hifting images of a radioactive-green road map of the United States underlie the opening credits, drawing the viewer ever westward along such iconic highways as Route 66, eventually to deposit us in the mean streets of Los Angeles. But first we witness an odd desert encounter between a highway patrolman and a man (Fox Harris, as J. Frank Parnell) driving a '64 Chevy Malibu. After being stopped for speeding, a dazed, sweating and trippy Parnell warns the patrolman not to investigate the trunk of the Malibu, but of course the officer immediately does so. His fate is instant vaporization under a blinding flood of radiation. Exit Parnell.
Meanwhile, in L.A., we plunge into the everyday world of our protagonist, young Otto Maddox (Estevez), 18 passing for 21. Otto is a disaffected punk—buzzcut, wearing a huge cross earring—without ambitions or goals. His supermarket job—stocking shelves—is humiliating and unsatisfying, so he quits in a flurry of curses. Hanging with his fellow mosh-pit pals, he finds no respect, either, as his girlfriend, Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin), is stolen from under his nose and his harder-edged compatriots, Duke (Dick Rude), and, Archie (Miguel Sandoval), get in his face for not being punk enough.
Walking aimlessly down the city streets the next day, Otto is tricked by repo man Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) into participating in the repossession of a car. Back at the auto yard, Otto encounters the other sordid repo crewmembers: karate-chopping secretary Marlene (Vonetta McGee), gun-toting African-American repo man Lite (Sy Richardson) and spacy mechanic/handyman Miller (Tracey Walter). At first mistaking the repo men for tools of the establishment, Otto is disdainful of them. But once he understands that the repo men are outsiders like himself, a kind of counterforce to society, he is convinced to enlist in their ranks.
Otto encounters Leila (Olivia Barash), an employee of United Fruitcake Outlet, who is also involved with the driver of the mysterious Malibu. Leila informs Otto that Parnell is a renegade scientist who has absconded with the corpses of four UFO aliens in his trunk. Leila is intent on bringing the corpses to the attention of the media, but must first counter the efforts of a secretive government agency, led by the creepy Agent Rogersz (Susan Barnes), who is also on the trail of the Malibu. Otto is unconvinced, but when a $20,000 award for the Malibu reaches his attention, he's suddenly gung-ho.
An outrageous drive on the wild side
What is the quintessential cyberpunk movie? Johnny Mnemonic? The Matrix? Naming any film from the '90s onward is a dumb choice. By then, cyberpunk had spent its truest energies, become mannered and codified, just another flavor in the Hollywood kitchen. No, it's best to look back to the dawn of the cyberpunk movement, circa 1985, for the truest exemplars of the untainted c-p spirit. Of course, Blade Runner (1982) is always cited as proto-cyberpunk, and does indeed to a large extent embody the virtues and hallmarks of the genre. But its model, Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? hails from an earlier era. What film created de novo could rightfully claim to herald the turbulent sociocultural and artistic currents that were to soon revolutionize written SF?
Alex Cox's Repo Man captures perfectly the "low life, high tech" ethos of the genre. Never before in an SF film had such a down-and-dirty set of characters, living such ordinary, hardscrabble, even pathological lives, been embraced as the true citizens of the future, worthy of our attention. Despite its contemporary setting, the film is, of course, speculating on the path ahead. Otto's catatonic, TV-hypnotized parents, in thrall to a televangelist named Reverend Larry, represent a kind or brain-dead, media-soaked Orwellian future, as well as the failure of the hippie efforts to remake the world. And the intimate identification of cars with their owners (seeking to understand someone, Otto asks first what kind of car the person drives) seems to point to a kind of future cyborg lifestyle. The clever visual touch of having all consumer products come in generic packages also hints at a creeping pod-person fate for humanity. (During a hospital scene, the paging of one "Dr. Benway," William Burroughs' creepy mad scientist, deepens the dystopian tone.)
The tech element is more subtle. There's no hacking or space stations, but the government agency that wants the aliens back is fully equipped with computers and various sensing devices. Agent Rogersz and her metal hand evoke Dr. Strangelove, of course, but also add to the cyborg motif. The figure of Parnell as a weapons designer who underwent a lobotomy rather than face the consequences of his own researches is a strong indictment of the scientific mentality. And the constant chatter of television and radio in the background, commenting on the action, underscores the weight of media in the affairs of society.
In short, Cox's intelligent, funny, outrageous script could have flowed from the combined pens of John Shirley, Marc Laidlaw, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, circa 1984. Responding to the very same global phenomena that inspired these writers (as well as Los Bros. Hernandez and their Love and Rockets comics begun in 1982), Cox managed to tap into the zeitgeist—abetted by such musicians as Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins and the Circle Jerks—coming up with the fullest expression to that date of the cyberpunk worldview.
