Repackaged Wisdom with Paul Shirey

“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”

- Murphy (Peter Weller) in Robocop, 1987, directed by Paul Verhoeven

I was born in 1977 in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky was number one at the box office at the time, and a few months later, a little movie called Star Wars would dominate cinemas for the rest of the year, becoming a global phenomenon that continues to this day.

By all accounts, I was a pretty normal American kid growing up. My parents divorced early in my childhood, and I split my years between two households, one in Virginia and one in Southern Illinois. Eventually, I had two brothers to share in my upbringing, as well as a host of friends and acquaintances that filled my time.

My family became a bit nomadic, moving frequently due to my mom and stepdad’s pursuit of new opportunities, living in Florida for a time, then back to Southern Illinois. I would visit my father in the summers, where I hung out with my grandparents while he worked during the day, usually at various reprographics firms, something he’d done for a long time, having never found the will to pursue work as a photographer, which was his early passion.

My grandparents, nicknamed Bucky and Har Har, were fairly standard old folks in many ways. They lived in a modest three-story home in Fairfax, Virginia, surrounded by massive trees in a clustered neighborhood, sitting on the corner of a busy street. My grandmother was Bucky, and I couldn’t tell you why we called her that, as her real name was Laurie. She was a big woman, with old-lady glasses and dyed-red hair with a take-no-shit attitude that I always appreciated, even as a kid.

Har Har was thin and grizzled, with a lower jaw that jutted out and a jokey demeanor befitting of an old man his age. He was an alcoholic who served in WWII as an engineer, and upon entry into the house for the first time each summer, he would bellow from the comfort of his easy chair, “Har-Har, Maties!” as we entered. It became something we expected with delight, and decided that it was only fitting that his mantra would also be his name.

His real name was Paul, and I was later told that it was where my name came from, as well as from my dad’s favorite member of The Beatles, Paul McCartney.

My father, Jon, lived in the upstairs of my grandparents’ house, having never found the footing to really branch out on his own after his divorce from my mom, despite several apartments, townhouses, and failed relationships that always ended in his return to Bucky and Har Har’s. Dad was a dreamer, like me, and was quick to follow his passions in the early stages of fermentation, but quickly lost steam when it came time to dig his heels in and stay the course, making him a lifelong wanderer.

The summers would be a vacation for my brother, Scott, and me. Growing up in the 80s, we spent most of our time riding bikes, reading comics, playing with G.I. Joes and Transformers, watching Nickelodeon, beating the shit out of each other, and snacking.

Lots and lots of snacking.

However, amidst driving Bucky and Har Har nuts with our prepubescent antics, they would indulge our whims with trips to the comic shop and the movies, keeping us well fed on entertainment, as well as sugar, throughout our long summers.

When most people think about or discuss their grandparents, they often harken back to fond memories of going fishing, baking, sewing, or learning a time-honored tradition passed down from generation to generation. Outside of Bucky teaching me to tie a bow on a wrapped present, I can’t think of a single thing they taught me. But what they did do, however inadvertently, was plant the seeds of my movie geekdom.

My brother and I had been to the movies many times since birth. I was even taken to Star Wars in 1977, although you’ll forgive me for not remembering the experience, as I was an infant. I remember E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and the magic of John Williams’ magnificent score tuned to Spielberg’s visual flair. I remember The Goonies, sitting front row because we showed up late, loving every “truffle shuffle” minute of it.

I remembered Back To The Future, always wondering what it meant that the film ended with “To Be Continued…” as we hadn’t yet been weaned on the promise of sequels.

I remembered Rocky IV, experiencing the movie with an audience as if we were at an actual boxing match, the crowd yelling and cheering with each punch. I remembered Teen Wolf, seeing Michael J. Fox become the weirdest-looking werewolf I’d ever seen in a movie that both scared and delighted my young self.

I remembered Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, seeing it with a bunch of my friends on a Saturday afternoon, with one of their older sisters coming along and freaking out at each gross-out scene, causing all of us to chase after her every time she got up and ran out of the theater.

I remembered The Three Amigos! and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, seeing both films multiple times, and loving every revisit more and more. I remember so many films like these that made up a significant chunk of my early cinematic awakening, but it wasn’t until 1987 that it really started to take hold in a new way.

Bucky and Har Har straight-up did not care about ratings. They didn’t even flinch. PG, R, G, whatever, they didn’t care. It was never a consideration for them. But they loved movies. They loved TV. They loved the moving pictures a whole lot, and two chubby grandkids weren’t going to stop them from that enjoyment. So, they did what they had to do. They brought us with them.

On July 17, 1987, the sci-fi action film Robocop was released in theaters. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch-born filmmaker who had previously done the medieval flick Flesh + Blood starring Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as well as a string of films in his native Netherlands. The film starred Peter Weller as the titular character, along with Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, and Kurtwood Smith as the particularly diabolical villain Clarence Boddickeer.

Robocop takes place in the distant future of Detroit, where robotics and military-grade technology are being introduced to fight crime in the deteriorating city, making way for the construction of a “new” Detroit that would seemingly be better than the old one. After a first run at using a robot as a cop malfunctions before even getting on the street, the Robocop program is put into effect, which takes a recently deceased cop (played by Weller) and augments his human body with robotic parts to make him a compliant and effective robotic policeman.

That’s a pretty basic way of explaining Robocop, as anyone who’s seen it knows that it’s got a lot more going on than its sci-fi premise, much of it due to Verhoeven’s sensibilities. Robocop is a subversive, violent, hilarious, and yes, even philosophical film that mirrors what Verhoeven would continue to emulate in later films, which is the absolute absurdity embedded in these violent delights.

At age 10, sitting in a dark theater with Bucky and Har Har, who dragged my brother and me along for a little weekday matinee of Verhoeven’s opus, I was mesmerized.

The shocking, blood-spattered carnage was on a scale I’d never witnessed before. The emotion I felt, watching the movie unfold at a young age, worked me over, as if twisting the wiring in my brain to connect to things I had not yet considered or even dreamed of. My synapses fired like a film reel starting up. It was an awakening.

Robocop was a visual feast, but not just in the sense of special effects. It was a visceral experience that shocked me to the core while invigorating my senses. It was the first time a movie had had that effect on me. In the past, I’d been delightfully entertained, but never shocked. Never tested. Never pushed beyond my PG limits.

Now, let’s take a moment here for those of you who are getting judgy about this. Yeah, I’m talking to you. “No ten-year…

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Have a listen and find out!

Read the full article on Substack: https://arcticninja.substack.com/

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