ROBOCOP A n d  Anne  Lewis 

                    Partners in Crimefighting

• Anne Lewis discovers the man inside the machine. She discovers the secret of RoboCop. RoboCop is so confused about his new reality and struggling to recover whatever he can of his identity and feelings. Lewis is not as important to him then, but she will become more important as the movie develops.

• Getting deeper into RoboCop/Murphy feelings, there are some that are so painful he prefers to bury: There’s a scene in the middle of the movie where RoboCop/Murphy goes to visit his former house and finds a picture of him and his family, and destroys it. Maybe it is too painful to see the reality just in front of his eyes. He is mad, overwhelmed, he wants revenge of those that killed him..

• Alex Murphy has nothing left as RoboCop, but he doesn’t admit it Lewis is near him and supports him. This is when he could develop feelings for her without knowing it. If RoboCop eventually realizes those feelings, he would reject them…what kind of relationship could they possibly have?

• She is there when he unmasks himself. “You may not like what you’re going to see” he says.

• Lewis, at that point, is curious about Murphy/RoboCop..she discovered his identity and now he is facing himself in a distorted mirror. She feels compassion for him and doesn’t know what to say. If we consider she witnessed the cruel way Murphy was killed, then she finds out  RoboCop is Alex Murphy, she will eventually try to protect him out of guilt for being unable to save him from Boddicker. Her worrying becomes compassion and her compassion becomes affection. RoboCop is now an important issue in her life, but she doesn’t know it..she is too busy trying to make it up to her deceased partner, the man she saw destroyed by gunshots, and that now that he has been rebuilt as a cyborg she feels she has a second chance.

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• In a scene near the end of the movie, RoboCop shoots some baby jars that Lewis had brought him. “No thank you, Im not hungry” he told her earlier. The meaning of shooting the baby food jars, according to Director Paul Verhoeven:

•  “There’s something going on between these two characters, nevertheless, RoboCop is destroying the jars because that’s probably the relationship they will never have:

• “We are not going to have sex, we are not going to have babies.”   Paul Verhoeven ignored or changed some of the scenes originally written for both characters because Officer Anne Lewis was in danger of getting stereotypical. Also, he “neutered” her, by trying to make her look  “a boy type of girl” with short hair, and hiding her body with her uniform. Once more, she becomes genderless.

• At the end of the movie, Officer Lewis gets shot several times by Boddicker. This happens because she stays at the steel mill to help Murphy with his personal revenge, his only ally. When Lewis is wounded, we see RoboCop/Murphy worried for her for the first time in the movie:

• “Lewis!” he shouts, several times until she stirs, alive.

• “Im a mess!” she says; he replies in a sarcastic tone: “they’ll fix you, they fix everything”   Murphy feels a relief now. Lewis, at that point, is his only friend, …  she can’t die now, she is really important to him. Like it or not, he is living a new life as RoboCop/Murphy, his former life is lost, (though he keeps his memories) and now Anne Lewis is the first important person in his new life.

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