Robocop and Mr.Smith Goes to Washington and McCarthyism Are the Same Movie

“It’s still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by”Just those lyrics tell you what happens in 99.9% of the movies. They are all the same movie and the lyrics tell you that and what it will happen in almost all movies.All these movies are social commentaries, and they all say the same thing.

Robocop is very trashy and violent and most of the people talk ignorantly and there seem to be no values.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is classy and has a lot of wonderful rhetoric, it’s just a sort of classier version of Robocop, but they all say the same things.

Most of these movies are made in America so they really are all talking about life in America.

Here is what both movies have in common.

They both have cities run by a huge corporation.

Most of the people are pawns.

In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, you like them because they are decent people, but they don’t matter to the rich people especially the richest people.

In Robocop, all the people are decadently stupid and violent. It doesn’t matter because the richest people don’t care about them. The richest people in both movies don’t care about the common people. That is also almost always and especially now been true of America.

The heroes:

Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart): The only good decent, honest man alive. He is naive and gets sent to Washington by the most evil character in the movie. Totally out of his league except he doesn’t realize it yet.

Alex Murphy (Peter Weller): The only decent, honest man in Detroit. He gets killed and is turned into Robocop. You don’t think that he is controlled by the most evil character in the movie, but you find out that he is. Totally out of his league. He sort of realizes it as Alex Murphy when he 99.9% dies. Then he doesn’t realize it yet when he is Robocop.

The Villain:

Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold): Runs everything with his money and only cares about money. He can only be stopped by someone he thinks is benign.

Dick Jones (Ronny Cox): Runs everything with his money and only cares about money. He can only be stopped by someone he thinks is benign.

Dick Jones does not run his company, but knows that he will. He is basically Roy Cohn working for Joseph McCarthy. The true evil guy.

How do you know he is the true evil guy? He constantly tell you “Don’t Fuck with Dick Jones!”

Robert Kennedy was a lot like both Murphy and Smith, he thought McCarthy was a good guy, and had his eye off the ball because he respected and loved McCarthy. He eventually realized that the really evil guy was his number two guy, Roy Cohn. That’s Dick Jones, he’s the number 2 guy and pure evil. Jones knows he’s the number 2 guy but doesn’t care because he knows he will soon be in charge of everything.

The Sympathetic Seemingly Benign Guy

Joseph Paine (Claude Rains): Paine is a senator. He has been bought and sold by Taylor, but Smith worships him, because he doesn’t know that he’s been bought. He just knows that his dead sainted father had told him that Paine was a great guy.

The Old Man (Daniel O’Herlihy): He’s in charge of Jones corporation. Jones says he’s not a really bad guy, but he’ll be dead soon and I will soon be in charge.

There are some extraneous details in Robocop. Jones has a young rival named Bob Morton, that is totally out of his league.

Jones wants to replace the policeman in Detroit with pure robots. One of Jones’ robots has a glitch and kills a guy. No one cares that this man was killed, but it gives Morton a percieved opening to convince the benign, likable Old Man, to use his idea for a time. That idea is to replace the cops with 99.9% robots.

It’s all just a loophole. Jones tells this guy everything you need to know in a bathroom confrontation.

Neither Jones or his Morton care about human lives, they just care about winning. Morton never had a chance to win.

Jones tells his rival that even though his plan had a glitch that it was the better idea because it made more money.

Dick Jones: [in the executive bathroom] Congratulations, Bob.

Bob Morton: Thanks.

Dick Jones: I remember when I was a young executive for this company. I used to call the old man funny names – Iron Butt, Boner… once I even called him… Asshole – but there was always respect. I always knew where the line was drawn, and you just stepped over it, buddy-boy. You’ve insulted me and you’ve insulted this company with that bastard creation of yours. I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209 – renovation program, spare parts for twenty-five years… Who cares if it worked or not?

Bob Morton: The old man thought it was pretty important… Dick.

Dick Jones: You know, he’s a sweet old man, and he means well, but he’s not gonna live forever and I’m number two around here. Pretty simple math, huh, Bob? You just, uh…

Dick Jones: [grabbing Morton’s hair] … fucked with the wrong guy.

Bob Morton: [removes Jones’ hand from his hair] You’re out of your fuckin’ mind!

Dick Jones: You’d better pray that that unholy monster of yours doesn’t screw up.

Moron has screwed it up, he took something that was 100% and turned it into 99.9%.

Over in Washington, that’s all run by Taylor, but they have a pecking order too, and protocols, and levels of respect. At all times, Jefferson Smith, breaks them because he doesn’t understand it’s all been rigged. He has been brainwashed my romantic, democratic rhetoric. As the movie goes on and on he finds out how ignorant he is and realizes the way the world really works.

Murphy/Robocop: Had his memory literally washed by the corporation, but it’s only been 99.9% lost.

So while Smith figures out the way the world works and only has his sheer humanity to save everything, Robocop has to remember that he was human and only has his sheer humanity to save everything.

Neither one is capable of saving everything. Smith doesn’t have the power. Robocop has a secret command that he must follow “Don’t fuck with Dick Jones.” Only Jones didn’t program it in with those words, because that would have been more effective.

Taylor realizes he has a problem with Smith, but he’s assured by Paine that’s its a very infinitessimal problem, because Smith would never fuck with Paine.

There’s been some rejiggering, but both plans will only fail 0.1% of the time.

The Female Savior

Clarice Saunders (Jean Arthur)

Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen)

This should be called the love interest, but Robocop and Allen are very vague, whereas there is nothing vague about Arthur.

She is a much better actress and was director Frank Capra’s secret weapon. She’s my favorite actress of all time.

Frank Capra had her play the exact same character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as she did in Mr Deeds Goes to Town. You could be that blatant about it back then, because moviegoers had very little choice. You make the same movie and you barely even change the title.

Here is who Arthur is in both movies.

She’s considered “one of the boys,” but she isn’t she’s a woman.

She’s smarter than all the men combined, but it doesn’t matter because she’s a woman. As a woman, she knows that she has no real power. This makes her very cynical. So every single time Jefferson Smith realizes how naive he has been, Saunders becomes a little less cynical because one good, innocent, pure guy exists. She also falls in love with him and decides to help him.

The original plan in both Arthur movies was to just make some money and survive. Then she falls in love and cares less about money. She also becomes more of a traditional “woman.”

At first Saunders wants to skip town, because she knows Smith is doomed and doesn’t want to see it happen, but because she is in love she has to see it happen.

Both Smith and Deeds have been waiting their whole lives for a woman to realize how decent they are so they can fall in love with them.

Allen gets a lot less to do in Robocop.

Still, Anne Lewis is “one of the boys.” She’s the only real female cop in Detroit. She has no power. She tries to arrest a guy in the middle of urinating and there is no way that the guy urinating is ever in fear. Lewis is always in fear.

She falls in love with Murphy’s decency.

She gets very little to do other than to be the one to help Robocop remember that he was once Murphy. The more he knows what is going on the more she can help him.

Still both heroes are basically, not in control of their destinies. That is where the loopholes come in. The benign old men.

One last good act

Smith gets crushed and Saunders tragically has to watch it. Their plan to have Smith filibuster while the news of him exposing the rich evil guy totally fails. Taylor controls the news. Smith’s story is never going to get out.

Smith’s dad was a small reporter who believed in “lost causes,” and was killed for it. Paine watched and learned it was a lost cause. He decided to sell out, before he got killed. Smith has little kids with a little printing press to replicate what his father was, but when they try to get the news out they aren’t just quashed those little kids actually are in physical peril. That’s how manipulative it is.

The only thing Smith can really do is hope to reach one key listener. He has to hope that Paine is still 0.1% decent. Smith makes one last appeal to Paine’s decency reminding him about the importance of “lost causes.” He then passes out and loses. Saunders thinks that she may have watch him die.

Paine’s first notion at seeing it all is to kill himself, but he’s not even competent enough to do that. Once he realizes that his life is over he decides. Might as well do one last decent thing and turns on Taylor.

In Robocop, Murphy can’t beat Jones, because Jones has programmed him to not take on anyone on anyone who works for the corporation.

This is sort of unbelievable, but there has to be something to stop him. I have no idea why Dick Jones was stupid enough to program Robocop to not arrest an officer of the corporation. Jones doesn’t care for anyone else at the corporation other than himself. There is no believable reason for him to have slipped in that code, when his code has always been “Don’t fuck with Dick Jones.”

But, there has to be a …

Happy Ending

Paine saves the day and Mr Smith Goes to Washington ends with Saunders knowing that she has found true love. Mr Smith Goes to Washington ends with Athur’s orgasmic “Yipee!”

Here is how Robocop ends.

Both movies end the same. Both villains get exposed. That is enough in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

It’s not in Robocop. The Robocop ending requires many stupid things done by its evil character, who at all times you thought was brilliant.

Dick Jones debuted his robots too soon, which threw a very tiny road block in his way. Then he didn’t program Robocop the easiest way. Still he has to become even more stupid. When he gets exposed, he has no real threats. Robocop can’t touch him.

Earlier in the movie there was a very stupid hostage taker. That guy was a politician who lost an election. When he takes hostages, he wants a recount and no matter what the recount is he wants to keep his job. While Robocop is coming up to end him, sure he’ll consider the trashiest expensive car and anything else he can get too.

Jones knows how stupid all of those people are and yet he panics and acts just like them.

Why is he taking the Old Man hostage instead of killing him and becoming in charge of everything?  That gives the benign Old Man just enough time to not really show he is decent, but to show he isn’t 100% stupid and he fires Jones.

The happy ending is Murphy realizing that he is Murphy.

After the movie ends

Personally, I like my movies to just end. If I want something to go one for hours and hours and hours, television is a better way to do that at least now.

Capra didn’t mess up his movies with sequels. He just remade the same movie over and over again.

There is no reason to believe that Jefferson Smith and Clarice Saunders don’t leave Washington and get married and return to the wilderness that Smith has now sold her on.

Smith knows he can’t stay in Washington, because he’s still way out of his league there.

Women then and now have to decide how they feel about Saunders. She’s smarter, she’s more economically viable in the city. Can she or should she be domesticated in some sense back in the woods.

How happy they wind up and how happy you are with what you think will happen is up to you. The movie is over.

Pretend Robocop didn’t have sequels, because those sequels destroyed its happy ending. In order to have sequels, Murphy had to forget he was now 100% Murphy and return to being 99.9% Robocop. I don’t even remember or care how that happened even given the fact that Robocop 2 was written by my favorite comic book writer, Frank Miller.

I’m going to hope that Murphy loves his real family enough to let them think he is still dead and leaves Detroit with Lewis. That’s not really possible because in Robocop there is nothing, but Detroit. They basically have to decide whether to live in the crappy inner city or in the suburbs.

The Directors

Even though it takes a lot of people to make movies this is where you have been brainwashed into thinking the director has final say and all of the vision.

Now the vision Frank Capra wanted to represent was that he belived in America and its people.

Capra wants to be the embodyment of the America Dream. He immigrated here from Italy as a youth, worked hard and went to college, and started making films. That still is basically the American Dream.

Still he did go to college unlike most of the people of his are. He hired very educated guys to enoble the masses, with beautifully written rhetoric about how great the original principals of America were founded upon.

His writers hated rich people. Capra likely didn’t think the uneducated masses were truly noble and decent, but he had wanted to make himself look like the ultimate patriot, and did so. After Mr. Smith Goes to Washington came out in 1939, Capra started to make pure American propaganda for the government to convince people to risk their lives in World War II against his home country of Italy, Germany, and Japan. Those films were called “Why We Fight.” If you watch them, they talk a lot about how great freedom is, but they are very racist especially towards the Japanese.

Except for its miracle happy ending Capra’s film is pretty dark. They all were. They all said that the world was polluted by evil rich people who controlled the masses and their only hope was  that some decent guy would step up.

That’s very Hollywood America. You rarely see the masses teaming up to demand justice. Everyone want to be Rambo or John McClane. Those are basically the same movie too.

You have to  decide if you think that is cynical or idealistic. What happened was Capra showed it to to all the Washington elites and they hated it. The politicians hated it. The press hated it. They called it anti-American and pro-communist, because they were educated and the guy who mostly wrote it, Sindney Buchman wound up in front of the McCarthy hearings and got blacklisted.

As for the masses, it depends on your view of the masses, it is either a leftist time bomb or more fodder for continued brainwashing about the pricipals our country was formed upon.  It is both.

Robocop was directed by Paul Verhoven.

Verhoven wasn’t even Ameican. He did love American films. So when he gets a chance to make films in America, his vision lets him trash America’s stupidity as much as he wants.

Everyone is his Detroit is cravenly stupid and criminally evil with rare exceptions. The masses watch stupid television. They play stupid violent games. They watch trashy bad news.

In a key scene, when one of the criminals actually sees a hardworking guy with a job reading a plane geometry book he is enraged that the guy thinks he is better than him and wants to educate himself and work hard.

Neatly everyone in Robocop is a heartless criminal, the biggest ones are the richest ones who work for the corporations.

Robocop didn’t have a beautifully composed script it barely had a script at all. He just told his actors to be entertainingly violent and irredeemable.

The film isn’t just commenting on America. It’s commenting on how stupid the people who watch it are by as being gratuiotously violent and stupid as possible. So of course, it’s ending has to require its smartest character being that stupid.

It’s either a wake up call to stop being so stupid or a craven attempt to make money off its audiences stupidity.

After Verhoven got bigger budgets and made a lot of money with some sex and some short flashes of nudity in Basic Instinct, he got barbecued over too much grauitous, not very sexy nudity, in Showgirls.

By the time he redeemed himself with Starship Troopers, he is using television night time soap actors of both sexes showering together in the military to become real citizens, and making it so fascist that you never know for sure if he is warning you against facscism or fucking with you to make money by being  a facist.

Whovever watches either of these two movies today, will probably leave with the same ideas they had when they came in, but have them reinforced.

Neither happy ending really changes anything in their societies, and neither movie really changed America. Whether they are cynical propaganda or  idealistic prayers is up to you, and that is pretty democratic.

Real Life

Real life doesn’t end. It doesn’t have sequels. It just goes on until we all die. If you died in 1962, you did so amazed that a rich spoiled brat embodied America and took down Roy Cohn despite his love for Joseph McCarthy. That 0.1% chance did happen.

Then John F Kennedy got assasinated and everything got infinitely crazy. People don’t just make fictional movies about America, they make fictional movies about real American events. If you watch Oliver Stone’s, JFK, you’ll see that John F Kennedy was our Jefferson Smith with wealth and education behind him. He was our greatest hope, but some evil, gredy forces brought him down.

What you’re left with again, is one guy giving a very purposefully executed, very Capra-esque speech showing he is the only one who knows the true America.

Usually, the only one’s who think they know the true America is the directors. America’s problem is that everyone wants to be the hero. No one want to work together.

Most people stay stupid. Some people get rich. The people who are the richest run it all and perhaps finance the movies to keep us at movies and to keep us brainwashed wanting to be the hero.

After Kennedy got shot, if you paid attention to the real world, you just got sucker punched over and over again. Martin Luther King got shot. Robert Kennedy got shot. Nixon arrived.

Pretty much the only way to enjoy Nixon is to watch him in the movies, getting taken down by various underdogs.

We always want happy endings and we always get them in a sort of cynical fashion.

Do We Ever Get Original Movies?

By now everyone has been programmed into these conventions. They’ve even been programmed into screenwriting software. If you don’t use these conventions properly, everyone will tell you that you are too uneducated to write screenplays. You aren’t supposed to mess with the formula. You just need to put perhaps 0.1% of an original spin on it so don’t think we are seeing the same movie again. Then we will argue over who did it well or not, mostly deciding that we personally are totally correct.

In 1992, a very original movie was put out by Quentin Tarantino called Reservoir Dogs. The criminals worked together to get rich in very clever fashion. There were no love interests. Everyone pretty much dies at the end, both good and bad, with various degrees of dignity or integrity.

That’s not a very American movie. Maybe it isn’t because Tarantino stole a lot of it from a Hong Kong film named City of Fire.

That shook up Hollywood a lot. Hollywood and Tarantino are a lot like Saunders and Jefferson Smith. Hollywood became more Tarantino and Tarentino got Hollywood to love him by becoming more Hollywood by using whatever movie he had ever seen and putting them all on puree.

So you will see one woman take on the world in Kill Bill Volume I and II. The epic confrontations in both those movie are all woman on woman, and the happy ending is sort of traditional motherhood.

Then he made two movies taking real-life horror shows and giving them violent happy endings in Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained.

Whenever real life events change things, movies change a bit to become more palatable to whatever the current climate is.

Pretty much as long as you have good heroes and very bad villains and someone falls in love and something can be considered happy at the end you have a shot at an entertaining movie and maybe a productive movie.

They are all basically saying the same thing. You just have to figure out which ones to best learn whatever you want to learn.

Books are more effective ways of learning, but film is way more powerful. One amazingly executed film with a bad message like Birth of a Nation and suddenly you have thousands of books to read.

They are all the same. Every book, every song, every life, every movie. Choose who and what to love and make sure that you choose carefully. Whether it was productive and or fun is decided by you, and then we all die.

Do try to know that at the end of Casablanca, the lovers choose not to be together and team up with people they love less to fight fascists.