The Burnzo Diaries

Sunday, September 27, 2026

REPO MAN: IT’S NOT JUST A MOVIE, IT’S A WAY OF LIFE

My earliest memory of being aware that the movie Repo Man actually existed was probably from somewhere back in the late-1990s or maybe very early-2000s. A VHS copy of Repo Man suddenly appeared one week at my local library and I probably never would have given it a second glance had the box art not been so cool-looking. It was immediately apparent from the green box, thrashy-looking Repo Man font and bad-ass look of Emilio Estevez folding his arms with attitude that this was a movie I should probably be watching.

The box art (front and back) for the Repo Man VHS.

So I did, indeed, borrow Repo Man from the library, popped it into my VCR, but I remember not getting very far into it. At the time, I guess I wasn’t ready for this movie, I suppose because it was just too different from what I was used to. It was immediately clear that this was no normal comedy, action, science fiction or whatever the hell it was. It was too different and, to be honest, I was kind of dumb back then and ‘different’ turned me off.

Despite being turned off from how "different" Repo Man was, I did still dig the opening titles right from the outset.

Maybe a couple years or so went by and the next memory I have of being made aware of Repo Man’s existence (other than seeing it at the local library) was from my brother who happened to mention the movie to me one day and he said it was considered to be a “punk film.” I was very much into punk music at the time (e.g. Misfits, Ramones, the Unseen, Rancid, etc.), so I thought, shit, I must see this movie Repo Man, since it must be about punks!

So I gave the movie another try. I can’t remember if I ever got through the entire movie this time around, but I still remember not being all that into it, mainly because—that’s right—it was different. I also spent the whole time searching for punks like I was reading a Where’s Waldo? book, and although there is some punk music in the film and one or two mohawks make an appearance, I didn’t think there was enough “punk” stuff in the film to be deemed a “punk film.”

One of the mohawks that makes an appearance in Repo Man.

Of course, the mistake I was making was that I was taking “punk” too literally and thought the film was going to be nothing but spiked hair, studded leather coats with butt flags, fishnet stockings and Doc Martens. But this movie was mostly about a group of non-punk men repossessing cars. Not what I expected. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was considered to be a punk film because it was irreverent, subversive, unconventional and just flat-out weird.

Fast-forward to my junior year of film school at Boston University. I was taking some kind of screenwriting course (possibly called “Screenplay Literature”?), but we didn’t write any screenplays in this class; we simply read one screenplay after another … after another, ones from all sorts of classic movies. Dozens of them.

The semester was divided up into different “Ages” of cinema. I may not have all these details right, but I believe there were three or four Ages: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Lead. I probably have my class syllabus somewhere and could check on this, but it’s possible these Ages were based on the time period in which these films were made, Bronze being early-20^th century films, Silver being 1940s-area films, Gold being mid-to-late 20^th century and then Lead being later 20^th century films.

But it’s also possible these “Ages” had nothing to do with the time in which they were made but more to do with the tone of the films. For example, Gold Age films depicted the world from a very optimistic viewpoint. But Lead Age films depicted pretty much the exact opposite, a cynical dystopian view of the world and especially America, or, even more especially, the American dream.

All I know is that Repo Man was categorized, at least in my “Screenplay Literature” class, as a Lead Age film, basically because it depicted America as being whacked out of its mind and the American Dream as being more like a nightmare, a kind of East-Los-Angeles, Skid-Row-like hellscape that was filled with junkyards, rusting cars, and broken-down dreams.

It was around the time of me reading the screenplay in this class that I began falling in love with Repo Man. The script by Alex Cox was so well-written, so funny and the dialogue was so fresh. I remember thinking to myself that, “Oh, I didn’t realize a script could be written like THIS!” Because even the script, if I remember correctly, had a very punk attitude. Although well-written and well-structured with formatting that (I think) was acceptable for its time, it almost felt like some street punker decided to have some fun and write a screenplay. It didn’t feel like it was written by somebody who was under the pressure to please anybody, like a studio or even an audience. It felt like something somebody wrote just for the hell of it and if somebody else happened to like it? Well, all the better.

The Repo Man screenplay.

After I read and loved the script, I of course got inspired to go back to my local library, borrow the Repo Man VHS yet again and, this time, I watched the movie all the way through once, twice, maybe a few times.

By my senior year in college, Repo Man was officially one of my favorite movies.

What is so great about Repo Man is that it is, in one word, wacky. And it’s not even that great of a story. To this day, I can’t easily summarize the plot to anybody. Basically, it’s about an 18-year-old punk named Otto who needs money, so he stumbles into a job repossessing cars. While still new to the job, a BOLO goes out to all the repo men, I think by the FBI or some other secret government agency, letting Otto and his other fellow repo men know that there is a stolen 1962 Chevy Malibu on the loose somewhere in Los Angeles and there is a $20,000 reward for anybody who repossesses it. What Otto and the other repo men don’t know is that this vehicle has been stolen by a nuclear physicist who designed the neutron bomb. He went crazy, had a lobotomy, went crazier, and stole a bunch of dead alien bodies from an Air Force base in New Mexico. Otto does eventually end up tracking down the Chevy Malibu by the end of the movie, then he hops into the car with a weird man named Miller who works in the repo yard, the car turns into a spaceship and they fly off into the nighttime skies of Los Angeles, maybe even travel through time? Did I get it right? Something like this?

The Chevy Malibu spaceship.

Yes, the plot is ridiculous, makes little sense at times, but that’s not what’s important anyway. What makes Repo Man a good movie is not its story but its characters, its tone and, yes, its wackiness. The movie absolutely, one-hundred-percent does not give one flying fuck. It does not take itself seriously. It was clearly not made for entertaining the lowest common denominator of a general audience. It was not made to gross loads of money, either. In fact, one has to wonder how this movie even GOT made and was eventually distributed by Universal Pictures. What was Universal smoking when they decided to release this thing? Of course, I’m glad they did release it and it probably paid off for them in the long run since Repo Man is now considered a cult classic. But this film definitely did not have “big opening weekend” written all over it. So it’s a wonder Universal ever even considered releasing it, let alone actually released it.

I’m sure many people liked Repo Man the first time they saw it, but I think the majority of people were like me and didn’t know what to quite make of it at first. But then it grew on them. And grew on them some more. And then it grew on a lot of people over a gradual amount of time, and this is why the movie eventually became a cult classic.

More than anything else, I think what fans like the most about Repo Man is its dialogue. Very few movies out there are as quotable as Repo Man is. The greatest lines include but are not limited to:

DEBBI: “Come on, Duke, let’s go do those crimes.”

DUKE: “Yeah … let’s go get sushi, and not pay!”

KEVIN: “There’s fucking ROOM TO MOVE as a fry cook.”

MILLER: “John Wayne was a fag.”

REPO MEN: “The hell he was!”

MILLER: “He was too, you boys. I installed two-way mirrors in his pad in Brentwood, and he come to the door in a dress.”

REPO VICTIM: “Are you going to give me my car or do I have to go to your house and shove your dog’s head down the toilet?”

OLLY: “Oh, yeah, you’re Fuckin’ A we ripped your car, asshole! You want to know who told us where it was? Your goddamned brother!”

And then there are all the lines that use the word “dildo” in them, which, for some reason, are among my favorites:

OTTO: “I’m a Repo Man.”

LEILA: “What’s that?”

OTTO: “It’s a re-possessor. I take back cars from dildos who don’t pay their bills. Pretty cool, huh?”
LEILA: “No.”

BUD: “Goddamn-dipshit-Rodriquez-gypsy-dildo punks! I’ll get your ass.”

BUD: “Don’t care how long it takes, dildos! Repo Man’s got all night, every night!”

In short, the dialogue is extremely bizarre-yet-hilarious and there is a strange kind of freedom in that. Yes, it is a very free film. One of the first scenes in the movie features Otto stocking generic cans of “YELLOW CLING SLICED PEACHES” in a supermarket. His boss Mr. Humphries gives him a hard time about not spacing the cans properly, Otto gets pissed off, flips his boss off and then says, “FUCK YOU.”

Otto in the supermarket, right before he says "FUCK YOU."

That “FUCK YOU” basically sums up the entire attitude of Repo Man. Yes, on the surface, Otto is saying “FUCK YOU” to his boss, but this first act scene is really the film saying FUCK YOU to anyone who thinks the film is not spacing its cans properly, not behaving the way it’s supposed to be behaving. It’s basically saying I don’t care what you think of this film, if you think it’s weird, if you think it doesn’t make any sense, if you think it doesn’t fall into a classic genre. I don’t care if it can’t be labeled, if it can’t be canned, marketed, sold or whatever. Fuck you, this film is what it is and if you don’t like it or if you got a problem with it, then, well, FUCK YOU.

That is freedom right there, a true American spirit ironically in a “Lead Age” film about how dead the American spirit actually is.

Another great thing about Repo Man that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention but I think often gets overlooked is the cinematography. It’s really important to highlight how great of a job Director of Photography Robby Müller did on the film. The movie is filled with these beautiful shots depicting how ugly East Los Angeles was circa 1984. You can smell the dust, the rot, the rust, the decay and, of course, the smog. It’s strange how, through the movie, you find yourself marveling at the beauty of these “ugly” shots. Yes, there is an irony there: the ugly East LA landscapes are so beautifully shot.

One of the many "beautiful" shots showing East LA's ugliness.

Another "beautiful" shot of ugliness, downtown LA in the background.

A "beautiful" shot of the LA river.

Over the past 20-plus years, I have probably watched Repo Man dozens of times. Many of these viewings were on the library VHS, but then that VHS eventually disappeared when the library moved to a new building and got rid of all their VHS tapes. I eventually bought the DVD, then sold it out of financial desperation, only to buy the Criterion Blu-ray released in 2013 and then I did eventually buy a cheap used copy of the DVD again in 2025.

This photo was taken in 2013 when my
Repo Man Blu-ray arrived in the mail.

By the way, I currently own three Repo Man T-shirts. Two of them are old and faded by this point, but the third one is still in good condition and part of my bi-weekly wardrobe rotation. Just thought I would mention that. Nothing further about this.

To no surprise, Repo Man also became an enormous artistic inspiration for me. I think the influence of Repo Man is very much apparent in much—if not all—of my writing, especially one novel of mine in particular called Supermarket Zombies!. If you are a fan of Repo Man and then read my novel, the influence will be noticeable, I think. My novel has a similar bizarre vibe that, frankly, does not give a fuck. I even went so far as to call Supermarket Zombies! a “punk novel” specifically because Repo Man was always known as a “punk film.”

It’s hard to say whether Repo Man is my favorite film of all time, although it might be, or at least it’s a strong contender. But it is certainly, I think, without a doubt, the most influential film for me. I have many cinematic influences—the films of Kubrick, Hitchcock, Burton, Cassavetes and many others—but I think Alex Cox’s Repo Man influenced me more than any of the others.

Thinking back on it now, there was probably a reason why Repo Man kept calling my name way back when I first started noticing the VHS at my local library. It took me a couple tries to fully appreciate the movie, but I think our crossing paths was part of my destiny. On some spiritual level, the Repo Man VHS was sending out a sort of frequency, insisting that I needed to see it, that it was ESSENTIAL that I see it.

Or maybe my attraction to the movie had nothing to do with destiny and I just liked the cool box art.

Either way, Repo Man, I think will always function as a kind of muse for me. It is part of my brain and even part of my soul. The lines from the movie probably come in and out of my mind on a daily basis. Whenever I write a novel or a screenplay, I have Repo Man in my head, at least on a subconscious level. It keeps my mind open. It gives me the confidence to be bizarre. It makes me feel comfortable with being uncomfortable. It makes me feel like I fit in when I don’t really fit in.

And, really, what’s more “punk” than that?

Indeed, Repo Man isn’t just a movie; it’s a way of life. It’s about embracing weirdness. It’s about being unique. It’s about not conforming to the norm. It’s about NOT spacing those cans properly. It’s about liberation … freedom …

And, frankly, it’s about saying, “FUCK YOU.”

…

MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Weird Monster, Supermarket Zombies!, The Woman and the Dragon and Johnny Cruise. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, Lymey Bastard, My Raging Case of Beastie Fever, Jungle F’ng Fever: My 30-Year Love Affair with Guns N’ Roses, Bostonwood and I Turned into a Misfit! Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.

Other trending articles by Matt Burns that may be of interest to you:

Film-related articles:

2001: A Shot-by-Shot Odyssey

WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER TURNS 25 (and it’s only gotten better)

NOT PLAYING IT SAFE: How Todd Haynes’ Film Was Used to ‘Deprogram’ Me and My Fellow Film Students

How I Got into the Films of John Cassavetes

If I May Say a Few Words About FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR

35 YEARS OF TURTLE POWER: A Tribute to 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie

Revisiting the Blair Witch Project

My Childhood Obsession with Rambo

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Charlie (a story about Burns’ recurring nightmares featuring Charlie Chaplin)

Short memoirs/nostalgia:

The Case for Cassette

A Trip Down DVD Drive

Some Wicked Good Times: A Love Letter to Newbury Comics

A Love Letter to the Emerald Square Mall (about the death of the shopping mall age)

I Dream of Dream Machine (a memoir of the local video arcade)

I USED TO BE A GAMER: The 8-bit Nintendo Years

Video Store Memories

NEVER FORGET the Fun-O-Rama (a traveling carnival memoir)

Skateboarding in the 1990s

WAAF Goes Off the Air

CAPE CODDING IT: A Cape Cod Vacation Memoir

GREYHOUNDING IT, BABY! A Guide to taking a Greyhound Bus Long Distances

Visiting Mom in the ICU (short story contest winner)

Remembering That Time I Tried to Stop a Shoplifter at the Wrentham Outlets

The Strange, Surreal Moment of Being Called a DILF Inside a Panera Bread Restaurant on a Wednesday Afternoon

Weird Times en la Weirdioteca

Gaming/computers nostalgia:

RIP PowerBook G3

PROXOS IN THE PLEX: A Goldeneye 007 N64 Retrospective

100 DAYS of ZELDA: Revisiting Ocarina of Time

Writing Tips/Advice:

THE AUDIO BOOK EXPERIMENT: Tips and Advice on How to Record Your First Audio Book

Getting Your Novel Done

Making Your Good Writing Great

Getting Your Screenplay Done

Writing the Sequel

Writing the Trilogy

No-No, Learn to Love the Rejection: Some Sage Advice for Writers in Search of an Agent or Publisher

The Story Behind Supermarket Zombies!

The Story Behind The Woman and the Dragon

Thursday, August 27, 2026

2001: A Shot-by-Shot Odyssey

For my first semester of my junior year at BU, I took a class called “Cinema of Suspense” or “Suspense in Cinema” or something with the word “suspense” in it. Like most students, I thought this class would involve us watching films that were, on their face, full of suspense. Films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or, you know, some kind of thriller.

But this was not the case.

In fact, the class didn’t really involve watching any films except for one. And this was not done as a class as most film study classes were. Basically, what happened is we met as a class once and my professor assigned each student a film to do a shot-by-shot analysis of. He literally just walked from one desk to the next and assigned each student a random film that popped into his head; well, not a completely random film. It was a film that he considered to be a good film.

I think I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the classroom, so he got to me after he had assigned maybe 10 or 12 films to other students. I was nervous about what film I would be assigned because some of the other students had been assigned some films that sounded like real snooze-fests. A French film called Last Year at Marienbad comes to mind. I think one of my friends got that one assigned to him. I had seen the film at some point during my film school experience and it was one of the most boring films I had ever seen, even though it is considered to be a great film. I really didn’t want to do a shot-by-shot analysis of Last Year at Marienbad. That would have been torture.

Fortunately, my professor assigned the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey to me, which was a film I had already seen at least a couple of times and I was already a big Kubrick fan, so at least I knew this shot-by-shot exercise wouldn’t be completely boring for me.

As far as the analysis went, it had to at least be 50 pages long, which sounds long for a college paper, but this would be the only work we did for the entire semester. No more meetings as a class. No quizzes. No exams. No oral presentations. Just one paper: the 50-page shot-by-shot analysis.

In our analysis, we would have to analyze the film’s lighting, composition, color scheme, sound design, musical score, actor blocking, camera angle, camera movement, mise en scène, acting, dialogue and, of course, editing. Then, we would have to explain how these film elements helped to create “suspense.”

Now, as far as what the word “suspense” actually meant, that part was a little vague. Everyone thinks of suspense as being excitement, mystery, intrigue and thrill! But this was not necessarily how my professor defined suspense, although it could be all those things.

Instead, he saw suspense as essentially being “viewer engagement.” In simple terms, he basically wanted us to analyze how a given film kept audiences engaged and interested in what they were watching. Obviously, telling a great story (i.e. starting with a good screenplay) is a large part of this, but aside from the story, great filmmakers utilize a multitude of cinematic devices to keep people interested in what they are watching, whether that be through lighting, composition, sound design, editing, etc. So, our mission was to, not watch the film as a passive observer, but to consciously reverse-engineer each shot of our assigned films so we could see how the respective filmmakers (in my case, Kubrick) used various cinematic devices to keep the viewer watching and interested in what they were watching.

It seems kind of simple, right? Of course the point of a film is to keep the audience engaged, but the question was how do you use the film language to accomplish that goal. That was the overall point of our assignment, I suppose.

Now, we had all semester to work on this 50-page analysis, but of course most of the students in my class waited until very late into the semester to work on their paper. I was no different from the rest of my fellow classmates. I didn’t exactly wait until the last week of the semester like some other students did, but I don’t think I started working on my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey until maybe the last three weeks of the semester. And the reason for this wasn’t really procrastination. It was because I was busy with my other three classes I was taking at the time, one of which was a production course making films and that itself was almost as time-consuming as the other three classes combined.

When I did start my shot-by-shot analysis, I thought it was kind of awkward because some shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey had more suspenseful elements in them than others. And some shots simply had more of the same elements from the shots preceding them. I also didn’t know whether I should have been talking about my interpretations of the film at any point. I mean, was this simply a technical paper, only talking about cinematic devices, or should I have been talking about what the film was trying to say thematically and how the cinematic devices helped convey these themes?

Ultimately, I did mix in some of my thematical interpretations of the film but mostly stuck to the technical aspects. Unsurprisingly, the paper took much longer to write than I had anticipated and I remember trying to rush to get it all done a few days leading up to the deadline. In the end, I met the 50-page requirement, pretty much right in the nick of time, handed the paper in and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get that good of a grade on my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I mean, it wasn’t THAT bad, but it wasn’t a grade I was happy with. Fine, I’ll just come right out and say it: I got a B-minus. And, since that one paper was the only assignment we had to do for that class, my grade for the entire semester ended up being—that’s right—a B-minus.

Again, a B-minus wasn’t that bad of a grade, but I was used to getting mostly A’s and B-pluses. That B-minus was actually the worst grade I ever got in any class during my time at BU. At least I think it was? I also took a very tough Physiological Psychology class where I may have also gotten a B-minus, but, now that I think about it, I think even in that class I got a straight B.

It wasn’t that I had done a bad job doing the shot-by-shot analysis. My professor appreciated my thematic interpretations of Kubrick’s film, a film, by the way, that is rather ambiguous and open to many different interpretations. The main problem with my paper was that I didn’t do a great job proofreading it (mainly because I ran out of time) and I also had a good number of grammatical errors that I didn’t realize would be factored into my grade.

Ok, screw it, let me just be frank here: if you want to know the real truth, the problem was that the paper was graded by a TA (i.e. teacher’s assistant). You know how it goes with TA’s. They grade papers “by the book” and they’re sticklers for every single grammatical error. They’re basically trying to prove themselves and show off to the professor. Yeah, you know how it is with TA’s—I don’t have to tell you.

By the way, a similar thing happened to me in one of my British literature classes at BU. A TA graded this really clever paper I wrote about Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay A Modest Proposal. Initially, I got a C on this paper or something ridiculous like that, because the TA found all these little nitpicky grammatical errors and basically didn’t even pay attention to what the paper was saying. All she cared about was the paper’s mechanics and, yes, every single possible grammatical error she could find, whether it be a violation of the Chicago style, MLA style or some other ancient writing style from, like, Old English times. Fortunately, the professor read the paper after the TA went over it and changed my grade all the way from a C to an A-minus. The professor not only appreciated how clever my paper was, but she also saw how ridiculously stringent the TA had been when she was grading the paper’s grammar.

This, however, did not happen in my “Cinema of Suspense” class. My professor did “check over” the papers after my TA graded them, but he did not change my grade, even though he wrote comments on my paper indicating that he appreciated my interpretations of the film. I’m sure this must have been because he didn’t want to make the TA feel bad. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell myself. No, I will go out on a limb here and say my professor almost certainly would have given me a better grade had it been only he who had graded my paper.

Either way, I was pretty bummed about getting such a bad grade (or at least what-I-considered-to-be a bad grade). At the time, I thought doing the paper was a big waste of energy that only ended up damaging my GPA. I was wondering if I should have just taken another class, a class where I would have had more than one shot at getting a good grade for the semester.

I also was upset with the professor. I thought he was lazy, that he purposely designed a class where he could do the least amount of work, not really teach anything, and only have to read over maybe a couple dozen of papers at the end of the semester that had already been meticulously graded by a TA. That’s right: he didn’t even have to do the toughest part of grading a student paper, all the editing and marking up. All he had to do was read over what the TA had already read over and write in a few comments to make it look like he cared. What a hustle, I thought.

And, honestly, maybe it WAS a hustle. Maybe my professor was, in fact, lazy.

As time went on, however, I gradually began to realize that the shot-by-shot analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey was not a fruitless effort. As I made more of my student films and made more short films after I graduated college, I consciously became aware of the fact that I was applying a lot of what I learned from doing the 2001 analysis to my filmmaking.

A few years after graduating, I started doing wedding videography and I noticed that I was even applying what I learned from 2001 while editing wedding videos as well.

And it didn’t just stop there.

Even when I started making corporate videos (mostly videos used for marketing), I often became aware of the fact that I was applying much of what I learned from Kubrick while shooting or editing those videos.

Anyway, here are some examples of the “suspenseful elements” I identified when analyzing the shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1. The titles at the beginning of the film are not always in perfect synch with the musical score. I’m talking about the opening titles, where the sun rises above the earth and there is the Zarathustra score. If you watch carefully, the titles always pop onscreen just slightly before you would think they would if they were being timed perfectly with the music. Knowing how big of a perfectionist Stanley Kubrick was, I’m assuming this was done on purpose, I think because it’s more visually and audibly interesting than having both titles and music in perfect synch with each other.

The Opening Title Sequence in 2001

2. The very first shots of the film after the titles, showing the African landscapes, are rather static. Since there is no movement in these shots (they were actual still photographs done by a second unit[i]), I notice Kubrick edited them in a way so that they were more engaging. In one shot, the horizon is near the bottom of the frame, then in another shot the horizon is near the top of the frame. When cut together, there is a jarring enough change in the image so that the shots become much more interesting. If there wasn’t enough of a change in the shots, like if the horizon was always center-frame, the sequence would have been much more static. In other words, it’s the cutting and varying compositions that give the sequence more movement and make them more visually interesting.

The African landscape shots

3. Kubrick uses colors very effectively. There are some shots early in the film where the apes are eating some meat that they obtained after figuring out how to use bones as weapons. The color of the meat is a striking blood-red that we can’t help but fixate our eyes upon. The red is almost appealing to the bloodlust within our DNA. The same thing happens, by the way, in a later part of the film where Dr. Heywood Floyd and some Russian scientists are sitting in blood-red chairs within the International Space Station, which is otherwise bright but subdued as far as the color scheme goes. The scene with these scientists talking is rather calm, but we can’t help but fixate on the red chairs and it gives the scene an unsettling undertone. Although the actors are conversing like civilized human beings—the complete opposite from how the apes behaved—it’s almost like Kubrick is hinting that there is something sinister lurking beneath the civility. Millennial man still has a primal violence, but we learned how to keep it under a face of benevolence. Instead of using bones as weapons, we use nuclear warheads, which, by the way, is the first thing we see floating in space after the famous cut from the ape’s bone spinning in the air.

The red chairs in the space station.

4. Kubrick is also brilliant with his use of sound. A lot of the film is quiet, mainly since space is so quiet (it’s not like what you experience in movies like Star Wars), but most of the early African sequences are quiet, too. One exception, however, is about three-quarters of the way through the first act with the apes. There is a quiet sequence of shots with nothing but peaceful cricket sounds and then there is an abrupt cut to the apes suddenly in a battle with a rival tribe, shrieking at each other, fighting over a watering hole. The transition is jarring and unexpected. It is suspense.

The apes shrieking at their rival tribe.

5. Much later in the film when HAL has malfunctioned and Frank Poole is trying to replace the AE-35 antenna outside the spaceship, there is a striking four-cut zoom that I think is one of the most overtly suspenseful devices used in the film. Basically, what Kubrick does is use four static shots to create a zoom-like effect. He starts with a quick wide shot of HAL’s eye on the space pod, then quickly jumps to a medium shot of the eye, then quickly jumps to a close-up of the eye and then finally cuts to an extreme close-up. I’ve used this same kind of static “zoom” effect in a couple of my short films. It always left an impression on me. It’s a great way to do a zoom if you don’t have a zoom lens and even if you do have a zoom lens or a zoom-capable video camera, it is tough to do one without being shaky or choppy, especially on a video camera where the zoom rocker is not always as precise as you would like it to be.

HAL kills Frank Poole

There are, of course, many more examples of “suspense” in 2001: A Space Odyssey that I could discuss, but those are five rather small examples that make a big difference, and when you add all those elements of suspense together, you constantly keep the audience engaged. The moral of the story is that there should always be something visually or audially interesting happening, however small the element of suspense may be. And you should cut out any frame of film that lacks suspense.

Of course, the paradox here is that sometimes even nothing can be interesting. Sometimes, there may even be nothing going on in a shot, but it’s being used to add to the rhythm of the editing, maybe give the viewer a breather after something too exciting, after too much suspense. Am I making any sense here? I guess I’m saying that there are exceptions to these rules, that even “nothing” can be suspenseful.

What’s ironic about all this is that the class I thought I had learned the least from at the time ended up being one of the classes that made the longest impression on me. It was one film. One paper. That one exercise could have potentially been all I needed to learn about making an interesting piece of film or video. I thought my professor was “phoning it in” at the time, doing the least amount of work to get paid as a college professor, but maybe he really knew what he was doing.

Or maybe he just got lucky.

…

MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Weird Monster, Supermarket Zombies!, The Woman and the Dragon and Johnny Cruise. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, Lymey Bastard, My Raging Case of Beastie Fever, Jungle F’ng Fever: My 30-Year Love Affair with Guns N’ Roses and Bostonwood. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.