Early
childhood memories are fleeting specters. They appear in fragments and single
images, and during adulthood we begin to question whether these memories are real
or fabrications of the mind, a mishmash of different scenes and snippets from
different years.
Without
doubting myself, I can recall a few memories from the first two or three years
of my life. I remember sleeping in a cot between my parents, behind the grocery
store that the newlyweds were beginning to run. We didn’t have a home until
much later, but I still remember the darkness around us, the tight space that I
had between mother and father, the piece of tarp that divided our living
quarters from the store and its rows of iron shelves. That, I believe, is my
earliest memory.
But there
is another memory from that early age. I must’ve been three or four years old
when I watched RoboCop for the first
time.
A man is
surrounded by other men. Bad men. He is on the ground, looking helpless, as
they make fun of him. Then the boss…a bad guy with glasses…shoots him with a
shotgun. His right hands is blown apart, a sea of blood springs forth from the
stump. The man stands and screams in pain as he tries to walk away, holding his
wounded arm, half crouching. The bad men keep laughing at him and then they
start shooting with their shotguns. Despite the barrage of bullets that sink
into his body, the man doesn’t fall to the ground or die. Rather, he stands up
screaming in pain. It is a terrible sound. Smoke fills the screen, and the
camera pans as the murderers keep firing with glee in their faces. Finally,
they stop. The man with glasses takes out a pistol and shoots the man in the
face. Blood and brains blast out of the back of the head. His eyes stare
emptily into space. The finality of death.
I gape in
horror, and most of the scene I cover my eyes either with my hands or a
blanket. This is pure horror.
But I keep
on watching. After it’s over, I take the tape from the VCR and I place it on
the rewind machine. With time, I learn to measure the length of the tape on
each side of the VHS, so I can tell where my favorite part starts. For 20 years
I skip more than half of the movie. The murder of Alex Murphy terrified me so
much and I couldn’t bear to witness it again. It feels like a bad nightmare.
But the
scene where RoboCop busts through a factory and mows down an army of bad guys,
who pirouette and fall down with balletic grace, and sends his own murderer
crashing through several glass panels? I know it by heart because I rewound it
several times in a row.
At such an
early age, it was inevitable that the film’s astonishing images would sear
themselves into my own memory. I don’t remember watching the film…that is, I don’t see myself looking at our
television. Rather, the scenes became the memories themselves, playing off in
my head as if I had stepped into the movie’s universe and had become a
fascinated, sometimes horrified, witness of the happenings in Old Detroit.
I didn’t
really understand the story. For one, the characters spoke a language that’s
foreign to me. On the other hand, so many concepts evaded me. Years will pass before I understand things like resurrection, cybernetics, robotics,
corporations, drug trafficking, law enforcement and even everyday aspects of
modern life, like clubbing or house hunting. And yet, this movie holds sway
over me. I’m fascinated by every shot, every second. I don’t understand the
details, but I understand the story. I understand that the man that was
brutally killed is a hero and that he doesn’t die, even though he should’ve, after
being hurt so badly (I do not understand death fully, or ballistics, but the
kind of body damage that is inflicted in this movie is so brutal that it gets
to point across to those who have blessed with ignorance of extreme violence in
real life) he is built by other people as a robot.
RoboCop
himself is such a sight to behold, and he keeps me glued to the screen. He
drives in a car around a city that doesn’t look anything like my town. The
buildings are gigantic and their shapes look like something out of this world.
There are so many cars, and the streets and roads are so labyrinthine. It was a
glimpse into that wondrous land known as the United States.
I recall the characters. RoboCop's friend and partner, Lewis; corrupt executive Dick Jones; tough as nails Sgt. Reed; Clarence Boddicker and his gang of killers, so delightfully contemptible (seeing Emil Antonowsky turn into a melting man that gets splattered by Clarence's car is another scene that I replay constantly) and dozens of others. One of RoboCop's greatest strengths is its cast of oddball, yet real characters, and the brilliant casting of the actors who give them life.
The humanity and melancholy that permeates throughout the film is an essential part of the film. For all the talk of violence, fascism and dehumanization, RoboCop has a beating heart that is best depicted during the touching scene where our hero walks through the abandoned suburb house that used to be his home, remembering snippets of a happiness lost forever. Basil Poledouris's brilliant score shines through.
Another of the elements that I enjoy the most as an adult is the meta-fictional components: the media breaks, gaudy commercials, the weird-looking Bixby Snyder's ridiculous tv show that makes everyone laugh in a pavlovian response to the catchphrase "I'll buy that for a dollar!" When I was a kid, I didn't understand these scenes. They seemed to be unrelated to the rest of the movie. Now that I understand their purpose, I chuckle in a similar manner to "unemployed person" Keva Rosenberg, who chortles the film's thesis during an interview segment: "It's a free society - except there ain't nothin' free, because there's no guarantees, you know? You're on your own. It's the law of the jungle. Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!"
I must’ve
been two or three years old, and I was already living in a house. It was a
house built on the back of the building of the second grocery store that my
parents had secured. We were living in Sonoyta, a border town in the northern
Mexican state of Sonora. A wispy line drawn by cartographers separated us from
Arizona. Tucson was only two and a half hours away. This was my father’s
hometown, and this is where I spent my childhood. I enjoyed running around our
generous backyard, for the lot upon the house-store was built had previously
been the place of a mechanic shop. Two pits on the left side of the yard served
as remnants of the lot’s previous existence. But if there was something more
fun than gazing down the tremendous abyss of these pits (under the supervision
of my parents or my mother’s young siblings who lived with us) it was watching
television. During many years after my birth on October 19th, 1987,
our TV’s channel reception only received two channels. Cartoons were scarce. I
had to content myself with seeing grown-up movies or talking heads reading the
news.
My parents
regularly went on trips across the border to buy merchandise. Understanding my
need for entertainment and the opportunity to get familiarized with the English
language, my parents bought one or two VHSs every trip. Always. By the time I
was eight, I had an enviable collection of videocassettes, mostly Disney and
Don Bluth movies. But one of the first videos (if not the first) that my father
brought home was unlike any of these gentle, vivid, animated stories for the whole
family.
It’s funny,
because my parents were not careless people nor did they care much for action
films. My mother can’t stand them, and my father gets as emotionally upset, if
not more so, by tragic or harsh scenes on film. But somehow, RoboCop passed
below the radar. I guess my dad thought it was going to be a cartoon-like
spectacle (something that movie executives believed eventually) and since he
was unfamiliar with MPAA ratings, he bought the movie for me, thinking I would
love it.
He was
right.
Not only
that, but we watched it together several times. Barring the scene where
corporate hotshot Bob Morton snorts cocaine in the company of two escorts,
there was nothing objectionable to the film, outside of the violence. But movie
violence has a distancing effect that sex lacks. And movie violence like the
one depicted in RoboCop, outside of the gruesome murder of Murphy, become an
essential part of the film’s fabric, like the set design.
He bought me the NES game (unbeatable), a tape of the cartoon show and an action figure of RoboCop whose helmet I ended up losing twice: once down the shower drain (I took it everywhere) and once under the heels of a group of soldiers standing at attention during a speech given by then president Salinas de Gortari at the Zocalo square, during a visit to Mexico City. If Dick Jones engendered a distrust of men in suits, this tragedy confirmed to me that they were up to no good.
To this day
we talk about it. Like me, his favorite thing is Clarence Boddicker and
Kurtwood’s Smith brilliant performance. He says he felt like beating the hell
out of him, the mark of a true villain. He says I always looked forward to the
scene where RoboCop drives his USB spike into Boddicker’s throat.
RoboCop…bonding
people together since 1987.
To be continued (and developed)...
