Firas Durri: Enthusiast

Many years ago when we were kids and issues like “who’d win in a fight between Terminator and Robocop” seemed important, someone had convinced me that Arnie would dominate because Robocop tends to get easily shot up or otherwise battered. Now you can see the battle for yourself in this Terminator vs Robocop mashup video.

Looking at reviews for the 1987 Robocop, it occurs to me that his identity crisis and the way he turns on his creators is a rehash of the Frankenstein saga. On that topic, here’s Harold Bloom from the Signet edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:

It would not be unjust to characterize Victor Frankenstein, in his act of creation, as being momentarily a moral idiot, like so many who have done his work after him. There is an indeliberate humor in the contrast between the enormity of the scientist’s discovery and the mundane emotions of the discoverer. Finding that “the minuteness of the parts” slows him down, he resolves to make his creature “about eight feet in height and proportionately large.” As he works on, he allows himself to dream that “a new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” Yet he knows his is a “workshop of filthy creation,” and he fails the fundamental test of his own creativity. When the “dull yellow eye” of his creature opens, this creator falls from the autonomy of a supreme artificer to the terror of a child of earth: “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” He flees his responsibility and sets in motion the events that will lead to his own Arctic immolation, a fit end for a being who has never achieved a full sense of another’s existence.

As far as I can tell, the 1818 novel doesn’t make an explicit political point about whether humans should tinker with science to the extent of playing God or not. The preface says, “opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.”

This general disclaimer didn’t stop people from being horrified; the book was published anonymously, and The British Critic railed: “these volumes have neither principle, object, nor moral; the horror which abounds in them is too grotesque and bizarre ever to approach near the sublime, and when we did not hurry over the pages in disgust, we sometimes paused to laugh outright: and yet we suspect, that the diseased and wandering imagination, which has stepped out of all legitimate bounds, to frame these disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures, might be disciplined into something better. We heartily wish it were so, for there are occasional symptoms of no common powers of mind, struggling through a mass of absurdity, which well nigh overwhelms them; but it is a sort of absurdity that approaches so often the confines of what is wicked and immoral, that we dare hardly trust ourselves to bestow even this qualified praise. The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”