REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

By: Adam McGovern
May 15, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

WALKER | ALEX COX | 1987

In 1980s America and Hollywood, dissent was frowned upon and gunboat entertainment was delivered with a scowl. A pious president was evangelizing imperial values abroad, and unsmiling heroes like John Rambo were refighting America’s military disgraces at the box-office. It wasn’t the time to start snickering from the back row, but Alex Cox set up a podium right in front of the screen and laughed out loud.

The premise of Walker (1987) is that history was a farce the first time. This story of a crazed freelance colonialist from Tennessee who took over Nicaragua for 10 months in 1856–57 in the name of American manifest destiny was a movie we were seeing again, as the U.S.-funded Contra insurgents stormed the revolutionary (but then-democratic) government of that country.

Ed Harris plays the titular William Walker with a messianic self-seriousness that is macabrely funny; the swath of shambles he and his rabble army cut in their uninvited intervention is horrific slapstick. Before leaving on his latest misadventure, his deaf fiancée (Marlee Matlin) debunks and ridicules his corporate and political suitors to their faces in sign-language while he haplessly mistranslates to keep currying favor; this motif of messages unreceived recurs when the local head of government’s mistress, whom Walker thinks he’s “taken” as his own (Blanca Guerra), belittles and exults in manipulating him, all in a Spanish that he doesn’t speak.

People hear what they want to, especially people in power, but Cox wanted to be heard above the bubble of Reagan-era managed news and buried history. The sight of Walker’s ascension to Nicaragua’s presidency on TIME and Newsweek magazine covers, and his forces littering the landscape with Coke bottles and Marlboro boxes, is a prankish absurdity, but if Reagan was going to show no regard for facts and precedents, neither was Cox. Joe Strummer’s bravura score occasionally slips its time period and swells to the bombast of the type of epic we well know this isn’t; Peter Boyle’s cameos as an unhinged and bellowing Cornelius Vanderbilt could be based on some abusive studio mogul (especially after seeing Cox’s finished product). Like the useful maniac William Walker, whom powerful elites were happy to back until he became a liability, Hollywood was eager to gamble on Cox’s indie cred from Repo Man and Sid and Nancy until he ran with the marker and went rogue.

Not taking America’s divine right (or producers’ money) seriously was no joke to Universal, who pulled all promotion of the movie that got delivered and apparently saw to it that Cox never worked with a big studio or big budget again. But this now-cult favorite wouldn’t be contained to its time, and doesn’t even spare targets that came long after it; narrating his entry into Nicaragua, Walker falsely exults, “We were welcomed as liberators,” lampooning W Bush years before the fact; the gigantic scrawl of his own name we see on a document could be an advance satire of some executive order shown off by Trump. Before his brief reign ends Walker gloats that his cause will live on, and the point of the movie is that it sure did; but this farce still stands as the way he himself is most remembered, and shows that, for the legacy he left to others, the last laugh may not yet have been heard.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

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