Repo Man is a 1984 film written and directed by Alex Cox, starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, with Tracey Walter, Olivia Brash, Sy Richardson, Vonetta McGee, Fox Harris, and Dick Rude. Michael Nesmith of the Monkees was executive producer, and Iggy Pop wrote the Repo Man theme; he also sings the song during the end credits.

A satire on American life under the Reagan administration, on consumerism, and on the Atomic Age, Repo Man had a troubled initial release because Universal Pictures doubted the film’s commercial viability. It nonetheless received widespread acclaim, was considered one of the best films of 1984, and is now a cult film.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the script (including outtakes), and here’s a link to a rather poor quality video of the complete film (i.e., the image being in the bottom-right corner, it’s being sped up, with all the sound in a higher pitch).

After seeing, during the opening credits, a shifting road map of Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and finally to California, we’re in the Mojave Desert, with J. Frank Parnell (Harris) driving a ’64 Chevy Malibu. A cop on a bike pulls him over and wants to know what’s in the trunk of the Malibu. Parnell tries to warn him not to look in there, but the cop insists. He opens the trunk, a bright light shines out of it, and he screams as he’s being disintegrated from the mysterious thing in there, leaving only his flaming boots. Parnell drives away.

Later in the film, we learn from Leila (Barash) that aliens are what is in the trunk; they’re emitting the radiation that killed the cop. A question that should be obvious to ask is this: what business were the contents of the car to the cop? What right had he (I couldn’t care less about his badge) to stick his nose in Parnell’s personal business?

Now, aliens are heavenly beings, if you will. This fact, combined with the sinfulness of LA (where the bulk of Repo Man takes place), as well as the vaporizing of anyone who opens the trunk and exposes the ‘heavenly beings,’ makes me think of the Biblical story of Lot in Sodom. Such an association probably sounds far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, but please hear me out.

To get our bearings, I’ll start by saying that the aliens are like the angels God sent to destroy Sodom, which LA represents here. Granted, the aliens don’t destroy LA in the movie, they just kill a few people nosy enough to look in the trunk; but they do shake things up for a lot of people in and around the city. The radiation emitted by the aliens can be associated with the radiation from nuclear explosions, which can wipe out cities, as happened in Japan. These associations are close enough for me, since as was mentioned above, one of the satirical targets of Repo Man is the Atomic Age.

One of the major sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitality. The Sodomites surrounded Lot’s house when they knew he was accommodating the visiting angels. The Sodomites demanded he send out the angels so they could “know” them. (Gang rape, regardless of sexual orientation, can only be evil.) Knowing his duty to be hospitable to the angels, Lot couldn’t send them out. When the Sodomites tried to force their way into the house, the angels blinded them, which can be associated with the aliens vaporizing the intruding cop.

My point in bringing up the story of Lot in Sodom is that one of the central themes of Repo Man is impingement, encroachment, or imposing oneself on another’s personal space, just as the men of Sodom tried to impinge on Lot’s home and the guests to whom he was giving hospitality. If you impinge on others, they’ll impinge back on you, as the angels did when the Sodomites tried to break into Lot’s house and rape the visiting men.

The scene in the supermarket–where Otto (Estevez) and Kevin (played by Zander Schloss, bassist for the Circle Jerks, who appear later in the film as a nightclub band) are working as stock clerks facing cans–is full of impingement. Kevin, a geek who is annoyingly sycophantic to the whole capitalist system, is singing, of all things, a 7-Up jingle right next to Otto, irritating him. The last thing punk rocker Otto needs to hear is an advertisement for a soft drink while he’s doing monotonous wage slave work.

Otto impinges back on Kevin by sticking a price tag on his glasses. Then, to annoy Otto further, his boss, Mr. Humphries (played by Charles Hopkins), comes over to nag him about not only being habitually late for work, but also for not spacing the cans properly. He gives Otto an implicit warning of getting fired by mentioning how, in the bad economy of the time, one must be careful about the quality of one’s work. Luis, an armed security guard, gets in Otto’s face for not listening to his boss, then Otto curses at him, shoves chuckling Kevin into the pile of cans they’ve been facing, flips off Humphries and Luis, and walks out.

Incidentally, all the cans, cereal boxes, and other things sold in the supermarket are generically labelled and designed, as if either made by one company with no regard for visual style, or to indicate that it doesn’t matter who the makers of the commodities are. The satirical point being made here is about consumerism as an escape from eroding democratic freedoms in the Reagan era, which inaugurated the “free market” policies that have resulted in the neoliberalism that plagues us all today.

I’m reminded of what George Carlin would, in later decades, complain about: the illusory freedom of choice (i.e., lots of different brands and flavours to choose from) for consumers instead of meaningful, democratic freedom of political choice (viable political parties other than the GOP and DNC, ones that offer a genuine left-wing alternative). Seeing generic, no-name brands in the supermarket exposes the lie of consumerism as ‘freedom of choice.’

Kevin’s gloating over Otto losing his job, as well as his sucking-up to his boss, does him no good, because Humphries in his rage fires the “worm” too. Kissing the asses of capitalists is no guarantee of advancement.

More impinging is going on in the next scene, though it’s consensual–slamdancing to punk rock–at a party that night in the back of a warehouse. There, Otto meets Duke (Rude), a fellow punk who just got out of jail. The Circle Jerks song “Coup D’état” is heard. There’s a suggestion in this atmosphere of an anarchist wish for violent revolution, though it’s only a fantasy.

In the next scene, Otto is in bed with Debbi (played by Jennifer Balgobin) in Kevin’s house, where the party has moved. She asks him to go get her a beer from the kitchen, an interesting reversal of sex roles, especially seen in light of how she’s about the cheat on him with Archie (played by Miguel Sandoval) and Duke.

The partiers are living in a freely anarchist manner, while nothing is being done about the capitalist-based problems of the outside world, in the rest of LA and in the world in general. We don’t solve our problems by escaping the world and getting wasted, but far too many of us do this anyway. “Institutionalized,” a song by Suicidal Tendencies about teenage disaffection and alienation (a fitting subject for these punks), is heard from downstairs.

Speaking of disaffection and alienation, Otto is next seen alone outside in the early morning, in a vacant lot drinking a beer. He recites some of the lyrics from “TV Party,” by Black Flag. They’re lyrics about not wanting to think about anything important, about only wanting to watch the idiot box and drinking beer. Otto vaguely senses the futility of mindlessly partying instead of, say, organizing and advocating for social change.

Later, when it’s light out, Otto is still walking around outside, now in some neighbourhood. Bud (Stanton) is driving by in his car and offers Otto ten bucks, which sounds to Otto like he’s soliciting for gay sex, which of course would be more impingement. (Note how Otto’s homophobic response could be linked to the homophobic tone in the Bible story.) Bud actually wants Otto to help him repossess a car in the neighbourhood.

Repossessing someone’s car has to be one of the extreme forms of impingement, as well as the opposite of hospitality, which involves giving, not taking. Sticking one’s nose into someone else’s business, going into his or her personal space, and taking a vital personal possession of his or hers are among the worst forms of impingement.

Repossession of cars also makes for a vividly illustrative metaphor for the Reagan revolution, which was, in effect, a repossessing of so many of the working-class gains of the postwar period up to the 1970s. The Reagan years saw dramatic cuts in domestic spending, a steep increase in the number of homeless people, union-busting, and a number of other policies that resulted in the widening gap between the rich and the poor, policies continued and exacerbated by all succeeding US presidents.

Otto repos the car for Bud as requested, unaware that what he’s doing is a repo, and he takes it to the “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation,” a misnomer for a repo organization so ridiculously bizarre as to be outright Orwellian doublethink. Indeed, proponents of the Reagan agenda similarly regard its rolling back of government benefits for the poor as a ‘liberating’ of the people from the ‘shackles’ of ‘big government,’ all while jacking up military spending to the point of leaving the American government with a deficit.

When Otto realizes the people in this business are repo men, a truly despicable, thankless job, he expresses his contempt for them by taking the can of beer they’ve given him and spilling it all over the floor–impingement on their property. Instead of being mad at him, Bud and Oly (played by Tom Finnegan) say he’s “all right,” meaning Otto has the kind of confrontational, impinging personality that makes for an ideal repo man. Still, he doesn’t want to do the job.

A government agent named Rogersz (played by Susan Barnes)–she has a metal hand–is leading a group of people who are investigating how the cop got killed in the desert. They will now try to find the Malibu, which is to become the MacGuffin of Repo Man, the car that will be the ultimate repossession.

Otto and Kevin are going through a newspaper, job-hunting and sitting by an unemployment office. Still deluding himself that if he works hard and plays the capitalist game, Kevin can become “manager in two years, King! God!” after dedicating himself as a fry cook. Otto isn’t so optimistic, though. He’s had a dream in which he and Kevin were 65-year-old bellhops in a “sleazy shithole motel” in Miami. It looked painfully real to Otto.

Since job prospects don’t look too good for him, Otto goes home (he lives in the garage, incidentally: see the outtakes [link above] at about 9:00) and asks his parents for a thousand dollars promised to him if he finishes school, so he can go to Europe. His mom and dad are stoners sitting on the couch sharing a joint and watching TV. The show they’re watching is of a televangelist, Reverend Larry, to whom they’ve given the thousand dollars to sell Bibles to El Salvador.

To make money, Otto will have to become a repo man. You’ve gotta love the “free market.”

The televangelist, of course, is a real character in himself, and a reflection of the Reagan years in many ways. Apart from the fact that Reagan himself was a conservative Christian, his preaching of ‘small government’ was a ploy to lower spending on the poor in order to increase spending to further the interests of the rich (e.g., increasing military spending for the sake of US imperialism), that is, big capitalist government! Similarly, the reverend tells his viewers, largely lower to middle-class people in need of ‘spiritual answers,’ to give him their money.

Also like Reagan, the reverend wants us all to “destroy the twin evils of godless communism abroad and liberal humanism at home.” Note how the religious right, calling these ideologies “twin evils,” is either too ignorant or outright lying when they don’t see the huge difference between communism and liberalism.

It’s safe to assume that Otto’s stoner parents used to be hippies back when he was a baby. Hippies are liberals, by the way, not communists. A common complaint we on the left have is when liberals backslide toward the right, as Otto’s parents have done by going beyond smoking marijuana to enjoying the opium of the people, a subject I explored in my analysis of Drugstore Cowboy.

Note how Otto’s parents aid US imperialism by selling Bibles to El Salvador instead of helping the country be free of the American empire. Religion is a drug used to help people forget their oppression. TV, of course, can also be a drug in itself, a kind of distraction from one’s everyday troubles, just as the partying punks did as observed above. In the outtakes (link above, at about 12:34), we can see cobwebs enveloping Otto’s mom and dad as they’re on the couch watching the idiot box, just as Black Flag sing about in their song.

In his having no choice but to do a despicable job in order to make the money he needs, Otto demonstrates the lack of meaningful freedom in a capitalist society. And just as the punks have their beer and partying, and Otto’s parents have their marijuana and religion as manic defences against the misery of the world, repo men have speed and booze for the same kind of escape.

This escape will be necessary for Otto, since as part of his selling of his soul to do this new job, he’ll take Bud’s advice and “dress like a detective…dress kind of square,” so people will think Otto is a cop. So much for being a punk rocker. Since one imagines punk rockers have at least anarchist tendencies, we can see how this tendency can backslide into liberalism, then to even more reactionary thinking, as Otto’s choice to become a repo man can be seen to symbolize.

As he and Otto are snorting amphetamine in a car in an alley, Bud sees some people outside and tells Otto he hates “ordinary fucking people.” This is because ordinary people always try to avoid tense situations, whereas repo men are always “getting into tense situations.” Such an attitude, glorifying an aggravating of alienation, sounds suspiciously to me like neoliberalism romanticizing confrontation for the sake of furthering capitalist interests; it’s somehow ‘cool,’ ‘rebellious,’ and ‘edgy’ to be a repo man, rather it simply being an asshole.

Bud and Otto go into a store to buy six packs of beer (generically labelled “drink”) while Bud is still talking about “tense situations” with people with knives or guns. They leave the store, and speaking of tense situations involving guns, we learn that Duke, Archie, and Debbi have been hiding behind the counter, where Bud bought the beer, the whole time. The three punks are holding guns on the cashier, about to rifle the cash register.

We’ll notice as we go through the rest of the film that whenever we see Otto and Bud in a store buying drinks, the three punk rock thieves will also be there. Repo men and thieves are thus being associated with each other. This juxtaposition sends the message to us that repossession, properly understood, is stealing. Bud himself admits this earlier when he’s explaining to Otto how much money you can make when you “rip [off]” a car. Making money by stealing: this is also known as capitalism.

In an outtake (link above, at about 6:42), we see Bud trying to repo a car from a man named Arthur Pakman. Bud gives him his name card, which curiously has the name “I.G. Farben” on it. This is the name of a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that became a donor and major contractor to the Nazi government, relying on slave labour from the concentration camps; one of its subsidiaries supplied Zyklon B. That a repo man would have such a name on his name card is an obvious satirical comment on the corrupt Sodom and Gomorrah that is capitalist society, the fascism that hides behind its ‘freedom.’

More impingement occurs when Bud and Otto are driving around a concrete riverbed, and they encounter the Rodriguez brothers (played by Del Zamora and Eddie Velez) in their car, one of them flipping Bud off. They get into a car chase for a while, and Bud and Otto end up stuck in a puddle. Annoyed, Bud says he and Otto ought to go off and get drinks. Otto is amused at how “intense” the car chase was; Bud says that a repo man’s life is always intense.

Duke, Archie (with a paper bag on his head), and Debbi have just finished robbing the store that Otto and Bud are about to enter; the thieves have impinged on the store. They run out, and Archie knocks into a waist-high pole by the door, hurting himself in the balls…more impingement.

Next, Otto and Lite (Richardson) are driving up to Miss Magruder’s car, stopped at a traffic light, and get ready to repo it. Lite gives him a bag with a dead rat in it to throw into her car to upset and distract her, then Otto can get the car. He throws the rat on the seat just beside her; she sprays mace in his face and drives off when the light turns green. He who lives by impingement shall die by impingement, or get blinded by it, as the men of Sodom were.

After that, Otto and Bud drive over to repo a Cadillac owned by a millionaire named Peason, who is in a laundromat talking to two kids about the laundry, and how he wants it arranged. He has an unsurprisingly condescending attitude toward the kids. When Otto rips off the car, Peason runs out of the laundromat, and the kids toss his clothes outside while laughing at him. It’s hard to sympathize with a rich guy who can’t be bothered to make the payments on his Cadillac.

As he’s driving around in the Cadillac, Otto sees Leila running on the sidewalk. She’s attractive, so naturally he slows down to talk to her. He wants to offer her a ride, but she’s distracted him from his driving, so he drives his car into a pile of garbage on the side of the road (impingement), angering an old lady who nags him to clean it up; he ignores her, of course, Leila gets in the car, and he drives off.

It’s here where we learn that Parnell has been driving around with aliens in his trunk. She shows Otto a photo “of four dead aliens.” He laughs in disbelief at her story. Since she’s being chased by government men associated with Rogersz in their own car, Leila has ducked down and hidden herself from them; she’s afraid they’ll kill her over the aliens. She explains to Otto that Parnell has smuggled the aliens from an air force base in his Malibu. She needs to find him before Rogersz et al do.

In this sense, Leila and Parnell are like Lot and his family, and the government people are like the men of Sodom, so to speak. Otto drops Leila off at her place of work, “The United Fruitcake Outlet,” which sounds like a flippant pun on the United Fruit Company. Apart from the aliens being associated with the angels in the Lot in Sodom story, their deadly radiation implies an association with Soviet nuclear weapons, a capability that the American government would like to be about to take from them, as would any capitalists, such as the United Fruit Company, who spearheaded a coup against the leftist Guatemalan government in 1954 (remember the selling of Bibles to El Salvador in this connection).

It’s easy to see Rogersz’s government agents as the bad guys here, but one shouldn’t assume that Leila’s ‘fruitcake’ group of people are any more sympathetic just because she becomes Otto’s girlfriend…or something (Leila and Parnell aren’t the good guys, just as Lot’s family aren’t all that good, either, as we learn in Genesis 19–Lot offering his daughters for the sexual sport of the Sodomites, his daughters getting him drunk and committing incest with him, etc.). Recall how later Leila helps Agent Rogersz torture him by electric shock to get information as to where the Malibu is. At the end of the film, he leaves Leila to go in the car with Miller (Walter); she asks Otto about her “relationship” with him, and when he blows her off, she angrily says she’s glad she helped Rogersz torture him.

There isn’t really anyone in Repo Man who can be called a ‘good guy’ in a more or less pure sense. As I said, the LA of this film is a modern-day Sodom, a corrupt, impinging, inhospitable place. Even the aliens in the Malibu’s trunk, whom I’ve associated with the Biblical angels on the one hand, and with the USSR on the other (radiation>>Atomic Age>>Soviet nuclear weapons), aren’t to be considered the ‘good guys,’ given that this film is a product of Hollywood liberalism, which has no more sympathy for leftist anti-capitalism than conservatives do.

Accordingly, everyone in the film, those from the far-right to the left-of-centre of the political spectrum, wants to get his hands on the Malibu. Thus Agent Rogersz and Leila wanting to find it is simply symbolic of competing capitalists/imperialists wanting to thwart the Soviet accumulation of nuclear power, as represented by the radiation in the trunk of the Malibu. To repo the Malibu, one will get the unusually high reward of $20,000.

After repossessing a red car, Lite and Otto are driving around in it, and at one point, Lite mentions a book he once found when he swiped a Maserati in Beverly Hills. The book is called Dioretix: the Science of Matter over Mind. “That book will change your life,” Lite tells Otto. It is obviously a parody of L. Ron Hubbard‘s 1950 book, Dianetcs, and therefore a satirical stab at self-help books and pseudoscience in general. (Matter over mind? Not vice versa?)

In the next scene, we see Otto with Miller in a vacant lot. Otto is holding his copy of Dioretix and is about to toss it into a burning garbage can. Miller goes into a big spiel about how many things that seem to be coincidences are really interconnected in some secret, profound, mystical way; it sounds like Jung‘s notion of synchronicity, but Miller’s use of a plate of shrimp as an example of how it works sounds idiotic.

It seems as though Miller has been reading Dioretix, too. His absurd attempts at philosophical profundity give Otto the impression that he must have done way too much LSD over the years. Still, Miller seems like more of a Dostoyevskyan idiot, for though Miller expresses his opinions with ludicrous examples, he seems to have his instincts in the right places, for at the end of the movie, he gets into the Malibu, his gut correctly telling him that it’s an alien vehicle, a spaceship that goes up into the night sky, then into space, and…who knows?…may well even travel time, as he imagines flying saucers and time machines to be one and the same thing. He is a working-class man with a spark of intelligence never properly developed because of a lack of money for higher education.

When it’s learned from the repo men that the reward for finding the Malibu is $20,000 (and it’s speculated that the large amount of money offered for the car is due to it containing drugs, rather than celestial beings, symbolically linking the drug speculation to the “opium of the people”), Otto calls Leila about the car to arouse her interest. He, however, is aroused by her body, and when he arrives at The United Fruitcake Outlet, he tries to get sex from her…or at least a blowjob. Angered by his impinging on her at work, she slaps him…twice. He who leers with impingement shall get slapped with impingement.

But now that so many people are licking their lips over that $20,000, Bud is imagining a life of financial security without needing to work anymore. He insists to Lite that he can achieve this security with $20,000 because he has good credit.

In the next scene, he’s driving with Otto and telling him about how important credit is: it’s “a sacred trust,” what the American “free society is founded on.” (That’s funny: I thought American ‘freedom’ was founded on black slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, but I digress…) This “sacred trust,” combined with getting the coveted money, is what Bud imagines is the capitalist ‘liberation’ he has within his reach.

He compares this dutiful payment of bills and debts favourably to how the Soviets don’t “give a damn about their bills.” When Otto implies that not needing to pay bills in the USSR is a better deal, Bud (recall his IG Farben name card from the outtake) takes umbrage at such an implication and wonders if Otto is a “commie.” So many Americans are brainwashed about what ‘freedom’ is under capitalism to such an extent that it’s inconceivable to them how not needing to pay bills is one of the most liberating things possible.

Now, Bud doesn’t want to sound too right-wing, so while he won’t tolerate any “commies” in his car, he doesn’t want any Christians in it, either. Such an odd appendage to his hatred of the left can only be explained, in my opinion, as an ego defence anticipating an accusation of far-right thinking, or an attempt to seem centrist and liberal. One ought, however, to take into account the “fish hook theory,” which illustrates how liberalism and centrism are actually closer to fascism (remember again Bud’s IG Farben name card) than communism ever was, in spite of what that nonsensical horseshoe theory says.

Parnell drives over to a gas station, where Kevin has a new job. The nerdy boy still kisses capitalist ass, doing the phony friendly-to costumers attitude and hoping it will lead to advancement. He approaches Parnell and offers a vacuum of the Malibu, but the sweaty old man wants to find junk food from vending machines, imagining such food to be healthy. Kevin offers to check Parnell’s trunk, and luckily for him, he ends up not doing so.

He does the same ass-kissing routine for the Rodriguez brothers, who recognize the nearby Malibu and swipe it while Parnell is gone and Kevin is looking for a non-existent box of matches for the brothers in the gas station office.

In someone’s home, Otto tries, instead of outright repossessing the car of a sweet middle-aged black lady named Mrs. Parks (interesting choice for a name on Cox’s part!), to get her to pay the rest of what she owes for it. Her musician son and his bandmates, all huge guys, come home and, learning Otto is a repo man, beat him up outside. Oh, the karma of impingement…

Otto returns to the lot at Helping Hand, and Miller bandages up his wounds. Plettschner, a cop played by Richard Foronjy, interestingly has the same first name as Otto but is practically the opposite in personality or likability. He gets in Otto’s face by saying he isn’t cut out to be a repo man, getting a “fuck you” reply, which just gets the already obnoxious cop angry, so he brags about all of his ‘achievements’ as a veteran and as a prison guard, whereas Otto is just a “punk” and a “little scumbag.” ACAB.

The Rodriguez brothers carelessly lose the Malibu, which is literally and figuratively hot (from the radiation), to Duke, Archie, and Debbi, who see their chance and steal it while it’s unattended. Otto and Lite try to repo a car, but the owner shoots at them. Lite takes out a pistol of blanks and shoots back, telling terrified Otto to get in the car and repo it. As we can see, this juxtaposition of swiping cars shows how repo men are hardly any different from any ordinary car thief. Otto is increasingly realizing that repo men, with their guns and intense lives, are crazy.

Leila is talking to Parnell on public phones, but a car with Rogersz’s agents smashes into her phone booth just after she’s gotten out; they chase and catch her, put her in their car, and take her away. Rogersz is in a van, looking at Leila on a monitor and questioning her about the Malibu. When Leila mentions the aliens in the trunk, Rogersz asks her if she’s ever thought of working for the CIA, Leila having already said she is in no way averse to torturing people. As we can see, the sides these two women work for aren’t all that opposed to each other.

Next, there’s a party in the Helping Hand yard. The staff ask Otto who beat him up, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Marlene (McGee) asks Plettschner why he won’t go after Otto’s attackers, but the cop says he’s on his coffee break. ACAB. Bud says that repo men should get their revenge on Otto’s attackers without the need of cops. “Just like John Wayne,” Marlene says, sneering at the men, who insist that the Duke is the greatest of American men.

Miller rains on the parade of the repo men’s worshipping of this epitome of American machismo by calling John Wayne “a fag” who wears dresses. (One might recall, in this connection, the scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso Rizzo [Dustin Hoffman] tells Joe Buck [Jon Voight] that dressing like a cowboy in New York makes him look like a gay prostitute; Buck, shocked, says, “John Wayne? You wanna tell me he’s a fag?”)

The importance of this scene isn’t about the homophobia (though homophobia links this scene with the homophobia in the Lot in Sodom story, as discussed above). It’s a satiric jab at conventional masculine roles, something further developed when Oly says lots of straight men like to watch their friends fuck, as do Oly and tough-guy Plettschner…apparently.

The repo men insist that Otto tell them who beat him up, and he lies and says that it was his old boss, Humphries, who gets beaten up that night at his home. It’s hard to sympathize with a petit bourgeois capitalist, all the same.

Leila has Otto meet up with Rogersz in a bar to discuss the Malibu and the aliens in the trunk. The two women stress the urgency of finding the car. Recall how the aliens, via the radiation, represent the Soviet power that the women, in turn representing capitalist and state interests, want to get their hands on.

While this is all going on, significantly, the Circle Jerks are performing in the pub as a nightclub band. They’re playing a lame and square acoustic version (this must be deliberate) of their punk song, “When the Shit Hits the Fan.” It’s easy to see why Otto would say, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.” Recall that the bassist of the Circle Jerks is playing Kevin the nerd.

The song, as you can glean from the lyric, is about economic hard times that hit the poor the hardest. It is an ironic take on the Reaganite way of seeing the problem: “blame the government for hard times”; “let’s leech off the state/gee, the money’s really great,” thanks to “welfare checks,” and “free loaves of bread.” However, thanks to Reagan, “social security has run out on you and me,” meaning that it’s the capitalist government, not a ‘socialist’ one (something the US has never had, by the way), that we should blame.

So when we see the Circle Jerks having changed from a punk band into a lame night club one, the transformation parallels what’s happened to Otto (from punk rocker to repo man), to his parents (from hippies to supporters of a televangelist), and to Leila (from avoiding the government to working for them). All of these transformations allegorize the Reaganite metamorphosis of a welfare capitalist society, one where there’s at least the hope of evolving into a more left-leaning one, into a nakedly neoliberal capitalist society, the worst of which we have now in the 2020s.

Small wonder when Duke, Archie, and Debbi enter the bar and see Otto, they speak derisively to the repo man, annoyed that he’s too busy with work to hang out with his punk friends. Though Otto’s choice of work is a bad one, no other money-making opportunities have been opened to him. As the Circle Jerks sing, “We just get by however we can/We all gotta duck when the shit hits the fan.”

Of course, the trio of punk thieves aren’t all that much better. Committing petty crimes hardly improves society. Debbi thinks Agent Rogerzs’s metal arm is fascinating: it merely symbolizes how the system has dehumanized her and made her part of ‘the machine,’ as it were. The three punks, in their own way, have degenerated from their would-be revolutionary ideals, as have Otto, his parents, Leila, and this fictionalized version of the Circle Jerks.

The three thieves leave the bar and find Parnell trying to retrieve his Malibu. They feel he’s impinging on him, not realizing he was originally impinged on, first by the thieving Rodriguez brothers, and then by these three. Their sticking their noses into his business is no different, in principle, to the cop’s having done so at the beginning of the film, so fittingly, Archie suffers the same fate as the cop. Duke and Debbi run off in terror, and Parnell gets his car back.

The Rodriguez brothers are driving along and see Parnell in the Malibu. They claim to be “special deputies” and tell him to pull over. This pretence of authority to justify taking away a man’s car is how we can see no substantive difference between cops, repo men, and car thieves. Might makes right in the end.

This mutual identity is especially apparent when the repo men, in Bud’s car, find the Rodriguez brothers and Parnell in the Malibu, then start vying over who will get the coveted car, which soon drives off. Bud et al get into a violent altercation with the Rodriguez brothers. Swinging a baseball bat at the two, Bud would like to repo their car, but they insist they’ve paid it off.

Because Bud hit one of the brothers with the bat, they’re suing Helping Hand “for malicious damages,” and Bud has lost his job in a nasty falling-out with Oly. He is next seen in a car with Otto. They’re driving in a neighbourhood with a bunch of homeless people. Bud has just lost his job, but he still has no sympathy for them; he’s internalized the Reaganite attitude that the destitute have somehow ‘chosen’ their lot, and they’re leeching off the welfare system. Bud doesn’t understand that, as an unemployed man, he’s closer to being one of the homeless than he is to being the ‘made man’ he thinks the repoing of the Malibu will make him.

Otto is so disgusted with Bud’s attitude that he gets out of the car and walks down the neighbourhood with the homeless, people who truly deserve our sympathy. People in radiation suits carry off a dead body and put it in a car trunk…rather like those melting aliens.

Otto then sees the Malibu. His sympathy for the poor dissolves, he has dollar signs in his eyes, and he runs after the car. Parnell lets Otto in the car, and they drive together. Parnell is actually dying right there as he’s driving, from his exposure to the radiation in the trunk with the aliens. His ability even to focus and follow a conversation is clearly impaired when, during his conversation with Otto, he mishears the boy saying he represents the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, hearing instead radiation, something impinging on Parnell’s brain.

Parnell claims, in his obvious, growing mental instability, that any talk of radiation being bad for you is “pernicious nonsense.” Then he speaks glowingly of lobotomies, a friend of his and he himself each having apparently had one. Soon, he slumps over the steering wheel and dies. Otto gets him out of the Malibu and drives it to the Helping Hand repo yard.

It seems that Otto’s going to get the $20,000 for the Malibu, so at a party at Miller’s that night, the wives of several repo men, including Oly’s, are all over Otto…”like flies on shit.” Someone, however, has broken into the yard and taken the Malibu. Otto goes walking outside; Bud drives by, and Otto gets in the car. They’ll go to that liquor store to get some drinks again.

Duke and Debbi are in a car just outside the store. He’s talking, in all absurdity, about how they ought to settle down, get a house, and have a baby, since “everybody does it,” and it “seems like the thing to do.” Here we see yet another example of initially rebellious attitudes degenerating into mere social conformity–from rebel to liberal. She can hear how ridiculous he sounds, and so they just go into the store to rob it.

Otto and Bud are in the store, and a gunfight ensues. Debbi shoots, and her bullet grazes the side of Bud’s head. Duke is mortally wounded. As he’s dying, he does a melodramatic speech about how ‘tragic’ his demise is, and that it’s society’s fault that he became a criminal, but he’s a white suburban (implying at least middle class) punk. He who lives by impingement, dies by it.

Since the Malibu is missing, the agents are trying to find it. Marlene and Otto want to stop the agents from getting it, but Plettschner, dick that he is, tries to stop her and Otto from stopping the agents. Otto throws scalding hot coffee on the cop’s face (serves him right–ACAB), and Otto and Marlene run out the door; but he’s caught by the agents.

Leila and Rogersz torture Otto to get information about the Malibu. Leila is still a little conflicted about hurting her apparent boyfriend, but Rogersz rationalizes torturing him with a typical psychopathic projection: “no one is innocent,” apparently. Marlene and the Rodriguez brothers break into the room where Otto’s being held and get him out of there. Rogersz is fine with this, since it will lead her to wherever the Malibu is.

The search for the car continues, and even the reverend is interested in it, which shouldn’t be at all surprising. Considering what the Malibu, which is glowing now, represents as I’ve described above, it’s easy to see how commie-hating religion fits in with the capitalist state as personified by Leila and Rogersz, respectively.

Eventually, the car is found in the Helping Hand lot, angelically glowing with Bud at the wheel. It’s raining ice cubes, a kind of dialectical opposite of raining fire and brimstone over Sodom. This is fitting, if we equate the Malibu with Lot’s house, and equate everyone gathering to get at the car with the men of Sodom surrounding Lot’s house.

Otto goes up to Bud and tries to make a deal over what percentage of the reward money each of them will get for the car. Someone from a helicopter above warns Bud to get out of the Malibu. He gets out, but he’s brandishing a pistol. He’s shot from someone in the helicopter, but before he dies, Bud quotes Emiliano Zapata, in all irony, given Bud’s established opposition to revolutionary ideas: “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

The agents get close to the car, but sense “a strange, eerie kind of force field” surrounding it. Another agent approaching the Malibu catches fire. The reverend comes near the car holding a large Bible; he’s flanked by others in religious garb, as he himself is dressed, and Rogersz is with him, even calling him “your holiness,” implying a link between the state and religion that the ruling class would keep intact. A bolt of lightning from the car zaps the Bible in his hands, causing him to expose the phoniness of his “holiness” by saying “holy sheep-shit!” The Church is every bit as corrupt and sinful as everyone else in LA, the modern Sodom.

The force-field, the fire, and the bolt of lightning coming from the car thus all parallel the angels (i.e., the aliens in the trunk) striking the men of Sodom intruding into Lot’s house (i.e., the Malibu) with blindness.

So who is worthy of getting into the Malibu and driving it (even though he can’t drive)? Miller is, and he waves at Otto to join him inside for a ride. Miller, recall, is the Dostoyevskyan idiot whose innocence and lack of interest in the $20,000 makes him worthy. Now, Otto, spurning Leila and her association with capitalism (the United Fruitcake Outlet) and the state (Rogersz and the agents), as well as his tiring of the repo man job, is now also worthy of being in the car and enjoying its true benefits.

The aliens take the car up into the sky. Just as Lot and his daughters escaped the sin of Sodom, Otto and Miller fly up in the car into space and freedom from the sin of LA and the rest of the world.