20 Movies: Repo Man

After being fired from his job, Otto, an average L.A. punk rocker, lands a gig as a repo man. When a $20,000 bounty on a Chevy Malibu is issued, Otto embarks on a quest through the weird streets of 1980s Los Angeles, only to discover that the Malibu's trunk contains some otherworldly secrets...

I’m back to posting about my 20 most influential movies again.

I took some time off again to be consumed by the general air of malaise and overwhelming existential dread that comes with witnessing the ever-quickening pace of the End of America. It’s hard to set all of that horrible shit aside and then go enjoy things, or be creative and not be constantly aware that this broken Empire is crumbling around us, and all because white Christian Americans were so angry that the people they consider to be less human then them are demanding equal status in society, that they voted for a bunch of Nazis, bigots, assholes, and wholly unqualified dipshits. And they did this because, when it comes down to it, they’d rather just crash the plane directly into the side of the mountain than allow any of that shit to happen.

And now here we are at the end of everything, right? And we’re supposed to keep doing all our stupid every day shit, like “Hey, buddy! It’s Pumpkin Spice Season! Meet you at the Starbucks! Make sure to watch out for the masked gestapo on your way, I hear they’re snatching brown people off the street again!”

But I digress, I’m sure you’re probably aware of all of this.

Anyway…

I’m trying to wrap this whole mini-project up now, mostly because I’ve been thinking about maybe starting a new one, like watching all of the movies from the Trieste Science Fiction Festival that I missed, or maybe watching all of the Matt Helm movies. I don’t know yet. Whatever new mini-project that I decide to go with next, this one started due to a social media game where you choose 20 movies that greatly influenced you, and then post the posters of each one, one per day, for 20 days, no explanation, just the posters. So I did that, but then I decided I wanted to talk about them a little too, so I have been. But now I feel like it’s about time for this whole thing to be done.

And so, here we are with the 16th film on the list…

Written and directed by Alex Cox in his directorial debut, and produced by Michael Nesmith—the tall guy in the beanie in The Monkees, and also the heir to the Liquid Paper fortune–the result is a cult film that is often called one of the best movies of 1984. This is a pretty competitive field too. 1984 was a very big year for a lot Gen X film heads. It was maybe the biggest film year of the 80s too, although to be fair, there would probably be some debate between 1984 and 1987…

1984 was the year of Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, Terminator, Splash, Red Dawn, Gremlins, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, The Karate Kid, Romancing the Stone, Sixteen Candles, Nightmare on Elm Street, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Tank, This Is Spinal Tap, Bachelor Party, Blood Simple, Footloose, Dreamscape, The Philadelphia Experiment, Firestarter, Police Academy, Cloak & Dagger, The Last Starfighter, Muppets Take Manhattan, Purple Rain, Dune, Revenge of the Nerds, NeverEnding Story, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Conan the Destroyer, Cannonball Run II, Top Secret, Greystoke the Legend of Tarzan, Children of the Corn, Streets of Fire, Beat Street, Starman, Night of the Comet, Oh God! You Devil, Breaking, and of course, the movie that launched a million sequel title jokes… Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

1984 was also when my aunt lived in a fancy loft in downtown Los Angeles near Little Tokyo, and it was like a fortress. Outside was where Hollywood would often film its car chases, and since I knew the area, it was always easy to see in movies when they were just driving in big circles in that neighborhood, careening past the same warehouses, bouncing over the same train tracks, zooming across the same bridges or through that one tunnel, and racing along the long stretches of homeless camps. Meanwhile, inside the loft was where David Fincher directed Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love” and Arnold Schwarzenegger directed Christmas in Connecticut.

So while this meant, at least as far as the hallways of my various podunk midwestern schools were concerned, that I was only separated from Hollywood by a mere six degrees, it actually meant, when I was visiting, that there was no where to go outside and play.

On top of that, my aunt didn’t have cable either, and back in the 1980s, daytime network tv was an absolute wasteland of rerun trash during the doldrums of the mid-afternoon, and there were only so many times a person could watch Combat or The Flying Nun or Leave it Beaver before their brains melted from the inanity. So, no outside, no tv, no toys, rattling around in the cloistered, air-conditioned, concrete confines of a large and arty LA warehouse loft? This meant that, if there wasn’t a scheduled activity, usually due to the adults having to work or whatever, there was little available with which to fill my time. To make matters even worse for an idle and bored twelve year old, my aunt had a Betamax VCR too, not VHS, the legandary loser of the VCR Format Wars. And this meant, whenever we went to the video store, we could only pick from the meagerly stocked shelves in the small and ever-shrinking Betamax section, all while gazing forlornly over at the veritable cornucopia of ninja and/or barbarian movies readily available in the VHS section, which was the majority of the store.

And then... the cherry on top? The strangest part of all of this? My aunt's personal library of films only consisted of one single movie.

It was Repo Man.

Why did she own this particular film and only this particular film? I don't know, but it was just leaning against the side of her TV on the tv stand, untouched and a little dusty, almost as if it had always been there, and always would be. And do you want to know the weirdest (and perhaps the most fitting) part of this whole story? To this day, my aunt claims that she never owned Repo Man, and also, that she has actually never seen it. Weird, huh? No explanation. No point in looking for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness...

Set in a sunbaked and dirty Los Angeles, far from the glitter, glamour, and palm trees of Hollywood, some of which was even filmed outside of the very building I was in when I watched it for the first time, Repo Man is about a teenage punk who becomes a repo man and gets caught up in the pursuit of a mysterious Chevrolet Malibu with a pair dead extraterrestrials in its trunk.

I put off watching it for a while, because the box didn't spoil the sci-fi/aliens part, plus, it didn’t seem to involve any ninjas or barbarians, so I wasn’t interested. But when I finally did watch it...

It was incredible.

It was more than incredible. It was new. It was different. It was absolutely unconvential to me. It barely made any sense to me at the time either, but it was so strangely alluring. It felt dangerous too, almost like I maybe wasn't supposed to be watching it, even though there's no nudity, and not much in the way of violence, at least not like the genre films I usually watched. But it was still so cool. It went to seedy clubs. It walked around the nighttime city streets with abandon. It said fuck you to old people and authority figures.

I loved it.

It felt like watching freedom in a way I couldn't quite quantify, like you could just go off and be, and have a life of your own. I watched it twice during that visit. And after I went home, the hazy memories of it stuck with me. I thought about it a lot. But I couldn't really share it, because it was too hard to desrcibe, but it is the reason why I got my ear pierced as a kid, and why I worse a cross earring too. It wasn’t until years later that I was finally able to rewatch it again, during college, I think, in a city that had a real video store.

I still loved it.

So, anyway…

In the Mojave Desert, a policeman pulls over a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu. Driven by an eyepatch wearing weirdo, the policeman gets suspicious, and despite warnings not to, he opens the Malibu’s trunk. He is instantly vaporized in a blinding flash of white light, leaving only his smoking boots behind.

Meanwhile, Otto is a young punk rocker in L.A., freshly fired from his job as a supermarket stock clerk. Then his girlfriend leaves him for his best friend. Then his ex-hippy burnout parents let him know that they have donated his college fund to a televangelist.

Everything sucks.

This is when Otto meets Bud, who offers him $25 to drive his other car out of a bad neighborhood for him. It's supposedly for his wife, who's pregnant and could drop at any minute. Otto agrees, and after following Bud in the car to the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, he realizes that not only does Bud not have a wife, but he is also a repo man.

After a brief bit of “fuck you,” Otto decides to accept a job there too.

While repossessing a Cadillac, Otto meets Leila and gives her a ride to her workplace, the United Fruitcake Outlet, where he hopes to get a blowjob, but is denied. The United Fruitcake Outlet turns out to be a front for a UFO believers organization, and Leila shows Otto some pictures of dead aliens, telling him that not only are the bodies in the trunk of a Chevy Malibu being driven by a scientist fleeing a secret government base, but they are exuding a dangerous amount of radiation.

Soon after, Helping Hand is alerted t0 a $20,000 bounty for the Malibu, and the hunt is on. Every repo man in the city is looking for this car.

The eyepatch-wearing scientist arrives in L.A. in the Malibu, but his meeting with his UFO compatriots at the United Fruitcake Outlet is interrupted by Men in Black, who are led by a woman with a metal hand.

Unsure what to do next, the scientist pulls into a gas station to make a call. While he’s doing this, a pair of Helping Hand's chief rivals, the Rodriguez brothers, drive off in the Malibu.

But when the Rodriguez Brothers stop to cool down with some sodas, because the car's trunk is putting out so much heat, the Malibu is stolen by Otto’s ex-girlfriend, Debbie, his ex-best friend, Duke, and also Archie, three L.A. punk rockers who are out on the town and doing crimes.

After a brief Butthole Surfers break, the scientist happens to stumble across the punks, and tricks them into opening the Malibu’s trunk, burning Dukie-wookie’s little hand, and vaporizing Archie. Debbie and Duke run off, choosing to go and do some other crimes, like getting sushi and not paying.

The Malibu continues to pass through multiple hands, before finally ending up in the Helping Hand’s lot again, but now it's glowing bright green. All of the various groups trying to acquire the car end up there, the various repo men, the Men in Black, the Fruitcake Outlet, even the televangelist, but anyone who tries to approach the Malibu bursts into flames.

Only Miller, the mechanic at Helping Hand, is able to enter the car. Otto rejects Leila’s offer of a relationship and instead joins Miller, and the two then fly away in the Malibu, as Miller reminds Otto...

"The life of a repo man is always intense."

“I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.”

Writer/Director Alex Cox says that Repo Man is about “nuclear war and the demented society that contemplated the possibility thereof.” And I love it when creators say crazy nonsense shit like that. It reminds me of the time Jim Hosking was introducing his new film as “the most mainstream romantic comedy that I am capable of making,” and the movie was An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn. Amazing.

Repo Man is an imminently quotable, incredibly funny satire about disaffected youths, the search for meaning in a humdrum life, and the abject hollowness of consumerism in the wasteland that was Reagan’s America. It‘s set in an L.A. that looks like a ghost town, a near-empty and seemingly endless expanse of concrete steaming beneath a brittle blue sky during the day, but is damp with rain-slick streets at night. It’s a place where everyone has their own personal philosophies ready to share on why the world they live in, the world they’re all stuck in, is so fucked up, and they are all completely full of shit, nothing but ordinary fucking people with nothing to do but go through the motions.

Except maybe for Miller.

Miller: “A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.”

Otto: “You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?”

Best of all, Otto isn’t depicted as some too cool, insightful anti-establishment warrior poet who sees the world as it truly is. Despite all his punk rocker bullshit, he’s just a white suburban punk too, just like everybody else. But while the only way out of this shitty world, the only way to get away from all the ordinary fucking people, is in a literal space ship, Repo Man is a joyous film that skewers a very cynical world, and it does so without being cynical itself.

“Repo man’s got all night. Every night!”

All of its weird sci-fi aspects aside, this is why I prefer Repo Man to films like its distant cousin Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia, which was released in 1983, just the year before. Standing the two together, Repo Man seems almost like a refutation of Suburbia’s more po-faced self-seriousness and often naked exploitation. Repo Man isn‘t a movie about a movement, or a stillborn suburban revolution, and instead it portrays its punk rock lifestyle as just part of the fabric of the city, and as a result, feels more genuine because that. That sounds strange, I know. Repo Man involves dead aliens and flying Malibus, which is silly nonsense, but at least it doesn’t end in a telegraphed and manipulative faux tragedy, all in a cheap attempt to illustrate the dangers that comes when groups refuse to understand each other, even though they're all just people trying to make it in this uncaring world, and then pass that off as if it's some deep insight. Not to randomly crap on Suburbia or anything, but the ending of that film still annoys the shit out of me.

But I digress…

“A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.”

Repo Man also features a soundtrack of music by punk icons like the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, Iggy Pop, and of course, The Butthole Surfers, so that’s great.

In the end, this is the definition of a cult classic movie.

It’s got that thing about it, that mix of a skewed point of view, a weird idea, and a wild presentation, all the stuff that so many “indie” film makers work too hard to replicate on purpose. And then they end up falling so far short it’s laughable—I’m looking at you, Hobo With A Shotgun—because the truth is, you can’t set out and make a cult classic. You can’t make a true midnight movie on purpose, and if you try, you‘re only going to end up with garbage. Cult classic just are what they are, and you know it when you see it.

And Repo Man is the real deal.

It’s a weird, unconventional, irreverent little film, something that clearly didn’t cost much, takes a ton of risks and doesn’t care, and yet still works. And this is all while its cast with a bunch of “Hey, it’s that one guy” actors, including their king, Harry Dean Stanton, as well as a very young Emilio Estevez two full years before he became a star. It’s just a super cool film, the likes of which rarely comes along, the kind of movie you randomly comes across on a shelf somewhere, and when you sit down and watch it, it opens new doors in your mind. In short, movies like Repo Man is why you watch movies in the first place.

Even better, watching it now, all these years later, while this film is definitely a product of its time, and is very much tied to Los Angeles in the 80s, it doesn’t feel dated at all.

It’s still super cool.

“Never broke into a car, never hot-wired a car. Never broke into a truck. I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, nor through inaction let the personal contents thereof come to harm. That's what I call the Repo Code, kid!”