“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”
— Thomas Jefferson
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“The spirit of enterprise, which characterizes the commercial part of America, has left no occasion of displaying itself unimproved.”
— Alexander Hamilton
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“Excuse me, I have to go. Somewhere there is a crime happening.”
— Robocop
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I had always intended for the second installment of this oldest and most waited-for (if not awaited) Overthinking It series to be about a character I have often described as the Quintessential American Tragic Hero: Alex Murphy, a.k.a. Robocop from the truly excellent Paul Verhoeven film of the same name. Then, of course, other things happened.
Well, this is VerhOeverthinking It week, and as Darren Aronofsky will hopefully showcase for us Robocop’s durability — both as a cinematic subject and as a cybernetic apparatus — so will I persevere in hewing to one of my earliest intentions on this site.
Let us venture into the glory, the flaws, the fall and the suffering of that bechromed bulwark of semivoluntary justice — the American who is Half Jeffersonian, Half Hamiltonian, All Cop.
Do you want to learn more? Well, dead or alive, you are coming with me –
This time around, I don’t think I’ll be able to give our next candidate quite the respect and time it deserves.
It is the most important film about race in America made yet in this young century.
And perhaps I will return to it in the future in even more depth, because it certainly deserves it.
Of course, I’m taking about Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
Consider this the Cliff’s Notes – my short, simple attempt at tackling this cultural touchstone. And of course you choose to use the Cliff’s Notes, because you fail to understand how the competitive landscape of being young in America actually works.
Or perhaps because you know it all too well.
Learn more about that greatest story of the 2000s, the rise of Asia and the Asian-American, and what this remarkable little comedy has to say about it, after the jump –
