“We know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances.” – Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science
It takes an outside pair of eyes to see something as it truly is. The impossibility of knowing something from within, of applying sense and logic to a scheme of which we are but a minute part — a futile endeavor, and all the more so when sense and logic yield to the “lattice of coincidence” governing our world. In Alex Cox’s Repo Man, it is those who have themselves yielded to the inevitability of chance and circumstance who can see the nature of that world, and who will enjoy the rewards of their yielding; those who cling to some sense of purpose, or duty, or some code or rules, will enjoy only the futility of their servile mental rigidity.
America. Uncle Sam. The Man. Los Angeles — a city of dreams, not of reality — asphalt and concrete in a place made livable for its gargantuan masses only by gargantuan effort. A place without history in a country without roots — where culture goes to die. By the mid-1980s, punk wasn’t quite dead, but its then-present favor in the L.A. cultural scene was perhaps a sign that it was in its death throes. It follows, though, that punk ought to have proliferated among L.A.’s youth at that time — The Man had grown fitter and fatter than ever in the ‘80s, the decade of greed, and every self-styled authority figure (the grocery store cop, the televangelist, the elderly homeowner) was imposing that weight harder than ever on those deemed lower, less obedient, more expendable. Young people, perennially characterized as aimless and feckless by their elders and supposed superiors, had reason upon reason to be aimless and feckless, and punk provided them a means of expression for those attributes. Punk tells its disciples to abandon all sense of purpose, or duty, or codes or rules — the world has abandoned you anyway, and the lattice of coincidence will impose its ultimate weight on all of us in the end.
In Repo Man, Otto (Emilio Estevez) isn’t the first victim of coincidence; that would be the police officer swiftly and completely dispatched (save a pair of boots) in the opening scene by the mysterious, extraterrestrial contents of the trunk of a Chevy Malibu he pulls over on a road in the Mojave Desert. The allusion is to Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir Kiss Me Deadly, though Cox’s intention is less to signal to some kind of genre code than to signal to the lack of any code, any formula one might expect of his film. The cop pops the trunk and is instantly obliterated by a seemingly super-radioactive flash of light from within. It’s an absurd, garish, startling flourish, and Repo Man’s narrative and stylistic waywardness will only accumulate as it progresses. Otto, though, is initially a victim of authority, after he and his friend Kevin (Zander Schloss) are sacked on the spot from their thankless grocery store jobs for their rudeness. Otto ambles around the derelict and forgotten spaces of L.A. for a time, unemployed and disillusioned after finding his girlfriend cheating on him with a fellow member of their friend group of young punks; when Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a repossession agent, cons him into delivering a car to his agency’s lot, but pays him for his efforts, Otto has now an income stream renewed. But he’s no longer working for The Man — he is The Man, and he soon finds himself embroiled in the curious cosmic mystery of what’s in that aforementioned radioactive trunk, as his repo agency discovers its $20,000 value.
Otto’s assimilation into a quasi-legal enforcement agency grates against his anti-establishment nature — he’s only 18, yet he’s already experiencing punk death. But he needs the money, after learning that his TV-addicted parents have thrown all their savings at the caricaturish televangelist whose rabid virtual gaze they favor exclusively over their son’s. Religion, in its quintessentially American form — crazed fundamentalism, devoid of genuine spirituality, limitless promise with no reward — is their product of choice. Cox, a Brit, sees America as a nation of products and consumers, of relentless consumption wasting away its citizens. For some, it’s religion. For others, it’s cars, TV, music — even the lyrics to the song Otto sings to himself as he wanders the streets (“TV Party” by Black Flag) consist of the names of TV shows. The groceries in the stores are branded with basic labels — “corn flakes,” “yellow cling sliced peaches,” “drink.” Every item is a product, every person a consumer, every action a transaction.
In the largely green-free streets of downtown L.A., the connection to the natural world has been severed; Cox’s America is less a country than a giant supermarket, where culture has been replaced by commerce, and all are subservient to the desires and demands of the great corporation that is the United States of America. This outside pair of eyes sees this thing as it truly is, and sees escape only in detachment and subversion. Those who watched Repo Man upon its initial release may have seen it as an endorsement of rebellion; those watching it after Walker, Cox’s defiantly anti-colonialist 1987 film about an American who installed himself as president of Nicaragua in the 1850s, may see what Cox endorses we rebel against. This is a colonized country, divorced from its cultural roots, where the new culture is in perpetual service to capital. What does a nation do with a rootless, artificial culture? Emptiness accrues, and to what? And where? In American cars, ever around in circles, like this film’s plot. That subversive escape, then, is neither forward nor back — it’s up and out.
And that’s where Otto goes in the end. The Chevy Malibu, chased not only by the repossession agency but by an assortment of other interests, finds its way into many hands over the course of the film, killing some, enticing all, and growing in radioactive power as its enticing power grows too. All parties — repo agents, police, thugs, representatives of a paranormal investigation outfit of sorts — converge on the agency’s lot, where the Malibu literally glows with ferocious supernatural energy. It has arrived here by coincidence, of course, running its various would-be proprietors around in fruitless circles en route. In a land where everyone seeks something, willing to pay and to pay again when the dividends inevitably fail to pay back, a ferverous American aspirationalism has drawn them all to this most auspicious prize in this most inauspicious place.
But it’s a different American quality that Cox has commended throughout Repo Man: aimlessness. Those willing to embrace the randomness of the universe, to submit to the lattice of coincidence that defines our existence from birth to death — these are the people who will draw dividends from their labor, or lack thereof. Cox sees this quality as sincerity, abandoning all pretensions and aspirations in order to see ourselves and our world as it truly is. Only Otto and Miller (Tracey Walter), the agency’s nonchalant menial worker and the originator of the “lattice of coincidence” phrase, are even able to approach the Malibu without serious injury, and by this stage they’re the only two people in the lot who couldn’t care less about it. They climb inside, and the car rises from the ground, soaring this unlikely pair high above the lot, then through the skies above L.A., and eventually into outer space.
Even with his debut feature, at not yet 30 years of age, Alex Cox was rebelling against a system of which he was (briefly) a part, seeking an escape from the world. Walker’s brazenly left-wing politics made him enemies among the American studios — Universal released it without promotion, and Cox would never work in Hollywood again. He’s since settled himself quite nicely as a micro-budget experimental filmmaker, his works aligning well with the punk sensibility of his debut, which not even big studio bucks could assail. A resolute outsider who’s seen The Man as he truly is and, as the Hollywood filmmaking model has only become more and more bloated in the 40 years since Repo Man’s release, as he is now more than ever. Four decades on, the L.A. punk scene may be long dead, but the spirit of Cox’s film glows as bright and ferocious as the trunk of that Chevy Malibu.
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