So at first I thought Repo Man was just going to be one of those weird, post-modern 80s flicks. It was that... but then it turned into a freaky sci-fi 80s flick.
I've heard of "post-modernism" but I guess I never really understood what that meant. According to Mary Klages' article, post-modernism deals with rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Okay.. so we want to make fun of stuff and reject what used to be embraced as genres. Klages also says that post-modernism celebrates the idea of fragmentation, provisionality and incoherence.
Repo Man was strange just for the fact that it centered around the job of repossession. That's not typically the type of employment that you would see for a main character. A lot of the movie was really random, too. Like in the beginning when Otto fights with that one bald kid and then that really odd scene in the beginning where his lady-friend ends up in bed with another guy while he left the room for 5 minutes. Really strange.
And the whole incorporation of aliens?! This movie seems to be about some teenager who happens to become a repo-man and then all these people with tyvek suits show up and people get incinerated just by looking into a trunk. So weird.
I liked that whenever Otto ate or drank something, the container just said FOOD or DRINK on it. I thought that was going to be common throughout the movie- rejecting commercialism, but then I saw Bud Lite represented in the film later. So much product-placement exists in movies today. It almost takes over a scene sometimes. I was hoping Repo Man would be rejecting that type of this but it didn't end up doing so.
This movie was a lot like other 80s movies I have seen. There is the same type of dialogue. The cursing it really on an upswing here. Creative cursing, too. Of course there is the girl with the mohawk and Otto has that silly dangling earring.
It is obviously a movie that goes against movies such as Rebel Without a Cause, as Professor McRae said in class. I thought it was perfect, when the one criminal was dying at the end. He tries to blame it on society and Otto says "that's bullshit". That is a blatant rejection of the idea in Rebel Without a Cause, when they blame a child's outcome on their parents. I don't know how I personally feel about the idea.
So, it's Repo: The Genetic Opera. Not based on the movie Repo Man but it has similarities. That new Nicholas Cage move, The Knowing, was about damn aliens coming to earth in a spaceship and destroying the earth except for two kids. Granted, it has Noah's Ark overtones and the aliens were supposed to be angels and the two kids being the new Adam and Eve but the ending was a giant "really?" Sort of like this movie.
ReplyDelete>>I was hoping Repo Man would be rejecting that type of this but it didn't end up doing so.
ReplyDeleteInteresting observation. This was maybe part of the 80s reaction against the 70s--a sort of in your face embracing of deliberate materialism.
Wait, which idea aren't you sure of, that parents are to blame for their kids' bad behavior, or that some people are just spoiled punks with no motivation for their behavior at all? I'm not sure either, but I think I sometimes lean toward the latter view.
Your comment at the end about Repo Man blatantly rejecting the ideas expressed in Rebel Without A Cause is an interesting connection. I find it crazy that these movies in some ways address and focus on the same ideas and yet, because they're made thirty years apart, there is such a huge difference. Just look at the difference between the two films' portrayal of rebels with James Dean and Emilio Estevez.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering, what you think this rejection of past perceptions does for Repo Man? We spend all this time saying that the film is just ridiculous and has no underlying meaning. But do you think they're saying anything by clearly opposing these previous views? Or is this simply another way the film represents rejection and the rebellious aspects of postmodernist style?