COMMENT | Sock scandal: Out to make a quick buck

COMMENT | In Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 dystopian sci-fi action film "Robocop", a sleazy character who appears in an advertisement on TV screens is seen repeating a good deal by saying, mantra-like, “I’ll buy that for a dollar!”.

For someone my generation - a Generation X’er - this film (not the disappointing third sequel, the forgettable 2014 remake, and the preceding lowbrow TV series) remains a cornerstone of my childhood memories for its dark humour and satirical yet stark presentation of the future.

But of course, as a kid, I was initially enamoured by the presence of Robocop as this cool cyborg - I mimicked his moves and speech so much I actually made a decent impression of it - but as I a grew older, I began to appreciate the nuances of this artwork further.

Since we tend to forget that film is an art form - the youngest of art forms that combine music, literature, theatre, and the visual arts - the test of its relevance is how long the artwork remains in popular consciousness to reveal how current, contemporary, and evergreen its message actually is.

While it’s easy to write off this modern Hollywood classic as just an entertaining sci-fi film, the film is rich in subtext and at its core, it is a critique of modern free-market capitalism in a dystopian Detroit, Michigan - which was once the industrial automotive capital of the US - and how politics and institutions are inherently equally corrupted in such a dystopian ecosystem...