Dr. Raymond Cocteau is the secondary antagonist of the 1993 action film Demolition Man. He is the founder and Mayor of the city of San Angeles, a utopian version of Los Angeles established by the year 2032. While Cocteau portrays himself as a benevolent and even saintly leader, he is ultimately motivated by greed and power, viewing those living in poverty as vermin that need to be eradicated. He is portrayed by the late Nigel Hawthorne.
Biography[]
Years after Sgt. John Spartan and Simon Phoenix are frozen, Dr. Cocteau (who is one of the same people who built the CryoPrison) creates what he believes to be the perfect society where crime is virtually non-existent. His paternalistic society forbids anything deemed unhealthy, including fatty foods and sexual intercourse. Even cursing is illegal: in one of the film's running gags, characters (typically Spartan) incur a fine each time he or she swears. Also, tobacco products and alcohol are illegal. All of this is part of the doctor's personal dream that he calls the "Cocteau Plan". With this plan, he's able to establish San Angeles, a clean and pacific version of what used to be the city of Los Angeles.
Reinstated officer John Spartan and his new partner Lenina Huxley face Simon Phoenix at a museum, as both officer and criminal realized that would be the only place in the pacified society where lethal weapons still exist. As Phoenix escapes, he encounters Dr. Cocteau and threatens to kill him, but finds that he is physically unable to do so. Dr. Cocteau suggests that Phoenix kill Edgar Friendly, the leader of a resistance force called the Scraps that refuses to accept Cocteau's society, and agrees to release other prisoners from the CryoPrison to help him. Spartan and Huxley check Phoenix's rehabilitation program and find that he had been "rehabilitated" with training in a number of violent skills and access codes (while Spartan was rehabilitated as a seamstress).
Huxley procures a video from a museum security camera which captured Phoenix's encounter with Dr. Cocteau, and though the audio is undecipherable, Spartan is suspicious when he sees that Phoenix had plenty of time to kill Cocteau. Upon confronting Cocteau, an arrest warrant is placed on Spartan. Despite this, Spartan is able to convince Huxley to help him hunt for Phoenix in the subterranean passages where Edgar Friendly's resistance force lives.
When Spartan encounters the resistance force, he learns they are refugees who have refused to give up their way of life as required by Dr. Cocteau's utopia and have been forced to live in the wastelands of old Los Angeles. Spartan deduces that during his CryoPrison stay Phoenix was given a mental block that prevents him from killing Dr. Cocteau and was fed the suggestion to kill Friendly. This would eliminate the last resistance to the Cocteau regime, something that the pacifist San Angeles Police Department is incapable of doing. Phoenix and his gang attempt to kill both Spartan and Friendly, but Friendly has retained his combat skills, and the two of them and Huxley drive them off.
Death[]
Phoenix returns to Dr. Cocteau with the remaining members of his gang, presumably to lie about stopping Friendly, and unable to harm Cocteau himself due to his rehabilitation, orders his men to kill him instead as Phoenix now saw the foolish pacifist as an evil Mr. Rogers. Cocteau is then shot to death and his corpse is thrown into the fireplace.