Daniel Traber is a professor of English at Texas A & M University at Galveston, a punk at heart, and an active member of the cult of Repo Man (dir. Alex Cox, 1984). In this conversation, we get into why Repo Man, a movie literally about Repo Men in 1980s Los Angeles (oh, and aliens) is such an important lens on punk, postmodernism, and the twisted knot of counterculture, capitalism, and reaction that defined the Reagan era. Along the way we trade key scenes, lines, and characters, as we take apart a film that still seems, more than three decades later, far ahead of its time.
