“Always Intense”: Contests of Power in Alex Cox’s Repo Man by John Joseph Ryan

OTTO:     “Intense!”

MILLER:  “The life of a repo man is always intense.”

–Repo Man 

The American West is in some ways the ideal setting to explore contests of power, the United States having literally taken shape through the subjugation of this giant landmass west of the Mississippi River in a relatively short amount of time. Despite Golden Age Hollywood’s obsessive efforts to show the historical American West as having had “good” guys—cowboys—and “bad” guys—Indians, numerous filmmakers have been loath to view the West’s power exchanges as occurring between such clearly marked (and biased) avatars of good and evil, instead often subverting Hollywood’s depictions of this somewhat settled, sometimes unsettling place. Such artistic disruptions of a traditional, binary view of the West’s power struggles have also opened the door to more diversity, revealing contestants for power who are frequently outcasts, misfits, minorities—in short, alienated individuals in the American empire. The best artists and chroniclers of the West make visible fringe individuals hitherto hidden or vilified, and their work makes the case for those individuals’ inclusion as well. Back in the auspicious year of 1984, amid an intensive national effort spearheaded by the California actor-president Ronald Reagan to repossess an idea of America that is white and Christian, British ex-pat director Alex Cox made the cult classic Repo Man, a punk take on America’s national obsession with the automobile, spiced with its secondary obsession with the possibility of alien life, and set in Los Angeles, that fabled city of the so-called Golden State. But Cox shows us that this aspirational City of Angels is not the nation’s apotheosis in gold; it is, instead, the smoggy locus of power contests, many of them nasty, in the much-mythologized setting of the West. If we consider power itself as a kind of amoral force that is amassed by and traded among (or relinquished by) individuals, much as energy is in nature, then Repo Man’s inclusive vision of alienated individuals shows how power itself could be repossessed, if only for a time. Forty years later, the film’s power struggles continue to resonate in a country still contending with perhaps its most essential question: Who is America for?

Repo Man opens with an image of a computerized map centered on Los Alamos, New Mexico, a site whose very existence as the ground for the development and detonation of the first atomic bomb instantly belies the notion of a providential western mythology. An instrumental version of the film’s punk title track syncs up with the subsequent zooms into and out from the map. The camera follows old Route 66, that mythical road of westward motor migration, already crumbling and half-forgotten by the 1980s, from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, then to Flagstaff, and finally to Needles, California—a desert outpost that is expressly not what one thinks of when imagining Hollywood’s version of California. Finally, a sustained, distorted open E chord, the power note of rock and roll guitar, beats its anvil three times, and the map, as though blasted upwards by the chord’s concussions, magnifies to a flashing target on the old highway. The map fades out with the song’s cessation, and this flashing blip transforms into Dr. J. Frank Parnell (Fox Harris), lobotomized nuclear scientist, Los Alamos escapee, looking piratical in his one-lensed sunglasses as he weaves his Chevy Malibu amid the cactuses of Route 66 and sings “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” This is not a John Ford film. This is an apocalyptic vision of the West.

Dr. Parnell presents as Repo Man’s first contestant for power as he faces a bout with the California Highway Patrol. The patrolman is the literal guardian of the border to the state, and as a seemingly sober, trained individual capable, if necessary, of wielding deadly force against the discombobulated motorist, he should win this bout handily. He does not. In the film’s first surprise, upon opening the car’s trunk the patrolman is incinerated by whatever is inside (aliens, we later learn). At least he died with his boots on: they are all that is left of him standing on the road as Dr. Parnell weaves away, resuming his song. The scientist appears to possess great power, then. However, it might be just as correct to say that great power possesses him. The aliens in the trunk might somehow be directing Dr. Parnell’s moves even though they are dead; that is to say, the power within their inanimate bodies is searching for, or at least available to, a new host. Or, perhaps the lobotomy has unleashed unexpected power in Parnell. Maybe even the UFO network in Los Angeles is drawing him westward with their power. Whatever the case may be, the immolation of a clearly marked authority figure sets a kind of standard for fringe individuals to win power contests throughout the film.

Two subsequent encounters with authority figures end with unexpected results as well. Otto (Emilio Estevez), the punk anti-hero of the film, is first introduced marking generic cans of food with a price gun while his co-worker, Kevin (Zander Schloss), mindlessly sings a jingle for 7UP. After the store manager confronts Otto and reprimands him for his lackluster work habits, Otto knocks the irritating Kevin into the display of cans and faces down the store security guard, who actually unholsters his pistol and dares Otto to make a move. Otto’s only weapons are his middle fingers, which he deploys defiantly, fearlessly, even though the trigger-happy guard seems all too eager to shoot him. (Later, both the store manager and the guard are victims of Otto’s indirect reprisals, the former at the hands of Otto’s repo colleagues, the latter at the hands of Otto’s erstwhile punk cohorts in a shootout.) Most immediately, though, Otto’s act of defiance costs him his job, pushing him further to the margins of society and into the orbit, eventually, of the repo men. The second encounter with an authority figure, though minor, is no less significant for its continuation of the motif of fringe individuals wielding power. Hoodwinked by the repo man Bud, Otto finds himself entering the repo office, disingenuously named Helping Hands, where a Black man and woman appear mid-argument with the manager. In a traditionally-framed, binary contest of power, the couple would lose for two reasons: one is that they are truly in debt and behind in payments, thus legitimately forfeiting their right to the car; and two, they face a white authority figure, backed by another armed security guard, which would seem to tip the odds against them as it did previously against Otto. Nevertheless, in this encounter, too, the fringe contestants successfully secure power, albeit with a small sacrifice: the car owner must pay up in exchange for the key. Oly (Tom Finnegan), the manager, is forced to concede his win as a kind of loss, ruefully muttering, “Best goddamn car on the lot.” As the couple prepares to depart, both of them assert their newfound, or perhaps transferred, power in a final display: the woman belittles the security guard, Plettschner (Richard Foronjy), admonishing, “Shut up, rent-a-cop!” while the man tries to pick up Marlene (Vonetta McGee), the office secretary (who later unleashes her own power in surprising martial arts moves against federal agents). Otto, perhaps eager to display his own perceived power, pours a can of beer on the floor in disdain for the repo men’s occupation. Surprisingly, instead of being provoked into a new power contest, Oly and Bud (soon to be Otto’s mentor and played by Harry Dean Stanton), declaim in unison, “Kid, you’re all right!” These early moments in the film suggest that marginal individuals defying authority are expected and even encouraged to do so—and may even earn the admiration of their fellow power contestants.

Yet despite his daring fuck-you pose in these early situations, Otto is frequently foiled in his attempts to win contests of power. But this seeming impotence—rendered literal when his girlfriend Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin) exchanges him for Duke (Dick Rude) in bed and makes a sucker of him at the same time—parallels that of Dr. Parnell. Like the deranged doctor, Otto does, in fact, wield power in unexpected ways. His naivete might actually save him more than he would acknowledge. Had he, for example, asserted some right to remain in bed with Debbi, he would have had to fight off the sociopathic Duke. Instead, he vacates the premises, singing Black Flag’s “TV Party” before a viaduct at dawn. It would seem that, as the song’s lyrics suggest—“We’ve got nothing better to do / than watch TV and have a couple of brews”—he is fated to be a powerless voyeur only. But later, when an armed standoff in a convenience store ends with three dead (including Duke) and his mentor Bud wounded, Otto is one of the last left standing. The other is Debbi, who holds a gun on—and thus power over—him. He risks a joke that their chance of having a relationship is now past. Debbi, in a position to spare Otto, does so: she tosses him a bag of chips and departs the store with a smile, displaying power in the form of mercy. Perhaps she is mindful of Otto’s previous docility in the bedroom. It might be that she recognizes that Otto is just a voyeur to the store’s violence. (He is, after all, unarmed.) Or her smile might indicate that the power of humor has reached her. Whatever the case, Otto survives. 

While Otto clearly exists as witness to and participant in the contests for power in Los Angeles’ subcultures, he is too guileless and unself-reflective to do much more than survive them for a time. Dr. Parnell, with whom Otto is seemingly fated to cross paths, may have turned too far inward previously, as his lobotomy suggests. But despite his deranged look and behavior, he possesses at least two kinds of power: knowledge of the atom and the carcasses of the prized aliens. He could weirdly be construed as the hero of Repo Man—that is if we looked at the film as a kind of ironic treatment of the romance. His quest is to transport the secret, powerful alien bodies away from a Los Alamos government facility to a UFO network in Los Angeles (its mission cloaked by the anodyne and ironic moniker “United Fruitcake Outlet”). Through seemingly impossible odds—including the scientist twice losing the Chevy Malibu first to a rival set of repo men, the Rodriguez Brothers (Del Zamora and Eddie Velez), and then to the punk hoodlums comprising Archie (Miguel Sandoval), Duke, and Debbi—the precious cargo makes it to safe hands: not, after all, to the duplicitous UFO network, in league with the government agents, but to the innocuous-seeming custodian of the repo yard, Miller (Tracey Walter), who pilots the Malibu back to the stars in Repo Man’s final frame with Otto the anti-hero in the passenger seat. In such a viewing, Dr. Parnell, though he dies at the end, nonetheless succeeds in “saving” the aliens—and, more importantly, preserving their power—, thus revealing how much power has been unexpectedly transferred to, or operates through, him.

At the same time that Dr. Parnell remarkably evades or triumphs over others in power contests, Otto does manage to secure and wield power, too. Others’ pursuits of, or manipulations by, power frequently come into conflict or contact with Otto’s own. Otto participates in or witnesses numerous unusual and specific events throughout Repo Man’s ninety minutes: the most violent is the convenience store standoff; the most bizarre is his ultimate flight in the glowing Chevy Malibu. Each instance is specific and contextualized by one of Los Angeles’ subcultures, whether real or imagined. Otto, through dumb luck, accident, naivete, or self-assertion, powers his way through each one, notably resisting authority figures, the numbing quality of available jobs in a generic marketplace, the indolence of his stoned, profligate parents, the competing codes of the repo men he works for, the government agents, and even a seeming ally, Leila (Olivia Barash), who conspires with the silver-handed government woman to torture Otto for the whereabouts of the Chevy Malibu. Near the end of the film, when Leila asks, inconceivably, about the state of her relationship with Otto as the Malibu glows amid a shower of ice, he proclaims, “Fuck that,” to which she retorts, “I’m glad I tortured you!” disclosing that she had been manipulating him to get to the aliens. Previously, many other individuals have also tried to influence or manipulate Otto. Bud, in both a tribute to and parody of a nostalgic Los Angeles, tells Otto, “It helps if you dress like a detective,” while mid-century jazz plays continually on his car stereo. Bud also lives by a code, which he tries to instill in Otto with mixed results. Only when Bud is seated in the glowing Malibu while a police helicopter with a sharpshooter inside hovers overhead does Otto reveal that some of Bud’s code has seeped in, admonishing him to remember, “Only an asshole gets killed over a car!” Lite (Sy Richardson), the sole Black repo agent, also lives by a code, a peculiar mix of law-abiding—“Put on your seatbelt, boy. I don’t ride with anybody unless they wear their seatbelts. It’s one of my rules.”—and law-defying as he shoots into a man’s home while trying to repossess his car (though later he reveals to Otto that he shot blanks). Lite’s deadly posturing, which verges on militancy at times, is too much even for the rebellious Otto. Though Otto does not comment on Lite’s stance directly, he does reveal what he knows himself to be—and the limitations of his identity. As Duke lies dying in the convenience store, he sputters, like a second-rate James Cagney, “Society made me what I am,” to which Otto rejoins, “Bullshit. You’re a white suburban punk, just like me.” Finally, Miller, the offbeat laborer who merely seems to inhabit the Helping Hands yard, also tries to influence Otto’s beliefs by telling him there is “a lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything” and believes that UFOs are really time machines. Otto suggests that Miller “took a lot of acid in the Sixties,” but Miller becomes Otto’s source of salvation, or at least transcendence, during the film’s denouement. The bottom-tier grease monkey who refuses to drive—“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are”—is the one person who has the power to drive, or be driven by, the Chevy Malibu after all the others have been rebuffed by it.

The obsession with the power invested in the alien bodies, whether sourced there or merely transacted there, brings about the true identities of nearly all the significant characters in Repo Man. The secretive government agents are forced into the open, and their leader, the silver-handed woman, collaborates with her presumed hitherto foe, Leila, showing that her authority is not absolute and her hold on power is slippery. Leila, as mentioned, reveals her true identity not as the innocent victim she appears to be at first but a manipulator—and a dangerous one. Among the personnel in the Helping Hands office, Marlene, inspired by her physical triumph over the male government agents, bands together with the Rodriguez Brothers in a mutual consolidation of power and a presumed liberation from her mundane desk job; Bud, aware that he must “go indie” in order to have some form of power, risks his life, finally, and notably breaks his own code for the car that is his ticket to ride away from association with, and subordination to, Oly; Miller, who plays the fool, is both ingenuous and ingenious, recognizing that he must abandon his own code proscribing driving and get behind the wheel of the Malibu; and Otto, with his repudiation of Leila, his parents, his dead punk cohorts, the repo men, and any and all authority figures he has encountered at the western edge of the United States of America, can ride off, not into the sunset, but into outer space. 

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