RoboCop is a 1987 American action film directed by Paul Verhoeven.   The story is set in the late-capitalist future in crime-ridden Detroit.  The street cop, Murphy, is murdered by the gang so the corporate-run company supporting the police transforms him into a crime-eradicating cyborg and is subsequently revived as the superhuman law enforcer RoboCop. The story fascinates us by technologically refashioning human difference and the distinctions between human and machine becomes blurred.

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Cyborgs, in films, are displayed with a wide range of human physical and humanist characteristics.  Kirkup (2000) notes that RoboCop is cinematically transformed from fully human to soulful machine.  It represents the technological rationality of the man-machine hybrid.  In the film, cyborgs and men are “compatible images which mutually support cultural associations among masculinity, rationality, technology and science” (50).   It does consist of gendered stereotypes.

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On the other hand, in revealing the socialist feminist perspective, Donna Haraway (1985), in her famous essay, A Cyborg Manifesto, rethinks through the metaphor of a cyborg.  She observes “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private" (119).  Haraway argues that the cyborg in popular culture reflects the interplay of materialism and idealism, the duality of modern society, and the search for understanding one’s self as a body and identity. The cyborg is an incorporation of countless, and in some cases untraceable, stimuli that join together to form a confused whole.  Cyborgs are "the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism" (ibid.).  That hints conflicts between human and transhuman form the central plots of most of the films containing cyborg characters.

 

Works cited:

Haraway, Donna, Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Peter Trifonas. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century." The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2006. 117-58. 

 

Kirkup, Gill, et al., eds. The gendered cyborg: A reader. Psychology Press, 2000.

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“RoboCop (1987) Official Trailer - Cyborg Police Sci-Fi Movie HD.”

YouTube, uploaded by Movieclips Classic Trailers, 27 Jun 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tC_5mp3udE.

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Images:

Eggert, Brian.  “RoboCop.” Found, Deep Focus Review, 2 Feb 2014, deepfocusreview.com/definitives/robocop/.

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