Repo Man (1984 film) = Finished

Repo Man is SqualorPunk.
It's poverty made cosmic.
It is the exact kind of story of sex and religion and mysticism and rampant consumerism and meaningless crimes and meaningful coincidences that you'd expect to read from someone trying to be a punk in New Mexico.

A lot of folks talk about a world having 'texture', because there's a prostitute on a corner speaking an alien language, or grafitti on a nondescript wall. That is texture, in a classic video game sense. It's color on top of a grey base. Dirt strewn on an otherwise clean street.

Repo Man doesn't feel like that at all.

The dirt and poverty and heatbaked struggle of its world is ground into the very foundations. Impossible to wash. I can't imagine a single set of Repo Man being...anything else. That's saying something. Whether it's the one-floor rambler of Otto's parents or the repo office or that one stretch of neutron-bombed road that gets swarmed by men in flame retardant suits, each scene feels like it belongs to a place totally idiosyncratic and sacred to the movie.

And then you've got the movie's approach to plot.

I was confused about the scenes shown at the opening. They felt random and even bloated. Why are we spending three minutes watching punks mosh in a dirty alley? Why are we watching Otto sulk beside some train tracks, or a couple of angry customers try to buy back a crappy car? What's the story being told? How are these bits contributing to it?

Then, at a certain point, your mind detaches from what's happening on screen and you realize that this jumble of stuff IS the story. From the request for a blowjob in a gallery to a series of convenience store robberies, plot lines get picked up and weave together and dangle in a mess that feels transcendent and confusing all at once, until a car lifting off the ground and hurtling into the sky makes all the sense in the world.

I can't stop thinking about it.

Teasing bits and pieces out to try and understand what it all *means*.

Repo Man is SqualorPunk.
It's poverty made cosmic.
It is the exact kind of story of sex and religion and mysticism and rampant consumerism and meaningless crimes and meaningful coincidences that you'd expect to read from someone trying to be a punk in New Mexico.

I love it for that.