Robocop and The Shape of Self
“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by co-host, Reed Lackey, and is a follow-up article series to this past week’s episode featuring Robocop. Enjoy, then, the latest entry in this new chapter of The Fear of God…
Robocop is a film which seems to hold no sanctity for human bodies. It is one of the most sensationally ultraviolet films of the 1980s, appearing with almost gleeful abandon to delight in showing bodies torn apart by bullets, savaged by repeated blows, or — in one infamous scene — literally melted by toxic waste.
And at the center of its story is a synthetic body: the machination that is Robocop. Former police officer Alex Murphy, brutally tortured and gunned down by heartless thugs, is transformed into the unique being by having nearly every other organic component discarded. (In one almost throwaway bit of dialogue, the head of the project chastises his engineers for attempting to salvage Murphy’s arm, and — claiming authoritative control — demands that they “Lose the arm.”)
It is haunting to consider how much of our understanding of ourselves is tied into our bodies and what they can do. Our physical attributes qualify our concept of our acceptance, our hindrances, or our potential. The conversation surrounding biology and identity has become fiercely complex, influencing our perceptions of race, gender, and individual status in society. There has become an increased priority for people to reflect in their outer appearance who they are in their inner self, driving them to make sweeping body modifications in an effort to unify their personhood.
But Alex Murphy’s story in Robocop delivers a fascinating — perhaps accidental — observation about the relationship between body and self. With his body utterly decimated and his mind wiped clean, Murphy’s personhood still could not be hidden behind the labyrinth of machinery under which he now lay buried. The gun twirl he’d perfected to impress his son, the phrasing he used to intimidate criminals, and the unwavering sense of duty and justice he’d carried with him in his former life followed him into his new incarnation. His family, — which he confessed he could not remember — he could still feel.
The prospect that our identity isn’t exclusively defined by our biology sits relatively uncontested among religious, social, and even legal circles. A person’s identity encompasses matters of the mind, the spirit, the emotions, and even their individual choice of actions. It’s curious then that so much of our identity perception still revolves around what is tangible — what can be observed and touched — rather than what is intangible. It is as if we are equating our entire sense of self with what is merely a part of the whole.
And this is not to say that the body is irrelevant, by any means. 1 Corinthians 6 affirms it as “the temple of the Holy Spirit” and Jesus Christ’s incarnation from birth to death enforces for us as believers that bodies matter. But stories like Robocop inform us that bodies are not all that matters when it comes to our understanding and our sense of self. We are more than our physical limitations, and — though this seems harder for us to embrace — we are more than our physical potential.
It bears repeating that Robocop is a fantasy action story, and hardly a substantive basis for scientific or spiritual foundations. But the story of Alex Murphy’s unusual rise from the dead does have a rather profound reminder for us in its tragic and thrilling narrative: that we are more than the sum of our components... and that even as age, or condition, or trauma and destruction change the course of our individual stories, they do not have the power we so frequently give them to define who we are within our stories, or how we will walk through or stand in them.
