What is Repo Man about?
Quoted from Alex Cox's site:
Nuclear War. What else could it be about? And the demented
society that contemplated the possibility thereof. I'd written a script
for Adrian Lyne about the effects of nuclear war in an American city, Seattle.
It was called THE HAPPY HOUR, and was never made.
Repoing people's cars and
punk rock were just the tip of the iceberg. The real mad centre of the film is
J. Frank Parnell - the fictitious inventor of the Neutron Bomb. He sets the film
in motion, on the road from Los Alamos, and, as portrayed by the late great
actor, Fox Harris, is the centrepoint of the film.
Fourteen years
later, I had a call from one Sam Cohen, who announced himself the father of the
Neutron Bomb. I imagined a cross between Jack D. Ripper and Edward
Teller in a dark Brentwood apartment, raging because there hadn't been an
intercontinental thermonuclear war... But we had lunch, and he proved to be a
charming chap.
He told me that REPO MAN and DR STRANGELOVE were his
favourite films. He didn't view either of them as a comedy. From the nuclear
strategist's standpoint, he thought they were both very accurate."It was the
quintessential neutron bomb in the trunk... what we call a SADM - a Strategic
Area Denial Munition." He and the Russian politician General Lebed gave
press conferences a couple of years ago to draw attention to the number of
ex-Soviet SADMs which had gone missing -- hundreds of them, Sam said, sold on
the black market to whoever was buying. He thought a SADM may have
destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma.
"The Neutron Bomb
was the most moral weapon ever devised... " Sam would insist. It turned out the
Pope agreed with Sam, and sent him a Peace Medal, for the invention of the
Neutron Bomb, in 1979.
