Conservative’s Dystopia: Demolition Man

This article is the first in a two-part series on films depicting hellish dystopian visions: one silly, the other serious – a sort of Goofus and Gallant for horrific dystopias.

“Far from being mindless, violence is usually the cutting edge of ideas and ideologies.” - John Fraser, Violence in the Arts

“When I cleanse myself, I shall kill evil.” - Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist art-movement founder

“It was either him or us!” This is the line delivered by Sylvester Stallone’s military specialist John Spartan, a name that unimaginatively gels with his talent for invading the hideouts of heavily armed evildoers alone and scuppering their evil plans single-handedly. For this, he’s given the nickname “Demolition Man,” for which this absurd and revealing neo-con fantasy from 1993 is named. The Stallone character was cryogenically frozen in 1996 by a hyper-militarized American State and thawed out in 2032 to hunt his old arch-enemy Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes, giddily channeling Eddie Murphy in some scenes), who was frozen along with Spartan. The Stallone character is speaking to his sidekick; the nerdy, gawky Lenina Huxley, played by a fresh-faced Sandra Bullock as a police enforcer who’s just itching to get down with some violence and destruction of her own. The Bullock character (who, despite the name, has no behavioral relation to the character in the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World from whom she derives her first name) has just killed one of Phoenix’s subordinates and it’s her first “murderdeathkill”.

In this vacuous Pacifist future, the police are undertrained and unequipped to handle seriously violent offenders. The ostensibly anodyne San Angeles of Demolition Man (named for the merged territory of the “the San Diego/Santa Barbara/Los Angeles Metroplex”) is all asymmetrical interior spaces and corporate office complexes decked out with lavish concrete fountains. Temperamentally, citizens are milquetoast and vapid subjects, addressing each other with the effusive nothingness of daytime talk show hosts. They look at violence and outward displays of aggression as relics from a barbaric past, suggested by the unease of Huxley’s partner, Garcia (Benjamin Bratt) regarding the decor in her office - a hodgepodge of in-your-face pop culture bric-a-brac from the 80’s and 90’s. “What I wouldn’t give for some action,” she exclaims early on.

At this late point in the film, Officer Huxley stops to interrogate what she’s just done – taking a human life. Stallone is posited to the audience as the no-nonsense answer to what the anarchist terrorist Phoenix calls “this pussy-whipped future,” and Spartan’s gross rationalization is supposed to put all her moral concerns about murder away with that one idiotically simplistic justification. Him or us. Countless action movies (as well as the historical epics of Mel Gibson) have framed this them-or-us scenario, with whole scenes and stretches of dialogue illustrating countless reiterations of the same narrow-minded cowboy mentality. It’s become sort of an implicit mantra of the action genre in commercial moviemaking. The futility of Pacifism is a theme that’s always humming under the surface of most action movies. But this is a loaded predicament, as Hollywood scripts are always effectively tipping the tables in seeing the initiated hero or supporting characters thrust into situations where there can be no alternative but to kill or be killed. So persistent in American movies is this trope that it eventually becomes a dominant political viewpoint – for citizens and law enforcement officials alike – regarding crime.

Of course, without this mentality there’d be no action movie and so the inherently Conservative nature of this genre can always brandish its ideology in the very act of its execution. Often ignored, however, is the fact that the movies routinely set up situations where no other alternative is possible. Under the conditions of most screenplays, the storyline rules out any other resolution to conflict other than violence. It’s become a dogma of blockbusterhood. So the tables are tipped anyway and the audience is led to believe that this one situation could stand for all of them, with the lone wolf vigilante or combatant forced to roll up his sleeves and settle the score in blood. It’s not that Pacifism is expressed as a futile pursuit - movies merely use their tricks to make it an irrelevant concern. In a society that benefits from the sophistication of laws, this is a deeply immature and antiquated impulse, with all the moral maturity of a child in a playpen. It should have died out with Will (or Roy) Rogers.

Because action movies must ultimately serve the purpose of entertainment, and because chase and gunfight sequences don’t just happen out of nowhere, a kind of moral expediency becomes central to the overall concept. This is understandable. It’s when this expediency is conflated with moral clarity in real life that I start to get anxious. Listen to the way George W. Bush referred to terrorist networks as “evildoers,” rather than something closer to what they actually are: the result of decades of disastrous Western foreign policy and its emboldening of Islamic Fundamentalism (or Sunni Wahhabism – the extremely strict interpretation of the Quran). The leader of a superpower nation employing ancient cowboy rhetoric from TV serials to describe his plans for dealing with America’s enemies (“smoke em’ out of their holes”). Historically, this reduction of messy reality to a bedtime story has been dangerous, with wrongful incarcerations and unjust wars as the residue of rash political and legal decisions that ignore the many-sided nature of the problems facing the world. But then again, modern Conservatism in the wake of the neocon movements of the 70’s prides itself on uniformed simplicity and maybe it’s here we can use the kinds of stories it likes to tell as a teaching tool.

Sometimes, these oversimplifications are painfully obvious to the audience, but the characters in these movies and sometimes even the actors playing them act as if they’re not. The scripts have the cops, soldiers and vigilantes they play in no moral doubt as to the nature of their enemies, who are shown to grin and snicker while senselessly doing bad things to innocent people for us to get the idea (writers and cops are said to share the same sad knowledge that everyone is always lying). Aristotle cautioned that it is insufficient for the hero to get the idea, and action movies routinely reject the notion of a cold, Darwinian zero-sum world to be found in say, Film Noir, for one in which peace and tranquility are simply only a shootout or explosion away. These individuals reject the plea for the clean statement, as the cops and soldiers are surrounded by emotional intensity and are not much moved by anything beyond this Manichean notion of Good and Evil. Unable or unwilling to see the world as the mess of crisscrossed, situational, contextual and highly politicized motivations it actually is, contemporary American Conservatism seems to pave a way for the roles to be played by these actors, who no doubt believe the oversimplified notions of Good and Evil in the movies they make.

I used to wonder why male stars of action/adventure movies tended to be Conservatives: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Robert Downey Jr, Kevin Sorbo, Charlton Heston, Kevin Costner, James Woods, Tom Beringer, Kurt Russell, Liam Neeson, Steven Seagal, Tom Selleck, The Rock, and Jackie Chan (who fell out of favor in his Hong Kong homeland for supporting the Imperialist hegemony of Chinese Authoritarianism after refusing to join in a citizen’s protest against the neighboring oppressors alongside Chow Yun-Fat and other contemporaries). Looking at the simplistic way Conservatives view crime, conflict, violence, right and wrong, it’s no wonder why this material seems to draw this type of lead. Listen to Bruce Willis’ remarks on the misinformed and ill-equipped invasion of Iraq in 2003. Or self-described “Black Belt Patriot,” Chuck Norris on Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes in 2008 appearing to try to transcend partisanship – despite promoting his book trashing the Left – in citing the failure of politicians as the pretext for sweeping Conservative reforms in taxation, law enforcement and immigration. The same tired exploitation of populist sentiments to justify unconstitutional martial law and the characterizing of certain civil liberties as weak-livered, PC projects.

While I don’t think these actors are generally the main parties responsible for the specious themes and messages of some of their projects, it does at times seem to me, based on how they speak about actual conflicts in the real world, that they believe the situations their characters find themselves in are real or potentially real. I suppose I’d sooner excuse the narrow-minded twaddle their scripts peddle if I had the sense it was meant to start conversations rather than stop them, which is why so many of the more serious action movies feel like instruments of intimidation. It’s easy to mobilize people against a tyrannical government, given its obvious track record of lying. But this criticism – that the government fucks up whatever it touches – uncontroversial as it is, seems more like an appeal on behalf of Authoritarianism and corporate oligarchy than a rallying point for empowering the true victims of tyranny (minority groups, the poor) in any meaningful, productive way. In other words, the case against Bureaucracy and the overreach of a tyrannical State are dog-whistle pleas for our sympathy. Their replacement with less accountable and more brutal realities like Militarism and Fascism following the demise of the villain figure is less likely to be emphasized. It’s a plain and simple hoodwink.

In this context, Demolition Man is a unique case. Where Conservative action movies like the 2018 remake of Death Wish with Bruce Willis or the Taken Trilogy feel like bogus models for various forms of cultural policing, Demolition Man houses its critique in the form of a Sci-Fi abstraction – a kind of partisan Idiocracy (though far less prescient than that film). In depicting Political Correctness and Pacifism – non-violent conflict and the act of policing attitudes and speech - as the lynchpins of this hideous Authoritarian future, it can hold up the violent combatant as both the threat to and the cure for this wayward society.

Sylvester Stallone had written something like 36 scripts that were rejected while he was fighting for roles in 70’s Hollywood productions that required a burly henchman. He persevered, biding his time on screen as a chiseled heavy, and got into the movies with old-fashioned persistence and hard work. He didn’t look or sound like a conventional leading man, and he undoubtedly had an uphill battle getting studio backing for his projects. Finally, Stallone was established with the filming of his scripts for Rocky in 1976 and First Blood in 1982, in which he also got to play the leads. These were two crucial pictures in the development of Conservative American cinema in terms of their galvanizing a large portion of the American public into some sort of consensus about the wounded tough guy as the true saint or martyr in society at large.

Being that in 2023 we now live in the Age of the Martyr, as the fanbases for everyone from Donald Trump to the Mypillow guy grow more rabid the more repercussions they face for their transgressions, the cinema of the lone hothead pitted against the mediocre or corrupted, lawless landscape will only gain in providence upon arrival into a culture as saturated with tribal resentments as ours. Movies that become bricks to fortify castle walls in a permanent bullshit culture war. Since Ronald Reagan, Washington and corporate media conglomerates have streamlined the messaging of old homesteader Westerns in presenting election cycles and wars as entertainment, with The Right showing the most steadfast devotion to cheesy mythologizing inherent in the Christianized way they see political matters: Endure, be patient, keep low – a savior is on his way.

I would attribute a large part of Stallone’s success to the need for America to invent figures like Rocky and Rambo. These entertainments followed Watergate and the U.S. assault on Indochina from 1954-1975, especially Vietnam, where over 4,000,000 people were bombed, napalmed, crushed, shot and individually "hands on" murdered in the "Phoenix Program" (where Oliver North got his start – nice, ironic name for the Snipes character, no?). Both cheer-up fantasies constitute a turning point in American movies when rooting for a scrappy underdog helped a doubtful public forget or suppress the rumblings of its wounded ego following the slaughter of civilians overseas (as did the cheerful annihilation in Star Wars). With both Stallone characters, what is most taken to heart is what is most real, like religious faith. Meek and inarticulate, Rocky triumphs on the basis of his stamina and heart, and despite losing the big fight, re-establishes the stoic hero figure at a time when the prospects for a white world-champ looked bad. The idea of succeeding on nothing but heart would pave the way in spirit for the Morning-In-America mantra of Ronald Reagan, the actor and former SAG president who would help cement the political discourse as a cultural matter, completing the link between Washington and Hollywood as complimentary entities with overlapping goals and strategies.

Stallone’s John Rambo in First Blood moves the model further to the right. The Rambo is like a physicalization of grief at not being allowed to finish the job in Vietnam, a military killing machine at loose ends who tears up a comfortable American town with the audience’s approval. The script and its execution succeed in moving the audience to cheer Rambo as he upsets and demolishes the kind of communities in which they live. They, the comfortable homebodies who chickened out and didn’t serve, along with the brutal Southern bigot sheriff running the town (a stock villain strangely removed from his comfort zone in the Pacific Northwest setting) serving as the motivating triggers of Rambo’s righteous fury. They’re trying to pull him back to mediocrity, back from his Grand Project. US soldiers committing atrocities in the midst of war – now isn’t that just terrible. Like The Deer Hunter, the movie is about the emotional aftermath of what those mean Viet-Cong did to us – the invading forces - overseas, to say nothing of the horror of their experience.

Demolition Man illustrates its positions in the form of a contrast to what it sees a dystopian nightmare produced by Progressive attitudes and policies regarding crime, speech, physical health, temperament and above all, violence. The script wasn’t written by Stallone but by the team of Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau and Peter M. Lenkov and directed not by Stallone or one of his regular collaborators but by Marco Brambilla and this might account for some of the sneakier ideas the script tosses out that Stallone’s pile-driver mechanical writing style tends to omit. The movie at times comes off like an in-joke among the filmmakers and actors, with the presence of other Conservative performers like Denis Leary, Rob Schneider and former wrestler Jesse Ventura (the huge, bald, government-hating, antisemite who ran for governor of Minnesota as an Independent) gamely helping the concept along. Stallone, in my opinion, isn’t what’s wrong with the movie by a longshot. On a personal basis, he might actually be the least conservative among this lot. He’s occasionally donated to the DNC, as well as people like Chris Dodd and Joe Biden. He’s also a staunch advocate for gun reform measures, though not terribly outspoken about his other views. He’s never come across to me as any kind of fanatic. And yet his presence in this movie helps complete its packaging as a Conservative item, even with the cat-and-mouse action storyline foregrounded.

It's when we look past those action elements, what their motivations imply, and what’s going on behind them that the nature of this multi-headed political fear becomes clearer. A re-instatement of the guiding principles and pitfalls of actions movies can be helpful:

The hero Stallone plays isn’t just a person who saves the day. He’s the moral beacon in a debased landscape. Of course, there will always be the same number of stars, and certain parts require certain guises. There is a table of operations, and the places must be filled and to a degree (as with politicians), it is irrespective of the distinction of the applicant pool. But the movies are not real. On screen, this conflation of professionalism with stoicism can be effective or it can be laughable. Offscreen, as with the conflation of vengeance with justice, it is dangerous and callous. Action movies flatter those who see the world this simply (or those who can suspend this thinking effectively during the running time) by presenting these stoic tough guy Heroes as good (and in the process, you, the viewer). His trials and struggles are shared vicariously by the viewer, who undergoes none of the Hero’s pain. You will desire to do violence to the Evildoers as he does.

He will be hampered by periodic fits of initial restraint (action movie rituals) before he’s able to let loose. The presentation of the justice of his cause (which is just a cheesy, gussied up version of revenge) will be incontrovertible, and this is how action movies pander to what they presume to be the audience’s desire to do violence. Warnings against these impulses may actually be cleansing. But most action movies don’t warn against this impulse. They aggrandize and celebrate it. This speaks of the moral doublethink of Conservative attitudes towards crime, violence and right and wrong – where a criminal’s persistence is the simply the result of not brutalizing them hard enough. “Justice” feels like a more benign term than “Revenge”. But it can’t be all that benign if violent people are the ones using it.

The moment of initial restraint.

So knowing all this, Stallone’s John Spartan is dropped into a future where he’s robbed of his ability to assert the traditional hierarchical values with respect to how law enforcement and justice are articulated, or rather, meted out. So he must rebel against the milquetoast status quo and its alternative notion of policing to accomplish his mission. Vengeance against his enemy done in a spirit of defiance of the prevailing social mores is what unofficially supersedes restoring peace and furthering the public good as his motivation. For violence to be justifiable in a Conservative sense, it must be personalized, as in a mindset that sees no demarcation between Justice and Revenge. Revenge is a sensation for the benefit of the avenger, so its enactment is justified on the basis of these cathartic feelings – and “feelings” is the operative word here. As a passionate form of anti-intellectualism that props up “doing” as the productive antidote to “thinking,” Conservative ideas about Crime and Punishment hinge largely on feelings. The feeling of moral clarity – in which social and political issues are conveniently no more morally complicated than a gun-toting chunkhead can manage. The feeling of purification in the act itself. The thrill of the release of violence in all its forms – as catharsis, communication, escape from reality, self-discovery, self-defense, self-affirmation, or play (i.e. “fun’) – the last of these being the most relevant to the characters in Demolition Man.

John Spartan is introduced to people who are too brittle and wussy to receive his bro-y black-slapping greetings. He’s told, “enhance your calm,” when the tone of his voice suggests the slightest trace of frustration or anger. He’s mocked by the other officers for not knowing how to use the three seashells to wipe himself with in a bathroom stall rather than toilet paper, which has been banned (I like that they never actually do explain it). Also illegal are caffeine (in America? Yeah, right!), the eating of meat and “spicy food, alcohol, contact sports, uneducational toys” and (interestingly) abortion, as people must obtain a legal license to get pregnant. There appears to be no violent crime in this future, which could account for the stressing of these goofy, moralistic laws (the nation of Singapore arrests people for jaywalking). But we’re informed everyone in this society has been microchipped, so these gains have come at the cost of the personal freedom to be crude, lewd, unhealthy and unaccountable to The State.

80’s and 90’s production stir nostalgia for futuristic visions of the past.

Personally, I’ve never associated Liberalism with a contempt for high-fives, buffalo wings, beer, hockey, or Legos, let alone a woman’s right to choose, but the screenwriters intend for us to associate those concerns in this future with the desire not to brutalize all criminals (real or perceived) and take their rights away. A person who doesn’t want to interrogate a suspect by handcuffing him to a chair and torturing him is probably a football-hating vegetarian who thinks children should read books. This is what Conservatives believe constitutes Progressive priorities, and why this kind of future is hell for people like John Spartan. The weakness of this concept lies in the depiction of the principles of nonviolence or non-aggression as merely the product of a composite of arbitrary material preferences – a reduction of a person to a single catchall assessment based on their consumer identities. How depressing.

The element of this dystopia that’s most antagonizing for Spartan and most scary for Conservatives is the fact that there’s no crime. Why? Because a crime-free society isn’t something they want. Watch any Right-leaning cable news network for one evening to see that their Narrative needs its boogeymen, its threats from outsiders, its conspiratorial paranoia, its demonized adversarial groups. It doesn’t matter what those groups are, so long as they can be used in buttressing the Nationalist, Identitarian and often racist storyline of the Right. One year it might be imaginary covert pedophile rings, immigrants the next year, trans kids the year after that. The Manichean ideal can’t survive in a crime-free society, in which policing aims for something with more dignity and nuance than gun-toting thugocracy. There must always be people to fight, kill and hate to justify the defiance of Democracy – the aggrandizement of the idea of people who have no other motivation than to tear away at the social fabric.

This is why I tend to be anemic to the popular chic nihilism of attitudes that claim that the two parties are basically the same – a view I used to share. My reasoning for this lies in the difference in grievances. Liberal social anger is always directed complex targets like institutions and attitudes: racism, Capitalism, Imperialism, corporate hegemony, organized Religion, modern policing. Structures and pathologies that need to evolve or be reformed or dismantled. Conservative anger, however, seems directed at people; individuals and groups (Liberals, feminists, non-Christians, welfare queens, social justice warriors, the LGBTQ community, etc.) and it’s just a matter of separating them from their rights, or if you’re really extreme, incarcerating or killing them.

Spartan’s ostracizing by his new colleagues for his surly demeanor, his casual vulgarity, his close physical contact with his peers, his bottom-drawer personal tastes, his blunt and direct way of speaking, and his occupational recklessness leads to efforts to restrain his actions by the custodian-of-the-status-quo, Police Chief Earle (reliable movie weasel Bob Gunton). These restraints don’t just annoy Spartan. They rob him of his identity. Perhaps the resurgent popularity of this movie may lie in late contemporary Conservatism’s choice to identify itself entirely with these impulses, not so much out of belief in their efficacy, but as an antagonistic reaction formation to what it perceives as the restrictive social values of the Left. Everything in their world is reactionary, based on grievance, not any kind of vision for a more just, humane society.

Where Demolition Man is instructive is that it can effectively be read as a diagnosis of what Conservatives think Liberals want to impose on society; fines for swearing, a ban on eating meat, an aversion to physical contact (which includes sex and hugging or high-fiving) with strong emphasis on passive-aggressive verbal communication, a forced “emasculating” of traditional patriarchal controls, and an elitist mandate for the predominance of high-brow culture. These impositions are posited not because the movie argues that they were practically necessary (like the no meat thing, which will be an environmental imperative in the years to come) but simply because Liberals are just a bunch of touchy-feely, elitist grinches who want take things away from anyone not sharing their idea of fun. The notion of personal freedom stressed in Demolition Man exactly as juvenile as that.

Bob Gunton, consummate Plot Obstacle

 If this future is Spartan’s idea of Hell, then the manic opening of the movie would be his Heaven – an out-of-control Los Angeles riddled with crime. It’s waiting, almost begging to be tamed by his violence. It’s important to remember where Stallone’s character comes from, as this is the sneaky way the movie justifies its petulant dystopian abstraction. The 1993 film opens three years in the future -1996 Los Angeles – and it’s a Conservative tough guy’s wet dream: we pan over the Hollywood sign in the hills, which is inexplicably on fire, to a metropolis engulfed in chaos: smoke, flames, helicopters zooming everywhere. It’s the modern version of a lawless, one-horse town waiting for its Sheriff to strut and sashay into the war zone. No Lincoln-like brooding for this quick-trigger loner in this neo-frontier town with its version of rule by the six-shooter. Effective redress can only be shown to appear in this form. The burning society is what makes his mythologizing possible.

A promising opening image – I do hate that tacky Hollywood sign.

Conservative fictions fetishize social collapse and rampant anarchy and are here again depicted as forums in which to set their lust for cool-looking, consequence-free murder and martial law. 21st Century Conservatives hate civilized society and their reactionary stances and attitudes in the post-Trump age of social media evidence this: Pluralism leads them to paint immigrants as trash, criminals and terrorists. Actual Democracy threatens their hierarchies, so they court Fascism. Art can empower the disenfranchised, so they burrow deeper into morally ugly entertainments. They are the most rabid portion of Quentin Tarantino’s audience – as sure as the message of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood may as well be “Make America Great Again.” Heath Ledger’s punk anarchist Joker in The Dark Knight really spoke to them. The end result of anarchy can only be on their terms. This explains the popularity of zombie survival fictions – a deeply Conservative genre - with the re-animated undead as an elaborate hypothetical work-around to the moral impediment of the desire to slaughter nameless hordes of people for amusement. Being largely impotent when faced with emotions other than anger, Conservatives naturally substitute violence as their chosen form of sexual release.

Dropped alone into the middle of a hostage crisis in a flame-belching factory, Spartan is in his element, mowing down gunman as they spring up like targets in a shooting gallery. It doesn’t matter what he says to Phoenix before we see their first fight in the movie. What’s important is the cadence of what’s said, the two-gun stance, the lunge into the climactic showdown. This is where Conservatism vindicates itself. This moment, not some notion of Heaven, but the license afforded by war is the true reward to the faithful. The Carte Blanche afforded him by a complete social breakdown in the form of lawlessness and disorder is part of the fantasy. Thirty years later in our real world, this fantasy has been extrapolated to include a supposed entire network of child kidnappers and traffickers out to snatch children and groom them for life in sex work for pedophile rings in blue states or “brown” countries (to be dramatized later on in Taken and other Conservative porn items). Why? Because this is most horrible thing Conservatives can imagine and at heart, this is an ideology that enjoys the thrill of being afraid. Fear and anger are the only emotional currencies. Fear is the starting point, anger the fuel for the enactment of violence.

Wesley Snipes’ Phoenix character is an extension of this fantasy – The Evil Black Man used to scare white people on the nightly TV news. Evil because he acts without any political motivation. There is no cause or ideology though which we can understand him. He’s a creation of Hollywood and the fearmongering news media that the public still eats up – a black maniac who kills and threatens simply because he likes it, while dressed in a denim overall jumper like a kid ready to play. He’s a labyrinth without a center. Both he and Spartan stand out in the LA of the future because they’re creatures of the ID. Spartan’s ID is in check, such that he’s still capable of ethical agency. Phoenix is an ID monster – his evil is tinged with a childlike curiosity, adding to his radical ambiguity (Freud describes the ID as corruption mixed with a childish innocence). The senselessness of what he does, along with how joyous the act of destruction and violence make him, are part of the meretricious simplifications of Conservative action movies. A perpetually gullible voting base makes this caricature the starting point for all its views about policing and justice. Poorly educated, economically expendable and systematically bewildered, voters are unable to recognize their real oppressors and betrayers. But somebody must be punished for their humiliation. Bummed out as they are, they are flattered at this depiction of the idea of a world of enemies simply acting according to their naturally wretched natures.

This may be why when Spartan leads his team into the sewers to engage with a renegade Libertarian sect led by an individualist crank named Edgar Friendly (Leary), he’s like a fish in water. Friendly’s steampunk underground possesses refurbished classic cars and trash videotapes from the bygone era. When not stealing food from people above ground, they eat burgers made from rat meat and defy the social order by living for the sensations their hedonist instincts dictate, even if those instincts seem to relate strictly to consumption. It seems like a surprisingly brittle gambit, staking an entire revolutionary endeavor on the desire to be free to drink booze, gamble, watch trashy movies, and eat junk food with outlawed salt on it. But this is what the movie presents as its example of an authentic life in this context, as again we’re made to irresponsibly associate the Hero’s worthiness and ability to defeat his enemy with his embrace of this “authentic” lifestyle. Unhealthy living and perverse material tastes as a marker of authenticity are always part of the populist con job that coddles the rise of Fascist demagogues whose vulgarity on this level makes them “relatable,” while, contrary to doggedly persistent stereotypes that people seem genetically predisposed to believe, the supposed elites no doubt share those same lowbrow lifestyles and tastes en masse. Spartan wants “real food” so bad that the rat burger is tolerable. He doesn’t spit it out.

In Demolition Man, Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne, collecting a paycheck), the architect of this sterile, repressive social order, is discovered to have secretly sanctioned the thawing of Phoenix himself, while giving him an upgrade in strength and tech knowhow. He’s obsessed with bringing down Edgar Friendly and his punk rebel stunts and the presence of Phoenix gives him a license for expanding his power and control wherever possible. Like the shark threatening local commerce in Jaws, an external threat severs the idealized fullness of these communities. With the help of a little propaganda, all threatening issues facing society are rolled into one solitary evil entity. A singular threat is attractive. It ties everything together. It’s only when Phoenix defies Cocteau that he ceases to be useful.

Again, it’s the fun of enacting violence that’s stressed here as its most essential quality. The thrill of terrorizing people, of punching or shooting someone, of wrecking cars and buildings, blowing shit up, running from an approaching wall of flame (a staple Stallone image) – its immediate sensation, the exhilaration of channeled entropy, that makes Spartan feel so naturally alive. When he steals Friendly’s restored vintage muscle car to chase Phoenix down a highway rather than using one of future LA’s round-ended, sterile, self-driving cars, Spartan seems most equipped physically and mentally to hunt his nemesis, as if the mojo of the car were recharging his primal male potency, girding him up for his task.

There’s probably no more telling sequence than when he engages Phoenix in a civic history museum decked out with guns and 90’s street paraphernalia – the relics of a more primitive age. Phoenix is raiding the museum to arm himself with the only guns to be found in this future, which are on display as artifacts. He and Spartan crash through a glass floor and into a kind of urban diorama carved into the bedrock. Like a Paleozoic landscape in a natural history display, it’s dressed with a concrete storefront, neon signs, an old car and even a working fire hydrant – a futurist society’s simulacrum of 20th Century niceties. Fighting each other in this mockup of their old milieu, they look like lab animals in a terrarium, living out what feels like a genetically determined grudge in what is presented as their “natural habitat,” – both of their time and out of their time. It’s one of the cleverer moments in the movie because it paints what they’re doing as archaic (like violence itself), despite the fact that it looks to be the only way for the hero to function as his true self.

Notwithstanding the occasional grotesque nods to postmodernist convention, action heroes like the ones Stallone portrays may be the closest depiction of the Nietzschean Übermensch American culture can arrive at. And if that sounds like a depressing observation, don’t worry. I’m inclined to agree with you. The Übermensch, or Superman, as best as I can tell (because I’m not sure Nietzsche even knew), is the figure who, in willing his own identity into being, reestablishes or reasserts the heroic figures of Homeric poems (like Achilles). He’s a vital, powerful, proud (and of course male) individual who doesn’t allow the masses to diminish his near-divinity – a warrior and leader who’s also thoughtful and reflective about the world. Nietzsche describes this figure in his seminal work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) as a kind “Caesar with the soul of Christ,” which is a remarkably paradoxical formulation if you think about it. The Grand Project of the Übermensch is the saving or redeeming of Humanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche is the rare 19th century philosopher who would enter the mainstream lexicon, challenging readers to live heroically, to transcend the banalities of a sick and decadent culture (before being consumed by sickness himself). And yet, his work is full of contradictions. He tosses out traditional morality while also warning against various forms of cultural collapse. They’re hard ideas to pin down, penned in many different voices, and they go to some undeniably dark places. His ideas have proven seductive to the most sinister social movements in history, right up to the Fascist aims of modern American Conservative movements beginning in the late 70’s. Still, I would argue his anticipation of some of our modern crises is unmatched from a historical standpoint. I agree with Nietzsche scholar Matt McManus, who in editing a new essay collection called Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction, calls Nietzsche one of the great diagnosticians of the 20th Century (referring to the prescience of his ideas  – Nietzsche died in 1900). Love him or hate him, his work matters, even as a conflicted thinker with some insidious elements in his Crisis of Modernity that we need to confront.

Despite their appropriation by the Nazi movement in the 1930’s, Nietzsche’s ideas about this Übermensch never had anything to do with white supremacy, antisemitism or eugenics. For better or worse, the concept is multivariate, susceptible to numerous factors that broaden its potential for interpretation. Personally, I think Hollywood action movie heroes are the closest thing contemporary cultures have to imagining the Übermensch, closer even than the most overt model we have for Nietzsche’s concept: Superman, who as a being from another planet, can’t ultimately relate to human beings. I won’t speculate about the degree to which Joe Shuster’s and Jerry Seigel’s iconic comic book creation was influenced by Nietzsche’s writing, but I can say that other traditional heroes fit my idea of the model much more comfortably not in spite of but because of their contradictions and because of the worlds in which they’re placed. I don’t think this strategy can resolve those contradictions, but perhaps it can be instructive in highlighting them.

 Nietzsche’s Übermensch is a conceptually nebulous, conflicted figure. Movies may be the correct vessel for transmitting the concept.

Is the Demolition Man the Übermensch? He arrives from another time. His ways are alien to the masses, who are meek and subordinate. He’s capable of the kind of grandeur their passivity, Nihilism and enlightened hedonism hold them back from. His changes are destructive (as implied by his nickname), but are they transformative? In a false world, his actions are true because they are authentic, even if that authenticity has a kind of inhumane brutality in its execution. With his blind noumenal will allowing him to interpret phenomenal world, he could dispatch his enemy simply, but where the ideology of the movie insidiously creeps in is that it’s the fault of this mediocre society for holding him back. He is trapped in a society of what Nietzsche called “Last Men,” whose hidebound desire for comfort and security and aversion to risk make them incapable of self-actualization. Spartan can self-actualize because he’s curious and passionate – not bored and tired of life. This is his most Nietzschean quality. On the other hand, he’s too vulgar to be transcendent and is not charged by the aim to lead this society back on the right path (despite offering to help at the end). I can say that because the movie gives us no indication of whether these strict social rules apply to anyone anywhere outside the LA setting. Like Idiocracy, no other nations or any other parts of the country seem to exist, to the movie and therefore, to Spartan. Far from being a Last Man, Spartan is certainly no Übermensch.

Thawed rivals in futures they can’t comprehend. It’s a lot like Austin Powers, no?

The concepts of the Übermensch and Last Men survive as male-originated, male-centric concepts but their articulation in 21st Century Western culture is tied to an appropriation by Right-Wing movements that stress their elements in the most damaging ways. It’s hard to name a 20th-century thinker who was more misread, misunderstood and misinterpreted. The macho elements of Nietzsche’s ideas conflated with juvenile ideas about strength and weakness lead to the reaction formations I mentioned earlier (inclinations toward Fascism and racist xenophobia). Across multiple texts, Nietzsche routinely stressed a view of society that was upside down, plagued by sacred cows that were deserving of slaughter and today’s Conservatism sees that as a kind of anti-establishment social movement, leading people like Alex Jones-acolyte Paul Watson to tweet “Conservatism is the new Counterculture,” at the same time he unironically expresses his love for Nirvana and punk music. I’m not sure what’s punk about supporting the police, but it does bring to light the hypocrisy at the heart of a lot of this posturing.

Despite his influence on Fascism, Nietzsche routinely mocked Nationalism and antisemitism (as a weakness characteristic of herd mentality) several decades before the rise of Hitler. And yet his continuing influence on the ideas of the alt-Right play out in an extremely crude spirit of bad faith. Nietzsche’s ideal Conservative reader fancies himself as someone who will be included in the elite aristocracy charged with the task of enacting Great Projects that move our societies forward rather than as one of the Slaves who Nietzsche believed were necessary in toiling away for that vision (and he was unafraid to use the term “slave” in his writing). Of course, no one imagines an elite radical aristocracy in which they’re part of the ditch-digging class. Everyone sees themselves as Rand’s John Galt. This is the silly part of the fantasy. So the imagining of the Übermensch figure in Demolition Man must come with a sense of self-mockery to deaden some of its more alarming underpinnings. Giving Spartan a self-deprecating sense of humor, making him relatively unperceptive in the New World or having his upgrade upon being unfrozen from cryogenic sleep include a passion for knitting. It softens the package, even as his appetite for destruction and will to violence as conflict resolution remain unchanged.

Never understood why the Bullock character is such a history buff with an apartment furnished with old pop culture bric-a-brac but is as relcuctant to have real physical sex as any other member of this awful future. Wouldn’t she be old-fashioned about that too?

These principal traits are what seem to excite Officer Huxley, in whom Bullock expresses a nerdy, little-girlishness in her desire for action. She’s scolded by Spartan, who assures her that what they’re doing is serious business, despite the wisecracks he makes. Presumably, she’s entranced, even aroused by the ersatz Nietzschean model inherent in Spartan’s violence. At her apartment, Huxley sites a psychological correlation between sex and violence, implying that his violent tendencies are making her horny. Little does Spartan know that sex in this world involves VR headsets and no physical touching. Given the decline in actual sexual relations over the past few decades, the increasing anxieties people are reporting about sex, the ever more difficult-to-navigate dating scene, and the steady development of VR technologies like Oculus, this is one of the movie’s less absurd conceits. We are physically recoiling from each other, and this is a direct of result of it.

For all its bogus defenses of base human impulses, I also think Demolition Man makes some good points about the excesses of American Progressivism and Egalitarianism, at least where attitudes towards vice and morality are concerned. It’s a pushback against hypocrisies in these ideologies, but in swinging its ideas in the other direction, it rather clumsily overcorrects. She casually tells him she wants to have sex with him following their date at an unrecognizable Taco Bell, which, in one of the movie’s more absurd conceits, has become the only surviving restaurant operating. The blinkered, misbegotten priorities of the movie’s politics show here as well: corporate dominance over every element of daily life is the most disturbingly restrictive aspect of this depiction of the future and it’s barely (if at all) regarded as any kind impediment to the kinds of choices people are allowed to make – the personal freedom Conservatives squawk so much about. Yet some abstract deluded fear that Liberals are going to start fining people for swearing as a violation of “Verbal Morality Statutes” (in a script courtesy of people who identify themselves with the book-banning party) is an offense so heinous the movie makes a gag out of Spartan’s triggering of the fine-printing dispenser with his stream of profanity just so he can wipe his ass without seashells.

I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant as far as dubious politics are concerned and a commonly held critique of Nietzsche as a diagnostician of ressentiment is that his grievances can only be located on the political Left. Nothing on the ressentiment of the Right, which in their capacity for violence and injustice I would argue are by far the most potent kind to found in politics today. The value of Demolition Man may lay in its rare depiction of these Right-Wing anxieties that reveal their duplicitous falsehoods by simply depicting them. Though I find much to disagree with in the assertions of critic Pauline Kael, I do agree with her idea that movies show us how absurd our fantasies are by simply holding a mirror up to them. A kind of aristocratic attitude starts to emerge in the story of John Spartan that says, “I am entitled to a superior status relative to others. The hunting and vanquishing of my enemy is my sacred charge, my Grand Project, and this is somehow being taken away from me by the losers of society. And I will do something about it.” It seems to me we can’t be a society that condemns violence if we agree with this movie that its enactment is a fun and necessary form of social healing. The action Hero can reassert these values by his example, because the fetishizing of the crisis facing society empowers him to return the status quo to its more functionable model of inequality. People fear for their lives, and so they must defer to a professional patriarch, who will use the opportunity for defeating evil to push back against Secular or Egalitarian movements which have gained providence and a kind of cultural hegemony.

If I had to define the political Right in America today, it would not be on the basis of regard for tradition or individuality or faith or small government or any kind of disdain for communal, Egalitarian forms of living. I would define today’s Right solely on the basis of its steadfast commitment to inequality. Inequality has been the only throughline consistently visible in Conservatism in my lifetime. I agree with F.A. Hayek in his 1944 publication The Road to Serfdom, that to be on the political Right in the 20th Century means that you believe that there are demonstrably superior people in society and that they’re entitled to higher status, more political influence, and if you want to be really vulgar about it, more wealth. Conservatives believe in naturally occurring hierarchies – an order deciding who should be given preference in a society: White before non-white. Male before female. Rich before poor. Judeo-Christian or even just Christian before all other faiths. Heterosexual before queer. If those hierarchies are to be maintained throughout history, then the idea of equality constitutes tyranny and anything a government does to address the disparities fostered by that ideology constitutes an infringement on a person’s rights.

Where Demolition Man finds common ground with some of the evils of Nietzsche’s political aims is in imagining a triumph of The Herd in the form of Secular doctrines that will become ever more hegemonic. It posits the idea that a society can’t uphold these precious hierarchies without violations of free speech. It gives us a scary, nihilistic villain to justify the brutality of its Hero, which in this future is a figure intended as the stand-in for all villains and all heroes. In presenting us with a monstrous antagonist so unreal, he could only have been cooked up by hack screenwriters, it can dismiss enlightened, nuanced, logic-based, non-violent forms of policing as naïve, unrealistic conceits – despite decades of mounting evidence regarding the inefficacy of current forms of policing (beginning with the Kerner Report in 1967). But this is all “pussy talk” in the Conservative world of persecuted individualists and bred-in-the-bone evildoers. This ancient and banal Crisis of Manhood, now unmoored and psychotically insecure in the 21st Century, may speak to the renewed popularity of Demolition Man. Perhaps a little too well, judging by the way so many hardcore fans of the movie seem to miss the element of satire and take it literally as a very real and scary possible tragic fate for a country that they believe immigrants and a weak, milquetoast herd have taken from them.

Glenn Shadix (left) made to reprise a version of his dandy Beetlejuice character for the movie’s presentation of the mincing, elitist bureaucrat antagonist stereotype.

To a degree this is understandable. Human beings have a thirst for absolutes. We want to be certain. We want a horizon and a story that secures that for us. We want capital “T” truth and whether it’s God or political ideologies, we’re going to glom onto whatever provides us with this horizon of meaning. Whatever gives us this way to interpret events and validate action. There’s going to be a new kind of ideological, metaphysical conflict in the rise of the pluralistic, Secular society and movies are models for this mythologizing and this wish-fulfillment. Perhaps this is the basis for Right’s identification with Nietzsche’s deep fear of the leveling power of mass culture. Perhaps for Conservative America, the most potent denial or negation of that leveling power to be found in art may lie in the propagation of the male-centric, patriarchal reassertion by way of cinematic violence.

Violence is a Conservative’s primary inroad to art. And violence in the arts is an almost exclusively male prerogative. Within this framework, the debasement of the body is its primary and perhaps its only means of expression. The violence in action movies like Demolition Man becomes axiomatic of a kind of hyper-reality in which the most pure and unmediated path to knowledge stems from a pathological attraction towards the extremes of experience (towards what critic Paul Seydor terms, “the masculine principle in American art”). These extremes define the ethos of so much of the trajectories of macho artist-philosophers like Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Clemens, Hemingway, Mailer, Peckinpah, Tarantino and most recently, Christopher Nolan. In a Conservative mindset, this is what separates the free, self-determined, creative individual from “The Herd.” No mention however of qualities like Love, or the immense power Love has – Demolition Man has even less use for it than did Nietzsche.  

Cinema’s first imagining of the Zoom meeting?

I can go along with the notion that Political Correctness is malign social force, that it comes from an impulse to deflect from harsh reality, a craven impulse to conceal guilt over social sins in which we’re all complicit. An ignorant and intellectually lazy conflation of equality with sameness. A humorless enforcement of herd mentality through the threat of social or professional ostracization disguised as tolerance. I can get behind all that to a degree. But if that’s an accurate definition (and I believe it is), Demolition Man can be seen as a form of Right-Wing Political Correctness. All it sees in Democracy is a triumph of the least creative and the least willful; individuals who can’t face up to reality or create themselves from the ground up in a Secular society (where according to Nietzsche God is Dead). In doing so, real Democracy is perceived as a process that makes virtues of ignorance, self-fulfillment, non-aggressiveness and a compassion shown to human weakness – the last two of these being the most “unmasculine.” The movie imagines a totalitarian society that it urges us to find restrictive and inhuman but that vision can only spring from the kind of Egalitarian, secular society Democracy makes possible, in which case, it could be said that what the movie actually hates IS Democracy – defined as it is here by historical inclinations towards Pacifism, mindfulness, consensus and anti-machismo, which are painted as ultimately part of a giant con job.  

We might see this as just a cheesy summer action movie of no consequence, but it only appears inconsequential on the surface. Movies like this usually contain a great deal of ideology. Until American Conservatism (which should probably disavow that term since it seeks to conserve nothing) addresses its nakedly anti-Democratic, pro-violence agenda in the 21st century, which movies like Demolition Man only serve to reinforce, then it’s time for those of us weak-livered, herd members who are actually silly enough to desire a society without violence to start demanding better futures, if not in the moviehouses where we think we’re escaping rather than confronting ideology, at least in real life.