Repo Man ia a 1984 cult classic sci-fi comedy starring Emilio Estevez as Otto, a disaffected LA punk who falls in with a crew of repossession agents led by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Otto gets pulled into the repo business and ends up chasing a mysterious Chevy Malibu with a bounty on it. The trunk supposedly contains something otherworldly (aliens, or their remains) that melts anyone who looks inside. It’s all deadpan, anarchic, and satirical and mixes punk rock culture, government conspiracy paranoia, and B-movie sci-fi into something genuinely weird and funny. It became a defining cult film of the 80s. Repo Man works on a few different levels of meaning. There’s punk nihilism vs. corporate conformity, as Otto starts as an aimless punk stuck in a dead-end supermarket job, then drifts into repo work — itself a kind of scavenger capitalism. The film satirizes how even “outsider” punk culture gets absorbed into hustling and grinding just like everyone else. What’s in the trunk is never fully explained…it’s often read as a stand-in for Cold War paranoia, government secrecy (Roswell/UFO conspiracy vibes), and the anxiety of nuclear-age America. Characters who look inside are annihilated, suggesting some truths are better left unknown, or that ultimate “meaning” itself is a kind of void. Repo agents as modern gunslingers. Bud’s repo code (“the repo man’s always intense”) parodies macho professional codes with corporate ethics dressed up as philosophy, applied to a grubby, morally dubious job. nd then there’s the general absurdism of it all. A lot of it resists tidy interpretation on purpose with nothing quite making sense, mirroring the disillusionment of Reagan-era America.
Today I am awake early because I have a deposition on a case for which I have written an opinion and a supplemental opinion. I have been doing expert witness work for seven years and it seems to suit me. Speaking of suits…I am roadtesting one of my new suits today since I’ve thrown out all my too-large custom suiting of years gone by. It’s a basic charcoal grey birdseye weave that I’m wearing with a white shirt and a conservative blue/black diagonal pattern tie. I cannot think of a more corporate outfit I have ever worn. Depositions generally last for up to seven hours, so I will be sitting in my office on Zoom with lawyers from the opposition and my lawyer across the country in various rooms. There will likely be videographer and stenographer somewhere managing the process and I will be asked questions regarding my personal qualifications and the facts of this case and my opinions on them for all seven hours. In one sense it is a grueling process and in another sense it is surreal enough to allow me to be somewhat detached and purely professional. For three years now I have taught the Masterclass for my firm on the topic of how to be a good expert witness. The whole second class is about giving depositions and testimony and how best to do it, so I am pretty well-practiced at this art form and I don’t expect much that will surprise me. There will be some “when did you stop beating your wife” questions that are intended to trick me into an answer I don’t want to give that might afford the opposition a soundbite to use during negotiations or the trial. There will be lots and lots of repetition as the lawyers try to wear me down and I resist. And there will be. Great deal of reference back to my report and attempts to get me to contradict something I may have said in the report.
This morning I awoke to an email from my lawyer requesting (from opposing counsel) that I have a hardcopy of my reports on hand to make the questioning flow more easily. I had come back from our show last night (we went to see an ABBA revival group at The Welk at the invitation of neighbor Winston and his wife Kathleen) and purposefully made copies of both reports in preparation for the session. This is not my first rodeo. As I sit and think about what I have to do today, I am reminded of the movie Repo Man for several reasons. To begin with, I have always like Emilio Esteves. Here is a guy of Hispanic heritage (I am half Hispanic) who grew up in L.A. as a solid American citizen, who has a quirky take on the world that I generally relate to. While I am not into conspiracy theories or UFOs, I do relate to the issues of corporate conformity. I have spent a career in an arena that I don’t relate to all that well…and yet I was able to prosper in. As much of a non-conformist as I tend to be, I have worn a suit most of my life and I think I wear it well. Place only ever sued someone once and been sued only once. I think our U.S. system is overly litigious and yet here I am making a second career out of representing people in lawsuits…and doing it quite well if I do say so myself. To me it is less about the “who wins” approach of litigation and more about the professionalism of analyzing the facts and opining on them…and then advocating or defending them. There is something about that process that appeals to me even if I sometimes think that the underlying squabble is making mountains out of molehills.
But as Bud might say, “the Depo Man is always intense” and I will be serious and intense all day today, because that is my job and I always take my responsibility seriously. I wanted to teach corporate ethics for years and when I finally got the chance I was terribly disillusioned by the experience. What I thought was so important I found the young business school students had a very different take on. It was a required course for them and they almost resented having to take it. They broke into two camps on almost every issue and while I tried hard to be balanced in my presentation, it was hard for my personal views not to come through. Ethics is a normative practice that requires a worldview and a sense of moral standards and that cannot help but come through. I found that half the students agreed with me strongly and the other half vehemently disagreed with me, and that was on almost every issue of substance. It was all very dispiriting. In my expert witness work, I always start by reading the claims and the answers or counterclaims. There are always two sides to every story. Nevertheless, I have generally found that Icome down on one side or another in terms of overriding righteousness. Luckily, I have always found my way to the righteousness of the position I have been asked to take. I have never had to recuse myself from a case or withdraw because of some facts that make me feel I am representing and advocating for the wrong perspective. It is important to me to believe in what I am advocating. So, today I will be Depo Man and I will be intense and serious. And then I will take off my corporate armor at the end of the day and go back to being who I really am.