Repo Man (1984) and the "So-Bad-It's-Good" Genre

I loved Repo Man (1984). I loved it’s style, I loved it’s nonsensical attitude towards film-making and I loved it’s absolutely insane twisting plot. But past these basic statements, I couldn’t really put my finger on the cinematic reasons why I though this particular film is perfect. So I did some reading to see if I could get some inspiration, and found that several people identified this film with the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre, a relation I found rather odd, as to me films like The Room (2003) and films like Repo Man are on two separate planes of cinematic reality, in my mind. So, what follows here is an assessment of the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre, using Repo Man as a sort of example of what I love about poorly constructed films.

~~ "So-Bad-It's-Good"? ~~

Tommy Wiseau’s The Room remains one of the cornerstones of this cult genre: this masterpiece of bad cinema commits every possible sin against coherent story telling, continuity editing, and maintaining semblance of reality through acting, set design and dialogue. Savvy and novice film viewers both get a kick out of watching the train-wreck unfold, watching as actors butcher lines, as unnecessary green screen ruins any semblance of reality, and as the horrible dubbing clips the audio and offsets the actors temporal presence creating the bizarre uncanny effect of misplaced sound. There’s a good reason why The Room is the first experience many have with the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre: it’s perfectly bad to the point of audience ecstasy. It’s enjoyable because we know it’s bad; it’s enjoyable because it’s cathartic to watch failure unfold. Yet, we all know it’s bad: most would still call it a terrible example of cinema, even if they have a good time watching it, and even if they think the end is perversely perfect in it’s self-awareness. We enjoy it but it’s still bad.

I think the reason we need to reevaluate the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre is because so often it feels like only bad films can exist under it’s definition: films like The Room which are poorly rated by all, but enjoyed nonetheless; films like Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010), and Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) occupy this category because they are fun to point and laugh at the spectacle of failure. One would be hard pressed to come up with a reasons why Manos is a good movie, why there is actually some hidden meaning, or some masterful use of terrible framing and editing which creates a masterwork. It might be a masterwork because it’s so horrible, but it’s never going to be a masterwork because it actually achieves something; it thrives on it’s terribleness and it’s terribleness alone.

Yet there are films that have many of these same issues that I attached to The Room — bad writing, bad acting, overall disconnect from any reality — that actually achieve some fascinating world building and philosophical effect, through their worst components. I have argued in the past that House (1977) — the absolutely bizarre Japanese horror-nostalgia experience — might very well be one of these films, as all of the things that might be considered “bad” about this film — the cheesy acting, the strange effects, the overbearing soundtrack, the clumsy sets — all elevate the interpretive potential of the final product, making it what I consider a masterpiece. This understanding of (what I consider) the masterpiece House might then be contrasted with a film like There Will be Blood (2007), which is an excellent movie which many consider a masterpiece, but for me will always feel a bit underwhelming in the end: the line at the end of the film “I’m Finished” (for me) not only signifies that the main character’s work (and arc) is finished but that the movie is complete to the point that the audience cannot engage with its ending; when There Will be Blood is over, the audience’s engagement with the film is also over. The difference, then, between House and There Will be Blood, is a sort of leakage in the structure of the film: the latter is air-tight letting no audience interpretation breach it’s rock solid veneer, while the former must be patched through audience interpretation, only becoming a complete film through the labor of the viewer. I might further identify this distinction as films which revel in audience participation, and films which are meant to be watched, more or less passively, that that might be an essay for another day.

So, how does all this relate to the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre and, ultimately, Repo Man? I want to argue that Repo Man and House fall into the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre, while films like Manos and Birdemic fall into a different category entirely. The “so-bad” part of the phrase “so-bad-it’s-good” implies to me that there is something transcendent about the badness; it’s not just that the film is bad, but the bad elements of the film become good within the context of the art. The “it’s-good” part implies to me that these leakages make it entertaining and maybe, in a more high-brow sense, requiring an audience to interpret the film, ultimately creating meaning by plugging up the holes that might traditionally be considered bad film making. I think these sorts of films are not the sorts of films that we normally relate to the genre; rather the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre is filled with films that we see as being so obviously flawed that it becomes farcically entertaining. In other words, the film is never actually considered “good”; rather it’s enjoyable to watch because of it’s flaws — it feels “good” to point and laugh at Birdemic for all it’s failures. Yet, this cannot be said of films like Repo Man or House. The continuity errors in Repo Man are often atrocious; much of the story and dialogue feels inconsistent and random. But these facts within the fabric of the film cannot be said to be poorly constructed, and (at least to me) cannot be enjoyed ironically. They instead enhance the interpretive possibilities which (I find) makes for a more engaging watch. I think that these are ultimately the one’s I might place in the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre, as these film’s worst qualities ultimately enhance the experience of watching, where as films like The Room might be better described as “hilariously-bad” or “ironically-enjoyable”. (I think The Room might actually be a bad example to use in this essay, as I have heard the argument that there is an interesting reading that makes the film make much more sense — hbomberguy’s discussion of The Room in this video is really great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TebCHHCw9rY&t=1674s — so maybe we could think more about Troll 2 (1990), Manos and Birdemic as poster-children for the “ironically-fun” genre.) Or maybe (to preserve the current genre conventions) we can leave the room in the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre and instead label these films — Repo Man and House — as something like “so-bad-it’s-perfect” or “purposefully-and-perfectly-bad”. Regardless of how we qualify these films, my point is simply that there are two types of films we might refer to here, and I hope to lay out a difference I see.

~~ Repo Man and Perfect Badness ~~

So. How do the bad aspects of Repo Man enhance it’s potential meaning? While it is definitely not a good movie in the There Will be Blood sense, I clearly rate it higher than the perfection that we find in PTA’s filmography, considering Repo Man a movie in the “so-bad-it’s-perfect” sense. Continuity is all over the place, there is a very weird sense of pace to the film which never feels natural, there are all sorts of weird interrelated sub-plots which culminate in very bizarre ways, the characters trace very strange arcs and ultimately the film never feels like it has a coherent thesis or a point. It’s almost like a strange set of interconnected skits or sequences, with a recurring cast of characters. Characters becomes caricatures. The culmination of the film is nearly off the wall nonsense. It smacks of low budget fun, but ultimately this vibe just enhances ones enjoyment in trying to tease apart all it’s disparate threads. It’s disjointed and messy and rather mean on occasion. But nothing ever feels fully out of place. This ought surprise us as Repo Man forms a sort of plot point (un)holy trinity (as Ebert understood it): it combines punk rock, repossession, and aliens. Somehow the film’s universe is still coherent even within this tripartite conceptual base, as the disjointed film making matches with the disjointed form — bad continuity, weird shots — matches the disjointed plot. If anything, this is a testament to the “bad” film-making employed here.

More importantly, this tripartite plot allows for much of the interpretive potential of Repo Man, as we are quickly called to ask questions of the off-the-wall plot. We are introduced to the different components of the film rather quickly: we begin with blatant punk-rock sonic energy blaring, as we fly around an electric green map of the southern United States, then transitioning to a car drifting down the highway, which causes a death by flash of light and disintegration. Mysterious as this event is, we are quickly transitioned to more punk, and the disaffected youth that consume there in. The disaffection grows stronger as we are introduced to more characters and places which all seem to alienate the lead character, at which point he is welcomed with open arms into the repossession business. From there, the film spins us in episodic spirals of car repossession and alien mystery interspersed with scenes of revealing dialogue about the near post-apocalyptic would of poverty in the United States.

This interwoven “punk rock-extraterrestrial-car repo-ing” plot could most certainly be considered jarring. Yet, ultimately, this jarring feeling left me thinking about the nature of our modern world and the ways in which our current global political economic systems operate. While I can’s speak directly for the time around which this film was based on (as I am young), this film left me with the sense that it was the end of a (largely perceived and fictional) economic prosperity; the film had a certain feeling of realization to it, a sort of “waking up” — realized through counter-culture rock movements, and a general sense that things weren’t working out as promised — which lead people to question the nature of the structures of their societies. Hence the question: “you know how everyone is into weirdness right now?” We might read this — in light of the film’s own excessive weirdness — as a sort of escape-ism: the “weirdness” is — in the real world sense — a way for people to justify and engage with a reality that has increasingly alienated them, as it’s nice to believe in time travel, God, aliens, auras and the pure ecstasy of punk-rock suburban crime rather than look out the window to watch people die in the street; the weirdness is additionally — in the film sense — a way for the filmmakers to alienate the audience from their own reality, isolating and escaping from the perceived ways in which art and the world function and relate to each other. The film is weird because the world is weird: the world is weird because it’s legal for repo men to run around taking peoples cars, because millionaires don’t pay their bills, and because it’s weird that people have cars at all (what is a car if not a time-warping alien spaceship when compared to walking?). Ultimately, we might even identify it as alien in a very fundamental way: the fact that our object-of-desire is some four wheeled poison machine is weird. Yet, the characters still chase the McGuffin-mobile to ultimately discover this alien-ness manifested as it flies away into space. We lean out the window and yell “this is insane!” only to realize that the “time machine-Chevey Malibu-alien transporter-atom bomb trunk” is just that: an insane collection of man-made signifiers which ultimately mean nothing in combination. It is insane and jarring and wrong. And the film highlights this all perfectly through it’s best and worst parts, and the interrelations therein.

There’s a lot here that I probably missed in my short interpretation. But, that is just one more joy about these sorts of film. There is so much to talk about that no one person can really do it all. There is no way to wrap it up; there is always some paradox, some new idea or theme, that must be explored. Reviewing and thinking about these sorts of films come from a combined effort of watching and thinking and rewatching and rethinking, which all of us are a part of. These sorts of films spark conversations, even if some people think this film is bad for it’s worst qualities. It’s just interesting, at the end of the day and I like that. Like many of my more recent reviews, I feel like my assumptions about good and bad cinema might be best summed up with the claim “perfection isn’t entertaining”. While many people look for films that have perfect editing and cinematography, that have continuity, and the perfectly explained character arcs — looking for the film that turns to the audience and says “I’m finished”, I wonder what we can really say about those films in the end. Can we really have a conversation about those films? Maybe for a bit. But, again perfection isn’t all that fun to talk about. Having been a part of multiple film clubs, the best discussions about film I have ever had were about the weaker films, the ones that left a bit too much up to the imagination, or a bit to much up to interpretation. It’s fun to piece things together. It’s fun to talk about what Repo Man means, or the possible meanings of bad movies. They leak, and in the end that is far more interesting to hypothesize about.