Another central theme centers on defining what is humanity, and how much of Murphy is left in RoboCop. Neumeier wanted to leave audiences asking the question of "what's left" of Murphy, and he described the character's journey as one of coping with his transformation. As an officer, Murphy works for a corporation that insists it owns individuals based on waivers and can do with Murphy's remains as they wish. Even so, Murphy does the right thing and fights against the demands of his corporate masters. Despite his inhuman appearance, RoboCop has a soul, experiences real human fears, and has a core consciousness that makes him more than a machine. In contrast, Brooks Landon argues that Murphy is dead and, while he recalls memories of Murphy's life, RoboCop is not and can never be Murphy and regain enough of his humanity to rejoin his family. Dale Bradley posits that RoboCop is a machine who mistakenly thinks it is Murphy because of its composite parts and only believes it has a human spirit within. An alternate view is that RoboCop's personality is a new construct informed partially by fragments of Murphy's own personality. Slavoj Žižek describes Murphy as a man between death, who is by all measure deceased and simultaneously reanimated with mechanical parts. As he regains his humanity, he transforms from a state of being programmed by others to his former state as a being of desire. Žižek calls this return of the living dead a fundamental fantasy of the masses, the desire to avoid death and take revenge against the living.