Setting
The film portrays the future in a quirky, satirical manner. Most people speak in an odd formal dialect with sanitized euphemisms, such as "joy-joy." Profanity is outlawed and its use triggers automatically dispensed citation. All restaurants are Taco Bells, which "won the franchise wars" and evolved into fine-dining establishments that serve nouvelle cuisine. Twentieth-century advertising jingles are heard as popular music. Sexual intercourse and french kisses are illegal. In addition, it is stated there are no "non-natural caused deaths" since 2016; when Phoenix murders the CryoPrison warden and officers in order to escape, the police are notified with a "1–8–7" (Murder-Death-Kill), a code none of them can remember. Firearms can only be found at a museum and officers carry stun batons that act like tasers. In terms of police training, virtually none is given towards physical combat. As one policeman states, "We're police officers! We're not trained to handle this kind of violence!" Furthermore, they are highly dependent on handheld computers to instruct them on how to handle volatile situations, rather than using their own judgement.
By 2032, toilet paper has fallen out of use; a set of three seashells is provided in every toilet stall. Though their method of use is left unexplained in the movie and is instead left to the viewer's imagination, Stallone later suggested a possible method in an interview as told to him by one of the film's writers involving extraction with two and scraping with one.
A passing reference is made to the political era, including the U.S. Presidency of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Huxley explains to Spartan that the Constitution had been amended to allow Schwarzenegger to be elected despite his foreign birth. In the 1990s, Schwarzenegger had been mentioned as a potential candidate for political office, although at the time the movie he had an honorary posting as chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, and he did run successfully for Governor of California ten years later. Schwarzenegger and Stallone often make tongue-in-cheek references to one another in their films, notably in Last Action Hero which was released the same year as Demolition Man.
Read more about this topic: Demolition Man
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship—a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.”
—Anthony Storr (b. 1920)
““Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them tonight,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow....””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)