Repo Man

Well, Noirvember may be over, but our journey into my made-up sub-genre, atomic noir, is not. It’s a cheery continuation for the holiday season. At least the next film has some humor in it, as opposed to the sadism in November’s Kiss Me Deadly… Thanks for those memories Mickey Spillane! This month: released in 1984 by Universal, it’s Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox on a shoestring budget of $1.5M, resulting in lasting indy fame and approbation. If you look it up on Wikipedia, they label it as science fiction black comedy. Oh, but it’s so much more! So, I’m slapping on my own label of atomic/punk/noir. But, yeah, there is a science fiction twist, and it does have some stealthy humor. 

 Why continue in this vein? Well, last month, we looked at the horror of mid-50s America, with its hide-under-the-bed fear of commies and pinkos, plus it’s palpable fear of the A-bomb. That whole scene blew open with the rise of white guy rock n’ roll, Kennedy kicking Nixon’s ass (well, by a slim margin), the rise of the counterculture, and the narrow atomic war escape of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the clock ticking toward Armageddon nearly struck midnight. Whew! People woke up, man! But then, that was blown away by Johnson’s failure in Vietnam, the US actually losing a war, resulting in Nixon slithering into the White House for two terms (but now, the guy looks like an amateur), ending with the national nightmare of Watergate. Backlash to the Democrats and Jimmy Carter. But public trust had evaporated. Justice and higher ideals went out the window. People were tired --- they didn’t believe in much at the dawn of the 80s. Except maybe in going to B-school, working on Wall Street, and having a home in the Hamptons, with a pool and jet ski. Who rode in on a white horse to burnish this turn towards Mammon? Why, Ronald Reagan. Or, as Doc Brown memorably put it in Back To The Future --- “The actor?” 

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