Be an asshole, but don’t be an asshole about it.
Repo Man, Straight to Hell, Walker
“What if a middle finger was a movie?” is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religion. Refusing to accommodate anyone, even your own audience, requires both a sincerity of vision and a douchiness of character that you rarely see in the same person at the same time, let alone actively working together to make that person better at their job. It’s resolving a hostage situation by yelling really loudly and banging two trashcan lids together. It’s talking someone off of a ledge by telling them that your pizza just got here and you’ll be good and goddamned if it’s going to get cold because you have to go downstairs and wait for the paramedics. It’s caring while also not giving a fuck, and it’s what dreams are made of.
Which brings us to Alex Cox. During his brief run as a mainstream filmmaker, Alex Cox took deadly serious the central premises of two of his best films (“the egos of little men will always doom those around them to unimaginable suffering” in Walker and “Los Angeles sucks” in Repo Man) and absolutely nothing else. This total indifference to everything except the single thing he cared about allowed him to go as far afield as he saw fit without ever risking the structural integrity of the story. Everything works because there’s always a sincere heart beating at the center of it all.
And that’s the key to harnessing punk’s fury without falling victim to punk’s penchant for self-destruction – you can’t hate everything. You can only hate pretty much everything. It’s why Walker and Repo Man work and Straight to Hell doesn’t – the latter mocks its own existence, which causes it to collapse under the weight of unfocused snark.
Honestly, it’s crazy how unprepared people were for the discomfort caused by Cox’s bottomless contempt for everything besides basic decency. Walker was savaged by critics, but The Death of Stalin is rightfully considered a modern classic, even though they’re both powered by the same energy. The refusal to be traditionally funny, inescapably draping everything in the grimness of the topic at hand – all things that feel right at home today, but didn’t back then. We weren’t ready for Walker when it first came out, but punk is all about being ahead of the curve.
The End
The point of capitalism is to live forever, and the point of punk rock is die young. Given these conflicting prerogatives it’s impressive that Alex Cox even had a career, let alone a good one. He constantly dared his bosses to fire him, and they only had the courage to do it once his movies stopped making money. I guess the stiffs had their prerogatives, too – it’s just that Cox’s were way cooler.