Cobra .. or Stallones Version of Beverly Hills Cop.

What is it about?

Stallone gets into his son’s wardrobe to dress up as a tough cop and stroll around dark Los Angeles to catch the Night Slasher. Yeah, and there is Brigitte Nielsen, because .. yeah, she is in it, doing things, ehm, yeah.

---

What is it really about?

L. A. 1986. When a city is ruled by outlaws, a cop has to become the law himself. His name: Cobretti, or in short:

Cobra.

He is the medicine for the disease called crime. And the city is a sick juggernaut that can only be cured by him … that must be cleansed by him. Because when Cobra judges, the murderers don’t end up in the dock, but six feet underground. Cobra wields his judge’s gavel like no other to knock down the scum and with his grenade-strong paragraphs he sends them straight to hell.

Cobra.

His latest case: The Night Slasher and his henchmen. Wearing masks and wielding knives, they prowl the nightshade, slashing innocent citizens with relish. Only the permed face Ingrid (Brigitte Nielsen) was able to escape them before her hair was cut short. She also has a secret: she is an Amazon-like barbarian because she dips her chips in ketchup until the potato sticks look like blood-stained fingers. Despite this and her marginal acting skills, she is protected by

Cobra.

He, the empathetic creature with the concrete face. He may hide his face behind sunglasses (like criminals hide behind masks), he may also hide his identity under leather gloves (like burglars do) and behind his irresistible coolness, and yes, he may be as ruthless as that and share cold slices of pizza with scissors, but he can’t hide his true self forever.

Cobra.

For just as a cobra follows the flute of its snake charmer, Cobra dances to the tune of crime, for without crime his law would be a crime against humanity – only with the crime of others does he find legitimization for his own crimes.

Cobra.

And not only that. In truth, he is also a prepubescent boy, disguised as a childishly fantasized image of an adult. Although women lie at his feet, outside of his gunfights he meets them with a childlike innocence and shame. He can only return a kiss fleetingly if he can flee to his Colt immediately afterwards. If only to scrub the phallic gun barrel. And when Cobra drives off with Ingrid on a motorcycle, I’m sure that he really only drives her home to drop her off at the front door without sipping a coffee with her upstairs.

Cobra.

The world in which he exists at all is a hypermasculine boys’ fantasy, imagined at an age when boys chase each other as cops and robbers and shoot each other with foam bullets, at an age when girls are bad; at an age when one internalizes one’s own physical weakness in relation to men, who are stronger and more powerful, in a completely exaggerated way. A phantasm that exaggerates unattainable (thick biceps, permanently available fast food) or even forbidden (heavy guns, fast cars) image elements for boys. In which there are simply no girls, because in this game called crime and street only the archaic solutions – namely physical strength and materialism instead of words – count.

Cobra.

But because it’s a boy’s fantasy, it’s also a trip back to childhood for the grown men. A time when not everything was serious and hypercritical. A time when it didn’t matter whether you had to wear a tie at a job interview or were allowed to hand over a bouquet of lilies at a funeral. A time when everything seemed so carefree because any repercussions only lasted until the end of the two-week house arrest. A time when solutions were simple – precisely because the problems were so simple.

Cobra.

See Sylvester Stallone as Cobra and Brigitte Nielsen as Ingrid. In the incomparable 80s cult film by George Pan Cosmatos. With an absolutely irony-free screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, which – mainly because it is so unironic – throws the man back into being a boy. With cool, memorable oneliners, comic-like characters, countless explosions and gunfights. A movie that was unfortunately cut up by the real night slasher, the MPAA, because the original version of the movie was too brutal and self-righteous. Nevertheless, the movie still offers incredible entertainment potential, especially thanks to the handmade action and a man, his fat gun and cool sayings as a universal solution for everything that shakes law and order, in a way that could only be shown on the big screen with a serious face in the 80s and 90s.

---

Conclusion

Feverish boys dream, full of Action. Action! ACTION!

---

Facts

---

What is Stranger’s Gaze?

The Stranger’s Gaze is a literary fever dream that is sensualized through various media — primarily cinema, which I hold in high esteem. Based on the distinctions between male and female gaze, the focus is shifted through a crack in a destroyed lens, in the hope of obtaining an unaccustomed, a strange gaze.