How One of My Favorite Movies, Demolition Man, Explains Trump’s America

There is a tendency in much amateur criticism to find exactly the societal critique that one is looking for within a particular cultural artifact that the author already adores. It reveals less about the artifact—it is difficult to critically evaluate something that one has already decided to use instrumentally—than it does about the author.

So, this is that.

Twenty-four years ago, the blockbuster Demolition Man was released to middling reviews and indifferent box-office performance. It was the debut feature for its director, Marco Brambilla, and he would be out of Hollywood for good after his sophomore film, the Alicia Silverstone vehicle Excess Baggage, received no better reception. (He now makes multimedia art installations. One of his highest-profile projects, Sync, was a montage of clips from pornographic films.) Cowriter Robert Reneau never made another movie.

The critical pans of Demolition Man seemed to miss the fact that it was not merely a dumb action movie like so many of its peers, but that the rockheaded idiocy of its steroidal Stallone hero was actually in service a pretty sharp satire of the consumerism and moral lassitude of the Clinton era.

(Contemporary critics also frequently missed the satirical edge of Starship Troopers, another of my favorite movies, and one that I’ll probably eventually try to shoehorn into a critique of jingoist militarism in American politics.)

Now that we’re living in a time-warp back to the culture wars of the ’90s as pop icons of twenty and thirty years ago relitigate the bitterest fights of years past, it may be worth digging it up as another semi-forgotten artifact of the era, because the culture it satirizes is again ascendant.

In retrospect, the satire at the heart of Demolition Man shouldn’t have been that tough to spot. The movie wears its influences on its sleeve. Sandra Bullock’s character, police officer Lenina Huxley, takes her name from Lenina Crowne, the main character of Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian novel Brave New World.

Demolition Man is set in a postapocalyptic Southern California megalopolis called San Angeles in which a B.F. Skinneresque social planner played by Nigel Hawthorne has established a strict moral order which has created a crimeless city with an unarmed police force that has literally nothing to do.

As Lenina Huxley explains:

Smoking is not good for you, and it’s been deemed that anything not good for you is bad; hence, illegal. Alcohol, caffeine, contact sports, meat… bad language, chocolate, gasoline, uneducational toys, and anything spicy. Abortion is also illegal, but then again, so is pregnancy, if you don’t have a license.

The only blight on the candy-colored metropolis is a literally underground underclass who cannot afford to live in Cocteau’s planned community, or to follow the rules. Having seen their city riven by the Rodney King riots and then literally destroyed by a monumental earthquake and STD pandemic, aboveground Angelenos are only too happy to accept these strictures as the price of a safe society. The bien-pensant elite are literally disgusted by the thought of breaking the code.

Stallone is there because a cackling supercriminal played by Wesley Snipes has broken out of cryostasis and begun to terrorize the city once more, and the unprepared peace officers have no idea how to take down bad guys. So, destructive supercop Stallone is unfrozen as well. He got his nickname from his penchant for leaving a trail of collateral damage in his wake, and a particularly massive explosion in the first scene is what resulted in his cryonic imprisonment. He becomes the eyes of the audience as we learn how society has changed.

Since at least 1985, when media theorist Neil Postman published his classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, it has become commonplace to note that our decadent society is much closer to a Huxleyan dystopia than it is to an Orwellian one. To wit, we are cowed by carrots rather than sticks. Instant gratification, permanent torpor.

In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother keeps the masses in line through a terrifying surveillance state in which punishments are swift and unutterable. By contrast, in Brave New World, the World Controllers are able to accomplish the same merely by ensuring ample access to sex and drugs.

(For that matter, in the dystopian YA trilogy The Hunger Games, protagonist Katniss Everdeen is explicitly told that her country, Panem, takes its name from the Latin “panem et circenses,” “bread and circuses,” two chief means by which Roman autocrats kept their subjects docile. Of course, The Hunger Games is Orwellian because it focuses on the working class. If it focused on the residents of the Capital, it would have been Huxleyan.)

Unlike in Huxley’s world, these excellent sheep placate themselves without even needing physical sex. Most physical contact is banned altogether, which is why, in one of the movie’s best visual gags, high-fives are replaced by a gesture in which two people aim their hands at each other, stop a few inches apart, and then mime a circular window-washing routine.

When Bullock’s character invites Stallone back to her apartment for an amorous encounter, she hands him a VR headset and puts one on herself, then begins sending lusty thoughts and naked pictures of herself into his mind’s eye. It’s like inviting someone back to your apartment for sexting… and it frankly doesn’t feel terribly different from the way that most teenagers nowadays first encounter sex.

There’s a lot to like about this future: city planners have eliminated virtually all disease and violent crime. It is the picture of a safe society, one which has completed the transaction of liberty for security and rests comfortable in the certainty that the bargain was a fair one. As Stallone’s jailer explains, “Things don’t happen anymore! We’ve taken care of all that!”

The greatest difference between an Orwellian dystopia and a Huxleyan dystopia is that in Orwell, the people are too terrified to resist, while in Huxley, the people blithely welcome their subjugation. Which, of course, brings us to Donald Trump.

Demolition Man came out a month before my tenth birthday, and thank God that it did. It is very much a movie of its time — the early ’90s — with a wisecracking kung-fu kicking bad guy, a boatload of gratuitous explosions, a comic relief character played by Rob Schneider, a huge product tie-in with Taco Bell, and a title lifted from a song by Sting and the Police.

When I first saw it, I loved the explosions, I laughed at the jokes, and I completely missed the connection to Sting and probably most of the satire. Just like today’s Marvel movies for the ten-year-olds of today, it was quite literally made for me.

I can’t remember who said it, but there’s a notion that your favorite music for the rest of your life is the music that was on the radio when you were 12. Considering the amount of grunge I still listen to and action movies from the ’90s I still watch, that’s definitely true for me.

Nostalgia for the 1990s is a strange thing: it was only two decades ago, and yet it feels a lifetime away, part of the September 10th world that we all yearn to return to. Those were the twin undercurrents of the election: a promise to restore the uncomplicated prosperity of the 1990s, when there was only one superpower and its economy was booming, and a promise to undo all of the horrors unleashed on September 11th and return to a state of fetal normalcy. When I listen to Nirvana or watch Demolition Man, I can just take a quick vacation back to when I was a child, when everything was so much simpler.

But it isn't just escapism. The film toes a fine line: it is a dumb movie with a sharp message. It embeds its critique of mindless consumerism within a blockbuster Stallone action movie, the very paragon of what is mindlessly consumed.

Not many things manage simultaneously to be a commentary on their form while also serving as a fine example of their form. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful, like The Producers (a musical parodying musicals), Scream (a horror movie deconstructing horror movies), and The Princess Bride (a romantic adventure book and movie that lovingly sent up romantic adventures).

There are a number of notable failures. In 1993, the same year as Demolition Man was released, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in one of the biggest turkeys of his career, Last Action Hero, which tried but miserably failed to do for action movies what Scream would do for horror films just a few years later. What Demolition Man did wasn’t easy. Indeed, it was so subtle that many moviegoers and many critics missed it.

(I was thinking about noting that many experts also missed the signs pointing to a possible Trump victory, but tenuous as the rest of my arguments in this piece may be, I realized that’s probably still a bit much.)

At the end of Demolition Man, Stallone kills his archnemesis Wesley Snipes shortly after Snipes has killed Hawthorne, the benevolent dictator of SoCal. Absent their autarch, the survivors are in disarray. Stallone steps into the breach and plants a huge Hollywood kiss on Lenina Huxley, the first physical contact she’s ever experienced. Meanwhile, Huxley’s best friend in the police department, played by Benjamin Bratt, has decided to join the underground outlaws and their leader, Denis Leary. Clearly, a lot of laws are about to go unenforced.

Since it’s a dystopia, it’s a happy ending: anything is better than a repressive nightmare where nothing is permitted and all is forbidden. But in the real world, it’s hard to cheer the collapse of the social order, even if that social order is abhorrent. Chaos is nearly always worse than stability, as we learned on September 12, and almost every day since. I’ve always believed in the importance of incremental change, and the best way forward is to raise consciousness and increase awareness.

As far as I’m concerned, rewatching Demolition Man is a good first step.