Perhaps the funniest joke in Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man – a movie released in 1993 – comes in its very first scene. Its seemingly dystopian Los Angeles, complete with a burning Hollywood sign, is set in the far flung future of... 1996. It almost puts the sci-fi series Max Headroom’s setting of “twenty minutes into the future” to shame. Quickly, we’re introduced to ultra-macho cop John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), facing off against cackling psychopath Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) in an abandoned building. Admittedly the building doesn’t last long. Its fate was sealed by the movie’s title, star, and genre.
Demolition Man’s screenplay initially began with Spartan being awoken after serving time for the deaths of Phoenix’s hostages – frozen in the Californian cryo-penitentiary and unfrozen in 2032. An uncredited pass by Fred Dekker added the prologue. He said, “If you don’t show Kansas, Oz isn’t all that special.” Famously, The Wizard of Oz (1939) shifts from black-and-white to colour to show the difference between its two worlds. Demolition Man goes from grim-and-gritty to squeaky clean instead. In 2032, the composite city of San Angeles has no graffiti. No swearing. The only guns are in a museum and murder is unheard of. It’s a utopia: a term first used by Sir Thomas More back in 1516. It’s from the Greek for “no place”, and initially that’s what it meant – any non-existent society. Over the years, though, it’s come to mean any society that seems like paradise, at least compared to ours.
There’s a reason that cinema is full of dystopias but only a handful of utopias. After all, it’s almost impossible to begin a story with ‘happily ever after’. There’s no inciting incident, no midpoint twist, no ‘save the cat!’, and no twelve-step Hero’s Journey. In Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), for example, a plane crash deposits its survivors in Shangri-La, high in the Tibetan mountains: a place so peaceful that it even prevents its inhabitants from ageing. The drama primarily comes from whether or not anyone would ever want to leave. More recent films like Tomorrowland (2015) and Black Panther (2018) mine conflict from how unfair it is that their technological utopias exist, but are not accessible to everyone. To paraphrase William Gibson’s quote about the future, utopias are already here – they’re just not evenly distributed. Perhaps most iconic is the seeming utopia of the Eloi from George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960). The Eloi do not work, worry, or make war, living carefree lives in the sun. Unfortunately, they’re actually cattle being raised for food by the underground Morlocks. Hollywood’s utopias almost always have a dark secret to help propel the plot.
Demolition Man has its own underground community like the Morlocks, but here they’re actually hiding from the ‘nanny state’. Led by Edgar Friendly, played by Denis Leary, their demands are explained through Leary’s largely improvised rants. He wants to say what he wants, read what he wants, and eat what he wants – even if it’s bad for him. “I’ve seen the future, you know what it is?” he says. “It’s a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pyjamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing ‘I’m an Oscar-Meyer Wiener’.” Friendly’s crimes are fairly limited in Demolition Man. Some graffiti. Some armed grocery shopping. The movie slyly lets you decide whether Friendly is a brave freedom-fighter or just proof that, as Simon Phoenix puts it, “you can’t take away people’s right to be assholes”.
Needing more drama, Demolition Man immediately unfreezes Simon Phoenix to bring back his over-the-top brand of violence, and suddenly a story presents itself: “Simon Phoenix is an old-fashioned criminal. We need an old-fashioned cop.” It has to create a world where John Spartan is not only necessary, but also the movie’s moral centre, and voice of common sense. Frank Miller, the man behind the iconic Dark Knight Returns comic book, once said that the character of Batman “works best in a society that’s gone to hell. That’s the only way he’s ever worked.” Similarly, San Angeles must be threatened by the Joker-like Phoenix to justify Spartan’s collateral damage. This requires the future’s police force to be so unused to violence that they’ve forgotten how to fight. At one point Officer Edwin cries: “We’re police officers! We’re not trained to handle this kind of violence!” They even have to be coached to use the phrase “...or else.” I can only imagine how this gag was received in LA in 1993, two years after Rodney King was savagely beaten by cops, one year after the riots that followed when the officers were acquitted. The trickiest part of talking about Demolition Man is deciding how far its tongue is in its cheek. Is it really saying that American cops need to be more brutal, not less? Should we take that notion any more seriously than, say, its idea that Taco Bell will be the only restaurant left in the country? How about Arnold Swarzenegger going into politics? Is Demolition Man prescient, parody, or both?
Screenwriter Daniel Waters, best known for the pitch-black teen comedy Heathers (1989) and the deeply weird blockbuster Batman Returns (1992), took on Demolition Man as a rewrite job. In an interview with Vulture, Waters explained that the movie had “no attempt at comedy” when he received it. “I only worked on it for two and a half weeks,” he said, “Then I ended up getting first credit on the screenplay because I had changed it [so much].” Waters resists the film being cast as a serious statement. He said, “It’s like, whoa, whoa. What, am I going to be Mr. Anti-Politically- Correct now? No, just having a little fun.” Demolition Man is a hell of a lot of fun – even if some of its predictions about the future now cut a little too close to home. Listing off all the pandemics that led to banning handshakes and replacing them with contact-free high fives plays differently thanks to COVID. Sandra Bullock’s bright-eyed performance as a listless cop longing for adventure, however, still shines. Stallone might get the tough guy one liners (“You’re going to regret this for the rest of your life. Both seconds of it!”) but Bullock gets the big laughs (“Eww, disgusting! You mean... fluid transfer?”)
But when her Officer Huxley is constantly worshipping the past – including displaying buddy-cop action movie posters – Demolition Man starts to feel a little nostalgic. Remember the good ol’ days when cops could crack skulls without consequence? It’s political correctness gone mad! Action movies have long been associated with conservative, even reactionary politics: yearning for the past, opposing all progress. Think of the infamous political poster of Ronald Reagan’s head superimposed on Sylvester Stallone’s body and labelled ‘Ronbo’ after the release of Rambo First Blood: Part Two in 1985; now the internet is awash in AI-generated art of Donald Trump as an ‘80s-style action here. Critic Alison Willmore, looking back at the Demolition Man, claims it has been a “cultural touchpoint” since its release, and “particularly for the right, who’ve seized on its restrictive utopia as a metaphor for government overreach”. Even the lyrics of the end-credits song by Sting mention, among other threatening quips like “I’m a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom”, that he’s also “the sort of thing they ban”.
According to one bystander, Spartan is a “brutish fossil, symbolic of a decayed era, gratefully forgotten”. Stallone is literally a man out of time in Demolition Man; in the real world, Daniel Waters referred to Stallone as “the great caveman”. It’s easy to see the “decayed era” being discussed as the era of action cinema itself. In her seminal book on action films, Spectacular Bodies (1993), Yvonne Tasker writes about how it’s usually taken for granted that action movies are “dumb movies for dumb people”. Some would see watching these films as barely a step removed from Demolition Man’s police officers singing along to TV jingles instead of ‘real’ music. But these films can be surprisingly politically complicated – especially the so-called ‘hardbody’ genre of Stallone, Swarzenegger, and other bodybuilders turned action stars, which paint masculinity in “complex and diverse ways,” according to Tasker. Do bodybuilder heroes just impress us with their physiques, or do their sculpted bodies protest too much, implying their kind of power might actually be in crisis?
There’s a specific fear that often runs through action cinema. It’s in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), when Swarzengger’s hero is told that he’s only imagining his adventures, and actually he’s just helpless, strapped into a chair. It’s in RoboCop 2 (1990), when Murphy’s programming is overloaded with PC directives like “pool opinions before expressing yourself” and he’s suddenly unable to act. In Demolition Man, it’s present in the cryo-suspension itself: the terror of being frozen in place. Action films, obviously, require action above all else. Bodies in motion, flexing and fighting and flying across the screen! But moments of narrative stasis are built into hardbody action films. Every time they slow down to give the audience time to appreciate the muscles on display, the story grinds to a halt. (RoboCop might not be a bodybuilder under his metal parts, but still has the ultimate ‘hard body’.) Stallone is naked as he’s first frozen in Demolition Man; on display, but utterly unable to move. This is the worst punishment imaginable for an action hero. As he sees other frozen villains at the of the movie, it’s an anxiety that occurs to Phoenix, too. He quips: “I hope my butt didn’t look like that.”
Daniel Waters stated that utopias scare him more than dystopias. (Admittedly, he explained that was because “everybody can’t be having a good time” or he absolutely wouldn’t be.) In fiction, though, utopias are much more frightening than dystopias. Dystopias require action to make things better; utopias are always the same, each day as perfect as the last. They exhibit the same stasis that terrifies action movies, but now it’s worldwide instead of limited to the human body. In Demolition Man, Spartan ends up preaching a kind of centrism. He tells Edgar Friendly that he’ll have to get “a lot cleaner” but that the authorities will have to get “a little dirty” too. And if Spartan has to break some things to create that debris, so be at. At least that way there’ll be something to rebuild. It turns out that the tech-bro saying “move fast and break things” is a terrible motto for society – but a great one for action cinema.
