REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

By: Erik Davis
April 18, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

REPO MAN | ALEX COX | 1984

It is only one of Repo Man’s many marvels that this deeply Californian cult film was directed by a visiting Englishman. Indeed, Alex Cox’s surreal and gritty clairvoyance is proof positive that the “special relationship” comes supersized in Los Angeles, a city grokked and transformed by all manner of oddball Brits, from Aldous Huxley to Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. Cox, just out of UCLA film school, may have shot local for budgetary reasons, but he also knew that there are three kinds of movies filmed in LA. There are all the movies that pretend to take place elsewhere. There are the movies set in an Anywhere that happens to be LA (or set in an LA that looks like Anywhere). And then there’s the rarest and most precious category: movies that, from big budget Chinatown to no budget The Exiles to B movie (and Repo Man ur-text) Kiss Me Deadly, manage to be authentically local. Repo Man is one of those films — a rootlessly rooted pulp articulation of the region’s strip malls, weedy interzones, ethnic frazzle, suburban anomie, sunbaked fantasies, and almost theophanic car culture.

As well as, of course, SoCal’s singular hardcore punk scene. Today, when subculture proper has died and gone to TikTok, it is much clearer that punk was, for all its discordant inversions, of a piece with the long current of fuck-it-all hepcat rebellion that goes back to the Beats. Sure, Repo Man skewers the hippies. Otto’s parents are aging pothead losers addicted to televangelism, and their generation’s spiritual aspirations are reduced to cult crap like Dioretix (the film’s hilarious Scientology parody) and shadowy flashbacks of Charlie Manson, which a tabloid Otto reads claims is plotting a prison break in a hot-air balloon.

But then there’s Miller, the (former?) acidhead whose “plate of shrimp” synchronicity speech incarnates a still potent mysticism of the fringe, and provides the most quotable sequence in a highly quotable film. Otto may be skeptical of Miller’s “lattice of coincidence”, but the film — which revels in repeated subliminal icons, from plates of shrimp to smiley faces to the generic food items that were actually available at the time at Ralphs’ — is not. (You can bet that even the sushi Duke and Debbi plan to not pay for includes ama ebi.) And among the repo men, all of whom share an adherence to a frontier cowboy code that bests even wussy John Wayne, it is Miller who can finally drive the radioactively transformed time machine Malibu into and over downtown’s Blade Runner future, our future now, where alien conspiracies and hippie acid and surveillance tech and mad scientists are all mainstream, and no longer cult at all.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

Categories

Tags