Repo Man's Always Intense

A couple months ago I shared Repo Man with my daughter, as you do. The movie graced theaters in the spring of 1984, probably just mere months before my friend James and I befriended the middle-aged woman who ran the ticket office at the Bellevue Cinemas, resulting in a run of perhaps two years during which I saw virtually everything, usually six or seven times. God knows what mayhem Repo Man would have caused in my head had I seen it then, at the tender age of fourteen, but I was fated to encounter it only after I’d already been wallowing in the music; Black Flag in particular was my jam, to appropriate a morsel of my daughter’s argot. 

As a high school senior I spent most of my free time hanging around at my friend Aaron’s house. There was a group of us that hung out there, listening to records and watching movies and making goat noises with Aaron’s trumpet and bashing holes in the basement walls trying to shoot pool in too small a room. His parents, who were absolutely saintly in their gentle accommodation of all us coming and going at all hours and occasionally drinking their liquor, possessed two VCRs at a time when many people, myself included, didn’t possess one. They purchased a matched pair in the competing formats, VHS and Beta, and built a small library from rented movies; instances of the former taped onto blanks of the latter. They had a lot of good stuff, classic stuff like Casablanca and The Red Balloon, a lot of weird stuff like Eraserhead, and we consumed it all with utter disregard for genre or quality or developmental appropriateness. Mostly we watched them just once; but three films—A Clockwork Orange, The Blues Brothers, and Repo Man turned into a whirling trilogy subject to almost masochistic repetition. Naturally I memorized large parts of the scripts, and for years I’ve driven my kids mad by telling them things like, “Come on Duke, let's go do those crimes.” They look at me nonplussed and I tell them that it’s from a movie they haven’t seen. Which I guess is why they’re always jabbing me with quotes from some you tuber¹ with hair like The Great Wave off Kanagawa..

If you haven’t seen the film, it tells the story of a group of repo men tracking a Chevy Malibu with a trunkload of alien bodies through the seedier parts of Los Angeles. From that warped iron framework springs the whole movie and its cast of manifold and weird characters. Emilio Estevez plays Otto—an aimless kid for whom life is a series of parties and minimum-wage jobs before he crosses paths with repo man Bud—the great Harry Dean Stanton. Now Esteves does fine with the snotty kid—it’s the role he was born to play—but Stanton is the battery that powers the whole film. Bud is as prickly as a handful of broken glass, with an impressive substance abuse problem, a dangerous and unglamorous job with all the risks but none of the rewards of being a car thief, and a temper that keeps him continually adjacent to injury or arrest. Yet he lives by a strict ethical code—a code entirely orthogonal to any Judeo-Christian tenets that might occasionally trickle down to the squalid world in which he lives, but a code none-the-less. And it is this code which connects him to the freshly unemployed Otto, whom he takes under his admittedly seamy wing. He outlines his ethos to Otto over lines of coke in an alley:

“Never broke into a car. Never hot-wired a car, kid. I never broke into a trunk. I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof. Nor through inaction let that vehicle or the personal contents thereof come to harm. That's what I call the repo code kid. Don't forget it. Etch it in your brain. Not many people got a code to live by anymore.”

Bud

The meeting is a watershed for Otto, who is stuck between disloyal friends intent on a comical crime spree that spans the length of the film often popping up at the and of an unrelated scene, and his stoner parents, parked on a grubby couch and nursing their obsession with a televangelist named Reverend Larry. Otto’s mother explains, between drags at a joint what happened to the money they’d promised him if he went to college: “Your father gave all our extra money to the Reverend's telethon, Otto.” His father continues, deadpan, “You're on the honor roll of the chariots of fire. Same as us, Otto.”

For the viewer, of course, the choice Otto has to make is a forgone conclusion. Repo Man makes a hero out of, well, repo men, right from the moment Bud first appears, trying to trick Otto into helping him rip a car with a line I repeat every time I get behind the wheel, “Right now we need to get both of my cars out of this bad area, alright?” Lest we forget what a ridiculous proposition this is, Otto’s love interest, Leila (Olivia Barash), an anti-government crusader bent on exposing the bodies in the trunk of the Malibu, gives us a quick reminder:

OTTO
I'm a repo man.

LEILA
What's that?

OTTO
It's a repossesser. I take back cars from dildos who don't pay their bills. Cool huh?

Hombre Secreto plays on car radio.

LEILA
No.

But Bud is competent and tough, and it doesn’t matter that he lives off of the miserable debris of out-of-control consumerism; he’s instantly the good guy, a man so easy in his skin we instantly want to pattern ourselves after him, even if some translation is required. And so I tried to do for a long while, and not entirely to my detriment.

It’s hard to say what Repo Man is really about. It does definitely have something to say about capitalism, but writer and director Alex Cox was too smart to just lay out a thesis like a slab of cold fish. It’s a comedy after all. The film takes place largely outside of American capitalism, in a Los Angeles constructed entirely of viaducts and empty highways and slums. Otto’s suburban home is located in a place called Edge City, and the movie’s ubiquitous liquor and convenience stores are stocked with generic products in white packaging labeled with heavy black lettering—BEER, CHIPS, CORN FLAKES. Everything feels abandoned, leaving only the repo men and their prey to spar in the empty, trash-strewn streets and run-down neighborhoods.

The film never plays straight with its criticism though. Bud, who is literally a parasite living off the waste of capitalist society, is himself a staunch capitalist champion:

BUD
Credit is a sacred trust. It's what our free society is founded on. You think they give a damn about their bills in Russia? I said do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia?

OTTO
They don't pay bills in Russia. It's all free.

BUD
All free? Free my ass, what are you a fucking commie? Huh?

OTTO
No I ain't no commie.

BUD
Well you'd better not be. I don't want any commies in my car. No Christians either.

It’s an ironic double-rejection, of course, and it’s cut like a setup and a punchline, but the scene does yeomans’ work establishing Bud as an outsider and an antihero. He doesn’t quite understand the world beyond his own but he also doesn’t care; the only logic that matters is the one that applies to his own reality. This is as close as the movie ever gets to the sort of lumbering critique that makes so many mainstream films—lets take Avatar as an example since it contains both aliens and a ham-fisted anti-capitalist moral—seem preachy and obsequious.

I couldn’t possibly talk about this film without mentioning Tracy Walter, who plays Miller, a possibly drug-addled semi-homeless guy who hangs around the repo yard, cleaning personal effects out of the repossessed cars. Walter, one of the really great character actors of the last fifty years, has been in everything, and without a doubt you’ve seen him in something. He’s one of those guys you see and you’re like, oh, it’s that guy. Miller is maybe his best, a puff of windblown hair, a beatific expression permanently fixed on his face, and a series of gnomic utterances at odd moments. Midway through the film he delivers a lengthy monologue about UFOs and time machines. It’s several minutes of absolute balderdash, but Walter recites it as though he’s patiently giving an exegesis of scripture. Otto is bemused, “You eat a lot of acid Miller, back in the hippie days?” But Miller is unfazed. It’s in this context that he gives what is probably my favorite line in any film, ever:

MILLER
I think a lot about this kind of stuff. I do my best thinking on the bus. That how come I don't drive, see?

OTTO
You don't even know how to drive.

MILLER
I don't want to know how. I don't want to learn. See? The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.

I mean, should that be on a bumper sticker or what?

In the end it turns out that Miller is the only source of external truth in the film, but that truth doesn’t come from our world, from the “normal” capitalist world that we as viewers carry into the theater with us. It’s from someplace altogether different, literally alien. It’s crazy and senseless but then the whole movie is crazy and senseless. A group of guys who make a living repossessing the property of rich people who won’t pay their bills (and, it must be admitted, poor people who can’t), mysterious government agencies, a lobotomized scientist driving around in a Chevy Malibu with alien bodies in the trunk—alien bodies which vaporize anyone who takes a peek. What is this madness? 

I’ve no idea. But I liked it way back when and I like it now. If it didn’t instill my antipathy for the conventional, it certainly reinforced it. I’m not sure that that attitude has done wonders for my wallet, but it’s a more interesting way of looking at things, and I think it’s at least in part the reason for what friends have occasionally noted is an unreasonable optimism in the face of virtually any of the modern horrors with which we all contend. Truth be told it’s not even optimism so much as resilience. I know I’m doomed, but I’ll damn well be doomed on my own terms.

BUD
There's going to be some bad shit coming down one of these days kid.

OTTO
Oh yeah? Where you going to be? On the moon?

BUD
Uh, I'm going to be right here heading north at a hundred and ten per.

I suppose that’s why I showed it to my daughter, in the hopes that one day, when she’s mired in some metastasizing ball of red tape, shedding money like water off a dog’s back while the news blares its relentless tattoo of war and economic crisis, when life seems like it’s barely holding together and can’t possibly continue another day, that she’ll buck up, grit her teeth, and extend her middle finger with a smile. It probably won’t lead to a ride in a glowing, flying Chevy Malibu, but there are more things in heaven and Earth, Otto, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

1. Yep.