Cops of the Future + Justice Warriors w/ Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson

[00:00:00] RoboCop, who is he? What is he? Where does he come from? He is OCP's newest soldier in their revolutionary crime management program. OCP spokesman claimed that the fearless machine has crooks on the run in Old Detroit.

[00:00:15] Today, kids at Lee Iacocca Elementary School got to meet in person what their parents only read about in comic books. Robo, excuse me, Robo, any special message for all the kids watching at home? Stay out of trouble.

[00:00:30] More fighting in the Mexican crisis today when American troops participated in a joint raid with Mexican nationals against rebel rocket positions in Acapulco. Now this. Leslie Lee III, as always I'm joined by my co-host Jack Allison. Today's special guest, the twisted minds behind the hit comic Justice Warriors.

[00:01:54] Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson join us to discuss this brilliant satire as well as the books and movies that inspired it. Matt, Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Tell us about Justice Warriors.

[00:02:10] Justice Warriors is a political satire, police procedural dystopian comedy set in a far future world called Bubble City where there is a massive domed mega city that has eliminated all crime and inequality.

[00:02:30] The only problem is the vast mega slum which stretches to the horizon which has formed around Bubble City. Now you said this was a dystopia but it sounds like it's pretty sweet for the people in the bubble.

[00:02:43] You're correct. It is actually quite utopian if you have the right zip code. Outside the bubble, it's pretty criminal out there.

[00:02:51] And so the book follows two officers of the Bubble City Police Department, the BCPD, as they brutally and methodically police the slum which is called the uninhabited zone. I noticed you said brutally but not efficiently. They're nuts.

[00:03:10] So Justice Warriors is absolutely amazing comic. No kidding. This is one of the best comics I've read because every step of the way. It's so funny because you don't pull any punches. You took the comment subtext is for cowards quite literally on this one.

[00:03:28] When you sit down to write a book, usually the point is to try and be restrained, to stay within the lines, to not scare people off.

[00:03:36] On the cover, I mentioned this on the episode last week, there's a quote from Peter Chung who made Aeon Flux, Rain, pretty freaky stuff. He said that he was freaked out by your book. So tell me about the twisted minds that came up with Justice Warriors.

[00:03:51] Why did you go this type of comic? It's so bonkers, so fascinating. I absolutely love it. Yeah, subtext is for cowards. Just say what you mean. And then the thing I find really interesting about that phrase in relationship to Justice Warriors is there's still subtext to Justice Warriors.

[00:04:09] It's just we're saying the quiet part of most satires loud so we can leave room for other quiet parts. There's a lot going on in the comic, but on the surface, it seems like poop jokes and a satire of bad boys movies. And it's very loud.

[00:04:30] Credit goes to Ben for most of the world. He created it before we got together and started writing it. He was conceiving it as an animation and he reached out to me to write for it.

[00:04:44] And animation being harder to self-produce, we decided to pitch it as a comic book. It was the type of world, the type of genre stuff that I've always been drawn to in comics. Just over the top violence, heavily influenced by 80s and 90s action movies, sci-fi dystopia stuff.

[00:05:04] That's what I love. And if you've ever read my political cartoons, I try to incorporate that stuff into those a lot. But I was getting out of political cartoons at the time that Ben wrote me about Justice Warriors.

[00:05:17] And I was like, this is absolutely the comic I want to help make. Is there more to come? Are we going to be seeing more Justice Warriors? Because that would be nice. Yes, there's no official announcement yet, but we've pitched Justice Warriors Volume 2.

[00:05:35] Our publisher Ahoy is very into what we're doing. All signs point to there being another volume. I don't know when it would come out, but Ben and I are already writing it with the anticipation that it will exist shortly.

[00:05:53] Ben described the world of Justice Warriors and what we want to do to me as like seasons of The Wire. At first, because in The Wire they go to the docks and one involves newspaper publishers and stuff, and a lot of the characters carry through.

[00:06:10] At first I thought that didn't make a lot of sense because tonally Justice Warriors is very different. But it is what we want to do in the sense that we want to show every aspect of the society.

[00:06:23] We want to do a volume on elections, how elections work in this crazy world. We want to do a volume on sports and basically the Olympics of this world and so on and so forth.

[00:06:38] We really legitimately have seven or eight volumes of concrete ideas that we have discussed. This is intended to be a long-running comic series. I was going to say, even in this first volume, I think you guys really hit a very difficult target to hit,

[00:06:57] which is doing political satire that still does feel like a story unto itself. I think part of what makes that really work is the sort of shifting focus to different elements in this world. It just moves so fast and we're switching antagonists and switching different ideas so constantly.

[00:07:18] I think it really works and it's really fun. On top of all that, even though these characters are brutal, horrendous police officers, I think that there is actually something that does work between the characters and sort of despite them being horrendous,

[00:07:35] there is something kind of lovable about them. And I did find myself sort of caring about their partnership even in spite of the satire of it all. That's a huge compliment that that works. Yeah, they're somehow lovable. Lovable riot cops.

[00:07:56] One of them is literally – for the viewer, listeners who haven't seen it, one is literally a human, like an anthropomorphic poop. Yes, a big pile of shit. A literal pile of shit. Like a literal pile of shit cop. And a police officer. And it's his first day.

[00:08:13] And then there is a big sort of creature from the Black Lagoon sort of cop and they're partnered together. Yeah, people love them. I'm always amazed at how much people like shit. People have done a lot of fan art of shit. This is his name, Officer Shit. Yeah.

[00:08:36] To be clear, this is his wife's maiden name. He took her name. Yes, a feminist. Well, the book is really great and I do look forward to more. I had a blast reading it.

[00:08:47] Yeah, I think it works not only as a sort of throwback to fun 80s action but also as just like a hilarious satire that feels quite modern. I mean it's about social media. It's about influencers. It's about astrology.

[00:09:02] I think it – I'm excited to see where you guys go next because even in this sort of first chapter in the bubble, I felt like the world was so expansive and felt so funny and real. Yeah, thanks.

[00:09:15] I mean honestly, I want to get to a big fat omnibus someday with this. We want to do 10 volumes. We want to – trying to have – the model is like what's a good creator on comic to Hellboy or whatever where there's 50 volumes and you just keep making them.

[00:09:34] I mean honestly, we come up with – I want three movies. Yeah, we come up with ideas every other week. We're texting each other just a whole – what if we did this? Comic publishing isn't what it used to be where you could kind of launch an ongoing series.

[00:09:48] So it's the model now is you sort of do mini series and then you just kind of launch one a year or whatever. So I think that's the plan as long as people buy enough of them that we can keep doing them.

[00:09:58] We're going to do one a year for like the next decade. That's awesome. Yeah, once the writer's strike is over, who is – do you want directing the Justice Warriors movie? Michael Bay. I think that's a great fit honestly.

[00:10:13] No, I try to think about what would Michael – I have a what would Michael Bay do bracelet on at all times. No, Michael Bay is an incredible artist and I think about his work all the time while I'm making Justice Warriors. I honestly don't disagree.

[00:10:29] I mean I think that the writing sometimes isn't there but watching a Michael Bay movie, you're like this man is on an IMAX camera on a electrified skateboard shooting an exploding car rolling into his face. Like just on a process level, we have to love him. Yeah.

[00:10:48] Justice Warriors is going to have to be – I don't know what degree it would involve CGI versus practical effects. But we even have like the idea of the uninhabited zone is the craziest place that we could dream up. It's not just inhabited by mutants.

[00:11:07] There are cartoon character species like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? So there's like tunes. So I imagine if we did a movie, I mean there would be CGI people. There would be people walking on screen who are rotoscoped, who are cell animation.

[00:11:20] Like we would need a visionary like Michael Bay to execute this. And that brings us to today's topic. There's crimes of the future and you can't have crime without cops. Cops of the future. That is the topic of our episode today, of course, because of Justice Warriors.

[00:11:39] But it's funny you mentioned Michael Bay because I'm looking at his filmography. He has actually not done a science fiction cop movie. It's time. He's of course done cop movies. He's done science fiction action movies but he's never brought the two together.

[00:11:53] Mr. Bay, call us when the strike is over. So the reason I was interested in this episode, it wasn't just because I was reading Justice Warriors. It was also because I went back and I watched Dirty Harry for the first time since I was a kid. Right?

[00:12:12] And you know that's like the progenitor of all like modern cop movies where they're hunting down serial killers and they have to kind of paint or walk outside the lines, you know, to get the man because crime is running rampant in the city, etc.

[00:12:27] Now when you go back and watch the movie now, it's quite funny actually. It actually has a bit more in common with like Batman, like the Adam West Batman. Like the villain is literally like the Joker. He has like a robin.

[00:12:42] All this kind of goofy stuff in the follow up movies like something like Death Wish. Whereas like a lot more like even though Dirty Harry is pretty, you know, right wing and reactionary. Like it got it was it was still has sense of humor and absurdity about it.

[00:12:57] And the director of the film like says like yes Dirty Harry is supposed to be a vile racist. You're not supposed to root for him.

[00:13:04] And so I was thinking about how we see cops in movies and generally speaking in almost everything we see, cops are always presented positively. And we talk about copaganda a lot on the show.

[00:13:16] But the one exception when I was wrapping my head around this was science fiction and anything said in the future.

[00:13:23] It was actually difficult for me to think of any movies or films or even books that present in that were science fiction that presented cops in a positive light.

[00:13:34] And I just wanted to explore that, talk about that and talk about some of our favorite lovable horrible cops of the future. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like, you know, Ursula Le Guin has a quote about how science fiction isn't really like predictive.

[00:13:48] It's just like always about now. And I think that that's actually, you know, obviously at play in Justice Warriors. But yeah, I think sci-fi gives license to creators to show cops as they are today in a way that doesn't make normal people uncomfortable.

[00:14:07] Movies like Death Wish and Dirty Harry are sort of about, they're about the here and now and about like a fantasy of like, you know, you wish someone would clean up the streets.

[00:14:17] And this is how this is how it has to be done. It's like, you know, projecting yourself into this character that you're kind of getting a thrill that they get to bend the law and, you know, blow punks faces off.

[00:14:30] Whereas sci-fi stuff, even, you know, one of the I think is interesting is Blade Runner because of, I mean, there's been so much discussion about Blade Runner, but you're basically watching a cop, you know, hunt down runaway slaves, really. Yeah. Immigrants.

[00:14:48] Yeah. And I mean, I've seen people be like, you know what, this is a movie about a cop that's trying to kill like clones and why is he the protagonist of the movie and everything?

[00:15:01] But it's like, well, if you watch it and you're actually paying attention, I mean, Harrison Ford isn't portrayed as like a villain, like Death Wish type stuff. But it is about that. It's basically it's about his realization of what he's doing over the course of the movie.

[00:15:14] Yeah. I mean, Harrison Ford is not necessarily portrayed as a villain, but his bosses certainly are like every scene with any other police officer. He's like constantly being monitored when he goes in to see his chief.

[00:15:27] It's extremely ominous. Like I think Blade Runner is a great example of kind of just beneath the surface of it.

[00:15:36] I mean, in fact, like, you know, that is really I feel like what the movie is about is, yeah, like the police as the slave catching patrol, you know, which is really what the what American police force like descended from.

[00:15:50] But yeah, I mean, Blade Runner and in fact, in some ways, you know, that's one of the reasons why I think the Blade Runner sequel doesn't work quite as well is it's a little more unambiguous, you know, in the replicants sort of being, I don't know, made to be bad.

[00:16:08] I haven't seen it in a little while, but I feel like the first one has a lot more sort of pleasing, you know, texture to the to the replicants and to the, you know, the how conflicted Harrison Ford is.

[00:16:23] Even Rucker Hauer at the end, Roy Beattie shows the only kindness, the only humanity in the entire movie when he spares Deckard. Like it's so it's a funny movie in the sense that like everyone is so concerned with reproducing society, reproducing this horrible world that they aren't kind to one another.

[00:16:46] And the only one that can be kind is this hunted man. The sequel, I feel like I have some affection for Villeneuve because he's from Montreal and I live in Montreal. That's basically where my. Oh, I love Montreal. It's a wonderful city.

[00:17:02] It's beautiful. I'm a big fan of the place where I live, which is convenient. Villeneuve, I feel there's a subtext to the 2049, which is a lot about women, I find like the film is really about the relationship between men and women and birth and reproduction, which saying it now.

[00:17:26] So I watched almost every movie on this. Leslie put together a list for this, for this podcast. Extensive too. So pretty impressive, honestly, that you got through the list. Yeah, check the show notes.

[00:17:38] We should put, yeah, put the list in the show notes. It's a great watch list. I watched a lot of it this week. None of the TV because I do not watch TV. Good for you. Life is too short to let someone drag something out.

[00:17:55] We've got a cinephile here. I'm a movie man, movie mindset. And something I noticed about the films is that cop media police procedurals are about, this is what I noticed, social reproduction.

[00:18:15] They're, they're Oedipal. There's this question of, will you reproduce society? This is the question that's posed to the cops. Like, are you going to reinforce these laws? Are you going to take your role within this world? And some of them say yes.

[00:18:32] And then there's the very rare anti-Oedipal film where they say no and society sort of collapses because the cop doesn't take their place. And as we talk about the films, I'll toss more of this opinion in because it's maybe a bit heady. That's very interesting.

[00:18:49] Like once again, 2049 is a, that's my good introduction. It sort of clicked to me thinking about it here. It's about social reproduction. It's about women having a role in social reproduction and then how their bodies are policed and how pregnancy is policed.

[00:19:05] But I feel like it, once again, like subtext is for cowards. Like it's literally always in the background of every shot. I feel like it doesn't really succeed in the same way as its progenitor because it's not as blatant about with what it's about.

[00:19:23] I really liked the sequel, but I don't know. The first one is just a very simple story and you don't know about the world yet and you find out about it as you go along. So it's just cleaner. Like you're basically just watching, I view it as you're watching Harrison Ford's journey of realizing that he's a killer for the state or for a corporation maybe.

[00:19:52] I rewatched it, I think last year for the first time in a long ass time and it hit, like a lot of it hit me where, so there's like one scene where he's killing, shooting the woman who's running away and she's going through shattered glass and it's this elegant slow motion scene as she's getting holes blown in her.

[00:20:13] And I just thought, oh, that's just about like he's watching this and starting to realize what he's actually doing. And then by the end after Roy Batty dies and gives his famous speech, he just, he sort of sits there and stares at him for like an inordinate amount of time. And I think he's just realizing like, oh, this was actually a human being that I was about to kill.

[00:20:30] And then he saved my ass and said, actually I think Roy Batty's best line is not the speech, but what he says right before it when he has Harrison Ford hanging off the edge of a building. And he says, it's quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.

[00:20:46] Yeah, it's and it's interesting talking about the movie Blade Runner versus the book that's based on Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep written by Philip K. Dick, who wrote a lot of stuff that involved cops in the original novel.

[00:21:02] It's somewhat unambiguous by the end whether or not the clones, the replicants have emotions, have the capacity for empathy. The book kind of says makes it very clear that the answer is no, that they ultimately aren't quite human.

[00:21:21] But there is also the point that Dick makes in the novel that neither are the cops. The cops who hunt them down are also devoid of empathy. And that's the thing. That's the kind of struggle that Decker goes through in the realization that he has.

[00:21:40] He meets one cop that he suspects is a replicant. He gives him the test. He passed the test. But he sees quite clearly that this man has no real empathy because he's been sexually exploiting replicants that he's been, you know, sub-tasked with hunting down.

[00:21:56] Yeah, that's another big theme that always comes back in cop media too. I've watched so much that the cops are just another criminal gang. And that's always like a subtext within not always a subtext, but there is there are many films where that's part of the major subtext of the work.

[00:22:17] So one where the cops as gangs thing is very prominent, the original Mad Max, where you have this, you know, a society that has already fallen. Just everyone is kind of pretending that still go going along like the apocalypse has happened, but no one really is like acknowledging it. They're still like going to work going about their jobs.

[00:22:40] Doesn't sound familiar at all.

[00:22:42] And so you have Mad Max, who's in the first movie. I feel like people don't realize this. He is literally just a cop. He's just like a patrol officer, but he's called Mad Max because he like dirty Harry tends to, you know, go. He'll take it to the extreme. He'll do anything to bring those perps in.

[00:23:03] But by the end of the movie, I mean, I actually probably fairly early on in the movie because all his like co-workers are kind of douchebags. You realize that, oh, they're just another gang and these are just two gangs fighting as opposed to because the cops aren't really protecting anything. There's no more society left to preserve or protect. They're just out there. They're just doing the same thing the gangs are doing fighting for turf.

[00:23:26] Yeah. And Mad Max turns into like a full on he turns into his alter ego toe cutter at the end of the film when they sever his last little tie to the Oedipal reproduction of society, which is his wife and his child.

[00:23:42] I feel like the first Mad Max one is probably the one I'm the least familiar with or have watched the least amount of times. I don't know. I probably haven't watched it since.

[00:24:13] I think that's common, actually. I think people typically, you know, jump straight to the road warrior. Well, I don't know. Road Warrior is the first one. Mad Max is the second one. Sorry about that. No, Mad Max is the first. Okay. I'm sorry.

[00:24:27] Get it right, Jack. So I love like, you know, the more obviously Fury Road is great and I love doing like Wasteland stuff. I've done it in a lot of my editorial cartoons. The thing I think is interesting about Mad Max is I don't think him being a cop was really that had that much to do with George Miller's vision because the Mad Max movies are not they don't actually make sense as a chronological story.

[00:24:55] It's like he reinvents the story each time and it all works, but it's not like it just doesn't make sense as a story and he drops the cop thing. You know, it's sort of never mentioned again to my recollection.

[00:25:12] George Miller is a sort of a filmmaker's filmmaker. Like he's very good at shooting action and understanding the language like his films are about the language of cinema and the original Mad Max is really good from a low budget or mid budget filmmaking perspective, but there's like there's very little story to it. It's he goes on vacation and a motorcycle gang smells his wife and then hunts him for the rest of the movie.

[00:25:40] Well, I wonder if it wasn't I'm sure there's information about this but if it was, you know, the cop angle was a product of that time where you have stuff like Dirty Harry coming out and they're like well like Dirty Harry, but it's the Wasteland.

[00:25:54] Yeah, I see a lot of that in it. Dirty Harry's a progenitor like direct progenitor for a lot of this stuff because Judge Dredd was based on Dirty Harry and then Robocop was an off like a brand ripoff of Judge Dredd very exclusive like explicitly like they couldn't get the rights to Judge Dredd. So they made a Robocop.

[00:26:19] And now we're carrying on the torch with Justice Warriors. So so so if Dirty Harry didn't exist, we wouldn't be talking right now. Yeah, it's the trunk of the tree.

[00:26:30] All right, so that is something we had on our list. Judge Dredd the comic the movies that adaptations. I've talked a couple of times about Judge Dredd on the show. I really like the Sylvester Stallone movie to this day.

[00:26:47] It's not a good movie, but it has like really like cool effects and the costumes. I think they're by Gautier, you know, like it's a really interesting movie to look at especially for the budget and it's time.

[00:27:01] But this is a there's a problem with the Judge Dredd movie as well as the follow up the Carl Urban one just called Dredd which people love as you know, an action movie.

[00:27:13] But as far as the themes and the cop thing and the films both leave out entirely the point of Judge Dredd, which is that it's supposed to be a satire of you know of Thatcherism of you know Reaganomics of you know, that 80s white right wing as you know economic policy.

[00:27:37] Because if you actually read the original comics of Judge Dredd this the thing is that the Megacity this horrible place how the earth is the cursed earth all this stuff this wasteland that people live in they ultimately choose to live there.

[00:27:53] There's numerous other planets that humans can travel to there are more or less Paradise, but the people who are still on earth are there because they like it that way.

[00:28:03] They don't want things to change so they stay on earth and they want the judges to lay down the law and live in this kind of dystopian society and even past that when you look at the really early comics.

[00:28:17] The Megacity isn't all you know like an urban wasteland.

[00:28:20] It's like a sort of like a 60s you know type futurism it looks like the Jetsons and so when you see Judge Dredd driving around on his motorcycle saying I am the law and you see all these people in like spacesuits and really nice you know modular you know globular houses.

[00:28:38] It looks kind of ridiculous you see like the absurdity of it he's kind of this man you know holding on to these old ideas and raging against you know the new world that actually exists.

[00:28:50] Yeah in that sense I think the Stallone Dredd is a better Dredd than the Carl Urban one although I think the Carl Urban one is infinitely more entertaining to watch.

[00:29:00] Just because of the art direction like it is it's impressive the original Dredd looks impressive and the second Dredd looks like a high-budget college film at times.

[00:29:16] The problem with the newer one I mean I liked it but it didn't capture the weirdness of you know 2000 AD and the world of Dredd which is there can be mutants there's aliens but there's also just weird you know weird futuristic societal trends people go they call it going futsy like going future shock causes people to go in have mental breakdowns and become criminals all the time.

[00:29:44] You know like the Dredd set up for the movie the 2012 movie I think it was or whenever it was you know it's pretty traditional it's just like well there's a there's a there's a gangster who runs this block and we gotta get her.

[00:30:00] And now we're yeah it is just kind of like a cop movie.

[00:30:05] I mean Dredd the comics are like actually pretty funny you know like I think that there's a lot you know just explicitly that you know is satire and it is funny in it and both Dredd movies while I do actually kind of like both of them kind of really only get to this is cool kind of only get to like action is cool you know versus the comics.

[00:30:28] I've read an inordinate amount of Dredd comics over the years and I love them. And yeah it's like the stuff that was you know 70s through the 80s is very satirical and over the top and great.

[00:30:45] And then you know in the 90s I think it gets into kind of being sort of more of an action comic and grim and gritty like everything else was during that time.

[00:30:54] But John Wagner one of the co-creator and main writer throughout the years I mean he still writes it and I think Dredd today is you know as good as it's always been like that he's at he has a little bit more serious tone and like examines fascism a little bit more seriously in the in some of the storylines that come out today.

[00:31:17] So yeah I'd love if they got an adaptation right but you know I'm actually they already had two shots it's time for Michael Bay to do Justice Warriors.

[00:31:26] It might be worth looking at sort of the prototypical future cop RoboCop we talked about him sort of having his origins in fact actually RoboCop might be the Judge Dredd adaptation you know that actually does really get the satire right.

[00:31:44] Yes yes absolutely so RoboCop I was first introduced to RoboCop as a child because back then in the late 80s early 90s our favorite characters were like Freddy Krueger Jason RoboCop the predator and everyone you can play in Mortal Kombat now.

[00:32:06] Yes yes all the R rated stuff was the big deal and we were as kids we thought RoboCop was the coolest fucking thing in the world just because he looked the suit which they spent like a year making and as you said they did try to kind of rip off Judge Dredd that's where they started from but they really spent a lot of time making this suit that actually like they had to have some Peter Weller poor guy actually had to wear.

[00:32:34] He had to learn and train he had to do like special like Tai Chi type training to learn how to walk inside it and then when he put it on it didn't work because it was too heavy so you have to learn how to walk in a completely different way but man that movie Paul Verhoeven absolutely phenomenal film I get more out of it every time I see it even as a kid I just saw shoot shoot bang bang cool violence but now you see the satire and again it's more of a economic it's a it's a satire.

[00:33:04] Of Reaganomics is basically showing how anything that capitalism touches it will ruin including like say taking over a city security it will just make things worse in fact it will make things worse on purpose to make more money because this job is is point isn't to make things better is to make money I love RoboCop so much I watch it all the time.

[00:33:28] The new ones not so great again they kind of digress into like action just the cop stuff but man the original RoboCop love it. Yeah I would also accept Verhoeven to direct a Justice Warriors movie.

[00:34:08] Yeah I think a lot of it is I think a lot of it is Verhoeven too obviously because if you watch the other RoboCops there's something missing RoboCop 2 I have some affection for RoboCop.

[00:34:37] RoboCop 2 I have some affection for RoboCop 2 because it's also funny but it doesn't quite get the that's the Frank Miller one right yes it doesn't quite get the same hit the same points as hard as Verhoeven's RoboCop because Verhoeven is very smart and he understood what was going on underneath of it.

[00:34:58] And there's so many tiny details like the news report at the beginning when they announced that the French that some African nation had unveiled a French neutron bomb as their new defense measure which I laugh I laugh and I laugh RoboCop is a comedy.

[00:35:18] RoboCop also of any movie made in the past depicting the future got it closest to what it feels like to live in the future I think honestly like I look at I watch that movie and it feels very familiar.

[00:35:34] Here's an interesting some interesting RoboCop lore I think this the writer was this guy Edward Neumeier and he's hardly written anything his filmography is RoboCop Starship Troopers Anacondas The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.

[00:35:54] And then interestingly he wrote the reboot to RoboCop that came out like in the 2010s which I thought was somewhat entertaining but just kind of like you can't top the original so why bother to do that.

[00:36:13] But here's this guy who has only written you know these two brilliant Verhoeven satires and like almost nothing else except like a B movie sequel that I didn't even know existed but a detail that I wanted to bring up was he actually wrote the original sequel to RoboCop 2 which was going to be called RoboCop 2 The Corporate Wars.

[00:36:38] And then there was a another WGA strike in 1988 and for whatever reason when things resumed they hired Frank Miller you know the writers I don't know exactly what happened but the writer strike somehow caused him to lose the gig and the production company just hired Frank Miller.

[00:36:58] I don't know if he was scabbing or what but we got a different RoboCop and I think I would I don't know if that's out there on the internet or something but I'd love to read this guy's strip or screenplay because he seemed if this guy wrote Starship Troopers in the original RoboCop he you know he seems to be the guy that he's the source.

[00:37:21] Yeah I would say that RoboCop is a good example a rare example of an anti-Oedipal cop movie where RoboCop chooses to overcome his sort of place in society and go against Omnicorp.

[00:37:38] A lot of the time these anti-Oedipal comp movies like Mad Max leads to the dissolution of society itself. This one more optimistic. Society survives RoboCop but he still bucks his social programming so a unique cop film. Here's a quote from Neumeier on why he wrote the movie.

[00:38:01] Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys ransacked the world enabled by Reagan and the Central Intelligence Agency. Beautiful. I mean that says it all. That should be on the back of Justice Warriors.

[00:38:17] Yeah RoboCop really one of the all-time greats and yeah again I you know especially the clips from TV I feel like you know really got their finger on the pulse of what it was going to look like to live in the future of 1987.

[00:38:35] I'm gonna point out another anti-Oedipal cop movie one near and dear to my heart Demolition Man where at the end of the film basically society is wiped away for everyone to start again.

[00:38:49] Sort of like a negative revolution where nobody has any idea what to do but the current social order just fails to reproduce itself because of the actions of the enigmatic John Spartan.

[00:39:02] Yeah it's very interesting because yeah like John Spartan's whole deal of being a sort of I mean he's kind of a Dirty Harry on steroids you know he's a guy who will break the law to enforce it and then but then the 90s it was what 94 they sort of imagine what if what if these Dirty Harry movies and like all the 80s action movies like what if they can't exist in the future because it's 2pc like what if they can't exist in the future.

[00:39:32] Like what if action heroes can't just kill whoever they want so they freeze them and yeah by the end of the movie though he's not political so they do if you remember there's for listeners you know there's the PC world and everything seems fine but then there's the underground Dennis Leary types who want to smoke cigarettes and eat red meat even though it's bad for you.

[00:39:52] And at the end of the movie Stallone is just kind of I mean I think he literally just says you're gonna have to work it out like he doesn't really have politics he doesn't have a solution he punched he kicked actually Wesley Snipes head off and that's really the end of his story that he was there that's all he knows how to do.

[00:40:22] But it doesn't really engage with it.

[00:40:52] And the resources they have to actually let these people into society as you know free people who don't necessarily want to you know not swear and follow you know this kind of regime and actually living under the surveillance state is a big issue in it they don't want to constantly be surveilled all the time that's that's not presented as a fun thing the world isn't necessarily a utopia just because there isn't any.

[00:41:22] Quote unquote crime.

[00:41:23] Well and let's let's you know address the main thing which is that they've outlawed sex so this is a this is a bad society right yes this is this is not good these the underground they want to fuck smoke eat sugar wrap burgers drink beer I mean this is my kind of place.

[00:41:44] Yeah demolition man is really where I got the original idea for this Oedipal cop thing because there is so much tension between the society that John Sartin has been tasked with saving and his own personal desires.

[00:42:03] And it's very blatantly about that that Oedipal urge that Oedipal pull even the villain the big bad guy Jean Cocteau or Cocteau Dr. Cocteau that's a reference to Jean Cocteau who also wrote an adaptation of Oedipus Rex called the infernal machine.

[00:42:29] Like there's even literary references to these ideas within demolition man which makes it really unique as well in that it's a highly literate action film there's a lot of illusions through throughout.

[00:42:43] It's it's one of those movies I mean it's a lot of people have affection for it because it's kind of funny and goofy.

[00:42:49] I think there's a there's a better version of demolition man that could have been made with like a different filmmaker or different script or something they also edited out storylines like if you remember he there's like a sea plot of him having a daughter and they don't show her in the beginning for one but so it's kind of weird all of a sudden there's talking about whether or not he has a daughter and then it you're like is Sandra Bullock his daughter and he's going to have mind sex with her.

[00:43:19] I mean it's kind of weird to express it again but she's in the original movie she shown like crying as he gets going goes to jail and then she's one of the underground people which I think is actually interesting is that his daughter is like trying to overthrow society.

[00:43:34] So you know that softens him up a bit too because he's a he's a dad reunited with his kid but they don't they don't show it and there's a bunch of other stuff I mean just you know dealing with the politics of it I think a little better like what the cocktail guy was actually doing would have made it better and then Wesley Snipes just sort of kills him and then it just becomes John Spartan versus Simon Phoenix for no real reason.

[00:43:58] And so I wish we got a little bit better version of Demolition Man but it's obviously just a fun as hell movie. What if John Spartan and Simon Phoenix had teamed up at the end? Modern-day Napoleons. They would have conquered the world in mere months. Yes.

[00:44:22] They both agree on a lot right? They're probably one of the only people outside of the underground who believe that sex should be engaged in frequently.

[00:44:33] I love John Spartan's character by the way he comes back after being frozen for however many years it's alluded to that he was conscious the whole time like basically being tortured and he's like my wife's dead and then like 10 minutes later he's like about to have sex with Sandra Bullock and he's mad that they're not having physical sex.

[00:44:53] There's not much to say about it but I was impressed really deeply impressed with Soylent Green actually I'd never seen Soylent Green and I did not know that Justice Warriors owed so much to Soylent Green until I had watched it and it really hammered like this is watching all these films has been a wonderful educational experience and I'm incredibly thankful.

[00:45:23] That I did it and that this was the idea for this pod because I now know so much so many more reference points of this like very minute genre of like pessimistic future cop movie thing that it opens up so many avenues for us to go even moving forward with Justice Warriors.

[00:45:45] And one of them...

[00:46:16] He was just like let's watch this cool movie and I was like oh you know the rich are in bubble cities essentially eating apples while everyone else is eating and that the only thing I don't know is if I knew the twist at the end or not at the time, but you know everybody else is eating people and yeah it made an impression for sure.

[00:46:42] Yeah, it's also a really good example of why there is so much cop media and what I mean by that is Charlton Heston is exploring this world and we go along with him while he explores the world and he needs a reason to do it.

[00:46:59] And so there is a murder and then we go on an investigation and cop movies have investigations and crimes in them. So we almost have a reason to explore a world of allegories for our own world as they explore these films.

[00:47:19] And so the structure of the investigation is very clear in Soylent Green which is super interesting and really beneficial for my cognition of cop movies.

[00:47:34] Well I think today we're very hyper aware of copaganda but I think one of the reasons that it's so ingrained in fiction is like you said it's a good narrative device but it also goes back to Westerns too.

[00:47:50] It's all about who are the people in society who are licensed to kill.

[00:47:55] Like it makes for an interesting story because if you have if Charlton Heston is just a guy who decides to look into this stuff and then he starts shooting people or something it's like oh well the cops are going to come and arrest him.

[00:48:08] Like you can't do that. You can't be like a lawless protagonist in most movies without the logic of the world collapsing.

[00:48:16] But like cops are the people who can like move between the law essentially and do illegal things or actually have a shootout with people on the street and not be in jail the next day. Right. I mean they also sort of like have the ability to traverse worlds.

[00:48:34] You know what I mean like they're allowed into corporate businesses to interview the executives and they're also on the street with the food riots and everything like that.

[00:48:44] Like yeah I think it is you know there's a reason noir is such a popular genre as it's sort of an outsider character like us as the viewer you know unfolding things before our eyes. That was Struggle Session. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:48:58] Matt, Ben where can people find you? Online. Yeah the internet. It's a public service that's been highly privatized. I'm on Twitter at Ben Clarkson and on Instagram at Ben Clarkson 1 million the number not the word. Very easy. Matt where can they find you?

[00:49:20] I'm just Matt Bores on you know most of the main platforms easy to find. And at bookstores you know or wherever they still sell comics any anywhere that physical media is still available. Yeah you can find it at bookstores which is quite surreal for me having a book.

[00:49:38] It's weird. It's cool. You get bookstores and there's also a Simon and Schuster link I will send to you guys which is a really great way to buy it online. Have a good one. Peace. Later. Like what you hear? Want to hear more?

[00:50:00] Check us out at Patreon.com slash struggle session or sesh.plus or struggle session dot sub stack dot com for all our public episodes commercial free as well as hundreds of bonus episodes. Thank you to all our listeners for holding us down five years strong.