Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch RoboCop
1987 · Paul Verhoeven · RoboCop on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the green grid slide across faces in the visor. (camera)
Detroit reaches RoboCop as a targeting box that crosses a street, locks onto a face and prints a name beside it. You are inside a sensor that scans and reports rather than behind an eye.
Payoff: The machine's vision has replaced the man's, and the film shows you the swap instead of explaining it. In the reading: engramme/photogramme. The reading calls this a gramme: perception cut loose from any living perceiver and handed to a recording machine.
Count the newscasts and commercials that interrupt the story. (cutting)
The film keeps snapping out to a screen: the 6000 SUX, a family board game about nuclear war, an anchor's grin over a massacre. Frank Urioste cuts them in hard and then snaps back mid-scene.
Payoff: You never get to settle into one register, and that refusal is where the film's double edge lives. In the reading: discourse-image. Images that pose a problem about a society and decline to resolve it are what the reading calls discourse-images.
Compare how the OCP tower is staged with the street. (staging)
Glass, mirrors, height and decorum upstairs. Rust, low light, ruined steel mills and wet concrete below. The higher the film climbs, the more abstract and the more lethal the cruelty gets.
Payoff: The social map here is vertical, and the worst violence happens in the politest room in the building.
Watch how Weller moves when nothing is happening. (performance)
Peter Weller worked with a movement coach to build a ratcheting mechanical precision, a stillness broken only when a half-remembered gesture twitches through. The suit puts weight into every footfall.
Payoff: You can see and hear a person who is now corporate property before anyone states it out loud. In the reading: the-gest. A posture that exposes a social relation rather than describing a feeling is what the reading calls a gest.
Listen for how seriously the brass takes RoboCop. (sound)
The satire runs on electronic and broadcast textures. Then Basil Poledouris writes a straight heroic march for the character himself, and the mix gives him servos and weighted steps to walk it with.
Payoff: The music insists on the tragedy while everything around it is being played as farce.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the visor and the green grid across it. The film shows you the world the way a machine records it.