As Otto (Emilio Estevez) goes about his life aimlessly in Repo Man he brushes shoulders with characters of various races around Los Angeles. These scenes often involve tension or violence, although the racial aspects of it are almost never articulated by the characters. When Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) scams young, white punk Otto (Emilio Estevez) into repossessing a car, we briefly see the interaction from the point of view of the Spanish-speaking family who own the vehicle. Otto ends up having to fight the father of the family off through the open window as he speeds away. A few scenes later we see him with a conical Asian hat on, hanging out with his geeky friend Kevin (Zander Schloss). Within the context of the 1980s and Emilio Estevez’ father Martin Sheen having the starring role in Apocalypse Now (1979), the hat could be seen as a reference to The Vietnam War, and Americans’ involvement in it. In the next scene, Otto’s stoner hippie religious cult parents are unable to give him any money because they spent all of it on bibles for El Salvador. In a number of scenes, Otto and the other men are seen repossessing cars from black families. Repo Man has people of color on the periphery throughout, most of the time presenting them in an ambivalent manner. But this ambivalence does not always lean negative, and Otto is frequently left looking like an idiot.
The ambivalence of the film goes very much along with the ambivalence of the Repo occupation. The official nature of their business suggests that repo men are aligned with the police and the legal system, but as Otto’s colleague Lite says of their rivals, the Rodriguez brothers, “They’re car thieves, just like us.” Lite is played by the great Sy Richardson, who had important roles in many Alex Cox movies. The character is a black man who holds allegiance to no group or demographic. These repo men all have a sense of honor to “the repo code”, but they are also very much mercenaries out to earn money for their survival.
This ambivalence is also seen in Otto’s friends, a trio of convenience store-robbing punks--Duke (Dick Rude), Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin), and Archie (Miguel Sandoval). Debbi is a mixed race person, and Archie is Chicano. In one of the most memorable and quotable scenes in the movie, they are involved in a convenience store massacre. Debbi escapes with the money, while Duke delivers his cliched, cinematic final words: “I blame society.” Otto rebuffs his friend, saying in reply, “You’re a white suburban punk, just like me.” The scene is notable in that it reveals Otto’s self-awareness, which the audience is uncertain of up until that point. In effect, he acknowledges the white privilege he and Duke have, and how their lives are relatively easier than many others around them. Duke can put the blame of his downfall upon the abstract generalization of “society”, but he just as easily could have avoided this fate by settling down, getting married, and having children as he brought up a few scenes earlier.
The cartoonish trio of robbers shows how the LA punk scene really was quite diverse, and Otto’s statement is just one of many examples we see of white punks explicitly bringing up their racial background. The first single by The Clash in 1977 was “White Riot”, in which vocalist Joe Strummer encourages white listeners to fight against the oppressive British system much like black communities at the time already were. Black Flag sang of being a “White Minority”, in which punks were perceived as an oppositional group to mainstream (white) culture. Somewhat more awkwardly, Minor Threat had their song “Guilty of Being White”, which has been easily appropriated by white supremacist groups. The thing to remember in the case of Minor Threat is that the song was written by teenagers who did not understand the complexities of race. This makes the staying power of the song that much more surprising. Punk is indelibly a youth movement, a fact that plays into the precociousness of the music as well as the naivete. The consideration of race is something largely missing from most music, movies, and media of that time. In cultivating their otherness, some white punks attempted to rescind their privilege, and in so doing, brought attention to the institutionalized racism of mainstream culture.
This acknowledgement of racial difference did not just happen to materialize in a conscious way, but was an organic aspect of punk’s formation within the working class. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige writes, “In some parts of London, at least, there existed a whole network of subterranean channels which had for years linked the fringes of the indigenous population to the equivalent West Indian subcultures. Originally opened up to the illicit traffic of ‘weed’ and jazz, these internal channels provided the basis for much broader cultural exchanges.” (39-40) Later on, in terms of semiotics, Hebdige mentions “that punk includes reggae as a ‘present absence’ – a black hole around which punk composes itself.” (68) Audiences with a mainstream or superficial understanding of punk rock may not get this relation to reggae at all, but after studying the history of how the genre formed, reggae is a clear influence. This is probably most clearly illustrated in songs by The Clash, who in turn had a major influence on countless bands. Many of these bands that came after them may not even be fully aware of where their style came from.
When looking at punk in the US, there are more examples of cross cultural influence. Alice Bag’s memoir Violence Girl: East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story (2011) is an in depth, first person account of how her working class background went on to shape the scene that was forming in the late 1970s. She explains how Mexican ranchero and mariachi singer Pedro Infante influenced her approach to music just as much as contemporary bands of the time like The Sex Pistols and The Ramones. Other chapters touch upon shows she played at Madame Wong’s and The Hong Kong Cafe, two restaurants in LA’s Chinatown that became unlikely meccas of punk fury and chaos. The two restaurants opened their doors to punk shows, with Madame Wong eventually going more in the new wave direction after being particularly dismayed over female-fronted bands like The Bags. The Hong Kong Cafe took the punks in and continued in that direction. It is interesting to consider how much Chinatown was an influence and enabler of these scenes, seeing as how most of the clientele came from different parts of the city. The situation up north in San Francisco was similar with Mabuhay Gardens, a Filipino restaurant and music venue lending their stage to local bands like The Dead Kennedys and Crime, as well as touring punk bands from all over the world. All of these venues have since become legendary in context to underground cultural history.
In her memoir, Bag also discusses how her sense of punk fashion came to be and how this was full of ambivalent coding. While taking community college classes she became fascinated with the history of World War II and Nazi Germany, in part because the aesthetics were so compelling, but also to find way to stop fascism from happening again. Much has been written about and discussed regarding punk culture’s adoption of the swastika. Bag writes, “We are forced to the conclusion that the central value ‘held and reflected’ in the swastika was the communicated absence of any such identifiable values. Ultimately, the symbol was as ‘dumb’ as the rage it provoked. The key to punk style remains elusive. Instead of arriving at the point where we can begin to make sense of the style, we have reached the very place where meaning itself evaporates.” (117) The energy of punk is generated by different kinds of contradictory friction, and the use of this imagery shows the immense ambivalence of punk clashing up against moral imperatives to state a clear ideology.
In a chapter introduction from their book White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, Stephen Duncombe and Maxell Tremblay write, “From the first wave of New York and London punks, symbols of starkley racist whiteness were mobilized for shock value; for the hardcore band Black Flag, whiteness was something to be ridiculed; for Minor Threat and the Fuck-Ups, whites were under attack; for bands like X, the White race had become merely one among many; and for Sham 69, race took a backseat to categories like youth and class. Punk whiteness at that moment and under these circumstances was inchoate and ambiguous: it was self-conscious, dejected, oppositional, and anxiety-ridden, with its political content still up for grabs. Yet it’s important to remember that race, even hazily defined, has salience: redefining whiteness didn’t release punks from the White race’s place and privilege.” (45) There is an intentional dissonance that comes with punk, which makes it impossible to speak about in a unifying way. Some performers used the swastika in a wholly ironic, tongue in cheek kind of way. Others presented it purely for shock value, which goes back to the nihilistic void “where meaning itself evaporates” as Bag said. And then there are groups who see no joke or youthful death drive in it at all--they are just white supremacists. The “no rules” approach to life that punk encouraged sometimes made it incredibly hard to figure out what the hell a person’s intentions were.
Steven Lee Beeber related Susan Sontag’s thoughts on camp to this whole situation, essentially suggesting that punks were in on an ironic joke. Beeber writes, “When the punk bands used swastikas in a camp way, they were making clear the “failed seriousness” of those symbols and the risks--in this case extreme risks--of “fully identifying with extreme states of feeling” like those of the ultrapatriotic National Socialists. Better to be ironic and detached than to trust unreliable emotions, pretending that they’re inarguable truths to be acted on.” (51) This makes sense if you imagine a Nazi in a spotless SS uniform looking through time at a bunch of disheveled, abject punks using the swastika. They would be absolutely disgusted by this clashing of cultural semiotics. The fact that some punks who wore that symbol were not even white in the first place, lends some credibility to Beeber’s approach. Bag is Mexican American, just as some early members of Black Flag were Latinx. Their use of Nazi imagery is clearly a provocation towards white supremacists as well as their victims. When you take “extreme states of feeling” and present them in a fluid, unclear way, misunderstandings are bound to happen.
This brings us to provocative, nihilistic attitudes that became a sub-genre of their own during the 80s. Troma movies are probably the most representative of the sub-genre I am talking about, but there are other examples that come from all over the world. A couple of other instances I watched recently are the Mexican films Intrepidos Punks (1988) and Vengeance of the Punks (1991). As the opening credits of the latter movie roll, we see a guy draw a swastika on his lover’s naked ass. It is a provocation both ideological and sexual, arousing and aggressively anti-social. Much could be said about these Mexican movies being completely separate from American culture, but the influence is clearly there. But not all punk movies of that decade used fascist imagery so recklessly. Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In (1986) gives us a clever satire in which a group of punks and other countercultural youth are trapped in a concentration camp created at their local drive-in movie theater. It gives viewers the opportunity to revel in the transgression of fascist imagery, while also experiencing a story that rails against such ideologies. Aside from all of these movies that invest a lot of time in the push and pull between the nihilistic and progressive sides of punk, there are punk characters that make cameos in films of the 1980s that portray them as goonish clowns. One example that comes to mind is the mohawked punk (Kirk Thatcher) blasting music on a boom box in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Disturbed by the loud, aggressive display as they ride the bus, Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) try to communicate with the punk. When this doesn’t work, Spock uses his super powers to incapacitate the man.
Lloyd Kaufman, the primary force behind Troma Entertainment Inc, has political values that are intentionally perplexing and murky. In a 2001 interview with The Flashback Files he stated “The reality of American life is constant racial and sexual violence. My movies are a reflection of that. From The Toxic Avenger on we have been involved in fighting hatred and violence and the puritanical dictatorship in America.” But in a more recent interview with Joe Bob Briggs, Kaufman spoke highly of George W Bush, who he believed to be one of the great American presidents. Later in The Flashback Files interview Kaufman states, “We [Troma] take the position that there is a conspiracy of elites. The labor elite, the bureaucratic elite and the corporate elite. These three elites conspire to suck dry the little people of Tromaville of their economic and spiritual capital.” In context to some of his other statements in the article, this makes him sound like some kind of libertarian conspiracy theorist. There is probably some truth to elite control of US and world culture, but that is what makes conspiracy theories plausible to some people. Ultimately, I come to the conclusion that Troma movies are sometimes fun, but also brutal in ways that are not satirical, but just intentionally hurtful. This is driven more by Kaufman’s desire to piss people off rather than to help them in any way. When it comes to punk or punk-influenced characters in Troma movies, they are of the caricatured, nihilist goon variety. In Tromaville, everyone is humiliated and no one is respected.
Let’s take Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986) as an example. The punk gang in the movie has none of the countercultural energy from the previous decade. They are just idiots. The movie takes an influence like A Clockwork Orange (1972), but removes the satire, keeping just the cruelty instead. One of the first punks we see is dressed up in some kind of bizarre version of blackface, with an oversized septum ring. The idea is to make him look like a neanderthal. At Nuke ‘Em High, casual sexual harassment is one of many things upholding the heterosexual order. These punks are seen as reinforcing the brutality of their oppressors instead of fighting against it. Kaufman may suggest that all of this is satire, but it certainly feels like it is being serious.
A movie like Surf Nazis Must Die (1987) appears to be making more of an effort to present the meaning and justice of all the racial violence it shows us. Directed by Peter George and produced by Troma, the story is about a gang of young fascists who decide that the local beach is their territory. This makes some kind of sense in that the iron cross fetishized by Nazis was also fetishized by surfing culture in the 1960s. Among the local citizens they terrorize and murder is Leroy (Robert Harden), a black man out jogging. Eventually Leroy’s mother, Mama Washington (Gail Neely) takes revenge on the Surf Nazis by gun, grenade, and speedboat. The movie is a lot of fun, and possibly the best movie that exploits the swastika outside of direct Nazisploitation movies like Salon Kitty (1976). But at the same time, the movie compels the audience to identify more with the fascists than with the victims. We barely learn anything about Leroy before his death. Mama Washington has some empowering facets of The Final Girl, but like Troma Entertainment in general, is presented as a sort of irreverent, over-the-top sideshow act. Viewers can laugh at this obese, elderly, black woman just as much as they can identify with her. In the halls of Troma, Surf Nazis Must Die remains one of the better titles. It may be giving Troma too much credit to consider them as a mirror--viewers can perceive themselves and their own ideologies (or lack thereof) in Troma movies.
Aside from the supreme ambivalence of 80s punk/goon portrayals, more movies followed that were better thought out and directly considered the conservative co-opting of punk. This is most clearly seen in movies like Romper Stomper (1992) and much later Green Room (2015), which both deal with the crossover between punks and skinheads. This is not to suggest that these movies or the makers are conservative or pro-fascist, but that they are presenting this material in complex, nuanced ways. But first, a more general understanding of skinhead culture might be useful. The style and ideology came after the mods but before the punks. Hebdige writes, “Aggressively proletarian, puritanical and chauvinist, the skinheads dressed down in sharp contrast to their mod antecedents in a uniform which Phil Cohen (1972a) has described as a ‘kind of caricature of the model worker’: cropped hair, braces, short, wide levi jeans or functional sta-prest trousers, plain or striped button-down Ben Sherman shirts and highly polished Doctor Marten boots.” (55) In contrast to the surreal, confrontational style of punk, skinheads were highly attentive to the order and precision of their outfits. Like the other styles to come out of post-World War II Britain, the skins were born out of the working class, with all the attendant contradictions. As with punk, Hebdige mentions the influence of reggae and the black working class, “It was not only by congregating on the all-white football terraces but through consorting with West Indians at the local youth clubs and on the street corners, by copying their mannerisms, adopting their curses, dancing to their music that the skinheads ‘magically recovered’ the lost sense of working-class community.” (56) Keeping this in mind, it is surprising that white supremacists would be attracted and invested in this culture.
Romper Stomper tells the story of a skinhead gang in Australia who are on a disorganized mission to violently disrupt Asian immigrant culture coming into the country. The particular focus is on Hando (Russell Crowe) and Davey (Daniel Pollock) who jockey for dominance over the group. Gabe (Jacqueline McKenzie), a young woman with massive family problems, holds the plot together but more as a counterpoint to the trajectory of the white supremacists. This highlights the inherent misogyny of white supremacist culture that is present in addition to racism. Everyone in the group is expected to enact traditional gender roles, and we see the men essentially uniting against Gabe. Romper Stomper is primarily about the bonds between men and how masculinity frequently continues to the same end--self-destruction. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there are queer undertones between Hando and Davey, but the movie is more about their homosocial bond than it is about either of their romantic involvements with Gabe. We watch as these seemingly powerful skinheads descend into crisis and impotence. By the end, the fight between Hando and Davey becomes a sideshow for a bus load of Asian tourists.
The reason Romper Stomper is so scary and captivating is because it is so well made. Whether intentionally or not, it takes a page from Leni Reifensthal’s Triumph of the Will (1935) playbook. If you get talented filmmakers to make facism look cool then a) people will pay attention to your movie and b) potentially get caught up in white supremacist identification. In Romper Stomper, director Geoffrey Wright makes sure to disarm the skinheads of any viable legitimacy. By the end Hando and Davey are seen as what they are--childish fools. It is ultimately a film that reveals the stupidity and powerlessness of fascist ideologies.
Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is another film about the ideological terror associated with punk and skinhead subcultures, but it presents the material from a different perspective. Instead of having the white supremacists as the main points of identification, we follow a punk band who just happens to show up at a white supremacist venue. While Romper Stomper allows for the possibility of the racist skinheads to be perceived as anti-heros, the boots and braces of Green Room are clearly the villains in opposition to our ensemble of protagonists. Green Room is my preferred film between the two because it is specifically about the tensions within punk subculture itself.
The fact that Green Room came out over 20 years after Romper Stomper is another thing to consider. The signification of music and style in 2015 is informed by, but different from the scenes they descended from in the 90s, 80s, and 70s. How our culture has changed immensely just since 2015 also influences how we perceive all the history being discussed here. The Ain’t Rights, the band at the center of Green Room do not dress like traditional punks or skins, although their music is in tune with the genre. Instead they wear t-shirts of iconic punk bands like Minor Threat and The Dead Kennedys. It is like they are a generation removed from the aesthetics and style I have been writing about, distilling all of it into a basic t-shirt graphic. I have no idea if Saulnier, the writer and director, had this in mind, but the characters at the center of the story are punk in sound and spirit, but they spend the whole film literally fighting against the people in the scene who are all dressed up. The mohawked punk (David Thompson) they meet in the opening scenes ends up fucking them over and sending them into the belly of the rural Oregonian beast. The skinhead style they encounter at the venue literally are uniforms for a white supremacist gang. Contrary to Suicide (Mark Venturini) from Return of the Living Dead (1985)--the punk I began the first part of this essay with--the boots and braces in Green Room are features of a costume. Through a series of unfortunate moments, The Ain’t Rights find themselves fighting for their lives against an opposition all made up in the semiotics of subcultural style. The film could be seen as a departure from the superficial aspects of punk culture, and into one where an anti-fascist spirit prevails regardless of the clothes it is wearing.
Many years ago a friend told me they used to hang out with republican punk rockers at a much earlier point in their life. My initial reaction was to say “Republican punks don’t exist. It’s not a thing.” As much as I believe that to be true, there are clearly other people out in the world who think otherwise. I began thinking more about how I originally saw Romper Stomper when I was 13 or 14 years old. The friends who showed it to me were into punk and skin culture, but by the time I was graduating from high school, I had stopped hanging out with them when I realized they were racist pricks. They appreciated the strapping alpha masculinity of a character like Hando regardless of the fact that he turned out to look like an impotent fool in the end. It could be called The Tony Montana Effect, in regard to the immense popularity of Al Pacino’s character in Scarface (1983). No matter how weak and fucked up a character may be in the end, some spectators will always identify with the aggressive, arrogant, violent, and self-destructive tendencies of these characters.
Punk’s radical acceptance of everything allowed for just the opposite to occur, turning it into an eradicating force. To bring back this quote from Hebdige, “Whereas the skinheads theorized and fetishized their class position, in order to effect a ‘magical’ return to an imagined past, the punks dislocated themselves from the parent culture and were positioned instead on the outside: beyond the comprehension of the average (wo)man in the street in a science fiction future. They played up their Otherness, ‘happening’ on the world as aliens, inscrutables. Though punk rituals, accents and objects were deliberately used to signify workingclassness, the exact origins of individual punks were disguised or symbolically disfigured by the make-up, masks and aliases which seem to have been used, like Breton’s art, as ploys ‘to escape the principle of identity’.” (120-1) Using these subcultures for white supremacist and fascist means does the opposite, upholding very rigid markers of identity in the service of discrimination and prejudice.
Perhaps resolving these contradictions would mean moving on from punk entirely. Maybe the style--at least fashion-wise--has run its course. What is real punk supposed to look and sound like today? As I mentioned last month in relation to Jon Moritsugu’s movies, underground and punk-inspired cinema would look very different today than it did in the 90s.The means of production are all at our digital fingertips. Distributing music online, promoting via social media, and arranging DIY tours are more likely than 16mm filmmaking or pressing 7 inch records now. Surely there will be media fetishists always practicing these things, but they are no longer dominant modes of production. The important thing is to avoid the apathy that has become so commonplace among subcultures. Nihilism and ambivalence will always be taken advantage of for conservative gains. Actively taking a stance against this--regardless of style and aesthetics--has never been more of a necessity as white supremacists and neo-fascists are so close to taking power in mainstream politics.
“Anything I so Desire: Lloyd Kaufman.” The Flashback Files. Accessed: September 14, 2024. https://www.flashbackfiles.com/lloyd-kaufman-interview
Bag, Alice. Violence Girl: East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2011.
Beeber, Steven Lee. “Hotsy-Totsy Nazi Schatzes: Nazi Imagery and the Final Solution to the Final Solution.” White Riot: Punk Rock and The Politics of Race. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2011. pp 45-53.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.