The Hero is the One Who Changes

Freedom, Dignity, and Disgust in Demolition Man (1993)

Demolition Man (1993) is the greatest movie that the general culture has not openly recognized as a Great Movie. It was born of strange alchemy: a sincere action movie re-written to be a comedy by the writer of Heathers (1988), Daniel Waters, it attracted talent far above what it might have merited, including Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes both at the height of their powers, mainstays like Bob Gunton and Sir Nigel Hawthorne (before he was knighted), and as-yet-unknowns who would go on to be knowns, like Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt, and blink-and-you’ll-miss him, Jack Black. Jesse Ventura plays a small but violent role, and Denis Leary is appropriately cast as an annoying jerk.

Jack Black when I’m assuming he was, what, 17 years old?

The plot of the story, without the comedy added in, is interesting enough: a tough-guy cop living in a hellscape 1996 Los Angeles is unjustly convicted for the deaths of 30 people and sentenced to a cryogenic prison. In 2032 he’s thawed out and told that his unique talents are needed: someone sprung his arch-nemesis super-criminal (the one who really did kill those 30 people) from the same facility, and the future is in no way equipped to handle the kind of violence this guy is handing down.

Because in 2032 Los Angeles is gone. They now live in San Angeles, where the streets are clean, the grass is short, the buildings are smooth and shiny, the cars are silent and electric, and the people wear monk-like draping robes and sandals, and are, in general, as meek as sheep.

So the sheepish future police thaw out John Spartan — the Demolition Man of the title — and ask him to catch Simon Phoenix. This puts a pretty typical action movie idea — good guy must catch bad guy, guns and explosions ensue — into a setting where the violence can really POP: after all, in a gritty hellscape context (like the movie’s opening) all that violence blends into the background. But in the soulless mallscape of the future where nothing ever happens, it’s actually shocking! (Note, in this movie, there is nothing that would count as shocking violence or gore by today’s standards; even when Phoenix takes the warden’s eyeball, it’s done tastefully.)

This meek and peaceful society of the future is the brainchild of Nigel Hawthorne’s character, Doctor Raymond Cocteau, who is also the city’s leader, and also the man behind the cryogenic prison: he is what BF Skinner called a “behavioral engineer” — he designed a society that allows all the people’s needs to be met in such a way that they mostly don’t object to being infantilized and controlled; to use Skinner’s phrase, they are beyond Freedom and Dignity.

The language used by the natives of this behavioralist’s paradise has strong echoes of the way the teens talk in Heathers — “greetings and salutations” anyone? Maybe the teens from Heathers grew up and gave birth to this world? These are phrases that act to emotionally remove the speaker from the situation — providing ironic distance, to the teens in Heathers, but in Demolition Man the phrases aren’t clever or original, they’re pat and expected, or phatic, so here it is just literal social distancing.

The way the film depicts a video conference is truly inspired: notice how the “boardroom table” is a symbolic gesture, allowing flow from embodied human to disembodied screen face.

In future San Angeles, everyone seems to live alone, in spacious, sterile apartments. Everyone is referred to by their full name, instilling formal distance. Instead of giving someone a “mellow greeting,” you state your intent of a “Mellow Greeting!” And instead of “I understand,” or “understood,” you say “thank you for the attitude readjustment. Info assimilated.”

Just after Huxley says that to Bob Gunton’s Chief Earle, she walks away and mutters that he’s a “sanctimonious asshole” (and is fined half a credit by the morality box that’s always listening for naughty language). A story about a peaceful future full of human sheep would have nowhere to go without a person who finds it unsatisfying, and that is Sandra Bullock’s Lenina Huxley. Benjamin Bratt’s Alfredo Garcia plays her opposite, utterly content:

Most people are like Alfredo Garcia, finding shallow things “deeply fulfilling” and not wanting (“goodness, no!”) anything to happen! They sing along to old commercial jingles, as though their minds can’t handle anything longer or more complex than 15 seconds of Oscar Meyer Wieners. Lenina Huxley sings along to the tunes and is as easily disgusted by bodily fluids as anyone else, but she’s also obsessed with the free and wild past, and there’s something in the way she watches John Spartan eat a ratburger that suggests her training wasn’t complete.

Lenina is in some ways the real hero of this movie: the one who pushes past her society’s idea of normal to find what she wants, not what she’s supposed to want, the one who gets John Spartan revived, who guides him through the world and is open enough to him to let him change her. You can read the kiss at the end of the movie as John Spartan conquering Lenina Huxley like the V-Day Kiss picture, but remember that when this film was made, we didn’t yet know that was a photo of an unwanted assault — people believed that was a photo two people in love. That kiss is also Lenina Huxley regaining some of the habits of physical humanity — she’s no longer disgusted by an actual kiss.

Famously in this film, rather than having physical sex as we know it, they wear headsets for virtual sex (wonderful detail in that scene: Huxley comes back in the room grinning and hands John Spartan a little white towel before she sits across from him for cyber-sex). The lack of physical contact surely keeps everyone clean and healthy, as a behaviorist society should, and as for reproduction, that’s done in a lab — after you’ve obtained a proper license. They also do no-touchy high-fives.

There’s a general sense that the future people are disconnected or alienated from one another — but joyfully so! Rob Schneider plays a police dispatcher who answers the phone: “Greetings and salutations. Welcome to the Emergency Line of the San Angeles Police Department. If you prefer an automated response, please press one now!”

…Suggesting the caller gets a human by default, but might prefer the robot. The robot after all might be even nicer to you. In this future there are little street kiosks where you can go for an emotional boost. Wesley Snipes’s Simon Phoenix encounters one when he gets into town, after killing four people at the cryo-prison.

There’s a sad man in the kiosk saying: “I just don't feel like there's anything special about me,” and the computer responds, “You are an incredibly sensitive man, who inspires Joy-Joy feelings in all those around you.”

It’s kind of remarkable that this guy doesn’t get killed. But Simon Phoenix just throws him out of the way and uses the kiosk to access everything he needs to know — his fingers fly over the little keypad and he wonders whether he’s possessed or whether he can play the accordion now too! Something happened when he was in the cryo-prison that “re-programmed” him with all the technical skills he needed to become an even more ruthless and effective assassin. (While John Spartan was re-programmed to sew and knit.)

Lenina Huxley explains the big picture of this future well in the scene where they first thaw out John Spartan, and he immediately asks for a Marlboro — they don’t know what that is.

And so does John Spartan decide to also rise from his block of frozen goo and go after Phoenix, and the rest of the film is comedy based on how disgusted the future people are by this “Caveman’s” habits and how pathetic he finds the future people’s squeamish wimpiness and outsized sense of disgust, punctuated by gunfights and car chases that take this utterly innocent society of grown-up children by storm.

What makes this movie great varies depending on who you ask — Amran Gowani breaks down its elements in his Field Research, explaining how all the parts come together to create a cult classic; Kabir Chibber asked in the New York Times whether “Demolition Man Predicted the Millennial” which is just RUDE.

I would say this movie is great because it speaks to how humans are torn between peaceful perfection which can be boring and violent terror which can be exciting.

The underground-dwelling rat-eating people are at one extreme, and the aboveground-dwelling sheep-people are at the other, and we can relate to both at least a little.

Figuring out how to be human is in part figuring out how to be neither too prissy nor too foul, and that has forever been a moving target. In the past my personal bathroom habits would be considered absurdly pristine, but my language would be considered a sin worthy of Hell. In some parts of the world if you eat with the wrong hand you’re disgusting.

Who knows what the future would think of us?

And our inability to use the three seashells?