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Director Paul Verhoeven describes his RoboCop (1987) as “an American Jesus,” but he also notes that “I don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus in any way.” His irreverent satire echoes the “ironic blasphemy” of Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) and other specifically postmodern theological readings of cyborg as saviour. Haraway’s more optimistic outlook is indirectly challenged by John O’Neill, who in his Five Bodies (1985) warns about losing human semiology to a capitalistic mechano-morphic society. Peter Travis (1987) uses O’Neill’s thesis to address the notion of the corpus Christi as the metaphor for the body politic in the late medieval English Corpus Christi pageants, and 1970s and 1980s scholarship on the famous Corpus Christi cycle plays of later medieval England generally focused on the role that having enacted Christ figures in the plays served to reunify a civic society devastated by economic and social turmoil following the Black Death. Verhoeven’s Christological imagery in RoboCop thus builds upon a long tradition of dramatic performances of the life of Christ. In close adherence to the larger contemporary social issues presented in the late medieval dramatic milieu, RoboCop successfully represents a Christ figure whose broken body reflects Regan-era civic weakness and decay while simultaneously possessing a revolutionary salvific power.

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