Repo Man: In Search of True Religion?

This review was published originally on cinekklesia on January 28, 2006.

It has been over 20 years since Alex Cox unleashed Repo Man (1984) into the world, and its underlying analysis regarding the nature of true religion still provokes us today. Generally regarded as a "cult classic" sci-fi comedy with a 1980's punk rock edge, Repo Man actually probes deeply into our quest for belonging, meaning, and mystery.

A young Emilio Estevez plays Otto Maddox, a Los Angeles-based rebellious teenager, who gets fired from his job as a supermarket clerk. Angry, aimless, and in need of cash, he gets recruited by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), an expert in the art of automobile repossession. (Should you find yourself several payments behind on your car loan, a man like Bud could end up "stealing" back your vehicle in the middle of the night.) Bud is looking for a kid to train in the business, and Otto soon finds himself transformed from an unemployed punk rocker to a relatively well-dressed representative of The Man, looking to take away your wheels.

Lest you think that automobile repossession is a monotonous cycle of staying out late, stealing cars, and driving them back to the yard, Cox throws in a pretty big twist: a '64 Chevy Malibu that becomes the grand prize of not only L.A.-area repo men, but also the feds and a group of vigilante activists. We learn at the beginning of the movie that something mysterious resides in the trunk of this car; it emanates a tremendous amount of heat and seems to produce detrimental neurological effects on the driver. In addition, whenever somebody dares to open the trunk in order to inspect the contents, he is blinded by a powerful green X-ray that incinerates him. This Chevy, or the contents therein, has a bounty of $20,000.00, and the repo men are out to claim their prize.

So what does this have to do with religion? Answering this question requires us to parse out the different elements that Cox carefully interlocks within his movie. We first notice the repo men serving the function of community. Before getting recruited by Bud, Otto was a drifter without purpose and hope; upon joining the ranks as a newbie, he begins to develop a more a stable identity with direction and structure. Bud serves as a mentor, teaching Otto that automobile repossession is more than a job; it is a totalizing identity with its own moral code and way of being.

Bud indicates that repo men exist at a higher level of consciousness, in touch with a raw experience of which the sleeping hordes have no clue. For example, after a brief car chase with rival repo men, Otto shouts: "HAHAHA WOW! That was intense." Bud responds: "Repo man's always intense." To be a repo man is to live outside the bounds of any "comfort zone," to become so acclimated to the extremes that they become the norm (though caution is still warranted): "Tense situations, kid. Get into five or six of them a day, and it don't mean s*** anymore. I mean, I seen men stabbed, and it didn't mean s***. I've seen guns. Guns, too, they don't mean s***, but that's when you got to watch yourself." (To read a transcript of the entire movie—the one from which I derive my quotes—check out this page.)

Yet, while the repo men provide Otto with a community, norms, and purpose, can they fulfill his ultimate, metaphysical needs? Cox implies that they are but a shadow of the essential religious experience for which Otto unconsciously years. Even Bud, the Repo Master, eventually exhibits doubts about his calling: "Eleven years of repoing cars and what have I got? S***!"

Otto must look elsewhere, and it appears that he may find some answers with Miller, a handyman who works at the repo yard. At one level, Miller does not appear "all there," and Otto suspects that he suffers from neuropathologies stemming from past drug use. However, despite his unusual persona, Miller exhibits a relatively complicated cosmology and metaphysics in which everything is connected to some "cosmic unconsciousness." Take this exchange between Miller and Otto:

There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine. People get so hung up on specifics. They miss out on seeing the whole thing. Take South America, for example. In South America, thousands of people go missing every year. Nobody knows where they go; they just, like, disappear. But if you think about it for a minute, you realize something. There had to be a time when there was no people, right?

Yeah, I guess.

Well, where did all these people come from? Hmmm? I'll tell you where: the future. Where did all these people disappear to? Hmmm?

The past?

That's right — and how did they get there?

How the f*** do I know?

Flying saucers. Which are really? Yeah, you got it: time machines. I think a lot about this kind of stuff. I do my best thinking on the bus. That's how come I don't drive, see?

You don't even know how to drive.

I don't want to know how. I don't want to learn. See? The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.

At this point, we see that perhaps the repo men have it all wrong. Their lives of stealing and driving cars, their intensely experiential and empirical view of the world may have led them astray. Perhaps the "code" that they follow is an ultimately worthless ethic that they have constructed in order to cover up their lives of thoughtless "intensity." Perhaps Miller, with his deeply introspective worldview honed over hours of rationalistic meditations on the bus, is closer to a "true" metaphysic. (Some may notice shades of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in Miller's words.)

So what, exactly, is Alex Cox trying to teach us? Is there anything that the Christian can learn from the lives of Otto, Bud, and Miller? At first, we should acknowledge that Repo Man appears to take a highly critical view of Christianity: one of the characters that the movie mocks is a televangelist, and in one scene, Bud tells Otto: "...I don't want any commies in my car. No Christians either." However, Cox's main critique appears to lie in popular, institutional variants of American Christianity. He seems to imply that social and cultural institutions, whether televangelists or repo men, distort the search for truth by clouding our vision. Instead, we need to be more like Miller, an outsider who personally and ironically eschews the very device that is central to his job (a car), spending his free time meditating on the higher questions.

At this point, we have to be careful to distinguish between what is necessary and what is empirical. Cox implies that maintaining an outsider status is essential to finding true religion. However, there is nothing intrinsic within religion that should lead us to privilege outsiders over established institutions; it is entirely possible for an institution to hold the keys to truth (certainly, conservative/traditional Roman Catholics would hold that view). However, empirically, it seems that an outsider perspective, one that attempts to clear the calcified clutter of "mainstream" thinking, is helpful. In the Bible, we see repeated instances of God using the margins to speak to, exhort, and condemn the center. Examples include His wandering tribes in the Old Testament; John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness; or Jesus Himself, raised in an isolated, uncultured outpost of the Israeli nation, which itself was under the boot of Roman occupation. God constantly shakes us out of our fascination with what the world considers powerful, charismatic, and true, showing us a better way by means of the weak, the humbled, and the shamed.

So, would Repo Man be a good tool for your next Sunday School class? Probably not. As mentioned, Cox seems to take some unfair, overly broad swipes at Christianity. However, the primary message—that the margins may have something to teach us, if we would just listen—rings true. What's the movie's secondary message? Keep up your car payments.

Munich: Steven Spielberg - Pacifist?

This review was published originally on cinekklesia on January 7, 2006.

I have come to the conclusion that Steven Spielberg is a "shotgun" director: the genres he tackles are diverse, and the quality of his work varies from the awful to the intelligent and sophisticated. In other words, Spielberg's work, taken as a whole, resembles the results of a shotgun blast: wide, scattered, and inconsistent.

Fortunately, Munich (2005) falls into the "intelligent and sophisticated" camp. Combining the excitement of a taut political thriller with the thoughtfulness of a complicated morality tale, our movie earnestly challenges our assumptions and forces us to ponder the never-ending conflict between our moral and national identities. Beginning with the hostage-taking and killing of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Spielberg both portrays and interrogates Israel's response. We see Avner (Eric Bana), a Mossad agent recruited by handler Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) to lead a five-man assassination squad in Europe, hunting down those suspected of participating in Munich. Avner goes into deep undercover, "resigning" from the Mossad so the Israeli government can deny any connection, and collecting instructions (and cash payments) from a safety deposit box in (where else?) a Swiss bank.

The first half of Munich resembles a typical (though well-made) spy thriller, as Avner and his compatriots speedily travel from one European capital to the next, bribing unseemly characters for information, forging documents, and assassinating their targets. The squad members initially see their mission as just retribution for the spilling of Jewish blood, and despite the stress of their task, they manage to remain relatively composed and professional.

Spielberg, however, wants us to question both the moral and psychological consequences of this line of work; he wants us to eschew the comfort of partisan posturing regarding terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to examine Israel's actions through a vague, cloudy lens. Interspersed between scenes of Avner et al.'s European travels are flashbacks to the original Munich massacre in which the Israeli athletes are portrayed as mere civilians brutally targeted by Palestinian thugs; on the one hand, we can see why Israel "had" to respond — if not for vengeance, then for simple justice and security.

Yet, during the course of the movie, we see the assassins increasingly uneasy with their assignment; at the end, Avner questions whether they are even hitting the appropriate targets (did they really know whether their victims were involved in Munich?). They also begin to struggle with whether they have crossed that vague and shifting (though very real) line between their moral identities (which allow for just retribution) and those of their enemies. The more they kill, the more senseless (and endless) their actions seem; at different moments, they wonder whether they have become just as immoral and nihilistic as their enemies — at which point, it is fair to ask: "For what are we fighting?"

With the plot before us, we need to step back and examine the situation that Spielberg portrays. If we do so carefully, then we shall realize that it is not nearly as complicated as he would have us believe. First, in regards to how we judge the actions of Avner & Co., we have several options. The pacifist would condemn the assassinations, arguing that no amount of injustice done to one's self, family, or country can justify an act of violence against another (even, or especially, against one's enemies). On the other side resides the extreme militant who takes almost every opportunity to attack his/her enemy and who would hesitate only for practical, rather than moral, reasons. Most people, including the assassins in our movie, find themselves at various positions between these two extremes. While pacifism may not serve their purposes, they still need a reason to retaliate; they need to feel as though their actions are, in some way, just.

Secondly, if one accepts the premise that some form of retaliation is justified, then we need to look at the method. While assassination may be regarded by some as a particularly sneaky and inappropriate method, it is unclear why it should be regarded any differently than, say, an army invasion. After all, both produce the same material effect: dead people. If one believes that retribution is justified, then discussions of method seem superfluous. (It should be noted that torture seems to present a different set of moral questions since one purpose of torture is to prolong pain — whereas the assassin's primary purpose is the quick kill.)

Yet, the biggest problem with both conventional warfare and undercover operations is that civilians are killed. While the probability is lessened in the latter, the possibility always exists that something will go awry and "collateral damage" will ensue. This is the struggle that our assassins face: they feel that their goals are correct, but they have reservations about their methods. Again, if their actions just mirror those of their supposedly immoral enemies, then what is the point of fighting? Who, in this scenario, can claim a moral high ground?

A common response, of course, is to claim that national preservation requires that one compromise with one's moral beliefs (as the Israeli Prime Minister notes at the beginning of the movie). To defeat the enemy, one must become the enemy. However, at what point is it acceptable for one's national identity to supercede his/her moral character? Why should one have a moral character at all, if he/she is willing to allow non-moral forces to take higher priority?

Ultimately, it seems that Spielberg's point is this: even if a particular war (or, more broadly, violent action) is justified, it is always tragic. Because the methods are so brutal (and, in most non-military circumstances, considered immoral), then nobody can claim a clear-cut victory. While the Israelis may have been right in some abstract sense to seek justice at the barrel of a gun, the material reality of warfare and assassination renders such justice painfully hollow. At the end of the day, Avner doesn't feel good about his assignment; he just wants it to go away.

Unfortunately, the cliché, "cycle of violence," rings true in Munich. Avner realizes that his actions are ultimately futile: for every Palestinian operative he kills, another is ready and eager to take over. Violence indeed begets violence, and perhaps the only truly moral response is for one to jump out of the cycle and to say "No" — even at great personal risk. Perhaps this is why Jesus said "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Mt. 5:9a). Perhaps Spielberg agrees.