Over the weekend I watched Alex Cox‘s Repo Man for the first time and before even seeing it I knew it employed the glowing MacGuffin a la the nuclear briefcase in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which was later used by Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction. However, like Kiss Me Deadly, Repo Man uses such items as symbolism rather than the simple homage Tarantino uses it for.
Cox plays a similar homage to Kiss Me Deadly as he scrolls the closing credits from top to bottom rather than bottom to top and while I wasn’t watching the brand new Criterion release of the film, the previously released version from Universal Home Entertainment includes a nearly 30-minute featurette in which Cox and producers Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks contemplate the idea of whether or not the film could be made today. Cox responds by saying you couldn’t make a film as political today (which I don’t necessarily agree with considering the film’s low, low budget), but it got me to thinking not about whether it could be made today, but what if it had been made 50 years ago.
Considering Kiss Me Deadly‘s influence on the film, what if Repo Man had also been made in black and white? It certainly wouldn’t have fit when it comes to the film’s punk rock tone, but visually I think it adds a whole new level of interest to the film, as Cox and cinematographer Robby Muller clearly had an eye for nostalgia.
In order to check out the images below in black-and-white, just roll your mouse over each of them for the comparison.
In color or in black-and-white, this shot of Fox Harris as the film’s mad scientist was one I instantly knew I needed to capture.
This shot and the one directly above it could be from just about any era of early sci-fi, be it black-and-white or color, but the black-and-white certainly takes you back.
Another one of my favorite shots in the film — 1.) for the joke with the air freshner (which had me laughing out loud) and 2.) for the appearance of the scientists in the background, appearing as if they are working inside a plastic bubble.
Roger Ebert wrote in his review about this scene saying, “There is a moment involving some food in a refrigerator that gave me one of the biggest laughs I’d had at the movies in a long time.” It’s hard to see in the screen capture, but virtually all of the products in this film are generic products that simply read something like “Beer”, “Drink”, etc. and in the scene above Otto (Emilio Estevez) is eating out of a can that reads “Food”.
His nearly catatonic mother on the couch says to him as he spoons another bite into his mouth, “Put it on a plate, son. You’ll enjoy it more.” One of the film’s many classic lines.
Had the film been made in black-and-white I think it still would have been great to end it with the nuclear Chevy Malibu glowing green. The effect is still there when you look at the black-and-white image, but given the fact this is a mid-80s feature with a commentary on Reaganomics built in, the green just seems to speak to the era much more than would have been the case in black-and-white.
Finally, I didn’t snap any pictures of Tracey Walter as the film’s resident philosopher Miller, but I didn’t feel it would be right to write something about this film without including the clip below, which begins with Otto tossing a copy of “Dioretix: The Science of Matter Over Mind”, the film’s jab at Scientology’s Dianetics, into the fire.
BONUS: You can read my Blu-ray review of Kiss Me Deadly from the Criterion Collection right here.
