Repo Men (2010) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Do not let your warranty lapse around these guys!

In this movie, Repo Men don’t just come for your cars. They’re coming for your organs and other body parts, in a film that is as much body horror as it is sci-fi. It explores loving your work, and how the nature of what you do can change who you are, and vice-versa.

First Impressions

In a future where replacement organs cost upwards of a million dollars, Remy and Jake are two hired guns that will repossess the company property if payment is not made. Until one day Remy has an accident and is given replacement organs without his knowledge. Now he can’t make the payments and people are coming for him. What are the Repo Men to do?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In a future world where recession, government bankruptcy, and endless war are commonplace, so too is the ability to buy replacement organs for almost any medical need. These artiforgs (artificial organs) are sold in America by The Union, a medical conglomerate that creates the synthetic devices, sells them to customers, finances the sales (at exorbitant rates), and–when the customer can’t pay–uses their in-house repo men to take the organ back. Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) are the top two repo men working for The Union and report to Frank (Liev Schreiber). However, Remy is a family man and believes the nature of the job is upsetting his marriage, and wants to get into sales with Frank.

Jake treats the violent job of extracting unpaid organs from living hosts as mostly a game. He even extracts a kidney from a man in a taxi outside Remy’s house during a barbecue. Remy’s son, Peter (Chandler Canterbury), sees this repossession in part, so he and Remy’s wife, Carol (Carice van Houten), leave. Remy continues his job, putting off conversations with Frank about switching roles. His next assignment is to repossess a heart from musician Jimmy T-Bone (RZA), an idol of his. During the repo, Remy’s defibrillator explodes, knocking him out. He awakens in the hospital with an artificial heart and a payment plan from The Union.

During Remy’s convalescence, he lives with Jake, due to Carol changing the locks on the house. He tries to complete more contracts but his heart is no longer into it (literally). He also has no ability to make the sales to clients, warning them about the high interest and repossession tactics. Jake blames Remy for messing up their partnership. On a job at an abandoned motel where multiple people with overdue artiforgs are hiding, Remy gets knocked out by a debtor. When he comes to, he sees Beth (Alice Braga), a drugged-out singer from a local bar he frequents. She has 10 overdue artiforgs, but instead of trying to cash in, he takes pity on her.

Remy and Beth go on the run together, since without taking contracts, he’s not earning any money and is due to default on his heart payments. When repo man Ray (Joe Pingue) comes for Remy and Beth, they attack him, but Beth is injured in the process. Remy breaks into The Union offices and assaults Frank to take them out of the system. Frank tells him that such a task can only be handled at the Main Office. They try to leave the country using a jammer–a device that makes the artiforgs invisible to scanners–but Beth’s injured knee gives them away. Jake is on-site to arrest them but decides to let them go.

The two visit Beth’s black market surgeon, Asbury (John Leguizamo in an uncredited role). He recommends Little Alva (Tiffany Espensen), a 9-year-old surgeon. While they are busy, Jake tracks them and kills Asbury. When he catches up to Remy he admits that he sabotaged the defibrillator so that Remy would stay partners with him forever. They fight and Jake knocks Remy out. Beth helps Remy escape and they meet Peter and Carol on the subway where Remy gives his son a manuscript of his life that he’s been writing and tells him to publish it. The two continue to run, deciding the only way out is to break into the Corporate offices and destroy the mainframe, erasing their debt forever.

Once inside the offices, Remy must fight against a dozen guards and repo men just outside the vault. After they get into the server room they discover the only way to get their bomb into the computer area is by scanning their organs to remove themselves from the system. In an erotic and perverse act of cutting each other open to scan their barcodes, they manage to put grenades into the return bin and destroy the mainframe for good. Jake arrives with Frank but kills his boss, deciding to help Remy after seeing his love for Beth. Sometime later they are all living on a tropical beach, enjoying drinks, and Remy’s memoir, “The Repossession Mambo.” The film glitches and the audience realizes that Remy never woke up from being knocked out by Jake. He is living in a virtual reality fantasy, the M5 Neural Net, in which Jake pays for his best partner to live forever.

“How can anything be alive and dead at the same time?” – Remy

History in the Making

When I first heard the title Repo Men it sounded like the sequel to the 1984 film Repo Man. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. While the 1984 film is a satirical black comedy about society, focusing on a group of repo men in Los Angeles, this film is much more part of the sci-fi pantheon about eugenics and body modification. Repo Men skirts the line between cyberpunk and biopunk in the way that it depicts the unintended consequences of the new technological advancements created by The Union. It does use a satirical bent in creating a world where the same attitude modern society has towards buying on credit is attributed towards organs which can be repossessed without any empathy or care for the well-being of the owner. The film’s main theme is the idea that one’s work defines much about oneself, and if you don’t like your work the rest of your life suffers.

The film was co-written by Eric Garcia, based on his 2009 novel called The Repossession Mambo, which was published just under a year before the release of the movie. The film contains similarities to a number of other science-fiction films including Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, and to a lesser extent Robocop. Primarily an action film, Repo Men creates tension by putting the protagonist into a situation where he’s constantly on the run for his life. On the downside, that ends up not being as exciting as it should be. Even before the dream sequence, which is the last half-hour of the film’s runtime, things feel a little off. Jake, who is shown to be all about the rules, ends up letting Remy go–multiple times. The film does make up for it a little in the final act hallway fight between Remy and a dozen guards and other repo people. It is modeled after a similar fight from the film Oldboy, even including Remy using a hammer to attack the onslaught of guards.

The final act also has an extremely perverse sequence that is reminiscent of something that might be seen in a David Lynch or David Cronenberg film. Forgetting for a moment that this scene takes place only in Remy’s head, the only way for Beth and him to gain access to the return bin is to scan their organs and check themselves into the system. From a logical standpoint, wouldn’t it have been easy to use one of the characters who was killed in the hallway for the same thing? Regardless, the scene is Beth slicing open Remy’s torso so she can shove her hand inside his abdomen to scan the serial number of his heart. Director Miguel Sapochnik plays this as an intimate act–which it certainly is. But there’s more of an erotic bent to the scene. He seems to be equating the act of scanning each other to the male and female erogenous zones. Remy is one and done, but for Beth, they must scan 10 different parts: ears, eyes, larynx, knee, liver, kidneys, and her reproductive system. Each scan that Remy makes makes Beth draw a larger breath. It appears to be both extremely erotic and painful as well. The sequence is something that may turn some audience members off completely.

Genre-fication

The biggest addition to the genre that Repo Men adds is its depiction of artificial organs or artiforgs. Many other films have dealt with organ transplants going back to the original Frankenstein. But even recent films like The Island, which deals with the harvesting of organs from clones of the donors, discuss only organic types of organs. Repo Men is still the default film about this type of scientific advancement, even 15 years later. An argument could be made that a film like Robocop fall sinto similar territory, as it has the main character receive artificial organs and augmentations, but that is only secondary to the plot of the film. For Repo Men, the artiforgs are the driving force for the characters. But since I brought Robocop up, the one similarity that does stand between the two films is that a popular member of an organization (Remy with The Union and Murphy with the Detroit Police) is injured in the line of duty and the Company decides to perform medical procedures on them without their consent. In Murphy’s case, he exacts revenge on the people who did the work on him. Remy, only thinks that he enacted revenge. In his case, he was also placed into a fantasy world that allowed him to live out his dream of sticking it to The Union.

From there, most of the other elements of the film stem from other popular works over the previous decades. Films with characters living out their wishes in some sort of fantasy-induced world include Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. One starts in reality and works his way into a fantasy, while the other starts in a fantasy and works its way back towards (arguably) reality. The Matrix is probably a better parallel to discuss. In that film series, the humans are placed into an artificial reality created in a computer, much like the M5 neural net. This is done against their will and without their knowledge, which again raises the issue–how can we tell if we are living in a simulation? The film gives one hefty clue that the ending of the film may be suspect. When Jake is helping Remy and Beth destroy The Union systems, he mentions the time that Remy told his son about the “badass Romans.” Jake wasn’t there for that story, as Remy was telling Peter about the Romans during one of their bedtime rituals. It would have been nice if there were some other subtle nods to the fact that Remy is living in a dream world, other than the straightforward wish fulfillment of sticking it to the man.

Societal Commentary

Repo Men is clear in its thoughts about modern consumerism. In the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, western culture is all about consuming goods and services. For those who can afford it, they buy what they want, but for others, the only way for many to keep up their consumption is on credit. Credit cards and loans provide the have-nots with the devices and goods they cherish. Repo Men takes this idea to its extremes by having people but life-saving organs on credit. And like modern man buying an expensive car on credit, when they can’t pay the monthly bills, someone shows up at their door to collect the debt. Unfortunately, collecting the debt on artiforgs usually kills the person. The irony is that the person probably would be dead without the transplant anyway. So they are only delaying the inevitable, which keeps people like Jake and Remy (and The Union) in business.

Throughout the film, Jake often tells Remy that a job is a job, which explains the way he can disassociate from the violent nature of his job. Together they are a bit like the droogs of Stanley Kubrik’s A Clockwork Orange, socially violent members of a group outside the bounds of normal society. Remy is slightly more sensitive than this but still performs his job with passion, gusto, and a lack of empathy. It never seems to occur to him how his daily living affects others. He lives blissfully unaware of the pain he inflicts, even ignoring his wife about getting a new job. But suddenly he has a literal change of heart–something that’s a bit on the nose–when he receives his artificial organ. At that point he begins to empathize with those people he’s been sent to hunt, realizing that they are (again, literally) no different from him. Remy is no longer to work zestfully or oblivious to the pain of others. It turns his life around as Carol takes Peter and leaves him, which allows him to live guilt-free with Beth. It’s an interesting parable about how an immoral or unethical world can affect all aspects of one’s life. Living virtuously, or at least honestly, is a more freeing lifestyle. Jake on the other hand becomes even worse throughout the film. Remy learns that it was his modification of the defibrillator that injured him in the first place. Of course, he only did this to keep Remy in the game, since they were life long friends. Jake’s lake of empathy extends even towards people he claims he loves. In the end, he decides to keep Remy alive and in the vegetative state/false reality because he can’t stand losing his friend. He promises to continue working so he can pay the bill on the neural net. What a sicko!

The Science in The Fiction

The scientific advancements of this future society (supposedly 2025 according to Wikipedia) are incredible. They have mastered self-contained artificial organs beyond what currently exists. At present the only self-contained artificial organ humanity has created is the heart. There are many other devices that can help with dialysis, respiration, and insulin production, but they all require some external tether or interaction. Repo Men’s inventions are the stuff of the Bionic Man. They have fully self-contained artificial hearts, as well as livers and kidneys. There are artificial voice boxes (with recording features and other tech), superior ears (with an extra 3.5mm headphone jack for sharing with another), telescopic eyes, and more. It’s a dream scenario for creating the technological singularity as people get closer to a transhuman future.

The future of Repo Men is not as bright as it may seem. Society has fallen far, at least American society as depicted in the film. Corporations are in ascendance over individuals and appear to have more rights than the average person. Otherwise, one might expect a consumer protection organization to advocate against The Union. Instead, people are openly hunted and slaughtered by these repo men (and women). The bright spot may be that this dystopia may only exist in America. The Union does not appear to exist outside the country, hence Remy and Beth’s plan to escape through the airport to somewhere they won’t be hunted. On the downside, maybe the rest of the world is actually worse off given the reports on a global recession in the opening moments of the film.

The Final Frontier

Repo Men opens with a narration from Remy (being slightly reminiscent of a hard-boiled detective film or even Blade Runner) about a story he heard about a scientist who had a cat in a box. Though the scientist’s name is never mentioned, it’s an obvious story about Erwin Schrodinger’s thought experiment. In that experiment, as described, a cat is in a box with a vial of poison (or acid). When the cat is observed, it can exist in one of two states: alive or dead. But until that point it’s neither alive nor dead, existing simultaneously in both states at the same time. Remy wonders how something can be alive and dead at the same time, which is of course a nod to the idea that Remy is that cat. He is alive, but he’s not living. He’s dead on the inside as shown by his morbid fascination with his job. He only starts to live when he realizes that he’s starting to die. Something that more people should be thinking about.

The film is an interesting take on a possible future stemming from contemporary American culture. And since it’s one of the first films to look at the artificial organ trade, it doesn’t have the hurdles of previous visions to overcome. Both Law and especially Whitaker are fun to watch as the grisly legal murderers for hire. Yet there’s little joy in the film. Remy becomes enlightened only to become the target of his former comrades, and what little joy might have been seized by the apparently trite ending, that too is stripped away as an artificial memory that is stolen from the audience just as the way the repo men take artiforgs. Perhaps it’s the repetition inherent in the plot that seems to slow things down. Characters go through the same motions several times, presumably to ensure that the audience understands what’s at stake, which takes some of the edge from the film. Repo Men is still a worthwhile watch, but maybe not more than that.

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