Takeover!Takeover!Takeover!

The most evil and most realistic of all evil corporations in the Eighties is Robocop’s Omni Consumer Products. Robocop is himself an interesting creation, a new kind of hero, an inversion of the Terminator, the fantasy of a benign, protective technology, literally technology with a human face. The only thing in these movies more evil than the evil corporation is the foreign evil corporation, a fear that rests on what we might call “Beale’s error” as highlighted by Jensen, that there are still nation states and people. All the Robocop films are essentially fascist nonsense presented as satire but the notorious Robocop 3 is the one of most interest to us here.

Robocop 3 is certainly a very bad film on every level, the rightful and righteous contempt for which is probably best expressed by youtube user Cameron Menefee in his own comment on his “mediocre movies” reviews section.

“This motherfucking movie should not exist in this damn world.One of the worst Robocop movies ever, just like the NES game is garbage. MAN, FUCK THIS DAMN MOVIE AND FUCK IT VERY FUCKING BADLY WITH THIS SHIT, FUCK THE MOVIE!!!”

Robocop 3 (in which, horrifyingly the evil OCP is bought out by the Japanese) like Crichton's Rising Sun is a response to the wave of Japanese takeovers of American firms in the late 1980s during the heyday of the Japanese Bubble (arguably stoked by the Japanese Government lowering interest rates in order to compensate for a post Plaza Accord strengthening of the Yen, in another of history's nicely intertwined and endlessly ramifying ironies) in which fear of Japanese technology is pathetically symbolized by a cyborg Samurai, which Robocop, due to his residual American heroism eventually manages to defeat.

Rising Sun starts with one of the most telling and extraordinary montages in recent(ish) American cinema. An image of the Japanese flag dissolves into a real sun, which dissolves again into a circular swarm of ants on the ground (remember Zizek?) that are suddenly crushed by a horses hoof. A cut to long shot reveals a group of cowboys cutting across a landscape, this image is then revealed to be a video in a karaoke bar. The song is being a sung along to by a Japanese man who is serenading a platinum blond 50s vamp. She leaves the bar in boredom and he follows her outside, angrily manhandling her into a bright red sports car. The immediate association is of the Japanese with the Fascist flag and ants ( the standard representation of Asians as an ant-like, identical swarm of drones, post or in-human, anti individualist and superhumanly disciplined) who are crushed under the hooves of a standard figure of American rugged individualism( read:WW2), only for this image to be circumscribed again, sapped of vitality and meaning, “virtualized” and made a symbol rather than a living force by its use as a karaoke backing. 

Then, of course, there is also the assumption of the basic Japanese desire for a western woman as iconic of American superiority, here a Fifties-style blonde.

They may take over our country but they will never be a true object of desire for white women! Directly after 9/11 a pathetic, racist j-peg circulated with a picture of a silicone enhanced blonde in a bikini one one side and a hairy and overweight dark skinned women in a veil on the other with the slogan, “Why they hate us.” Always the small dark races envy our women, our own potency is figured in the beauty and desirability of “our” women, especially a statuesque blonde as a universal ideal . When his ex-wife, Briggite Nielsen had her breast surgically enlarged, (embracing another of the Eighties posthuman possibilities) steroidal “everyman” Sylvester Stallone commented that a double-D Nielsen “must be every man’s dream”. Just as Sylvester imagined himself to be every woman's fantasy.

In Conclusion, this.