What better way to spend the day after your wedding than by watching movies for 16 hours straight? If that doesn’t sound like your ideal honeymoon, maybe don’t invite Paul Thomas Anderson to the festivities. The director of One Battle After Another recently made news for curating a movie marathon to celebrate the wedding of Jonathan Levin and Este Haim (who has a small role in PTA’s previous film, Licorice Pizza). While Anderson’s selections include Hollywood classics like Casablanca, Barry Lyndon, and Casino, the biggest outlier is a 42-year-old indie science fiction film that may have flown under most people’s radars: Repo Man.
For the unfamiliar, Repo Man is a 1984 film directed by Alex Cox on a budget of just $1.5 million. Calling Repo Man a movie is arguably a bit of a stretch. It’s more of a collection of non-sequitur scenes, oddball characters, and dystopian vibes, loosely connected by a plot revolving around a stolen car containing alien technology and a young punk rocker named Otto (Emilio Estevez) who gets taken under the wing of Bud, a speed-addicted repo man played by Harry Dean Stanton. When the car gets stolen, it sets off a series of events that threaten to destroy all of Los Angeles. (I think? The plot is honestly kind of murky.)
Stanton carries the movie with a grizzled performance (until his character is killed off, allegedly due to some behind-the-scenes conflict with Cox), but Repo Man is also full of scene-stealing performances from unknown actors. Tracey Walter delivers several iconic lines as a brain-fried mechanic, including a monologue equating a plate of shrimp with the “cosmic unconsciousness.”
Repo Man‘s music secured its status in the punk rock canon and fueled its modest box office success ($3.7 million). The soundtrack includes mainstays of the LA punk music scene at the time, like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and Suicidal Tendencies. Iggy Pop even wrote an original song for the opening credits. Unsurprisingly, it rocks.
Anderson also took inspiration from Repo Man for his own movies. In 2014, he praised the movie while speaking at the New York Film Festival (via IndieWire):
As far as I’m concerned, he’s [Alex Cox] underappreciated. I was 13 or 14 years old and I recognized the world [of Repo Man]. There such abandon in this movie — it’s focused, it’s funny, it’s outlandish. It’s talky in a way that never feels like a stage play ’cause it’s always moving. Quentin [Tarantino] I’m sure loved this movie, we’ve never talked about it, but there’s Quentin fingerprints all over the way these characters talk to each other…. I’m always trying to get night exteriors to look the way [Repo Man cinematographer] Robby Müller shot them. I can never do it. I never know how he did it. It doesn’t look like there’s any lights on, it looks like how it really looks and back then — there’s gotta be a million lights on… As long as I keep [making films], I’ll try and get night exteriors to look like Müller.
It’s easy to see how Anderson’s love for Repo Man fueled his work on One Battle After Another. Both films depict a dystopian present that looks eerily like our own, with a few slight differences. The mix of serious topics and dark comedy also translates seamlessly from Cox’s film to Anderson’s.
Repo Man might not seem like the most obvious way to kick off a movie marathon at 9 am — it’s best watched late in the evening after a night of partying. It’s possible Anderson picked the film as a “skippable” starter for any non-hardcore participant who planned to sleep in but didn’t want to miss Casablanca. Or maybe the goal was to simply let the sights and sounds of Repo Man wash over the audience while they sipped coffee and nursed their hangovers.
But assuming you weren’t invited to the Haim-Levinson wedding, I heartily recommend throwing on Repo Man the next time you find yourself sitting on the couch with a beer in hand. You won’t regret it.
