Repo Man

I was pretty excited about watching Repo Man, as I had remembered seeing a couple scenes from it as a youngster, though admittedly I remembered nothing about the film other than Emilio Estevez being in it. So, when I heard the film contained a great deal of imagery related to the punk rock scene of the late seventies and early eighties (something I have a vested interest in), I perked my ears up. I actually took notes of several of my favorite punk songs that I noticed while watching the film..."Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies and "TV Party" by Black Flag being two examples (no Dead Kennedys!??!?). I think that the song "TV Party" in particular was a brilliant choice and the song suits this film perfectly. As we all noticed, Emilio Estevez's character is a bored, anti-establishment teenager with no sense of direction or purpose, and "TV Party" is a song that explores this type of American youth philosophy through the use of satire and irony, much as the film itself does ("TV Party" is a pretty visceral critique on this type of behavior). "We've got nothin' better to do, than watch TV and have a couple of brews" is the main line in the chorus from the song, and the music video features a bunch of young, bored punks (namely the members of the band) doing exactly that. Henry Rollins is the singer for Black Flag and has been noted for his use of extreme satire and often existentialist humor in his social commentaries about America, I was very fortunate to have seen him perform a spoken word routine a few months ago, and it was one of the best spoken word/comedy sets I've ever seen. Here's the video for "TV Party", note the similarities between it and Repo Man, the beer cans simply labeled "Beer", and the outlandish behavior, etc.




I'd never really thought of Repo Man as being a film of any widely-known cultural significance, or even as being a post-modern film, for that matter. After doing the reading, however, and especially with regards to the paragraphs containing short, unelaborate plot summaries of the film, I realized that Repo Man does in fact have what I consider to be some of the main aspects of post-modern expression, namely, a series of strange and loosely connected events, and a great deal of fragmentation. As a critic notes "What do a car repossession company, a smarmy TV evangelist, a handful of zoned out L.A. punks, a lobotomized nuclear physicist, a notorious pair of Hispanic car thieves and a Chevy Malibu with a trunkful of extraterrestrial aliens have in common? Not a whole hell of a lot, except that they're all key elements in Repo Man, a new comedy of staggering weirdness and originality." After reading this, the movie does seem to be exceedingly strange, but honestly, as I was watching it, it didn't really seem all that outlandish to me. The way the characters reacted to the situations they were placed in and the way the plot was structured seemed to be to be very engaging and reasonable. I'm not sure what this says about post-modern expression in Repo Man, but it was decidedly easier to follow than films like Mulholland Drive (which is one of Lynch's easiest to follow films) and Natural Born Killers.

One thing I noticed that I found kind of interesting was with regards to the blandness of the packaging of the various food products in the film, and the scenes that took place in the grocery store. The packaging of the food was all very standard, and the way things looked reminded me a lot of the scenes in Double Indemnity that took place in the grocery store. In Double Indemnity, the food and products in the grocery store were all meticulously arranged in grid-like or pyramid-shaped patterns, and the labels on all of these products were uniform, suggesting an oppressive atmosphere and a lack of expression or individuality. These devices were used in Repo Man in much the same way, and I believe that they very intentionally were intended to represent the oppression, uniformity, and lack of expression that many people felt they were subjected due to their suburban lifestyles. Interestingly, I did a bit of research on this, and it turns out that those food labels were actually used for generic product packaging at a grocery store chain in Los Angeles, and that grocery store chain donated many of the products in Repo Man for use in the film.

I know I probably sound repetitive, as I've said this before, but Repo Man is by far my favorite film that we've watched up to this point. The bizarre nature of the story, the wonderful, satirical, and oftentimes low-brow humor I found to be extremely effective and entertaining. And besides, who wouldn't want to fly all over Los Angeles in a glowing Chevy Malibu with a pyromaniac acid burnout?