"I've seen the future, baby / It is murder": "Repo Man"
There's an idea that’s been banging around in my head for long enough that it’s almost come to seem like something of a motif in my work, both critical and creative. Thinking back through the pieces in this journal, I find traces of it everywhere, from my ruminations about the value of the negative mindset in Sorcerer, to my ideas about the failures of our symbolic systems as explored in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, or what Hopscotch says about our contemporary obsession with power.
The idea has two parts. One is relatively simple; the other a bit more complex. The first is that we're living in a moment, as certain generations do, of rapid, terrifying and complicated social change. This is certainly true if we compare our time to that of five hundred or a thousand years ago (not to mention eight or ten or forty thousand years ago) in which people could live their entire lives without experiencing substantial differences from the way their parents or grandparents or even earlier generations lived.
But I think it's also true when compared to the past century. The internet has brought about an epochal change in the way people live and interact with each other. The human shaping of the earth's climate has begun to radically alter our experience of the world around us: one can think of the now-ubiquitous forest fires in the western United States, or the intensification of storms in the eastern part of the country, or one can think of the fact that since 1970, animal populations planet-wide have fallen by 70%, meaning that for those of us who enjoy spending time outdoors the experience is far different than it was when we were young – the examples go on and on.
Beyond this, both the changes in contemporary macroeconomics resulting from the big buzz words – from "the internet" to "neoliberalism" to "the global economy" – along with the changes in the climate have combined to create a widespread sense of uncertainty and anxiety about the future. If you doubt this, ask someone under the age of thirty how they feel about what is to come during their lifetimes.
The second part of my thinking about all this has to do, of course, with art. The last time we faced such a massive social upheaval was at the beginning of the previous century, when what we think of as modernity came mewling into the world.
The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth brought into being in rapid succession many of the elements we think of as constituting our reality. These included scientific ideas, from evolution to relativity, massive population shifts as people flooded into rapidly expanding cities and began to create our modern sense of "urban life," the amazingly quick creation of new methods of social control – specifically, the physical and mental domination of populations embraced by totalitarian states – the proliferation of mass communication technology and electronic gadgetry, and a thousand other things.
This upheaval a hundred years ago also spurred an artistic movement, or instinct, or period, or response (choose your descriptor) that came to be called modernism. There are more debates about modernism than it's possible to list, and to sum them (or it) up in a pithy paragraph is far beyond my abilities (and runs counter to my inclinations). But I do think that without relying on too much easy reductionism I can suggest that when we think about modernist artists, from Pablo Picasso to Virginia Woolf to Charlie Chaplin and beyond, we can at least agree that their work is marked by an attempt to come to terms with a radically, and rapidly, changing world.
And here you see, hopefully, how the two parts of my thinking fit together. We are living in a moment of radical social change, and a hundred years ago artists were living through the same thing; so perhaps their works and the long-running debates about those works can help us understand our moment, the art it's producing, and the way that art might help us navigate this moment with our wits about us and our hearts intact.
Before we move on to the movie itself, let me throw one more idea at you, this one from the art historian T.J. Clark. In his extraordinary book Farewell to an Idea, Clark argues that the force of the modernist artistic movement comes at least in part from the fact that "the 'modernity' which modernism prophesied has finally arrived." His idea is that in many ways modernism is predictive, a grappling with an emerging future, an attempt not just to tell us where we stand but also to scan the horizon (which makes sense if we tie it to a time of accelerating social change: who, living in these times, doesn't want to know what's coming?).
Furthermore, the modernist artists who were trying to articulate what the world was going to change into were often right. According to Clark, we now are experiencing what they then were forecasting. We're living, in his words, through "modernity's triumph": what the artists said was coming is exactly what has arrived, for better and for worse, for joy and for terror.
Repo Man, made by Alex Cox and appearing in 1984, tells the story of Otto (Emilio Estevez) a teenager who likes punk music and is trying to find some kind of meaning in the world, although he suspects there's none to be found.
At the film's opening Otto is working at a grocery store, but he soon gets fired for insufficient obedience to the notion that workplaces are temples of sanctity with rules that make any kind of sense at all. Broke, and beset by parents who are ex-hippies turned acolytes of a ridiculous TV evangelist, Otto eventually falls into a job more to his liking: he becomes a repo man.
What appeals to Otto about this job is the pure devil-may-care aspect of it: he spends his days breaking into cars and then careening away from furious owners. As his new mentor Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) puts it (in a line that, oddly and with a fabulous lack of awareness, gets quoted in Jan de Bont's 1996 action extravaganza Twister): "An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."
Which is to say that Otto just likes the excitement, and doesn't have much interest in the political or sociological or even personal aspects of his job. The other repo men are a little different. Bud believes that the American system of credit and debt is a way of sorting out the winners from the losers, the latter being those who getting their cars repossessed. Some of their other compatriots see the job as their way of getting together enough money to advance themselves in the world, some (namely the owner of the company) get annoyed when they take too anarchical approach to the work, and at least one, a mechanic named Miller (Tracey Walter) doesn't really do much work at all, but instead stands around burning stuff in a trash can and talking about how the Earth was populated by aliens, who are, in reality, just human beings from another time.
Otto is amused by all this, and confused by some of it, but at base he's just looking for an adventure – and what are adventures except ways of trying to discover what's really meaningful in the world, by pursuing things that capture your undivided attention, instead of boring you?
There's also a second plot line in the film, which involves a Chevy Malibu being driven toward Los Angeles by a man who's either sick, extremely beleaguered, or crazy (and maybe all three). In the trunk of this Malibu is something irradiated, so much so that if you open the trunk a burst of light pours forth reducing you to ashes on the spot. (We might, if we are a certain kind of film fan, be inclined to make the association here with the box holding atomic material in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly from 1955 (also referenced in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction from 1994), one connection being that the Aldrich film has as its background an early nuclear paranoia, which was also a staple of Reagan's America in the 1980s.)
Soon enough, what you think might happen does happen: this Chevy Malibu appears on the radar of the repo men in L.A. It turns out that a secretive governmental agency is searching for it, and that whatever is in the trunk is valuable, in addition to being dangerous. After a series of misadventures, Otto finds the Malibu, and we also figure out what's in the trunk: the bodies of aliens that have gone missing from government possession. The film closes with the car in the repo yard, glowing green because of the radiation. The government spooks are closing in. Miller, the crazy guy with the theory about aliens, now seems like pretty much the only one who has been prepared for this moment. He climbs inside and asks Otto if he wants to come along.
And why the hell not? Because if aliens really are time travelers, then who knows where this Chevy Malibu / alien body repository / newly minted space ship might take them? With Otto and Miller inside, the car levitates up off the ground, and they zoom away off over the city of Los Angeles, and then possibly off into space (as indicated by a closing shot of the stars).
You will notice, if you read much criticism of movies (or other art forms), that opining elegantly about what they really mean and why they're really important or, more frequently, why they're no good at all, is the easiest part of the business. Anyone with a penchant for disputation and a solid list of the terms the cool kids are using can come up with impressive claims about why the latest Jordan Peele is (or is not) a revolutionary work of cinematic horror, or why Casablanca represents (or doesn't represent) a pinnacle of heteronormative and masculinity-servicing filmmaking that was (or wasn't) reactionary even for its time and should never (or actually should) be seen again.
This kind of stuff is easy and fun, and if you've been a reader of these pages for long you know that I myself like indulging in various forms of it.
The hard part, though, is actually connecting these ideas to the movie. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. Or, as Bobbi Fleckman memorably noted in This is Spinal Tap, money talks and bullshit walks. Which is to say that critics and academics can run their mouths off all they want about big ideas, but those ideas only have meaning insofar as the critic is able to convince you that what's in their head is actually tethered in some real way to what's on the screen.
This is precisely why, as you also may have noticed if you read a lot of criticism, so many pieces skirt away from telling you the precise places in the film you could find these big ideas they talk about. Instead, they fall back on generalities: "The movie gives the sense that…" (Okay, but where and how, exactly, does it do this?) "The movie shows how society treats…" (Okay, but does the movie really show that, or is it the critic's summary of the movie that shows it?) "The movie makes the audience feel like…" (Okay, we understand the movie made you, the critic, feel this way, but without the specifics, how can we know if we'll feel this way, or if you, the critic, just have an ax to grind?)
In light of this, to return to Repo Man, it seems fairly important to try to connect the claim that the movie has a kind of modernist sensibility to what appears on screen. One way to do this is to note that it's a film that has a playful interest in what might be called the materials of filmmaking. Much as someone like Cezanne was interested in the mechanics of making a painting (What happens when we look at something? How can I transfer that looking onto a piece of canvas?) or Klee used a kind of playfulness to break out of a kind of stodgy approach to representational painting (I've posted just above this paragraph an image of a Klee painting I used to look at a great deal in Baltimore; hopefully, you will see in it what I mean by the descriptor "playful"), Cox in Repo Man manipulates the materials of his medium to make us aware of them, both humorously and with an eye to their function.
There's a scene, for example, in which Otto and his girlfriend sneak into the back seat of his car to fool around; the film gives it to us in fast-motion, shot in medium-long from across the street. We see them leap in the back and disappear below our sight-line while a pair of old ladies scuttles by, all of it accelerated by the sped-up film stock. The scene lasts just a few seconds, but it's enough to draw our attention to the way action like this might ordinarily be shot. By putting it in fast-motion, that is, Cox lightly reminds us that what he's not doing is the kind of titillating, glimpse-of-flesh, lighting-scheme heavy presentation that we are familiar with from other movies.
The glowing green car in the end functions similarly, as does the burst of light that incinerates people when they open the trunk. They are both lo-fi punk-ethos solutions to filmmaking problems (What to do when you don't have a lot of money for special effects?), but they also function impishly, not simply immersing us in the story the way the effects of something like The Terminator (released in the same year) do, also making us smile, because somewhere in the back of our head we're also noting the revision these approaches make to the way things have always been done in movies. Like Duchamp turning a urinal upside down and labeling it a drinking fountain, the ending of the film seems to say: "Oh yeah? You think your high quality Star Wars / Star Trek spaceships are the way to go? I'm going to give you a glowing green Chevy Malibu and call it a spaceship, and it's going to be funny as well as making you think about how spaceships are 'supposed' to look."
Another way the film adopts a modernist sensibility is through its envisioning of consumer products. Throughout – from the opening in the supermarket, to the liquor stores that pop up occasionally, to the interior of Otto's parents' house – the food and drink we see is labeled as aggressively generic. The packaging is white and the lettering is blue. The beer comes in white cans with the blue word "Beer" printed on them; in his parents' kitchen, Otto eats out of a white can with the blue word "Food" printed on it.
Again, this is in part a DIY solution to an on-set indy-film problem. (Labels aren't supposed be shown without the consent of the company that owns them, so PAs spend a lot of time turning beer bottles or cereal boxes sideways to camera so the brand name can't be seen; sometimes it's just cheaper and easier to print up your own.) But it's also a way of bringing to the fore questions of consumerism and branding, both in film and in life, that suffuse so much of our existence; in this, of course, it bears resonances with things like the cubist work of Picasso and Braque, or even a novel like Huxley's Brave New World, in which the surfaces and constructions of things, the way that they are represented and pictured and sold, and the reasons for this, becomes a topic for meditation.
The generic food labels also help sharpen our understanding of Repo Man by demarking what it is not: a pop-art or post-modern work.
Unlike Warhol's famous reproductions of soup cans or Brillo pads, the film neither questions the importance and constitution of art (or "art") itself, nor hedges toward playfulness as a kind of nihilism. It has none of the "modern life is so glamrageous that we might as well just riff on it and get rich" quality of the work of someone like Jeff Koons – famous for making things of the sort that wealthy people buy to indicate that they're in on the joke – and none of the tortured, overly-referential and self-aware "see what I did there" quality of something like the lower-end writing of David Foster Wallace or a film like 2020's Promising Young Woman, in which playing with the form becomes something like the whole point, and is predicated on the assumption of preexisting ideological agreement (aka reassuring soft liberal bourgeois correct-think).
Repo Man is, instead, animated by a kind of outraged fury and despair at the movement of the world itself. Like the punk music which runs through it, the film doesn't much care to convert you, so much as it cares to try to holler something. And loudly. The generic food labeling seems to me to be a kind of slap in the face, an attempt to get you to look around and remember how much of our culture is composed of brightly-colored objects trying to convince you to consume them. Otto's quest for adventure – more exactly, his sense that there is no meaning to be had for him in his life thus far, and so he better try like hell to get into some tense situations if he wants to find that meaning – has playfulness on its surface but rage at its core.
It's a rage of growing up in the bland suburbs, a rage that adult life seems to have so little to offer other than staid dullness, and a rage that the only alternative to this seems to be a kind of rat-race economic antagonism: poorly paid people stealing cars from other poorly paid people who've gotten into debt, all in the service of the abstract ideals of meritocracy (as articulated by Bud), while the government runs around killing people to pursue its mysterious alien-hiding shenanigans.
And this half-humorous, half astonished fury is also the element that imbues the film with the mysterious quality TJ Clark attributed to modernism, which is that it gives us the feeling that we are now living through the "triumph" of the things the artwork of a past epoch was grappling with.
In this sense, the energized dread of the punks of the 1980s seems to me like a phenomenally accurate prediction of the broader feelings that appear (from my not-young vantage point, at least) to attend many of the young today. Dancing in furiously arhythmic contortions while someone screams at you over a machine-gun drumbeat may in fact be the visual metaphor yet come up with for the kind of desire for release of pent-up anxiety and fury and sorrow that many young folks carry today.
Similarly, Otto's character, although separated from our own youth by almost forty years of musical taste and fashion sense, seems to precisely anticipate a good deal of today's dilemma of the young: the older generation, once so idealistic, have now been pummeled into a kind of stupefied lassitude by on-screen hucksters, leaving the rest of us (the young, and the young at heart) to fend for ourselves in a kind of post-consumer wasteland.
And while the film's vision of consumerism gone bonkers isn't unique – see things stretching from The Stuff (1985) to The Running Man or Robocop (both 1987) to Halloween III (1982) for a notion of how endemic to the 1980s this was – it is frighteningly predictive. Here, Repo Man's use of generic labeling works as a kind of ironic subversion, a way of making us aware of something by presenting its opposite. By taking away labels, that is, it makes us aware of labeling; and further, it makes us aware of the way labeling – branding, selling, using bright colors and flashy logos – does not individuate things but actually makes them more similar. Walk through a supermarket with your eyes truly open, the film seems to be saying, and you will see that all these various products are really the same product. They are all identical in their attempt to capture our attention, our money, our fealty.
And what better word is there to describe our current modernity than "branding"? Except that it is not now products that do this, but people themselves. Athletes brand themselves. Celebrities do it. YouTube and TikTok stars do it. Our social media presences often boil down to little more than self-advertisements, attempts to make ourselves look more colorful than the next item down on the shelf of the unimaginably large internet supermarket we all seem to live in now. And in doing this we are not becoming more unique, but more similar, endless repetitions of people in white clothes sporting blue labels that read: "Person." (Or perhaps, were I feeling a soupcon more saucy, "Person?")
And finally, what of Repo Man's vision of economic activity? It is, I have said, a vision of poorly paid people stealing cars from other poorly paid people who've gotten into debt. It's a race to the bottom. Notions of economic solidarity do not exist; repo work is the ultimate gig work. It's just a job, paid by the parcel. That it affects other people – that the rideshare driver is putting the taxicab driver out of work, that the freelance writer is putting the paid staffer out of work – is up to nobody, controllable by nobody, just a result of the system of credit and debt under which we all live. We can trick ourselves, like Bud does, into thinking that the people in debt are there because they deserve it, or trick ourselves into thinking that if we do enough of this work we eventually won't have to do it anymore, but in the end, we're all just running around stealing each other's cars.
Oof. Tough medicine. But the film is not, as I noted above, a bitter one, or an angry one. It's playful in its way, and funny, and bombastic. Which is to say that its prediction of what is to come is not wholly, or maybe even mostly, negative. Because there is an antidote.
This antidote lies in the film's ribald contrariness, in the great dancing middle finger that punk music is famous for. One does not have to give in; one does not have to accept the world as it is given. Even without investing too much symbolism in the flying green Chevy Malibu at the end, we can note that the film clearly lands on a feeling of possibility and joy; the parallel here is, perhaps, the way so much modernist art invests itself in deep, and authentic, beauty.
In the glowing car, flying off over the city of Los Angeles and toward the stars, Otto has liberated himself from the old order; even in the face of the strange meaninglessness of modern life, he has insisted (or proved?) that meaning is possible. There is a place to go to, a wondrous possibility ahead.
This possibility may not have come in the guise we expected, but that expectation itself, that steadfast refusal to not believe in the ordinary stultification that holds the world in its grip, is the whole point. In expecting, in insisting, we remain undaunted. It's the precise, perverse beauty of Bartleby in Mellville's short story, the scrivener who with his single repeated statement that he would "prefer not to" defeats the entire sociological and psychological force of the world around him. If one simply refuses to accept, one renders all of the weight of orthodoxy and disaster meaningless.
This is one of the deepest secrets, I think, of the modernist stance: if one can see the conformity of things, the tortured, shipwrecked state of the modern world, it must be because one has a vantage point from which to see them. And in looking and seeing and describing and feeling what is happening and what it means, we begin to allow ourselves to slip free. And that, my friends, is a happy idea indeed.
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