'Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence'

Like Billy Wilder and so many others, Alex Cox saw Los Angeles through the eyes of a foreigner. Perhaps this perspective helped him gauge the weight of the city’s car culture. There is a boxy, sinister element to all the key autos: Bud’s Chevy Impala, Otto’s heisted AMC Matador, the Chevy Malibu that really did get stolen during filming. Actors auditioned in cars. The film’s only glamorous ride, the Rodriguez brothers’ 1964 Ford Falcon convertible, felt the wrath of Stanton’s baseball bat— during an on-set argument over his right to wield a real baseball bat in place of a prop one. And as a car film, Repo Man faithfully captures the terrors of its era. In Grease—a movie with a similar magic-chariot finale— the paved L.A. River is a private racetrack for gleaming hot rods. Here, it’s Bud’s doomsday escape route.

The original drafts of the Repo Man screenplay actually did end with atomic annihilation. Even with the sunnier conclusion that the film wound up with, it still fits snugly in the roster of politicized 1980s American sci-fi. Most science fiction made under Reagan—from the low-budget The Brother from Another Planet to Escape from New York, Robocop, They Live (a Cox favorite), and even the blockbuster bluster of The Terminator—couldn’t avoid engaging with political issues, providing the same kind of canvas for social commentary once offered by westerns. Nuclear apocalypse loomed, and Reaganomics turned downtowns into dystopian Bantustans; reality was rapidly catching up with fantasy.