Viking Night: Repo Man
By Bruce Hall
September 14, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Mouth breather.
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

Sometimes a film attains legendary status because it manages to present an unconventional or uncommon point of view on a controversial subject. This sometimes frightens or confuses mainstream moviegoers but such films usually earn themselves a devoted following among fans of the avant-garde. Other projects cultivate an underground base of fans simply by virtue of being offbeat. They’re not necessarily illuminating or informative; some movies are just quirky, original and good old fashioned fun to watch. The joy is in the experience itself and not so much in what you take from it, because there probably isn’t much you can take from it. So it is with Repo Man, director Alex Cox’s nihilistic post punk cocktail of satire, violence and apocalyptic cynicism. Repo Man is one of those films that nearly everyone you know has heard of, relatively few have seen and even fewer remember well if they have. But despite its low profile, it is an iconic remnant of an age gone by, and representative of a most peculiar sociological phenomenon. Repo Man is the cinematic embodiment of the punk rock ethos: the more successful others become, the more disenfranchised the least motivated of us tend to feel. Aimlessness and anarchy are dressed up to resemble innovation and independence, and next thing you know you’ve got a “movement”. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with activism, but a radical without a cause is often just a lazy person who thinks that anger is the same thing as ability. So if you’re apathetic, bitter, envious, paranoid and desperately in need of a job, there might be a place for you at the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation.

This is exactly where a disaffected teenager named Otto (Emilio Estevez) finds himself after the worst night of his life leaves him wandering the back streets of Los Angeles, waiting for something…anything to happen to him. After walking out on his job in a fit of protest, Otto seeks comfort in the arms of his girlfriend, only to discover that she’s been seeing another man – and having a jolly good time doing it. Despondent yet still determined, Otto returns home, looking to dip into his college fund and start his life over again. Unfortunately he finds his parents well on their way to getting themselves completely stoned, after which they casually inform him that his savings has been donated to a popular televangelist, and that charity is its own reward. Feeling anything but generous, Otto takes to the streets, where he inadvertently lends a hand to a grizzled, veteran repo man named Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Despite his aversion to gainful employment, Otto is seduced by the lure of money, drugs and fellowship with other misfits. Bud takes the young recruit under his wing and shows him the ropes – the ins, the outs, the Repo Code and the Rodriguez Brothers, a ruthless rival repo crew. But the real fun starts when a mysterious bank issues a contract on a decrepit old Chevy driven by a demented scientist carrying a lethal cargo of possibly extraterrestrial origin. Bud, Otto, the Rodriguez boys, a gang of punks led by Otto’s ex and a mysterious government agent in a Michael Jackson glove dive headlong into a race against time to find the missing car before its deadly contents lay waste to the city.

All this might sound like open chaos, and for a while it looks that way on screen as well. But there’s more happening than you think there is with Repo Man; underneath its anarchist fist-pumping flair, the movie espouses a kind of hippy dippy existentialist vibe that it calls a "lattice of coincidence". It is scripted bedlam conducted with impeccable timing, as these bizarre characters and events circle each other, weaving in and out of one another’s paths with the clockwork precision of an air show. Their movements are choreographed to the same snarling jackhammer beat so that at the movie’s madcap climax, everyone’s role seems to have been predestined. Think of it as a stripped down Cannonball Run with no stars, no budget, and no finish line, but definitely with more guns and aliens. Despite its shoestring budget, manic pandemonium and confusing plot this is at the very least, a story whose inertia is generally well used. An occasionally indecipherable adventure manages to avoid wearing out its welcome thanks to a surprisingly dry sense of humor, some deceptively witty dialogue and a heaping helping of snickering social satire. Yet much of the time, the film is having itself a lot more fun than you are – a funny movie with no real sense of direction still feels a little bit like wasted time. At the end of the day you are trying to tell a story and when the credits roll on this one, you’ll find yourself smirking but you’ll also spend about half an hour wondering what the hell just happened. Perhaps Estevez himself put it best when he declared the movie a "triumph of style over substance."

If nothing else, Repo Man reminds us that once upon a time the most famous member of the Sheen family was still named Estevez.

For better or worse, Repo Man is less a "lattice of coincidence" than it is a loosely connected patchwork of ideas on the nature of being. Alex Cox clearly had a lot of thoughts floating around his head about life, death, chance and experience. He was himself a repo man at one point, and a good friend of mine is as well – I can tell you that in that line of work, you do gain a lot of insight into what makes people tick if you choose to observe it. But whether or not legally stealing cars for a living can really give you an accurate read on the human experience in general is another matter. Repo Man attempts to juggle a lot of existential concepts at once but that’s a lot to ask of a film that despises the very world it sets out to examine, and whose soundtrack leads off with Iggy Pop and Black Flag. All of this might sound like a big turn off to most people, but Repo Man isn’t addressed to most people. If anything, it is a love letter to the post punk generation. For one brief shining moment in the 1980s, there was a strata of youth who were as tired of Van Halen as they were of the Ramones, as tired of consumerism as they were of nihilism. But being sick of everything generally makes you an advocate of nothing; and ironically nobody needs leadership more than the universal skeptic. Repo Man provides some by occupying a transitional space in the realm of agitant cinema just prior to the birth of alternative music and the modern independent film movement. It is a live action antidote to even more obscure fare such as Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal, and it stands as precursor and inspiration to filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. In fact, Repo Man itself is probably less important than the environment it helped create; sometimes being a pioneer means the results your work will be remembered more fondly than the work itself.

Despite its heritage and progeny, don’t mistake Repo Man for yet another garden variety '80s post apocalypse story. This is a movie that takes place in the shadow of an impending but unnamed holocaust, in a world where bandits, scavengers and junkies have at it not because the world has ended but because it is about to. The movie has the conflicted soul of a naïve, socially conscious teenager filled with barking cynicism toward trickle down economics, religion, pop culture, consumerism, the military-industrial complex and even itself. But the film isn’t trying to prevent the end of the world; its inherent punk rock sensibilities would never allow such a thing. Repo Man espouses a world view of insurrectionist mockery, pegging humanity as an endangered species blissfully sowing the seeds of its own destruction through rampant self entitlement. The film revels in its own ironic world where everyone blames everyone else for society’s ills, blithely unaware that this very lack of general accountability is what dooms us all. Basically, it is that guy you knew in college everyone was just sure would end up going postal one day but somehow managed to end up more successful than all of you. And much like your old college pal, Repo Man is all enigmatic irony – frustrating and revolting, clever and reassuring all at the same time.

So watch it with a friend, reminisce about the 1980s and take a moment to salute the MTV Generation, the Pepsi Generation, Generation X, or any other generation you know of who decided that doing nothing was the way to change the world. And know that after Repo Man, you’ll never look at a plate of shrimp the same way again.