Repo Man: Ordinary effing people
The punk, sci-fi comedy got much of the Reagan-era underbelly right, while serving as a vehicle for 80s atomic anxiety.
I grew up in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a leafy, orderly suburb and quite the respectable place. That means that the chances of me embracing the punk movement were somewhere around the odds of finding life on Venus. Not only was conformity the order of the day, there was little about me that was especially rebellious. There was nothing much to push against. Also, I was about as self-aware as a bullfrog.
Punk never really penetrated our world. I’m sure there were kids who were fans of the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Black Flag and the Clash, but their numbers paled into comparison to those who drew “THE WALL” on their denim notebook covers. I suspect most of the people were like me, however, listening to Top 40 radio without too many stray thoughts colliding. Before punk was ever really on my radar, it had been supplanted by so-called New Wave bands that popped up on the early MTV. I had no idea what I had missed.1
It was only years later that I could appreciate the energy of the movement, and I did so, it must be said, without becoming much of an acolyte of the music. For me, it was something more to admire from afar than something I could live within. I was too far gone for that. I understood the politics more than I did the culture or the performance aspect of it all. Anti-corporate, anti-consumer, anti-government, a middle-finger to everything, a shriek of anger and frustration at a world that viewed its adherents as disposable. That I I understood, even if I couldn’t always articulate it. Punk was organic, born of circumstance. It was alive.
Nihilism. Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski famously had no use for it. “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.” Nihilism is all dead-ends and wrong turns. It is the place we go where hope is folly. In that way, it’s both frightening and magnetic.
While punk had its origins in the U.K. and U.S. amidst liberal governments who were grappling with the eroding middle class, widespread unemployment and rampant inflation, it found its full hardcore flower when the twin conservative regimes of first Margaret Thatcher and then Ronald Reagan took hold. Thatcher and Reagan threw the conflict into sharp relief. Every narrative needs its Vader.
That was the context into which Repo Man was filmed, a time in the early 1980s in the United States when Reagan seemed to dragging the country into a recession while gearing up for a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets, when factory jobs were vanishing, America seemed broken and annihilation appeared more and more likely to be the ultimate exit ramp. That explains the film’s dark humor, its whistling-to-the-gallows spirit. A cloud of doom hangs over the entire movie from its opening sequence — but you might as well go out your own way.
The story: Young Los Angeles punk Otto (Emilio Estevez) is fired from his nowhere supermarket job and ends up being recruited by a veteran repossession agent Bud (the redoubtable Harry Dean Stanton) to liberate cars back from their deadbeat owners. At first, Otto’s politics won’t allow for it. He sees the repo men as bottom-feeders. But some quick cash changes his mind. Otto may be a clueless product of the punk scene, but he shows he can be a Reagan-era capitalist as well. His parents help seal his transformation. Ex-hippies, sitting in their surburban home smoking pot, they hand his college money away to a televangelist for the purpose of sending bibles to El Salvador.2
As this is going on, a mysterious Chevy Malibu is making its way to L.A. from Los Alamos, New Mexico with some kind of glowing cargo in its trunk that vaporizes anyone who dares look at it. Atomic horror had come to the 1980s. Soon enough, a bounty is placed on the car, giving the repo men an incentive to chase it. But U.S. government agents — including a woman with a metal hand — want it too. Otto is swept into a midnight world of punk bands, street thugs, shadowy operatives and sudden violence, all set in the bowels of Los Angeles, its glamorous lines nowhere in sight.3
The characters in Repo Man are, in a way, broadly drawn grotesques, but they’re also forgotten, the people the go-go 80s decided didn’t matter. Otto lives in a world where people eat generic food and drink generic beer from white cans and where life is entirely what you make it. The repo men like it that way. “Ordinary fucking people,” Harry Dean Stanton’s Bud sneers at one point at a couple of L.A. Yuppies. “I hate em.”
Repo Man was directed by an English filmmaker, Alex Cox, who may have had a clearer view of America at that point than we Americans did. He clearly saw a country on the razor’s edge. A telling sign: the film’s central conceit, the atomic whatsit in the Mailbu trunk, is a direct homage to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which we covered earlier in Nuclear Theater and which also involved the pursuit of an instrument of apocalypse.
Cox, however, seemed to be suggesting the 80s was an even darker twin of the 1950s, one with more and more people scattered to the fringe. It’s likely no accident that Otto the punk looks an awful like James Dean.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Repo Man is rentable on the major platforms. I bought it from Amazon for five bucks. Highly recommended. The soundtrack alone, which features a title track by Iggy Pop, is worth it.
THANKS TO: My longtime friend and former colleague Sam Loewenberg, who suggested Repo Man. Have a request? Email at nucleartheater@gmail.com
HEY ISN’T THAT: Tracey Walter, who plays the enigmatic mechanic Miller, has had a long career as a character actor. Soon after appearing in Repo Man, he popped up in Something Wild, Midnight Run and Tim Burton’s Batman.
DUST CLOUDS: In early 1984, we were in “The Bachelorette” phase of U.S.-U.S.S.R relations with the aging leading men of the Soviet Union changing seemingly overnight. Longtime General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had died in November 1982, replaced by ex-KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov. Andropov could only stay on the job for 15 months before perishing. Andropov was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko in February 1984, right before Repo Man was released in theaters, Chernenko lasted barely a year on the job before his own death, and his place was assumed by Mikhail Gorbachev. You know how that turned out.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: (6/10) Repo Man’s ending is almost subversly Spielbergian (is that a thing?) in its transcendental nature — but even so, the nuclear whatsis is loose.
WHAT I’M ALSO WATCHING: TV: “Lowdermilk” (S3, Netflix), “Veep” (S1, MAX), “Northern Exposure” (S1, Amazon). Movies: The Great Escape (Sturges, 1963)
LAST ENTRY: Argo (2012)
NEXT ENTRY: Fail Safe (1964)
I was more in tune with what came after the height of punk and new wave, the so-called alt-rock or “college radio” revolution: R.E.M., the Smiths, etc. But to be honest, I’ve never had exceptional musical taste. It takes a lot of work!
The great rock writer Robert Christgau defined West Coast punk as “a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth.” In that way, it was more of a political fit with Reaganism than it may have seemed.
A clear cousin to Repo Man was James Cameron’s The Terminator, released the same year , filmed in similar locations and shot through with the same sense of inevitable doom.
Very nicely done. Have a plate o' shrimp.