The 1990s was a period for a lot of cheesy fun: pizza bagels, Saturday morning cartoons, VCRs, arcades, Sloto Cash, and gangster rap. At least, that is what I assume it was like since I was only born in the year 2000. Oh well. My connection to the period is my parents’ VCR, their stories about what it was like, and the cultural lens through pop culture that has survived the two decades since Demolition Man.
The most influential and long-lasting are Hollywood films. Blockbuster films like The Matrix, Terminator 2, Independence Day, The Fifth Element, and Starship Troopers walk the fine of “cheesy action flicks” and “sci-fi dramas” in a way that movies since have a hard time doing. It turns out you CAN mix deep themes and philosophical messages into your movie without it turning into a miserable, emotional, septic tank!
My favorite of such movies is the 1993 film “Demolition Man“. I rewatched it recently, now from an adult’s perspective, and holy cow, was it prescient! Major spoiler warnings for this 30+ year old movie, as I retrospectively break down the themes, ideas, and sheer intelligence of this amazing, goofy movie.
Plot Premise
The movie opens in 1996 (only three years after the movie’s release date), and Los Angeles is in chaos. The government has so little control criminal warlords like Simon Phoenix have taken parts of the city as their own little empires. When Simon Phoenix takes a busload of people as hostages, it’s up to Sylvester Stallone- I mean, Lieutenant John Spartan, to bust in as a one man army to find the hostages and save the day. Spartan’s history of excess violence and destruction during his operations earned him the nickname “The Demolition Man”.
After an initial scan fails to reveal where the hostages are, Spartan busts in himself to find Phoenix and get the location of the hostages, their climactic confrontation ends with Phoenix blowing up the building and the bodies of the hostages being found in the aftermath. Spartan is accused of being negligent in his efforts and is sentenced to 70 years in Cryosleep prison, where he will be “reprogramed” into a better citizen.
The movie skips ahead to the year 2032, and society has radically changed. Everything is clean and fixed up. There hasn’t been a murder in over 20 years. Crime is almost nonexistent. Society is now ruled by a benevolent dictator named Dr. Raymond Cocteau.
To achieve this “utopia”, society has become draconian and restrictive. Masculinity and aggressiveness are looked down upon. Meat, salt, spicy food, cursing, contact sports, and anything Cocteau (the state) deems as “bad” are forbidden. Pregnancy is forbidden without a license. Everyone is tagged with tracking devices that constantly logs where you are, your medical condition, and who-knows-what else. People don’t even touch one another for fear of germs.
Gee, that last one sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Now, where’s my mask…?
This otherwise peaceful society gets disrupted only by two things:
- An underground society called “The Scraps”, led by Edgar Friendly, who rejects Cocteau’s vision and comes above ground to steal food.
- Simon Phoenix, when he breaks out of Cryoprison and begins a mass-murdering spree across the city.
The police, so unused to violence at this point, are completely incompetent when it comes to handling someone as assertive and dangerous as Phoenix. So, in desperation, the police decide to revive John Spartan early in order to hunt down the criminal he had put away 35 years prior.
The Three Ideologies
What makes Demolition Man so good is that behind the explosions and cheesy special effects are the ideological arguments present underneath it all. Cocteau’s dystopic utopia is directly influenced by Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, which is hinted at through one of the main characters being named Lenina Huxley, which clearly is referencing both the author himself and Brave New World’s protagonist, Lenina Crowne.
What is so startling about Cocteau’s awful society is how representative it is of the modern left’s vision for the future. Big Tech companies track people more than ever, interpersonal contact is more prohibited than ever as a result of MeToo plus Covid, left-wing thought leaders praise China’s one-child policy in the name of environmentalism, meat is constantly a source of outrage for the same people, and places like New York restricts sugary drinks and salty foods. In the name of security and safety, anything and everything that makes life worth living are getting ripped away from us, and Cocteau’s world is the end goal.
The counter-ideology presented in the film is represented through Edgar Friendly’s “Scraps”, an underground society that rejects Cocteau’s vision of the world and lives off what they can to survive, including, but not limited to, rat-burgers. Edgar Friendly’s worldview is all about personal liberty and freedom, taken to the extreme.
In one of the best pro-freedom speeches ever put to film, Edgar Friendly says, “See, according to Cocteau’s plan, I’m the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, ‘Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?’ I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter, and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body, reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I’ve seen the future, you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sittin’ around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing “I’m an Oscar-Meyer Wiener”. You wanna live on top, you gotta live Cocteau’s way. What he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Your other choice: come down here, maybe starve to death.”
Edgar Friendly has traded all the security and safety of Cocteau’s world for the Freedom of the Scraps, even if it’s more dangerous, even if it means risking starvation.
The third and final ideology is represented by Simon Phoenix, who represents a sort of anarchical might-makes-right sort of worldview. Maybe I’m stretching this one. Whatever the case may be, even this psychopath views Cocteau’s world with disgust when Phoenix bluntly tells Cocteau to his face, “Hey, you can’t take away people’s right to be assholes.”
And it’s clear how the director feels about each of these. Simon Phoenix is clearly the villain and Cocteau alongside him. John Spartan, quite literally, wipes his ass with Cocteau’s laws. However, the director doesn’t outright promote Edgar Friendly as perfect either. At the end of the film, once Cocteau and Phoenix are taken care of, the uptight police chief asks Spartan what can they possibly do without Cocteau to guide them? When Edgar Friendly suggests running through the town, getting drunk and spray painting graffiti everywhere, Spartan restrains him, saying, “Whoa, Whoa. I’ll tell you what gonna do:
[to the Chief] “Why don’t you get a little dirty?
[to Friendly] “You a lot clean.
“And somewhere in the middle… I don’t know. You’ll figure it out.”
In the end, the movie’s message is… moderation. You can’t take away everyone’s freedoms in the name of safety like Cocteau wants because that’s totalitarianism. However, neither can you have complete freedom like Friendly wants because that’s anarchy.
The movie highlights other important messages. It points out that masculinity, aggression, and violence are not necessarily bad things when channeled for good. Otherwise, when a force of nature like Simon Phoenix comes along, who will be capable of stopping him?
We can see this in the real world being played out right now. The police are being made impotent but more totalitarian across the western world. In Britain, the police are more likely to hunt you down for posting mean words on Twitter than they are to crack down on grooming gangs.
Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada is currently in hiding from protesting Truckers after declaring that they hold “unacceptable views” for not wanting to be subjected to a vaccine mandate and be required to have a digital Covid ID that tracks them whenever, wherever.
Australia locks people away in camps, and in the US, members of the Biden Administration and congress actively call for big tech platforms for more and more censorship. The world economic forum predicts that people will own nothing, be happy, and won’t eat meat by 2030.
So as you can see, “Demolition Man” was startling precognizant about where the elitists and the fascist-left would like to bring society if they have their way. Even their prediction of dates lines up, with the movie taking place in 2032 and the World Economic Forum’s predictions for 2030.
In short, “Demolition Man” is sort of like a good pizza. It’s cheesy on the surface, but dig in a little, and you’ll find it stuffed with substance, and you’ll be devouring it all by the end of it. It’s a 10 / 10 movie featuring top actors a smart script that manages to make a philosophy class fun.
