Santa Barbara Shooter: The Evil is in the Man, not the Implements

OK now that time has passed for the dust on this to settle I'll put in my input.

Again we got a disturbed individual in Elliot Rodger who went out on a GTA-style rampage. Several people run over, 3 dead from stabbing, 3 dead from gunshot.

Could more laws have prevented this?

In a word... no. California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. We have "assault weapon" bans, we have universal background checks, we have 10 day waiting periods, we have magazine limits, and getting a Concealed Carry Licence in this state is next to impossible depending on the county.

The thing with laws is they are a part of the social contract, as such they're only terms of a contract. To enjoy the benefits of a civil society and government benefits (like a fire department) you give up certain things.

Contracts are broken all the time, and the social contract is no exception.

Laws do nothing to physically stop someone from committing crime. Sure laws can set the punishment for violating the social contract, but they do nothing to stop someone from breaking the contract if they decide the punishment is worth it or they can duck the punishment. So ultimately what this means is that laws are only as effective as far as people are willing to obey them.

Words on a piece of paper do nothing to stop someone who decides to go against them no matter how much money or good feelings went into putting those words down. Anything else that happens beyond that becomes damage control. And that's what police are, they're society's damage control agents. They can't act until there is reasonable suspicion, therefore they are a reactionary unit.

Given that condition what can be done? Hide and pray until damage control arrives? Or become proactive in your own defense. Do I think this could have been prevented with more lax laws? Yes I do, this could have been stopped by a law abiding citizen with a gun. The rampage started with a stabbing.

But why won't more control laws prevent this? As I said, once someone decides to ignore those laws, they mean nothing. It's already illegal to drive like a madman and hit people with your car (didn't stop that other lunatic that thought he was the Angel of Death and intentionally plowed his car into a crowed in Santa Barbara). It's already illegal to stab people, it's illegal to carry a loaded weapon on your person in California without a CCL, and it's sure as hell illegal to shoot at people. Even without more laws this guy is already a multiple felon, looking at a life sentence and possibly the death penalty. Another law is not going to do anything.

Cars, knives and guns have no will of their own. They cannot act on their own. A car will not decide to drive into people on its own, a knife will not decide to shank someone on its own, and a gun will not shoot anyone on its own.

The Evil is not in the objects, it's the heart of Man.

Let's take a look at this kid (I refuse to reffed to him as an adult.). He has a 100+ page manifesto you can check out here if you're so inclined.

Going though this tale of sein kampf, nothing really seems out of the ordinary aside from having a rich and privileged background. Though I need to point out, for one reason or another he was a scared kid, every year of school he was scared to go. He was the kid who got bullied in high school is freshman year (yeah but who doesn't get it from the sophmores when you're a high school freshman?). There's really nothing out of the ordinary, for a teenager, though seems to be on a more intense scale. Though he singles out an event where he was bullied by a girl at summer camp.

All the weirdness really started when he was 17. He started to get jealous of people living life. Of people doing what he simply put didn't have the fucking balls to go out and do. His obsession over sex drove him into hating people that were getting laid because he wasn't. He pretty much started turning into Lil Adolf at this point, talking about wanting power just to impose his own warped ideology and what not.

It's just one story of being friendless after another with a generous heaping of sex obsession. Eventually we start to see things like this.

It's not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime, because I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentleman.

And things like this:

On the day of retribution I will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck up blonde slut I see inside there. All those girls that I've desired so much, they would have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them. While they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes. I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true Alpha Male.

To sum it all up he was an entitlement mind little bitch, who essentially shot up a part of Santa Barbara because he couldn't get laid. Why couldn't he get laid? Well as I mentioned this guy was scared of his own shadow. He was scared of going to school, he was scared of interacting with people. He mentions sitting around in a Barns and Noble just hoping people would come and talk to him. He just expected things to just happen to him, and that just ain't life. It also seems his mind was poisoned by images portrayed by the media since he had this idea that he was entitled to sex. He talks about punishing women. Punishing for what? For not sleeping with him. Sorry kiddo but you got to make thing happen.

A good friend of mine had her take on this over a text convo she gave me permissions to post up.

Fuck those guys, who say that they deserve a woman's body, why say that because women deny a man access to our most personal selves we are souless succubuses, who demand that women be tools for their amusement because they want us to be. Fuck those guys so much. And if they do get sex it should be a dildo to the ass.  

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And you know what drives me nuts about those guys? They have literally nothing appealing about them, but when they aren't appealing to women it's the woman's fault. Instead when women get turned down, they blame themselves, and it's still the woman's fault. What the fuck is that 

And you know what? She's right. What did Rodger have to offer a girl, or to anybody when he isn't even willing to go out and for himself, live the life that he wants to live?

Do I think he's an evil person? Yes I do, not evil as in born with malice, but evil as in corrupted. His own fear is what stopped him from living the life he wanted. This is by his own admission. Sure life as a teenager is hard, I've been there, we've all been there at some point. But for one reason or another (I say upbringing) he never really developed the skills to deal with life after that girl bullied him.

Speaking of fear, considering he claims to be a big Star Wars fan, how did he not take what Yoda said about fear to heart:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

What happened here is exactly what Yoda cautioned against. His fear of others, lead to anger over his inability to do the same thing. This Anger and envy of people living life lead to hating them for doing what feared to do. And hate lead to this. He went from an insecure kid who became warped and twisted. There was evil here, but that evil was not in the car, millions of cars out that haven't been involved in crime. There are billions of knives out there that haven't been involved in crime. It is said that private gun owners in the U.S. is one of the world's largest standing armies. That's millions of guns that haven't been involved in crime. The evil wasn't in these objects, but in his heart.

Now to bring things full circle.

Do you think this guy, and other like him care about what the laws are? No... hell no, they don't care. So what would passing more laws to do stop this? How can we stop this?

The ones who can stop someone like this are people, not words on a piece of paper. People with the will and the means to stop someone when they go off the rails like this. You can't prevent behavior when a person decides the law doesn't apply to them.

He became a monster when fear corrupted him and he went out and acted out in malice, without giving the laws a thought. And so I'll leave on this quote from Alucard/Vlad Dracula (Hellsing) if you want to know what would prevent this from happening again somewhere:

It takes a man in order to kill a monster!

A tale of two RoboCops

No I don't mean Alex Murphy and John T. Cable.

Just by making that reference I think it can be said I'm a big fan of the franchise. I've seen the three original movies, two of the TV series, and grew up on the cartoon.

And now we have a new one, so how does an old fan like me feel about it?

Well I liked it. Just as you can like both Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger's Joker, it is possible to like both.

*Spoilers ahead*

The main underlying theme of RoboCop is humanity, what makes us human. Verhoeven and Padilha's RoboCops are essentially two approaches on the same topic. 1987 RoboCop is about a man trying to reclaim his humanity, where as 2014 RoboCop is about a man trying to maintain his humanity.

In a sense when people say "there is only one RoboCop" they're right. While both movies take different paths, the end destination is the same. Alex Murphy is still a man, RoboCop might have a mechanical body, but the man is still there.

Alex Murphy and Alex Murphy

Probably the most obvious difference between Alex Murphy (1987) and Alex Murphy (2014) is that the former is dead and the latter seriously injured. Whereas Murphy (1987) was brought back from the dead, Murphy (2014) was more like Darth Vader in that the mechanical body served as a mobile life-support system.

In RoboCop (1987) for a good portion of the film Murphy is a brain in a case and nothing more than an organic CPU. When he's revived, he isn't reffered to by name, he's called "RoboCop" or rather Crime Prevention Unit 001, as his full designation. As the movie goes on more and more of Murphy's memory and personality emerge. By the end once he has taken his helmet off and the audience sees his face again, his movement has become much more fluid coupled with his facial expressions, he looks less a hulking robot and more a man in an armor suit. At the film's conclusion the OCP CEO asks him "What's your name?" to which Murphy replies simply with "Murphy". By the end of RoboCop 2, his restoration seems complete when he remarks to Lewis "Patience Lewis, we're only human."

Where as in RoboCop (2014) Murphy never has his memory blanked and people still reffed to him by name. His face was never really concealed from the audience. Yes he has the visor but when he was revived as RoboCop, the audience saw Murphy's face, not the iconic red visor. In 1987 Murphy's family had moved on, in contrast in 2014 Murphy's family is still there and they are still trying to hang on to each other, he's trying to keep his family while they're tying to keep their husband and father. In the end he has his true, long awaited reunion with his family.

The Execution

In the execution, Padilha stayed respectful to the source material unlike say, Paul W.S. Anderson with Resident Evil or Uwe Boll in your pick of any of his video game based movies.

From the start there was a lot to be said about Murphy's new black armor. People generally saying "that's not RoboCop" and in a sense they were right. I'm not sure if it was an intentional stroke of script writing genius or a just a fluke, but when Murphy is revived in the re-imagining of the blue-silver armor he asks "What kind of suit is this...?" to which his physician Dr. Norton replies "It's not a suit, it's... you."

One will also notice that when Omni starts to screw directly with Murphy's brain, he is the black armor. In a sense the black armor is not him, it's not Murphy. When he starts acting like a robot because his brain chemistry has been screwed with, to the point where he ignores his wife, child and partner, he's is in the black suit. As with the original, his personalty starts to re-emerge when he starts encountering elements of his own (here attempted) murder. In this case his first act of hanging on to his humanity is to investigate his own attempted murder. At the end when he has over come everything Omni did to try to make him into a robot, and he finally has his reunion with his family, he is back in the blue-silver armor. Another notable thing between the two bodies, is that the black armor bears the logo of OmniCorp while the blue-silver armor only has his badge engraved on.

And of course, he still retained the heavy thumping footsteps, which is about as iconic to RoboCop as Darth Vader's mechanical breathing.

Omni did what they could to suppress Alex Murphy and ultimately failed, the man prevailed.

I also enjoyed the numerous references to the original. There was a subversion of the "I'll buy THAT for a dollar!" tag line. This time around Alex retains an organic hand, a nod towards Bob Morton ordering the surgeons to remove Murphy's left arm in 1987. There were other smaller ones I can't remember off the top of my head without watching it again, but they're there.  

But...

The 2014 isn't exactly perfect. The concept was sound but there were a few things in the execution that could have been better. While a lot of attention was paid to Murphy and Norton, there was less to Murphy's wife and his partner Jack Lewis wasn't any better off.

I can see they wanted to place more emphasis on Murphy's humanity, what they should have done was spend another 30 min to flesh out his relations with his partner before and after becoming a cyborg. For instance when they meet again after Murphy's procedure, they exchange a few words and a joke, no fistbump or secret handshake between the two.

Also 2014 lacks a charismatic villain. While Sellars is obviously the stand in for both the main villain of the original, Dick Jones, and partly for Bob Morton as the initiator of the RoboCop project, a part that was done very well, who's the stand in for Clarence Boddicker? Boddicker seems to have been split of into two, hardly memorable villains, the criminal Antoine Vallon who is cahoots with at least three corrupt officers, and Rick Maddox.

Vallon was almost just a cardboard cut out, the biggest role he played was being responsible for the car bomb that crippled Murphy. His last moments were hardly memorable compared to Boddicker.

Maddox by contrast, arguably isn't even really bad. An asshole, yes, but at the end of the day he was really nothing more than a mercenary on OmniCorp's pay role, just a guy doing his job.

By contrast to both, Clarence Boddicker was a through and though bad guy, and he knew it, not only did he know it, but he loved it. Even the lettering to the billboard advertising his car, the 6000 SUX could be read as GOOD SUX if you squint your eyes a little. He was mean, vicious, violent and had a dark sense of humor, show on one instance when he blew up a member of his own gang's car because he had the audacity to buy a 6000 SUX as well. Boddicker was loud and in your face and you couldn't help but laugh along with some of his twisted humor, he was the sort of villain that the audience loved to hate. Maddox by contrast was really nothing more than, as Murphy put it "...a little asshole..."

All and all, the concept was sound, I liked what they were going for, but in the execution there was more they could have done.

Other thoughts

Both movies were clearly products of their time. Which is one of the reasons why I like the new one. It wasn't just trying to copy the 1987 movie, but instead was it's own narrative on the same themes and topics. Though this time around, I actually found this incarnation of Alex Murphy to be just a tad more likable. Yeah I said it, I liked this Murphy more. 1987 Murphy was just a straight shooting cop doing his job. Nothing wrong with that. Though 2014 Murphy, with police having a more and more negative image due to corruption and police brutality in our modern times, this Murphy refuses to let a case go involving crooked cops, "they're either dumb or dirty!" he says. He is the cop we all want today, the one who'll clean the streets AND clean house.

And being a product of it's time, I actually do like the redesigns. I like Murphy's "it's you" suit. It was sleek but still looked like the original. While it was sleeker and more lean looking, Murphy was still taller than everyone else, he still had a presence. The I liked the black armor as well, not as much as the blue-silver one, but I liked it since it reminded me of an Evangelion unit from the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series. I liked how it looked different because it wasn't him so to speak. It differentiated Murphy the man, from OmniCorp's efforts to turn the man into a product. The sleek stealthy redesign of the ED-209 was also welcome in my opinion. If ED-209 was made today it would look like that as opposed to the blocky version we saw in 1987.

Watching the fight between Murphy and the ED-209s I couldn't help but think of another cyborg, Jack "Raiden" from Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid video game franchise. Murphy's battle with the ED-209s was a little reminiscent of Raiden's battle with the very ED-209 esque Gekko cyborg anti-infantry units.

At the end of the day, it is a good movie on it's own. And yes, you can like it and the original 1987 film at the same time.