WHAT WAS REPO MAN ABOUT - REALLY?

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Alex Cox：Nuclear War. Of course. What else could it be about? And the demented society that contemplated the possibility thereof. Repoing people's cars and hating alien ideologies were only the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg itself was the maniac culture which had elected so-called "leaders" named Reagan and Thatcher, who were prepared to sacrifice everything -- all life on earth -- to a gamble based on the longevity of the Soviet military, and the whims of their corporate masters. J. Frank Parnell - the fictitious inventor of the Neutron Bomb - was the central character for me. He sets the film in motion, on the road from Los Alamos, and, as portrayed by the late great actor, Fox Harris, is the centrepoint of the film.

Fourteen years later, I had a call from one Sam Cohen, who announced himself the father of the Neutron Bomb. I imagined a cross between Jack D. Ripper and Edward Teller in a dark Brentwood apartment, raging because there hadn't been an intercontinental thermonuclear war...

The following week Sam Cohen and I had lunch in Venice, California. Sam had lived in LA since 1923 - "Grew up in the Jewish ghetto of East LA - grew up knowing all your locations." His daughter saw REPO MAN when it came out in 1984 and took him to see it. He's seen the video "a couple of dozen times".

"It starts off with nostalgia for me... the map at the beginning, I spent World War Two at Los Alamos, working on the Fat Man device. My job was to study what the neutrons did. I know more about neutrons than you would ever want to ask.

"My daughter took me to see this film, and here was this nutcake, our hero, lobotomized, head bobbing. A cop stops him, opens the trunk, and -- voila! He's neutronized!" Sam had no doubt there was a Neutron Bomb in Otto's trunk. "It was the quintessential neutron bomb in the trunk... what we call a SADM - a Strategic Area Denial Munition." He and the Russian politician General Lebed gave press conferences a couple of years ago to draw attention to the number of ex-Soviet SADMs which had gone missing -- hundreds of them, sold on the black market to whoever was buying. He thinks a SADM may have levelled the Federal Building in Oklahoma.

Sam's next destination was Washington, DC. "I've got a grand bash to attend: two friends of mine, aged 87 and 90, both four-star Air Force generals, are having a birthday party. One of them is General Schraber. Perhaps you've heard of him. He put together the ICBM program."

Later he reconsidered, and called me again. "It wasn't a Neutron Bomb in the trunk - it was an enormous concentration of nuclear material - it was gamma rays that killed the cop."

Sam had one more observation, re. his contribution to thermonuclear devastation: "The Neutron Bomb was the most moral weapon ever devised... it was a weapon for good Christians... a defensive weapon, it spares innocents, keeps war to the warriors, doesn't damage the economy, has no hideous, crippling, lasting effects as in conventional warfare... if you survive, a lot of the victims will recover... no significant level of radiation is produced... it disappears very rapidly. My friends Graves and Slotin were in just such an accident. Slotin died horribly; Graves had a fifty-fifty chance of dying, but recovered, and in a few months was playing handball."

I asked if he meant his Bomb was intended as a battlefield ("theater" in the vernacular) weapon. He insisted that was its only possible application: "The Neutron Bomb totally conformed to the so-called Christian principles of a Just War. I got a medal from the Pope in Rome, in 1979."