Demolition Man

Mellow greetings, readers! 

Demolition Man is a successful mainstream film with lots of explosions. But it was a deliberately satirical film made in the 1990s (fast becoming known as the Golden Age of Cinema) and I found it worth re-watching when I did so recently, and so I'm going to talk about it a little bit. 

If you want someone else's take on the film then the Critical Drinker covers it here; mine is after the break.

The film stars Sylvester Stallone (playing Sylvester Stallone, but as a cop), Wesley Snipes (playing a maniacal bad guy, most of whose lines must be "throws his head back and laughs like a madman"), Sandra Bullock (playing young, sweet, adorkable Sandra Bullock) and Nigel Hawthorne (playing Sir Humphrey Appleby again, but this time in a dressing gown). 

The plot is simple: Stallone and Snipes are ultra-violent 1990s people who are frozen for plot reasons and woken up in 2032, by which time California has become an extremely peaceful and orderly utopia under the tutelary governance of Hawthorne. The plot is neatly done, with nice references back to the opening scene at the end, but the plot is not the interesting part of the film.

The interest instead lies in the satire. Now, you can tell that Hawthorne is a bad guy because not only does he have a British accent but he also has a French name: Dr Cocteau. So the seemingly perfect world of zero crime and manicured lawns will turn out to hide a dark secret. Let's keep that thought in mind. 

(The bizarre idea of casting a distinguished British actor in American sci-fi, giving him a French name and asking him not to bother with a French accent but instead hang around with lots of Americans with no explanation for his presence or the accent discrepancy is in fact not original - think of Patrick Stewart playing Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation. Is Dr Cocteau a parody of J-LP? Or was it just a well-known 90s sci-fi trope with hundreds of other examples of which I am unaware?)

Apart from Cocteau, I haven't given you the characters' names yet, but I feel you ought to have them: Stallone is called "John Spartan"; Snipes is called "Simon Phoenix"; Bullock is called "Lenina Huxley"; but I'm afraid to say that the writers ran out of steam when it came to the chief of the remaining elements of disorder in 2032 (who is - spoiler alert! - actually not bad), calling him "Edgar Friendly". Now I'm sure the distinguished readers of this blog do not need me to explain the significance of these names - Lenina Huxley! - but just in case you never watch the film you should note that the first scene of the film involves a very big fire for which Snipes' character is mostly responsible. 

So, what have we got? Brave New World? Yes! Spartans? Sort of! Someone friendly? Um, maybe. In fact, we have a strangely prescient parody of a certain kind of 1990s puritanism. 

I said that Cocteau had a dark secret. Well, the plot twist (another spoiler!) is that it was Cocteau who resuscitated Snipes in order to use him to destroy the last remaining elements of disorder in his utopia (Friendly). The dark secret is therefore that Cocteau, despite being British, is not all that clever. (Or maybe he's French.) 

More fundamentally, the manicured utopia that Cocteau has created is simply Not Good. Everything that is bad for you - salt, smoking, swearing - is banned but, as a result, people are weak and fearful. They need an injection of Spartan-ism into their overly-ordered lives. The id of dirty reality represented by Friendly and his cronies, who live literally underground and do things like eat burgers, cannot be repressed forever. Huxley's character arc involves learning that sometimes physical touch, whether violent or sexual, can be justified. 

"So what?" you rightly ask. "It's a fun satire on 1990s Californian puritanism with a pretty clear moral."

You're right of course. But, still, the whole thing is weirdly prescient. The electric self-driving cars are pretty much bang on in terms of timing and even outward appearance, but that's an easy one. More impressively, a lot of the social details are correct in ways that were surely not obvious in 1993. So, for example, the 2032 police initially try to deal with Snipes by asking a computer what his plans will be, and even try to arrest him by following prompts from a handheld device ("... use an even more assertive tone of voice - and this time add 'or else!'") - just as we do with our apps. At one point, we see a troubled young man asking for reassurance from a computer ("You are an incredibly sensitive man, who inspires Joy-Joy feelings in all those around you", it tells him) - just as we do with AIs. When Huxley suggests sex, she does not mean physical contact but instead putting on a headset that creates an electronically-simulated substitute - just as ... well, I've already written about the OnlyFans dystopia. It may be just a 90s sci-fi comedy, but the writers were onto something.

One other weird detail: Demolition Man was directed by Marco Brambilla in his directorial debut. He did a good job, so far as I understand how to direct films, it was No 1 in the box office and it made a lot of money. So Brambilla surely had a big Hollywood career ahead of him? You may be wondering why you haven't heard of him, and it turns out that, so Wikipedia tells me, he is really a conceptual artist whose "work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Metronóm Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Barcelona, Spain and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C". The themes of his work include "transition, our culture's constant acceleration and emotional connection and disconnection through technology." I'd say that Demolition Man is a nice easy way in to exploring some of those themes, with multiple explosions as a bonus. If you want, you can consider it more as an art installation available via your favourite streaming service than as a Hollywood movie.

So, there you are. I don't want to oversell Demolition Man, but it's nicely done, there are plenty of other little jokes - Taco Bell, the three sea shells, knitting - that I won't spoil for you and, even if you are not terribly receptive to its moral (I say from experience), you'll probably enjoy it. Be well!