper. He still can't go home.

Nearly forty years later the film has aged into something uncomfortable in a different direction than expected. The privatisation of public services, the militarisation of police, the cleared city rebuilt for people who couldn't previously afford it — none of it requires much imagination to connect to the present. Verhoeven was working from Reagan's America. The blueprint is still in circulation.

It was never really a film about a robot. It was a film about who owns the robot, what they did to make him, and what it costs a person to become someone else's property — and whether you can ever fully come back from that.