Rubin: Some Detroiters view ‘Robocop’ film, statue as raw bigotry

Not long after RoboCop saved Trunetta Roach's hometown, which was in 1987, the Detroiter found herself on vacation in Florida.

Chatting with a stranger there, she told me in an email, she mentioned where she was from — and the woman recoiled, took a step back, and told Roach that she "seemed very nice to live in such a dangerous place."

It hurt, Roach said, and decades later, it infuriates. After I offered an update Thursday on the status of the crowd-funded statue of the star of "RoboCop" — it's still bound for Eastern Market, ideally by the end of the year — she responded with a concise review of the movie and the project.

"The RoboCop story," she said, "represents a mainstream, racist narrative about Detroit that has damaged our reputation worldwide. It should be consigned to the trash heap of lies and misinformation."

I've always thought it was on the amusing side of peculiar to erect, in Detroit, an 11-foot-tall bronze likeness of the title character from a film whose founding premise was that the city is a festering hellscape.

Having spoken often to one of the Detroit-based ringleaders of the project, I've come to appreciate that the intent is to get people thinking and talking, not just about the sculpture but about the philosophies and attitudes that inspired the movie.

As a rule, I hold that more art is better than less art, that public art makes places better, and that my taste should not be the universal yardstick, even if I'm always right. That 17-foot-tall statue by Kaws outside One Campus Martius in downtown Detroit makes me roll my nearsighted eyes, but I see people posing with it all the time.

What hadn't struck me, in my capacity as a white guy from the suburbs, is that some people view the film and its commemoration as raw bigotry.

"It’s a cult classic," said Wayne State professor David Goldberg, "but only for certain groups of people" — and not the ones who have to defend the city as “actually having human beings in it.”

MORE ABOUT ROBOCOP: 11-foot-tall statue is somewhere in Eastern Market awaiting new secret home

A mostly white cast

The movie had Dallas playing the role of a futuristic Detroit and Peter Weller playing RoboCop, a law enforcement cyborg constructed around what was left of a murdered police officer.

The leader of the drug gang that killed him is introduced as a suspect in the murders of 31 other officers, which suggests a wildly out of control city. He's white, as are most of his gang, some looters shown late in the picture, and pretty much everyone else except for a likeably tough police sergeant, the briefly seen mayor and one executive of the venal Omni Consumer Products.

"The hoodlums are mostly middle-class white gangster types," said Brandon Walley, a graphic designer and experimental filmmaker who has become the spokesman for the small band of artists behind the sculpture.

As for the movie's Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, Walley said, he's politically well left of center, and his goal was to blend science fiction, action and a human touch into a social commentary that took potshots at Reaganomics and the smothering state of capitalism.

The ultimate bad guy is a treacherous corporate bigwig played by the shiny white Ronny Cox. No bigotry was intended, Walley said, by either the filmmaker or the fundraising amateurs who attracted $67,436 in a worldwide Kickstarter campaign inspired by a facetious tweet to Mayor Dave Bing.

But intent and perception don't always march side-by-side.

The '80s view of Detroit

Art, whether high, low or blood-spattered, is supposed to evoke reaction.

What Walley found, he said, especially in the early stages of the project around 2013, is that many of the most strenuous objections came from people who had heard about "RoboCop" but hadn't actually spent whatever trivial amount it took to buy a ticket back then.

Others left the theater outraged, and it's not his place or his philosophy to begrudge their ire.

"No one that’s from the city wants this statue," said Brandon Keyes, another emailer last week. "We’ve always seen it for what it is: a racist joke that’s turned into some perverted project. It’s disgusting and offensive."

Goldberg, 52, an associate professor of African-American Studies and director of the Crockett-Lumumba Scholars program, ignored "RoboCop" when he was a high schooler: "I was watching sports."

He caught up with it as it spawned two unsuccessful sequels, a pair of animated series, video games, comic books and action figures, and "all I see is that there needs to be extra control of the Black population."

Give credit, though, he said: "It put Detroit in the exact role Detroit played in the national media in the 1980s, as the American Beirut."

Tragedy and possibility

Weller, the star, told the Free Press' Julie Hinds last year that he sees the movie as a tragedy.

Walley, the statue's guide, sees Weller's towering replica as an opportunity.

Not for profit, though it will likely draw visitors to its unspecified spot just outside the main retail area of the market. After commissions and unfulfilled pledges, the original campaign collected less than $60,000, which didn't even pay for the bronze.

Not necessarily for praise, either. Critics have complained that a better subject would have been someone like Rosa Parks, to which Walley responds that if they could have spontaneously collected that much money from small donors around the world for a likeness of her, they would have.

Rather, he said, RoboCop will stand at Eastern Market as a magnet for discussing everything from class to design to race to geography — and no, he said, despite years of reports saying otherwise, there was never any intention of parking the statue in front of the pre-renovation Michigan Central Depot, where it would simply have called attention to blight.

That's all presuming the sculpture stays upright, and that Keyes, who emailed his displeasure, is exaggerating for effect.

"This is Detroit," he said. "RoboCop's ass is getting scrapped" — a theft that would be, fittingly, a case for RoboCop.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Some Detroiters view ‘Robocop’ film, statue as raw bigotry