Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (22 page)

The
RoboCop II
team has a boy-genius or crazy-professor feel to it. On the set the atmosphere reminds you of the exotic unsalubriousness of Washington Square Park in New York, where all the skateboarders are chess prodigies, the bums are International Grand Masters, and the lounging brothers have four-figure IQs. Director Irvin Kershner
(Never Say Never Again, The Empire Strikes Back)
looks like a radical Sixties academic. Producer Jon Davison
(Piranha, Airplane!, RoboCop)
has the droll, wheedling delivery of a Greenwich Village intellectual. All around there is a reassuring sense of strength-in-depth. Unit publicists are usually cyborgs themselves, but
RoboCop
IPs Paul Sammon is an omnicompetent film-maker, writer, computer ace. And here's cold proof of how hip and classy this outfit is: nearly everyone had read my stuff. Even the continuity girl turns around and quotes me, word perfect . . . And shabbily lurking by the coke-machine and the chow-trailer are Oscar-winning designers, make-up artists, stop-motion animators, stunt illusionists — tricksters, wizards, futurists.

RoboCop
made money (£50 million in the US alone), and everybody hopes that
RoboCop II
will do at least as well. But they are in it for love — obsessive love. Between rehearsals they crouch down among the cables, the webbing, the gizmo wagons and gadget trolleys and gimmick barrows, the cans of engine enamel, the bottles of Havoline. They talk about the film — 'the show' — with almost parental earnestness and cautious pride, as if they were preparing an enormous machine, or an enormous robot, for smooth functioning, fully tuned and 'tweaked'. Someone is going around with a box of Noisebuster earplugs. We help ourselves. One of the redetailed Ford Taurus turbocruisers is about to blow. 'Not the "beauty car" — the one nearest camera - but the
oldest car,'
Paul Sammon tells me. 'They might not get it done in time, but if they don't they'll want to do something else noisy.' The atrocious detonation comes and goes, and the team gets ready to do it all again.

'Wetdown,' says Irvin Kershner — Kersh — to his assistant. 'WETDOWN,' says his assistant. There ensues, of all things, a long delay, as every inch of the set is hosed with water. The set is regularly wetdowned to give it a glossy, slinky,
noiry
look — also to preserve continuity, in case it rains. 'BEEF . . . MORE BEEF.' On conies the beef: unsmiling figures who all seem to be called things like Tug and Tiff and Heft. The beef on
RoboCop H,
you feel, will be better beef than usual, real thinking man's beef, the most skilled and dedicated beef you can buy.

That night's shoot spluttered on until 4 am, but Jon Davison is at his desk early the next morning. Like all on-the-job moviemen he has an air of exalted exhaustion, of priestly fatigue. 'The whole thing was
awful
the first time around,' Davison croaks. 'Robo himself just didn't work visually. You know: his ass moved in a funny way, he looked smaller than the women. But now . . . it's all going along.' Nobody knows exactly how much the first movie's
frisson
owed to its director, Paul Verhoeven, and his 'neurotic elan', in the phrase of one team-member (here are some other phrases: 'He's a wildman.' 'A sick genius.' 'A real extremist.' 'Bananas.' 'Nuts'). 'Kersh', says Davison, with some concern, 'is, of course,
much
less violent than Paul .. .' Kersh is also sixty-seven; and at present he is too busy to sleep, let alone be interviewed. There is a feeling that Kersh will have to be kept an eye on. He may have a weakness for the
light.
Others, then (the deep talent), will have to make sure it's
heavy.

The floors of the production offices are heaped with Fed Ex envelopes and copies of
Variety,
but the walls are papered with fanatically exact 'storyboards' of the scenes to come, frame by frame. The drawings remind you of RoboCop's imaginative origins: comic books. Comic books, given flesh, and metal - given hard life. 'What made you choose Peter Weller?' I asked. I wondered if it had anything to do with his mouth (his only visible feature for much of the film) and what my wife described as the 'unerotic perfection' of its cupid's-bow lips. 'His mouth? No! Peter was chosen because no other actor would do it.' Like all surprise successes,
RoboCop
was something of a lucky accident. It gathered the right people at the right place at the right time. Davison put them there. He is the puppet-master - or rather the master of the puppeteers: Verhoeven, Weller, the designers and animators, right the way down to all the unsung eggheads at Dream Quest, Praxis, Intervideo, Screaming Lizard and Visual Concept Engineering.

RoboCop
was a genuine original. All its admirers know this, and even its detractors partly sense it.
RoboCop
was
doubly
futuristic. As a movie, and as a vision, it wasn't just state-of-the-art. It was also state-of-the-science: when you see its twirling rivets and burnished heat-exchangers, when you hear its venomous shunts and succulent fizzes, you suspect that the future really might feel like this — that it will act this way on your very nerve-ends. Technology is god in
RoboCop,
but it is also the villain, with its triumphant humourlessness, its puerile ingenuity, its dumb glamour. And that ambivalence explains why
RoboCop's
special effects had a special effect.

Also a special
affect.
To define:
affect
means 'feeling tone'; and
affectlessness
means 'no feeling tone' - no heart. And the heartlessness of our response to the
RoboCop
future is most noticeable, of course, when we confront the movie's extreme violence. American children laugh at
Rambo
because they don't yet know what violence means, because they shouldn't be watching
Rambo
(what, you wonder, will
their
children be laughing at?). The hoods in
RoboCop —
and in most American thrillers of the past twenty years — laugh as they kill and rape and devastate because this is the expression of their anti-ethics, their sociopathology. But
we
laugh at the violence in
RoboCop,
even though we really should know better. We laugh because we have no response to it. We laugh to fill the silence, to fill the vacuum, like embarrassed Japanese.

Take the celebrated and show-stealing scene in the corporation boardroom, when the grinning VP introduces the executives to his latest concept in 'urban pacification', Enforcement Droid 209. An android is supposedly 'a robot with human form', but there is nothing humanoid, or even organic-looking, about ED 209, whose otherness is in fact emphasised by its weird borrowings from the animal kingdom: the shape of the 'face' (killer whale), its warning growl (angry black leopard), its squeal of distress (dying pig). By way of demonstration, the VP asks a young executive to raise a gun at ED 209 'in a threatening manner'. The robot jerks into its attack mode, and says, in its warped baritone (the voice is actually Jon Davison's, slowed and distorted),
Please put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply.
The executive complies, but the machine advances, citing the appropriate penal violation before announcing, with robotic probity,
I am now authorised to use physical force.

There instantly follows a scene of startling butchery, partly cut by the censors, in which ED 209 applies physical force — with twin machine-guns. 'We always knew that sequence was going to be excessive,' Jon Davison has said. 'I sent somebody down to the local 7-11 to get the biggest ziplock baggies they had; and then we filled them with blood.' In the footage submitted to the MPAA, the executive's corpse received an additional 200 rounds. 'I thought it was funny and the preview audience thought it was funny. The censors didn't think it was funny. The result was that they took something that was basically funny and turned it into something horrifying.' Actually, the comic element survives. Where there is no affect, there is no horror. And we laugh because there's nothing else to do.

But our laughter isn't entirely wanton. I finally met up with ED 209, in one of the unit's prop shops. It looks smaller than it does on screen, and slightly bedraggled: one of its gun-arms was ripped off while it was making a PR appearance at a Los Angeles theatre. But it still inspires real menace and amusement, because of the integral brilliance of its design. This is ED's creator, Craig Davies:

I did include things that were my own digs at what I see as a really lame current corporate design policy. For instance, there are four huge hydraulic rams on the legs, even though a creature like ED wouldn't need nearly that many. So it's like complete redundancy - a true corporate product.

The violence of
RoboCop
isn't the 'poetic' violence of, say, Peckinpah. It is 'sweet' violence: violence as technological fix. When we laugh at ED 209, we laugh at corporate overkill, corporate literalism. Here is a death-dealer with a heart made by Yamaha: thoroughly sophisticated, thoroughly murderous, and thoroughly moronic. When we laugh at ED 209, we laugh at something that already exists in the present and eagerly awaits us in the future. The future won't just happen: it will be our creation, our machine.

The time had come to do the star interview — a nervous interlude. Peter Weller was chosen for
RoboCop
because he was the only actor who would do it. For the sequel, naturally, he is the only actor who would do. This is a period of what Hollywood calls 'dignity' for Peter. Already, the night before, Paul Sammon and I had tiptoed to the Star trailer. Covertly we watched Peter limbering up in his cycling shorts, his face already 'gone' in Robo's numb glaze. We tiptoed away again. For RoboCop, also, must come close to affectlessness incarnate. Not quite incarnate, because he is part machine. And not quite affectless, because he is still a man.

There are three distinct phases in the evolution of a movie star. Stage 1 represents the swirling, gaseous years of ambition, fever, hard work. In Stage 2 (the briefest stage: you might call it 'Denial'), the star solidifies and heats up, all the time pretending that nothing irreversible is happening to him. Stage 3 brings the nuclear burning of full deity; hereafter, no mortal can ever really look his way. Peter Weller is halfway through Stage 2, still struggling somehow to
combine
stardom with his original identity. It can't be done. Such laws are universal. The old Peter will be lost for ever in the cosmic fire. And then the star awaits its final destiny: white dwarf, red giant, black hole.

Wonderfully opaque and stylised on the screen as RoboCop, Peter Weller, in real life, is
all
affect: it's like being in a room, or a trailer, with about fifty different people. Simon Schama's new study of the French Revolution is cracked open on the table; so is
Teach Yourself French;
so is
Teach Yourself Italian.
He puts down his trumpet, looks up from the stack of inspirational videos
(Ivan the Terrible)
and shouts out of the window for more classical CDs. His feeling-tone is intense; but so is his muscle-tone. He hums with vigour. I would too, I suppose, if I got up at three and ran 16 miles every morning, which Peter does, before settling down to his two-hour make-up session. What with one thing and another, he's neglecting his yoga and karate and aido - or was it his ashinto, or akimbo? 'He's a maniac,' says Moni, Peter's mime coach, admiringly.
'Very
systematic.'

'The patience factor on number one was nuts,' says Weller, in his hybrid style. 'It took
ten hours
just to get into the suit. Then five. Then four. Now it's one-and-a-half.
Robo II
is easier because we're over the hump of making this shit
work.
There's a Harvard professor who teaches
RoboCop
in a course on the Hellenistic hero. But I tell you, it's heroic just to be in that suit. The real preparation went much deeper. Moni and I worked our ass off, man.'

I believed it. There is nothing accidental about the strange beauty of RoboCop in motion; the effect is fully thought out, and fully achieved. Like many others on the team, Weller is more than a perfectionist. He is an absolutist. For him, it is a kind of liberation, and not a hindrance, to do all his acting with his neck. 'Did you have any doubts about doing the sequel?' I routinely asked. 'Now that you're a major - '

'Now that I'm a major shit, you mean?' He smiled brightly. 'No. I didn't worry about the dangers of all that career shit. I thought: Do I want to judge up all
that
jazz?'

'What's the key to the part? For you.'

'Aside from executing the physicality of the robot - I think of him as like a guy with amnesia. That's the only plane on which I address this character.'

Later, Weller arrives on the set in a caddycart; he stands there, holding the rail — a modern Steve Reeves, on a modern chariot. An entire truck-sized cooling unit is trained on him as his dressers do the final clip-on and polish. Additional helpers attend to his itches and aches and stiffnesses. He looks charged. He is
the man.
Like the creation he plays, though, Weller is only partly human now; to some extent, inevitably, he is
product.
The lost-self theme works so powerfully on us — perhaps we all feel it. Perhaps, as we speed into the future, we all feel that something has been left behind.

RoboCop II
was being made by a kind of brotherhood - a brotherhood of know-how and can-do — and on the set there was an attempt at a kind of moose secrecy. One of Paul Sammon's duties was to thwart paparazzi ('They want shots of The Monster. Or Peter without his suit on'). Similar interdictions apply to the script, I'm not allowed to quote from it. But presumably I'm allowed to praise it.

The author is another boy-genius, Frank Miller, who wrote the cult comic book
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
He is perfectly placed to expand and deepen the RoboCop idea; he understands how 'this unique creation' vibrates with myth, everything from Frankenstein to Captain Marvel.
RoboCop II
will feature the same underlit corporate boardrooms, the 'mediated' reality of ads and newscasts, the same reflexive corruption and passionless violence. The script also offers us a more pained and plangent hero, and two resonant new villains: a murderous twelve-year-old drug baron, and RoboCop II itself - the heir, not of RoboCop, but of ED 209, the latest concept in machine literalism, machine justice. Frank Miller has seen the future. And it sucks.