(funky music)
- (Michael) What’s up Wisecrack, Michael here.
In 1987 and 1995, two movies about futuristic crime fighters were box office hits… well,
one was a hit and the other was a huge flop. Ok Ok, let me try again. In 1987 and 1995,
two movies about futuristic crime fighters sold tickets across North America: RoboCop
and Judge Dredd.
At first, these films might seem like just two more additions to the dumb action flick
canon about the forces of good racking up bad guy body counts in the name of justice.
But what if they’re actually doing a lot more - like asking some really big questions?
Questions like: how should a society enforce its laws?
- (Dredd) Happy motoring.
- (Michael) And more importantly, what if they’re secretly commenting on how these
guys answered that question?
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition on Robocop and Judge Dredd: Who is the law?
- (Dredd) I am the law!
- (Michael) And of course, spoilers ahead.
- (Michael) Before filmmaker Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Edward Neumeier brought us
this
- (Man) Here's a bunch of MI kids that look like they eat bugs for lunch!
- (Woman) Yum yum yum!
- (Michael) they brought us RoboCop. In a futuristic dystopian Detroit, the megacorporation
Omni Consumer Products (OCP) wins a contract to run the city’s police department. After
cutting funding so that the cops can’t do their jobs properly, they lead police officer
Alex Murphy to a gang of criminals led by the dad from That 70s Show. Murphy is murdered,
and OCP, looking for a guinea pig, rebuilds him as a cost-saving cyborg that is programmed
to
- (Robocop) Serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law.
- (Michael) Eight years later, Judge Dredd premiered. Sly Stallone’s Judge Joseph Dredd
isn’t a robot, but a heavily armored Street Judge who patrols Mega-City 1. In this 2080
totalitarian police state, law is maintained by Street Judges who serve as judge, jury,
and executioner. Dredd basically worships the law, and is VERY good at implementing
it with catchphrases like:
- (Dredd) I knew you'd say that
- (Michael) Until he gets framed for murder.
- (Judge) Dredd you're under arrest! - (Judge Hershey) What's the charge?
- (Judge) Murder.
- (Michael) RoboCop and Judge Dredd have a lot of similarities, and it’s not just the
co-ed locker rooms. They’re both stories about crime run amok, and the increasingly
desperate and ethically questionable means of containing it.
Importantly, both the worlds of Robocop and Judge Dredd see law enforcement outgunned
and ill-equipped to maintain order. Alex Murphy, for instance, gets gunned down, in part, because
backup is unavailable.
- (Murphy) Now where's the backup? - (Dispatcher) Backup is still unavailable.
- (Michael) And, even Judge Dredd’s police-state, still can’t seem to keep up with the riff-raff.
Some cultural context is important here: In the 1960s and 1970s, the violent crime rate
in America increased by 126 percent. The 1980s brought the crack-cocaine epidemic, and handgun-related
homicides doubled between 1985 and 1990. Crime was heavily reported on and sensationalized
by the media, and became a frequent talking point of political campaigns. While most millennials
and zoomers have lived their entire lives in a world with decreasing crime rates, the
same can not be said for the original audiences of these films. The idea that “street savages”
had made the law as we know it collapse — as the Judge Dredd intro tells us — was a familiar
idea to anyone watching the 5 o’clock news. And for those terrified by crime, something
like this:
- (Morton) We're projecting the end of crime in all Detroit within 40 days.
- (Michael) Was the stuff of fantasies.
At first glance, one might assume these films were all aboard the “let’s shit our pants
over a crime epidemic” train. But both of these films are subversive commentaries on
these fears, not simple reflections of them. For Judge Dredd, the logical conclusion of
being “tough on crime” is this:
- (Dredd) I am the law!
- (Michael) Whereas Robocop warns us about the dangers of fear mongering and a for-profit
criminal justice system.
- I say good business, is where you find it. As you know we've entered into a contract
with the city to run local law enforcement.
- (Michael) But the core of these films’ commentary has less to do with dystopic predictions
about policing, and everything to do with … this guy: Earl Warren.
Chief justice of the US Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969, Warren headed the court through
rulings so world-changing that it’s hard to imagine a time before them. Of course,
there’s the big hits, like Brown v. Board of Ed - which desegregated schools, and Loving
v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage. But there’s also the Miranda warning
- (RoboCop) You have the right to remain silent.
- (Michael) which was not a thing some sweaty, wig-wearing founding father came up with,
but rather the result of a 1966 case involving a guy named Ernesto Miranda.
It was the Warren Court’s decisions dealing with criminal justice, like the Miranda case,
that made him the ire of conservative politicians, and a resultant scapegoat for society’s
problems. Remember those exploding crime rates? It wasn’t the lack of economic opportunity,
or access to guns, or funding cuts for all types of social services, nope, it was all
the fault of our man Earl. As Michal Belknap writes “Before Warren became chief justice,
few politicians would have thought to blame the Supreme Court for the crime rate.” But
blame they did. And the criticisms lobbied at Warren fuel the satire and commentary driving
both Dredd and Robocop.
So, why all the hate? It’s because Warren’s court laid forth an entire new set of protections
for our constitutional rights when dealing with the police, affirming the right to remain
silent, the right to a lawyer, the right to have that lawyer present during police interrogation,
and protection from the use of illegally-seized evidence. Critics, like a former New York
City police commissioner, argued that these protections stifled law enforcement, weakening
a police force that was already stretched dangerously thin.
Unsurprisingly, pop culture reflected these anxieties, most obviously in cinema, which
depicted endless streams of “good-guy” hero cops who refused to play by the pesky
Warren-style rules of policing. You know, the loose cannon who could just get the bad
guy if it weren’t for all the red-tape in his way.
In this context, who would be the ultimate answer to Warren-era restrictions, the ULTIMATE
unencumbered cop?
How about a guy who has perfectly internalized the criminal justice code and can thus be
trusted to enforce the law fairly no matter what? Sounds kinda like this:
- (RoboCop) Serve the public trust. Protect the innocence. Uphold the law.
- (Michael) Or this:
- (Dredd) In code 36-13, the first degree murder of a street judge...
- (Criminal) Let me guess. Life. (Screams)
- (Michael) Judge Dredd imagines a cop freed from bureaucracy, an officer so-thoroughly-trained
in the law he doesn’t need a “balance of powers” to justly administer it. A cop
who doesn’t have to worry about activist judges, because he IS the judge. Who won’t
be stopped by sympathetic juries, because he is the jury. And of course he’s also
the one handling the punishment.
- (Newcaster) Killed in summary executions by Judge Dredd.
- (Michael) Dredd is the platonic ideal of a cop. He isn’t driven by emotions
- (Dredd) Emotions... there ought to be a law against them.
- (Michael) And doesn’t have any friends that could create a conflict of interest.
He has simply memorized the law, and will dole it out without any bias or compassion.
He is to inner-city policing what your Roomba is to mid-sized apartment vacuuming. Of course,
this is the target of the film’s critique. Without a balance of powers, who is to save
Dredd when he’s on trial? His own biceps?
(Dredd grunting)
- (Michael) Earlier in the film, Dredd arrests the lovable Rob Scneider, who was just trying
to avoid a shoot-out.
- (Fergie) They were killing each other in there!
- (Dredd) You could've gone out the window. - (Fergie) Forty floors? It would've been
suicide! - (Dredd) Maybe. But it's legal.
- (Michael) Once they later team up, he can’t even give Deuce Bigalow a casual “my bad”
because:
- (Dredd) The law can’t apologize!
- (Michael) Robocop also incorporates many of the defining traits of Warren’s critics,
especially the eventual successor to Warren, Warren Earl Burger. I know, it’s too many
Warrens and Earls. Before he took the other Earl’s job, Burger complained about a drawn-out
legal process where criminals could bank on their “free lawyer” getting them off on
a technical loophole. Of course, many of those loopholes were civil rights protections concocted
by the Warren court - like the hypothetical drug dealer who gets off because the cops
don’t have a warrant.
We see hints of this narrative in Robocop, like a slimey criminal defense lawyer in the
intro
- (Lawyer) Attempted murder? Well it's not like he killed someone! It's a clear violation
of my client's civil rights! - (Man) Make it aggravated assault and I can
make bail, in cash, now!
- (Michael) And a guy screaming that he’sa “repeat offender" -
- (Man) I am what you call a repeat offender, I repeat, I will offend again.
- (Michael) Ostensibly because the justice system can’t legally lock him up for good.
One man who catapulted his career straight into the white house by criticizing Warren
was one Richard Milhous Nixon.
After an explosion of violent protests and riots swept the country in the “Long Hot
Summer'' of 1967, soon-to-be-presidential candidate Richard Nixon published an op-ed
titled “What Has Happened to America?” One of his scapegoats: judges weakening the
police’s ability to fight crime, a point that Nixon would continue to repeat throughout
his presidency.
- (Nixon) I believe some court decisions have gone too far in the past in weakening the
peace forces as against the criminal forces in our society.
- (Michael) In fact, as Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong put it in “The Brethren”, Burger
was chosen by Nixon to lead the Supreme Court specifically because of his ragging on Warren’s
criminal justice decisions.
While Robocop and Judge Dredd came out well after Nixon’s impeachment, his “tough
on crime” and anti-Warren-court rhetoric persisted well into the 80s and 90s.
(gunshot, man screams)
- (Michael) It’s no surprise then, that Robocop’s cartoonishly evil backstabbing
criminals and Judge Dredd’s disintegrating social order seem like a warning from this
Richard Nixon ad which tells us:
- (Narrator) In recent years, crime in this country has grown 9 times as fast as population
- (Michael) And to vote like your “whole world depended on it.” The idea that civilization
itself was being threatened by crime was, and continues to be, a common “warning”
in political rhetoric. Criminals aren’t your friendly neighborhood weed delivery guy,
a person trying to make ends meet, or someone pushed into desperation by addiction. They
are irredeemable monsters, willing to betray each other at a whim and destroy their own
neighborhood in the process. When the police go on strike in RoboCop, the city quickly
devolves into violent anarchy. This kind of rhetoric wasn’t limited to the likes of
Nixon. How the US was handling crime continued to be of great public concern in the 80s and
90s.Law and order rhetoric resurged during the Reagan years, and not because he starred
in a movie of the same name. Even Bill Clinton took a “tough on crime
stance,” and Hillary Clinton, in 1996, warned of child “Super Predators” with no “conscious
or empathy.”
- (Hilary Clinton) They are often the kinds of kids that are called "super predators"
no conscious, no empathy.
- (Michael) There is even a rumor that Hillary screened RoboCop for the White House staff
and then told them, “now you go make this happen.” That rumor was of course started
right now, by me, with literally no evidence to support it other than that it would be
crazy if that happened, right?
- (Michael) Of course, she wasn’t the first to accuse criminals of being inhuman monsters,
she was just putting her own spin on familiar rhetoric. RoboCop takes this concept and pushes
it to 11, giving us the least sympathetic villains possible. Before assaulting a woman,
2 men act like zoo animals,
(Men making animal noises)
- (Michael) While the dad from That 70s Show uses a wounded friend to slow down a police
car. In Judge Dredd, the people who exist outside the law are literal cannibals.
- (Dredd) I forgot to mention it. Your new friends... they're cannibals.
- (Michael) Dredd even has a copy of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in
his locker - suggesting the stakes of the war against crime are, in his mind, the decline
and fall of the Western civilization.
But these movies are ultimately criticizing this narrative. Even policing with an iron
fist can’t save Judge Dredd’s megacities, and the most inventive thing this guy has
to offer is more executions.
- The only solution is a tougher criminal code!
- (Michael) And even if our criminal justice system could clone perfect cops like Dredd,
it could do nothing to stop gross abuses of power without a separate judicial system to
stop it. Meanwhile, RoboCop, through artfully placed commercials, suggests that there’s
a perverse incentive for the media to report on the chaos of the world, so that OCP can
deploy extremely profitable murder robots to “save” civilization.”
The criminal justice system in both films are willing to go to extreme lengths in the
name of stopping perps, even though they’re inflicting a ton of collateral damage with
little consideration for the complexities of criminal activity. These worlds, both full
of law enforcers, don’t seem very lawful at all.
In other action movies of the time, vigilante justice is a noble alternative to policing
- “if the cops can’t get the job done, I will!” The good guys kill the bad guys
and everyone goes home happy, and maybe wondering if there are too many Warren-style rules obstructing
cops from doing their jobs. In contrast, RoboCop and Judge Dredd are making fun of both the
tropes and anxieties of the time. These films satirize romantic notions of good guy cops
in a world unencumbered by red tape.
They can also help us ask questions about how and when our desire for “law and order”
compromises our other values like “democracy” or the belief in a separation of powers in
the criminal justice system.
But what do you guys think? Are Robocop and Judge Dredd brilliant indictments of tough-on-crime
rhetoric and policies? Let us know in the comments. Huge thanks to our patrons for your
support. As always, thanks for watching and sadistically murder that subscribe button.
And remember, I am the law. Later!