John Demolition Man was put in tech magic cryofreeze while taught how to knit, so the passed time was subjectively compressed for him which is sort of like a personal going-forward time travel experience.
The resistance was Dennis Leary living in an abandoned sewer system because life on the surface was too… peaceful, clean, utopian, and free of suffering? It’s so American. "Those fuckers solved all of society’s problems and now no one goes hungry and everything is great! I’m so mad about it i’m going to go live in my own shit!
I could headcanon that Apple Campus City was a lot more brutishly tyrranical than Dennis Leary’s exposition made it out to be, only because I know and have known how fucked up and brutishly tyrranical techbros are once they get a crumb of power and that place screamed techbros.
Maybe the headcanon doesn’t hold up because if ’s “Snail City” (yeah he tried to astroturf that meme into existence) took off and became a city-state, it’d have the opposite of swear ticket machines and expect everyone to be “based” and say slurs when prompted to prove they weren’t “DEI.”
I don’t remember tech bros really existing the way they do now. We were still over a decade out from the iPhone, from mass adoption of video games, from ubiquitous cell phones. The kind of wannabe playboy technofascist celebrity that’s been a dominant cultural force since the Steve Jobs cult fired up really wasn’t on the scene yet.
I think that’s reflected in the portrayal of the hippy fascists being very sensitive to aggression - the running swearing gag, the guy getting shallow emotional counselling from the public phone/computer terminal, the use of pastels and kimonos as formal dress, the food not having salt. It’s an early version of “soy” and reflects the same kind of anxiety about late 20th century masculinity that Fight Club tapped in to. But then it softens and subverts that somewhat when John actually finds he enjoys knitting, and there’s a theme of John’s authentic aggression meeting Bullock’s character’s nostalgia for violence, and how her desire for the violence of the past isn’t good. The authors are saying that, soy or not, the la of the 90s often was violent, polluted, and difficult and the soy future isn’t intended to be read as inherently bad, rather than some restrictions and regulations went beyond the point of benefit.
The end where the one cop defects to the rebels is, I think, supposed to show a thesis-antithesis synthesis thing implying that they’re going to keep all the good aspects of the utopian society, but with the real villain gone they’ll be able to relax the enforced social and cultural conformity and people will be able to live more authentically.
That’s all part of what I like about it. It doesn’t outright fall in to shouting homophobic slurs like a lot of contemporary macho movies, it toys with different conceptions of masculinity, it’s very self-aware about it’s genre, it critques utopia without going all in on libertarian brain worms.
The rich bazinga in charge of it all is also shown to be hypocritical in his society’s condemnation of violence, yet he’s willing to thaw out a murderer from the past to kill some poor people. I’ve always assumed it was implied that he’d done something similar before.
I don’t remember tech bros really existing the way they do now
I kind of do, back during the AT&T “YOU WILL” commercial campaigns of the 90s. There were worse than these, usually involving children running around with kites and laughing in slow motion while a narrator voice says something about “knocking down the barriers and bringing humans together in a global interconnected information superhighway community” or the like.
My favorite part was when he said “IT’S DEMOLITION TIME” and demolitioned that big cryo prison.
Meme aside, the movie was actually a lot of fun and felt an awful lot like a prophecy of what Apple “campuses” would look like and what kind of fucked up gentrification they’d promote.
It’s a fun movie, but I’m not sure what to make of the ideology. On one hand, the movie seems to kind of say it’d be bad if cops never used violence, but on the other hand, it portrays a world run by corporations where all culture has been commercialized to the extent that ad jingles play on TV and all restaurants are Taco Bells (or Pizza Hut in Europe, because they didn’t seem to get that that product placement wasn’t meant to be seen as a good thing).
And yeah, gentrification is a major theme there whether it’s intentional or not. Anti-graffiti walls?
I think it might be a time capsule of gen-x slacker libertarianism. The anti-villain/decoy villain is Dennis Leary living in a sewer because he wanted to say gamer words and ear meat.
And then John Spartan is beating up Dennis Leary and is all “wtf these are poor people stealing food?” Which just goes to show how today is incomprehensible even by the standards of the distopian cop fiction of the past.
Definitely one of my fav Wesley Snipes characters. That man was born for the stage.
Sorry, but you need to call him by his proper name, John Spartan, not to be confused with the other Spartan John.
That and John Commando’s name being John Matrix will never stop being amusing to me.
There’s probably an alternate universe where Keanu plays a character called Johnny Matrix.
The name “John Spartan” is so on the nose that John Demolition Man was a kindness to say.
I love Demolition man so much.
The resistance was Dennis Leary living in an abandoned sewer system because life on the surface was too… peaceful, clean, utopian, and free of suffering? It’s so American. "Those fuckers solved all of society’s problems and now no one goes hungry and everything is great! I’m so mad about it i’m going to go live in my own shit!
10/10 one of the better 90s sci fi films.
I could headcanon that Apple Campus City was a lot more brutishly tyrranical than Dennis Leary’s exposition made it out to be, only because I know and have known how fucked up and brutishly tyrranical techbros are once they get a crumb of power and that place screamed techbros.
Maybe the headcanon doesn’t hold up because if
’s “Snail City” (yeah he tried to astroturf that meme into existence) took off and became a city-state, it’d have the opposite of swear ticket machines and expect everyone to be “based” and say slurs when prompted to prove they weren’t “DEI.”
I don’t remember tech bros really existing the way they do now. We were still over a decade out from the iPhone, from mass adoption of video games, from ubiquitous cell phones. The kind of wannabe playboy technofascist celebrity that’s been a dominant cultural force since the Steve Jobs cult fired up really wasn’t on the scene yet.
I think that’s reflected in the portrayal of the hippy fascists being very sensitive to aggression - the running swearing gag, the guy getting shallow emotional counselling from the public phone/computer terminal, the use of pastels and kimonos as formal dress, the food not having salt. It’s an early version of “soy” and reflects the same kind of anxiety about late 20th century masculinity that Fight Club tapped in to. But then it softens and subverts that somewhat when John actually finds he enjoys knitting, and there’s a theme of John’s authentic aggression meeting Bullock’s character’s nostalgia for violence, and how her desire for the violence of the past isn’t good. The authors are saying that, soy or not, the la of the 90s often was violent, polluted, and difficult and the soy future isn’t intended to be read as inherently bad, rather than some restrictions and regulations went beyond the point of benefit.
The end where the one cop defects to the rebels is, I think, supposed to show a thesis-antithesis synthesis thing implying that they’re going to keep all the good aspects of the utopian society, but with the real villain gone they’ll be able to relax the enforced social and cultural conformity and people will be able to live more authentically.
That’s all part of what I like about it. It doesn’t outright fall in to shouting homophobic slurs like a lot of contemporary macho movies, it toys with different conceptions of masculinity, it’s very self-aware about it’s genre, it critques utopia without going all in on libertarian brain worms.
The rich bazinga in charge of it all is also shown to be hypocritical in his society’s condemnation of violence, yet he’s willing to thaw out a murderer from the past to kill some poor people. I’ve always assumed it was implied that he’d done something similar before.
I kind of do, back during the AT&T “YOU WILL” commercial campaigns of the 90s. There were worse than these, usually involving children running around with kites and laughing in slow motion while a narrator voice says something about “knocking down the barriers and bringing humans together in a global interconnected information superhighway community” or the like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eo
I do agree with the rest of what you’re saying and I think it’s good analysis.
“Fuckin’ A.”
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
“They called him the Demolition Man” is an “I’m so tired of all these Star Wars” tier title drop too, I just have to respect that.
My favorite part was when he said “IT’S DEMOLITION TIME” and demolitioned that big cryo prison.
Meme aside, the movie was actually a lot of fun and felt an awful lot like a prophecy of what Apple “campuses” would look like and what kind of fucked up gentrification they’d promote.
It’s a fun movie, but I’m not sure what to make of the ideology. On one hand, the movie seems to kind of say it’d be bad if cops never used violence, but on the other hand, it portrays a world run by corporations where all culture has been commercialized to the extent that ad jingles play on TV and all restaurants are Taco Bells (or Pizza Hut in Europe, because they didn’t seem to get that that product placement wasn’t meant to be seen as a good thing).
And yeah, gentrification is a major theme there whether it’s intentional or not. Anti-graffiti walls?
The movie was an ideological mess but it was such a creative mess that I enjoyed it anyway.
And some of the one-liners… “You’re on TV!” uses an old TV as a bludgeon!
I think it might be a time capsule of gen-x slacker libertarianism. The anti-villain/decoy villain is Dennis Leary living in a sewer because he wanted to say gamer words and ear meat.
And then John Spartan is beating up Dennis Leary and is all “wtf these are poor people stealing food?” Which just goes to show how today is incomprehensible even by the standards of the distopian cop fiction of the past.
Definitely one of my fav Wesley Snipes characters. That man was born for the stage.
“DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO” turning into goblincore squatting.