Quote:
Originally Posted by The Great Owl
I like this observation! One of my favorite Repo Man scenes involves Otto eating the generic food at his parents' house. I always laugh out loud when I'm watching that scene. The violence in the movie, paired with the consumerism comedy, was such a fun commentary on the 1980s culture.
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Thanks!
Yeah, in that scene, I love when
[Show spoiler]his mom tells him that he'll "enjoy it more" if he were to eat it on a plate, and he tells her that he couldn't possibly enjoy it any more. That is hilarious. Emilio's delivery there was perfect. Related to his character, I also think the dangling cross earring is pretty classic and funny,
part of the great nostalgia of the film that you described earlier. There is just so much that is fun in Repo Man, the music especially rocks.
I've been thinking about other aspects of Repo Man in terms of
[Show spoiler]an anti-road movie of sorts, a claustrophobic road movie, a road movie that doesn't go anywhere, a movie that basically loops around and around from scene to scene, most of them involving transactions and hi-jinks of some kind or another related to moving cars, the characters are constantly moving in and out of cars, and within a set of dense cinematic arenas (highway chases, the repo company hq, gas stations).
Repo Man has a particular kind of relation to the pastoral. We never really go there, except in the beginning scene, indeed, the scene from which we then descend into Los Angeles, but, importantly, a largely unidentifiable, anonymous, and barren Los Angeles. (At least I assumed they were in LA.) Or, in some ways, this movie transforms LA into a pastoral landscape, with the dusty and weedy parking lots and dust-strewn empty alleyways and side-streets, a kind of urban badlands.
So in spite of this largely being about cars, and being framed from the beginning (via the use of the map during the credits and the opening scene in the desert) as a movie that will take place on the open road, the movie left me with a somewhat claustrophobic feeling and the feeling of a concrete jungle. The cinematography (which is very effective and often outstanding) by and large keeps things close and tight, and the constant hum of the movie - the music seems constant, there is the grumbling of the Malibu, and characters are always doing something to add to the claustrophobia, like when Emilio is in one scene playing a random musical instrument, or they crush beer cans or other tins, or their cars are rumbling. It would be interesting to consider these aspects of Repo Man with the ways that senses of space - if the road feels open or narrow, expansive or tight - in movies that by and large take place on roads. Where is the "horizon" of experience in the particular movie? Because in Repo Man it oftentimes feels very close to the street, and I think that this characteristic lends a gritty edge to the movie that relates to the critical commentary about, say, social inequality and petty crime in the 1980s. Keeping the horizon tight might be a symbol for limited mobility or social mobility?
Since the horizon feels, at least to me, confined, there is a stark contrast between the little network of car thieves and traders and the (concept of) the outside world. Where does the "rest of the world" figure in Repo Man? Does it exist? Is there real police? The movie feels like it exists outside of society (but in a different way than Easy Rider, which achieves something similar). Even the spacesuits belong to some nebulous non-organization, no concrete reference to a state or a government or an area of science or security, just white suits, like the generic labeled tins of "drink" and "food."
This tight focus also underscores the comments that the film also makes about foreign policy. The outside world is referenced, such as when the television news reporting is playing in the background, while Emilio is reading "Outlaws" magazine in the company office, and the news reports on political violence in Mexico. The outside world enters in the forms of music, much of which is Latin, commodities (which are all generic), background news reports, discussions about "weirdness" and the rise of conspiracy theories and obsessions with UFOs, and subtle references in the screenplay to outside events, as in that same conversation, about how people are "disappearing" in South America, a reference no doubt to the disappearances of many, many Chileans under Pinochet's dictatorship. And this is a technique that Cuaron also used, playing politically relevant and critical news in the background in moments in Y Tu Mama Tambien.
Given these thoughts about open and narrow roads and spaces, I'm keen on thinking more about how Repo Man might compare to and resonate with, say, these most excellent road films
http://www.criterion.com/explore/189-road-trips
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