What do you get when you cross a medical nightmare, a cyberpunk dystopia, and a succession crisis? At first glance, the answer may seem obvious. When considered together, these three factors feel like a clear summary of the United States’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic. They also are the best way to describe the world of 2008’s largely forgotten cult musical Repo! The Genetic Opera, a film described by writer Darren Smith as “Blade Runner meets Rocky Horror.” While originally meant to be a critique of cosmetic surgery and reality television in the 2000s, the film is now best known for looking and sounding like the unloved daughter of My Chemical Romance and Evanescence, screaming about how we live in a society. Like other “so bad it’s good” films, Repo! becomes entertaining not through offering a nuanced exploration of its themes, but through trying and failing to let the audience know how cool and edgy it is.
Ironically enough, it is exactly the film’s numbness and callousness in the face of mass death and suffering that makes Repo! a camp masterpiece, and a horrifyingly prescient vision of the United States now twelve years since its initial release. While contemporary films struggle to make sense of how the world has changed without being preachy or exploitative (looking at you, Songbird) Repo! has the benefit of age and a lack of expectations around solving every social issue in a two hour runtime. The film is so straight forward and over-the-top that it is able to cut through the burnout many are feeling, and provides an opportunity to laugh at the things we fear in a controlled environment. Under its absurd gore and teen angst surface, Repo! tells a deeply sincere story about the corrupting nature of wealth and the sacrifices parents make so that their children will not repeat their failures.
The film takes place in a near future dystopia where organ transplants have become necessary for all, and are leased out to patients on the condition that if they don’t make their loan payments in time, a ‘Repo Man’ sent by the megacorporation GeneCo will come to collect. When Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), CEO of GeneCo, learns that he is dying of a terminal illness, he sets out to tie up the loose ends from his past. Chief among these concerns is passing GeneCo off to seventeen year-old Shilo (Alexa Vega), the daughter of Rotti’s former lover, thus preventing the company from defaulting into the hands of his three spoiled adult children: Luigi (Bill Moseley), Pavi (Nivek Ogre), and Amber (Paris Hilton). The film also focuses on Shilo’s relationship with her overprotective father Nathan (Anthony Steward Head), a ‘doctor’ and widower who keeps her locked away under the pretext of keeping her safe from the outside world. While the film’s plot quickly becomes overcomplicated with secret motivations, and convoluted backstories (“a tale befitting any opera,” as it were), it is these two relationships that make up the bulk of the film’s runtime and provide the moral backbone to it , as well as placing it squarely within the long tradition of gothic literature.
The Gothic includes a common set of elements including: virginal maidens, tortured men, supernatural monsters, and exploring the hereditary illnesses that often manifested in European aristocratic families. Best known for novels like Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), Repo! transplants the genre into the modern era, pushing the themes of its predecessors up to eleven and adding an infusion of nu metal sounds. Rotti’s children are not just pale hemophiliacs. They are a perverted masochist who enjoys wearing womens’ faces as a mask, a thin skinned caricature of machismo, and a singer more known for being “hooked on surgery” and addicted to the street drug Zydrate than her voice. The archetype of the maiden can be found in Shilo who is terrified of the damage that hereditary illness has done to her body. “I’m infected by your genetics,” she sings in reference to a blood disease she contracted from her mother, “what hope has a girl who is sick.” Her father Nathan takes on the role of the Byronic hero, wracked with guilt over a choice he made to save Shilo in the place of her mother in a botched c-section. Nathan also acts as the film’s ‘supernatural’ monster, but in Repo! the supernatural becomes science without morality, and the Repo Man its agent.
At once a doctor, a militarized police officer, and a corporate debt collector compacted into a single figure, few film monsters have ever been this direct in their real world parallel, let alone three. Likewise, the film’s opening number is devoted entirely to expressing how terrifying this monster is, and his inhumanity. “He won’t bother to write or to phone you,” sings the Graverobber (Terrance Zdunich), “He’ll just rip the still beating heart from your chest.” The Repo Man is a pure personification of the terror of living in a state where insurance is given only at the behest of corporations and medical infrastructure is forgone in the name of overfunding an already bloated military and police budget. “None of us are free from this horror,” Zdunich continues, “because long ago we all fell into debt.” With this song, the Repo Man is presented as the inhuman slasher of predatory Capitalism. If you cannot pay in cash, you can pay in blood.
At least, he is in theory. When put to screen, the Repo Man is just Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer doing an off-Broadway Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde impression, growling about how he’s “the masked horror on your street corner” and how he’ll “stain the streets / they’ll run with blood.” Nathan is not an inhuman killing machine. He is a middle-aged man who can barely control his seventeen year old daughter, stuck in a job he dislikes but justifies because “somebody’s gotta do it.” The only point at which he becomes monstrous is when Rotti orders him to carry out his executions instead of allowing Nathan to go to therapy and work on his deep self-loathing and guilt. Shilo’s discovery of her father’s day job as a “night surgeon” feels not unlike what it’s like to discover that your dad is a cop. “Didn’t you say that you were different, didn’t you?” she sings, “Say you aren’t that person. Say it.” Regardless of how Nathan may justify how he became the man he is, it does not negate the harm he has caused. Once one participates in a monstrous system, they become in part monstrous. The only hope left is to prevent their children from joining that violent system.
It is precisely what Rotti wants for Shilo, revealing all of her father’s crimes as an act during the titular ‘genetic opera.’ He announces that he will give her the company only if she kills Nathan, redirecting the anger she feels towards Rotti against her father. It is a trap that Shilo fully recognizes, singing that “You would use my mother’s death to use my father. You’d use my father’s death to use me too.” All Rotti and GeneCo do is use people. The succession crisis is literally staged for an audience. Even Shilo and Nathan’s raw emotions are wrung for their value as entertainment. Rotti may fail, and die convinced that “No one will remember how lucky they were to have [me],” but he still uses even his own death as a product for consumers. Despite the drama of the opera, nothing has changed. After Shilo leaves the theatre, GeneCo is still in the hands of the Largo family. The face of the company may have changed (literally), but the methods are the same. The Repo Men still collect their debts. The poor and the destitute still cling to their zydrate as a way to numb the pain of living, convinced that this next surgery will be the one to save them. The entire effort was a performance.
Repo! is the camp reproduction of contemporary American society. It is garish, loud, and confidently speaks on sensitive topics it knows nearly nothing about. There is an extremely discordant sense of humor across the entire film and the extent to which these moments are seen as funny or tasteless depends on personal tolerance, experience, and desentization to violence. However, Repo! can act as a small vaccine for facing the very real fears of the day. It contains so many little moments that feel too accurate to have been accidental, from a girl singing about wanting to go outside, to a violent misogynist who gets away with murder because of his father’s money. The film is at once a gory escapist romp and an uncomfortably on-the-nose account of American society today.
For many in the States, the pandemic has laid bare an infected and festering political body, hemorrhaging on the operating table without any money for healthcare. The nation is choking on it’s own blood, but those in positions of power laugh off suggestions that it is even sick at all. There is an ever present sense of foreboding numbness. Repo!’s completely stale filmmaking and dedication to have every line sung makes it feel like a recreation of contemporary society experienced through a fever dream. If for no other reason, this makes Repo! worth examining. “Sometimes I wonder how we ever got here,” asks the Graverobber. The United States may survive this pandemic, but only if it undergoes surgery.
