Detroit, MI: Late last week, the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in federal court. Yes, the entire city.
Through decades of alleged funds mismanagement and job, population, and revenue stream loss, the city looks to clean approximately $18.5-$20 billion in debt and contractual settlement from its slate. The acceptance of the filing by a judge would lead to dispersing resources to claimants of debt owed by the city. The idea that streets, parks, buildings, and local law enforcement may be dispersed as settlement resources is still unknown.
What is known, however, is that the city of Detroit will not be able to be bought for a mere dollar.
“Ever since Detroit filed for bankruptcy, the internet has been saturated with ‘I’d buy that for a dollar’ quotes,” stated internet meme analyst Wayne Richardson. “It’s just stupid. Almost anyone would buy Detroit for a dollar. The question is, how high would people go beyond a dollar?”
The quote comes from Bixby Snyder (played by S.D. Nemeth), the mustachioed host of the sex comedy show It’s Not My Problem featured in the movie RoboCop.
The setting of the movie RoboCop, coincidentally, is the city of Detroit, downtrodden by financial crisis and crime. The city, in order to protect itself from complete and utter collage, enters into a contract with the private corporation OCP, which takes over the city’s law enforcement. The ulterior motives of OCP is to eradicate the city of its inhabitants to make way for a selective utopia, “Delta City.” Even more coincidentally is that the governor of the state of Michigan is named Rick Snyder.
The correlation between the movie RoboCop and Detroit’s current crisis becomes even more coincidental with the knowledge that Columbia Pictures, associated with MGM, will be releasing a remake of RoboCop in early 2014. While it is highly unlikely that the film industry could be implicated in Detroit’s collapse in order to increase exposure for the film, it is not implausible considering recent developments in guerilla marketing.
“The advertising and public relations industry has come a long, long way from print ads and commercials,” explained Shelia Burbank, social media analyst. “We’ve seen campaigns similar to The Blair Witch Project where people thought events leading up to the film were real. We’ve turned the awareness of causes into its own industry with rubber bracelets. Instigate the decline of a city to hype a movie? Why not?”