Young male loneliness is in the news again, for the same reason it almost always is — some loser is moaning about it and that loser has enough powerful friends to amplify the whine. Well, not “friends.” Enablers and exploiters, con men seeing uncertainty and offering flattering answers, people who see plenty of money to be made from teen (or post-teen) angst and the anguished debates around it. If the loser had friends, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. But young male loneliness is always around, whether the media priests of the big lie are paying attention or not. Why? Iggy Pop had it clocked in 1984: “I was a teenage dinosaur, stoned and obsolete / I didn’t get fucked and I didn’t get kissed / I got so fucking pissed.” All messed up and nowhere to go.
Pop’s pissed-off kiss-off is from the theme song to Repo Man and is an accurate representation of its hero’s mindset. Alex Cox’ film follows Otto, who is a loser, a half-assed white suburban punk who is out of place wherever he turns in 1980s Los Angeles He shoves angry music in his ears and deadening substances in his brain, and while he eventually does get laid it is only after he walks in on his girlfriend banging his best friend and they laugh him out of the room. Otto stalks around perpetually horny and pissed and dimly clever enough to think he’s found opportunity when he falls in with fellow malcontents: repo men who can only fit in at a job where they take from the rest of the world, where they offer up various codes for living one’s life that are justifications for how they’re scraping by in theirs. There’s also a car with radioactive alien corpses in the trunk. It’s the greatest movie ever made.
I first watched Repo Man as part of a bad movie night when I was in high school, 15 years on from its 1984 release. The badness was clear from the VHS box — Emilio Estevez is the fucking wiener coach from The Mighty Ducks, he’s not a punk! At the time I thought Estevez’ barking out of Black Flag’s “TV Party” after Otto gets cucked early in the film was ridiculous (although now it feels like he’s catching something unformed and crude and vital) and in terms of ridiculous, the X-ray effects of those radioactive alien corpses zapping people were eminently scoffable. But as we watched the movie I changed my tune. I think it was around the time that Bud, Otto’s mentor in repossession and in bitterly cruising through life, snorts some cocaine and rails “I don’t want no Commies in my car! No Christians either!”
While Estevez’ role requires some adjustment, Harry Dean Stanton is as harshly believeable and immovable in his belligerence as a hangover. And there is something almost fearful in the way he adds on to the banishment in the line above, like he couldn’t stand someone mistaking the disdain for the former as a potential endorsement of the latter. But there’s anger too, a refusal to be tied to a role someone else has cast. Bud is furious at the world he is rejecting, and part of Repo Man’s greatness is how it shows that as the lonely misery it is while respecting Bud and Otto’s impulse for rejection and understanding how it’s a way out of a shitty place. “How can YOU say what MY best interest is?,” Mike Muir accuses in Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized,” another punk classic on Repo Man’s soundtrack. “What are you trying to say? I’M crazy? When I went to YOUR schools? I went to YOUR churches? I went to YOUR institutional learning facilities?” Muir and Otto know the world really is full of asshole authorities and idiot co-workers and foolish parents and faithless lovers, let alone the oppressive church and state Bud won’t have in his ride. Why wouldn’t you get so fucking pissed? Why wouldn’t that make you feel alone?
In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus tracks the difference between nihilism, which is an actual belief in nothing, and negationism, which is a rejection of everything. Nihilism looks at emptiness with the same intensity that solipsism looks at the self and there is a lot of overlap in those limited philosophies. But negationism strips everything away and there is possibility in that. At the end of Repo Man, Otto finds himself getting into a car with a stranger, the weirdo junkyard janitor Miller, because that car is leaving the yard and maybe the planet. As he does so, the more aggressive punk of Pop and Black Flag gives way to The Plugz’ wondering and eerie space surf, the sound of a mystery instead of stale and strident answers. Otto rejects the world — his response to his ex-girlfriend’s “What about our relationship?” is a “Fuck that!” that is inspirational if not heroic in its blithe and contemptuous dismissal — but he takes a chance and gains the stars. The certainty of badness I had at the start of the movie was gone, replaced by something new.
***
Rejecting everything means rejecting yourself too. “They want to socialize you,” snarled the voice on the car radio and I thought oh boy, I’ve heard this before. Another tired punk cliché, and Repo Man’s rejection of everything absolutely (and with savage accuracy) included mindless punk rebellion. I was living by myself a year after graduation and more than a bit lonely, and of course post-college I knew everything, which meant I believed in nothing more to learn than what was already in my head. Solipsism and nihilism, that dynamic duo.
But I kept listening and Corin Tucker’s words and guitar drew me into the song and away from my disdain. “Call The Doctor” is undeniable that way, Sleater-Kinney refusing to let you reckon with anything but their fury at being proscribed, circumscribed. “All your life is written for you,” Tucker bites off in the first chorus, “All my life is right before you,” she bares in the second. And then the bridge hits, with Tucker’s breathless shouting of the title offset by Carrie Brownstein’s own chant building to an obliterating shriek of rage and rejection: YOU! ARE! NOT! ME!
This is beyond loneliness, it’s a nuclear bomb of negation that explodes outward on the people who try to turn you in their direction. The people who want to dignify and analyze and terrorize you, because they know what’s best for you. And it exploded on me. It was coming at me from a perspective that I couldn’t and can’t truly understand — “Your life is good for one thing / You’re messing with what’s sacred / they want to simplify your needs and likes to sterilize you” is something a young dude can hear but not feel on the level of Tucker and her listeners who face a hostility I never have to — and one that didn’t seek or need my understanding. Being confronted with something like that can reinforce your loneliness, but it can also mean recognizing you share the world with something beyond you even if you don’t fully share a perspective. Recognizing there are new ways to not be alone.
“Call The Doctor” and “Institutionalized” and “Repo Man” and Repo Man take different paths but all stare down a bullshit world and find power in the words and noise that jar you loose from that world’s loneliness. Being blasted out of your head is better than being trapped there. Maybe you can bitterly laugh at your frustrations from the outside, or find release in their expression in a way you didn’t know was possible; or maybe you can see more clearly how you’ve been staring down a narrow tunnel, and how there are a lot more possibilities beyond what you think you already knew and what others think they already know about you. After that all-negating bridge, Tucker sees what is left: “All my life is right before me.”
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What Did We Watch?
Superman: The Animated Series – “Livewire.” I will say something controversial yet so brave: electricity-powered supervillains SEEM cool at first – Livewire ionizing atoms to create her costume is objectively awesome – but are hilariously easy to defeat, throw water at them and as long as you stand a few feet away, boom, threat over. It’s almost as bad as Spider-Man using a vacuum to stop Sandman in his first appearance. Lori Petty is fun voicing the shock jock who somehow doesn’t die from electrical shock (if you get zapped, your hair and skin turn albino white?), don’t get me wrong. Still, her grudge with Superman doesn’t make sense even pre-accident and she’s essentially a better-costumed Electro. What’s the equivalent of a modern shock jock? A manosphere podcaster?
Without gender flipping her
livewire should be a true crime podcast host with a grudge against superman for solving too
many murders. “hey there murderinos! Stay sexy and don’t get murdered” could be her catch-phrase while electrocuting people.
Even better: a true crime podcast host with a grudge against Clark Kent for his mainstream reporting COVER-UPS OF THE TRUTH
On the one hand, Lori Petty as a ’90s grunge shock jock is just good sense. On the other, her stated reasons for hating Superman look like an excuse. Her job is to be an asshole, and Superman is in the news, so being an asshole about Superman is a given. But she seems to genuinely resent him for having had it easier than she did(?), and her rant at him during the event is basically “you can’t tell my stupid audience what to do! Only I can tell my stupid audience what to do!” and she’s pretty delighted when the place starts getting destroyed by lightning. “Look what you did to me!” Oh no you’re hotter with insane superpowers (electric blasts aside, she can basically fly and teleport), clearly the world must pay. I think it’s not too much of a leap to suggest there was something seriously amiss with her before she became Livewire, but I don’t think that was something the writers did deliberately.
M*A*S*H, Season Two, Episode Five, “Dr Pierce and Mr Hyde”
This is an early attempt at deathly seriousness, to the point that Hawkeye’s wacky prank at the climax feels oddly out of place – no surprise that Alan Alda is a writer on it. On the other hand, it also feels like an extension of the mosaic plots the show often indulges in, except instead of someone writing a letter or report, it’s riffing on Hawkeye suffering insomnia. The best part is Hawkeye effectively diagnosing himself; he works out he’s overproducing adrenaline and fucking up his ability to sleep, and he’s reduced to a childlike state as he wanders around in an increasing daze. The one nod towards plotting is that one of his wacky shenanigans includes sending a mildly snarky telegram to President Truman that escalates.
Biggest Laugh: “Let me try and answer that question… with an answer.”
28 Weeks Later
Alright. This has an even simpler story and explores the worldbuilding a little more deeply. The ideas are neat but it doesn’t really do anything with them, though I do enjoy having Robert Carlyle’s character end up turned about a third of the way in and stalking the characters the rest of the movie.
Carlyle is a great person to be a feral bloodthirsty lunatic, but his kid-hunting felt goofy to me. The rage virus turns everyone into homicidal freaks but apparently he can keep focus on specific people to do hunter/killer shit to them over the entirety of London — what is this, some sort of *snort* magic zombie?
It’s a weird thing zombie writers seem to inevitably go to, the zombie witha bit of awareness – George Romero himself went there with Land Of The Dead, and it reads to me partly as people getting emotionally attached and thinking “surely a zombie with intelligence is even better than a regular one!”, when it undermines the whole horrifying idea.
I thought of Land Of The Dead in this regard as well — I like LOTD a lot and I think it works better there for a number of reasons, chief among them that Romero has been developing zombie awareness if not intelligence for three movies now (Night’s ghouls, Dawn’s mall recognizers, Day’s music-loving Bub) while just as importantly becoming more disgusted with humanity at the same time. The convergence of intelligent zombie and evil humanity feels natural. (It also helps that the zombies’ actions are driven by human intervention in zombiehood — medical experimentation in Day and commercial exploitation in Land. — while it just happens to Carlyle in 28W). 28W feels like it has to level up the scale of violence but also the patriarchal theme of 28D and the former can be done effectively if a bit clumsily but the latter really does not work just amplified in this way.
The Grey — a wonderful wish fulfillment fantasy about being stranded in the frozen Alaskan tundra, the snow and wind chilling you to the very bone before you are eaten by a wolf, the very thing to watch when your air conditioner has broken. But! Beyond that aspect, this lives up to the boomerang hype, I remember both the dismissal when this came out and the subsequent reclamation and the reclaimers have it right. Very macho* but more powerful for that, because this man vs. nature and the various ways manhood is not going to cut it. While the dudes have conflict there is thankfully no “bad guy” underminer, it’s just them and the wolves and the landscape — one late death is a horrific freak mishap that is just how it is. But another one looks at that landscape and finds peace. This was apparently marketed to the emerging faith-based film screening network at the time, I can see how that would happen but there is certainly another reading here and more to the point Joe Carnahan gets sentimental (possibly the ur-Dead Wife In Bed flashback here) but never non-material, things happen and they must be dealt with. And if Carnahan sometimes missteps his instincts are sound, he is or at least was Good David Ayer in this regard. Good shit.
*grimly hilarious how one guy stoically gives a eulogy for the “men who died here” at the plane crash site — there were female flight attendants on the plane, dude! You just saw a wolf eating one of them!
Did you catch the post-credits scene?
Yes — I suppose it is a callback and it works as such but I really liked the ending as it is.
The X-Files, “Eve”
Huh, apparently this has gotten a rosy critical and fan reputation over the years. I thought it improved considerably by the time it got to the twist that the twins were the villains rather than the victims (which also meant that the child actors weren’t as bad as I’d originally thought and were instead deliberately playing almost everything spacey and low-affect so they could come alive when it was revealed that somebody set these things to evil), but all the setup dragged to an appalling extent. The vampire/alien double fake-out didn’t feel necessary–and the vampire part maybe wasn’t even deliberate, but: holes in the neck! Drained of blood!–and some of the writing was clumsy. (The hospital staff holding Eve 6 have conveniently never seen her, for example, since she always recoils from them and hides in the shadows, but we certainly don’t see any evidence of her doing that with Mulder and Scully.)
But the foxglove twist does make this previously flabby episode snap to new life, and the girls trying to poison Mulder and Scully’s sodas was great and led to some well-plotted moves. Eh on the ending, though, which feels more “trying to be creepy” than actually creepy to me.
“Eve” mainly disappoints me in that the mini-conspiracy is so cool that they ‘should’ be a major part of the conspiracy, which of course can’t happen.
Son of Dracula – fancied some 1940s b-movie horror but ended up watching this on Plex which did it no favours, multiple 2.5 minute advert breaks get in the way of establishing a cool, spooky, swampy vibe. I don’t think this is one of the better Universal Monster sequels either way though, there’s plenty of fun supporting characters but the actual Dracula (Alucard) story is a bit limp and Lon Chaney Jr. isn’t really the right fit for the count. I enjoyed the two professors figuring out the vampire lore though and there are some cool bat transformation FX.
Excellent work here, you get at what made Repo Man so great, couched in punk but refusing to BE punk rock because that would require a label close to the generic ones on cans and beers in the movie. If you haven’t seen Alex Cox’s Walker, I’d also recommend it, one of the most stinging depictions of US imperialism and a terrifying Ed Harris performance, veering between delusion and mystical horror.
Thanks! And Walker is fucking incredible, it winds up being a weird mirror to Knightriders in terms of Harris megalomania — Romero can find hope in how he’s trying to hold something together that will endure, Cox is looking at expanding to endure and finds horror and hate.
Bingo! Absolute companion blank check pieces to each other, Walker wants to find some kind of similar utopian endurance and ends up becoming Judge Holden.
Kojak, “6o Miles to Hell” – And two episodes to go as cancellation is at hand. In Vegas to bring back a suspect, Crocker and the suspect and two random women are kidnapped as part of a cockeyed scheme by volunteer “posse” members who help the LVPD divert police manpower so they can steal a shipment of pot. Kojak flies west to help, and it turns out one of the kidnappees has a twin sister. So while Crocker works with one sister to get free, Kojak works with the other to crack the case. And did I mention the sisters are the world’s only topless twin magic act? Priscilla Barnes plays the sisters. And for Reasons, Kojak needs to talk with Liberace, played by himself. Kojak doesn’t take him at all seriously. Nice scenery in and around Vegas, a reminder that on location shoots matter.
NBA Draft – I skipped ABC (since who needs more Stephen A in their lives?) for a no frills stream on Bleacher Report that didn’t have any breathless interviews of players’ mom. Don’t ask me how anyone besides Dallas made out.
Terrific stuff. I was eyeing the spine of my Repo Man copy just the other night and thinking that I should revisit it, and I think the timeline on that just got moved up. Love that sense of punk anger, rejection, and nihilism opening up into something exuberant.
Thank you! I had a small tradition of watching Repo Man on the Fourth of July for a bit, it just felt right, and I think I’m bringing that back (although the other traditional Fourth of July movie, Invasion USA, is also a worthy flick).