ROBOCOP And Anne Lewis
Partners in Crimefighting
So,
in the movie the relationship between the two main characters is not clear,
so combining Neumeier script with the thoughts of Verhoeven, the result
is very interesting:
They
are partners, friends, a relationship based of mutual support. There could be
something between them because circumstances make them bond.
Nevertheless
they’re police officers, with a high sense of duty: they can’t get so close,
feelings are not convenient in dangerous situations.
Anne
Lewis is a woman whom
is never shown as a woman with a personal life. We don’t know anything about
her, she is surely single and we never see her a male companion.
Painful
memories he prefers to bury, but at the same time he needs to have those
memories stored in his mind, because he feels he is recovering a part of the
human dignity that was taken away.
Anne Lewis is probably the most important person in RoboCop´s life (not in Murphys life). She was there when he unmasked himself and stood by him when he had no other friend left.
So,
are they in love or not?
That
is hard to answer. That’s probably the most appealing element of the
relationship of these two characters; a relationship can be suggested, but never
shown..there are so many obstacles between them. At the end they would probably
remain as friends. RoboCop can easily hide in his machine side to protect them
both from his feelings for her and Lewis would find a male companion somewhere
else..but the bond as friends won’t disappear.
On
the other hand if this is a weird a love story it is probably destined to an
unhappy ending and could never be fulfilled. It is more like an accident, a love
story that wasn’t meant to be. That’s probably what the writers and director
wanted to finally show: they were meant to be partners, friends, but if feelings
do come after that would be purely accidental. Life is tricky.
But
if they accidentally developed feelings, it would demonstrate once again that
love is in the end the connection of souls. People today are so materialist that
passion and our devotion to beauty can be easily be confused with love. Lets
remember beauty is just a series of artificially generated concepts society
recognizes and worships. We are blind in that sense..
Some interesting quotes about RoboCop and Lewis´s relationship:
“The
character of the female police officer Lewis played by Nancy Allen was already
established from the beginning. So there was not much I could add to that. I was
aware of the fact that a romantic erotic or sexual relationship between her and
Peter Weller´s RoboCop would be silly from a sexual point of view. You
couldn’t imagine how the hell they would perform the act. Any such concept
would have dangerously unbalanced the narrative…We emphasized her partnership
with Weller instead of a romantic sexual relationship”
-Director Paul Verhoeven, in the interview Going Dutch, 1988
"She is in love with Murphy; I think she is in love with RoboCop, but it´s the love of a partner...it´s almost like the love of a wife, without the sexual aspect, it is something mental and much deeper, they have an spiritual connection...
I don´t know how things could go sexually speaking, but I think that spiritually and emotionally, their relationship is open to new developments, they are so attached to each other".
-Actress Nancy Allen, in the interview PoliceWoman, 1990
"RoboCop does not find his humanity on his own: he has help. Lewis´ role in RoboCop´s reclamation of his human identity is one that I have termed the "midwife". Every cyborg whose quest is to find his or her human identity has such a midwife...The enabling agent that catapults the cyborg hero into humanity is always an intimate connection with a human being. The cyborg shows us that the quality we call humanity is integrally tied to community. Further we see that machines lack such community and connection, which is why the cyborg hero is positioned in opposition to technology, though he or she is alive because of it. This apparent incongruity simply mirrors reality. Technology itself is extremely contradictory in its effects: it has the amazing ability to connect people, while simultaneously serving to isolate them"
-Taken from: The loneliness of cyborgs, by Michele Lloyd
"It´s a suggested relationship, not explicit, between Murphy and the character of Lewis, the policewoman, a relationship that will be established because of the artifice of vision, because the targeting system of the cyborg will be corrected by Lewis´s vision in one of the final scenes of the movie, RoboCop´s sexuality will be centered in a shared vision then: "to see with the same eyes, even though we are two" it´s an ethereal sexuality that goes beyond the deep limitations of his metallic armor"
-Translated from Dr. I.R. Cunill´s essay "The encounter of the sense in the audio visual body" "El encuentro del sentido en el cuerpo audiovisual"
You have the last word on this topic...
Some sources:
http://www.cica.es/aliens/gittcus/inma.html The encounter of the sense in the audio visual body
http://home.fuse.net/mllwyd/cyborgs2.html The loneliness of cyborgs
