Welcome to No Shame November! This week we’re diving into the pop culture we love that society tells us we shouldn’t.
I’m an entertainment writer. I love my job because I like watching things and forming opinions on them. There is, however, one thing that sometimes irks me about having whatever nebulous responsibility comes with being a critic: I always think I’m supposed to have good taste.
Good taste is, frankly, a fucked up and classist concept. It shoves what people enjoy into categories like prestige, high art, camp, bad, and trash, and often the line between what’s considered tasteful and what’s not is a general sense of agreement among people who have the luxury of thinking too hard about it in the first place.
In short, rich, smart people have Good Taste. Everyone else can suck on their garbage pops and suffer through Transformers 17. That’s the dominant narrative here. We made this.
Even as a critic my good taste has always been a little questionable, but never more so perhaps than when I scream the praises of one of the least tasteful musical films ever produced — Repo! The Genetic Opera.
Repo, not to be confused with the Jude Law movie Repo Men (which may or may not have jacked Repo’s concept, no one could ever really figure that out in a court of law) is a sung-through goth opera set in a dystopian future where universal organ failures have decimated the human population. A company called GeneCo steps in and invents expensive artificial organs that save the human race, but the high cost of the organs causes some to fall behind on payments for their life-saving new parts.
When someone can’t pay for their shiny fake heart, the Repo Man comes and reclaims the company’s property. Permanently.
Did I mention that Repo is produced by the same company that makes the Saw movies? Right, sorry. That part’s important. All of the onscreen “repossessions,” of which there are not few, are rendered with alarming, gory realism. Blood everywhere. Intestines swinging in the breeze. There’s even a little song about it. Think about that a little.
Somehow, the setup of Repo is not even a tenth of its story. All of the above information is conveyed in the first minute through comic book panels that introduce the organ failures, GeneCo, and the main characters before Repo even touches its its live-action plot, which is a funky, Rapunzel-esque riff on how parents go too far in trying to protect their children and freedom of choice is man’s paramount virtue.
Oh, Paris Hilton is in this. She sings a song about being addicted to future heroin while wearing a leather bustier and trying to fuck a man who sucks glowing blue juice out of people’s brains. It’s incredible.
The girl from Spy Kids is there too. Anthony Stewart Head from Buffy plays her dad.
It wasn’t until I watched it twice, compelled to do that again with all the impulse control of a puppy smashing her face into a cactus, that Repo really clicked for me.
I’d be lying if I said I loved Repo on my first watch. It’s very easy to feel uncomfortable with some of the things that happen on screen — wanton murder, strong hints of incest, a lot of pelvic thrusting about drugs, bug collecting, grave robbing, inheritance law… It’s a lot to take in at once. Between the subject matter, the difficult music, and the bondage-goth costuming, it was easy for me to write the movie off as gross and wrong. Liking it would have meant I had Bad Taste.
It wasn’t until I watched it twice, compelled to do that again with all the impulse control of a puppy smashing her face into a cactus, that Repo really clicked for me.
“My god,” I thought as a character sang about stealing someone’s face to staple their face on top of his face, “I’m experiencing real joy right now. This movie makes me feel good. It’s fun and I like it.”
Cue crisis.
I tried to rationalize my love of Repo with some chatter about camp and controlled edginess, loving the music for its brashness and the story for its message, but it’s hard to keep one’s theory of art straight when a character shoves his hand up a dead person’s chest cavity to use the corpse mouth as a puppet. I can’t defend this movie as a commentary on anything besides what happens when producers finance a project because “fuck you is why.”
I just love it. It tickles me in all the right spots, and its music and iconic lines have been etched on my soul as clearly as my own name. Can’t explain it, so I won’t. Maybe I just have bad taste.
When I think about it literally though, taste means taste. Like the physical sensation of loving the way certain foods activate sensations on your tongue, Good Taste is and should be a relative concept. With all its blood, too-long songs, stunt casting, plot twists, nonsense costumes, and straight up offensive content, Repo! The Genetic Opera is delicious to me.
What tastes good to you?
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