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:
“One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The doctrine of those who have denied that certainty could be attained at all, has some agreement with my way of proceeding at the first setting out; but they end in being infinitely separated and opposed. For the holders of that doctrine assert simply that nothing can be known; I also assert that not much can be known in nature by the way which is now in use. But then they go on to destroy the authority of the senses and understanding; whereas I proceed to devise helps for the same.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)