When the Malibu glows inexperienced, it vaporizes anybody who comes shut. Televangelists are turned to ash. Many die. When Miller will get within the automobile, he beckons to Otto, and Otto will get in too.
This can be a second of freedom. Not solely did Otto obtain his prize, however he obtained way more. Like a f***-you-inflected model of “Shut Encounters of the Third Sort,” Otto makes use of extraterrestrial means to seek out his dwelling. As a punker, he needed to depart human society behind. As a capitalist, he needed to steal a automobile and be set for all times. Miller supplied him with each.
“Repo Man” argues that Nineteen Fifties glamor is a bygone fable, and that the grease of a automobile’s undercarriage is all that is still. Our quests to earn cash, get a job, and repay our payments are all makes an attempt to attain what we actually need: escape from humanity. Delving into the methods as they exist isn’t any resolution. Working a dead-end job at Bundle Mart is not going to fulfill you. Cash is not going to fulfill you. Love and intercourse is not going to fulfill you. Faith is not going to fulfill you; Christianity had been lowered to its lowest state within the Eighties within the type of evangelical TV preachers who hatefully ranted in opposition to homosexual individuals.
Alex Cox offers us a fantastical resolution. The image of bodily and financial mobility in the US, the automobile, will comprise deep inside it the means to depart perpetually. Perhaps that is what Nineteen Fifties automobile tradition ought to have been all about. Not the standing, not the power to eat hamburgers on the go, not even the need. Maybe they need to have all the time been about escape, about getting out.
Otto obtained out. Good job. This world sucked anyway.
