Repo Men
SPOILER WARNING: Repo Men has an Interesting Message. The movie is about a company called, “The Union” that builds artificial organs that are mechanical in the future that are uber expensive. People need the organs or else they die, but they usually can’t afford them so they take out massive loans to pay them off. The Union then sends “Repo Men” like Jude Law’s character (Remy) to remove the organs and take them back to the Union if you can’t pay for the loan after 3 months. What happens in the movie is that Jude Law’s character gets betrayed by his partner and he needs to get an artificial heart. He then can’t pay for his artificial or “artiforg” heart and then his partner has to repo Remy’s heart. Remy then goes on the run.
The entire movie deals with one central issue that is very interesting and applicable to modern American Society, and that issue is debt. Without a doubt Americans are facing debt issues that seem so big they might as well be as bad as having a fake heart. First of all we have the National Debt, which is about 12.6 Trillion dollars right now. This National Debt represents how much we owe the FED. This debt is spiraling out of control. I was reading this one document written by the Zeitgeist people that says something along the lines that if the National Debt continues to rise at the rate it’s going. Taxes will need to increase to 65% by the year 2013. 65% is a huge number. Imagine seeing 65% of your paycheck go to taxes. You would be left with 35% of your original paycheck in order to pay for housing, food, clothing and other life needs. The movie Repo Men shows us that debt that piles up can quickly get large and it happens without us really noticing it. Remy said that the three month grace period on his heart went by very quickly and he was running out of options. The artiforgs in Repo Men represent how we can’t go bankrupt on our national debt. The national debt is not like credit card debt where you can go BK if you get over your head. If the United States of America can’t service it’s debt then other countries will view our currency as valueless. This would cause an instability in the trade system of the world. This is because the USA is such a large consumer of world goods. The USA can’t simply say it has too much debt to the FED and that it wants to go bankrupt. That would probably make our currency worth less than the peso. This is very similar to the artiforgs in Repo Men because if you can’t pay for your organs you can’t simply go bankrupt and keep the organs, the Repo Men take then back and then you probably either die or suffer immensely. Who is going to come for the USA when we can no longer pay for the interest on our ridiculous national debt? Hopefully they don’t repossess our banking system, or the FED decides to pawn our Navy for payment of the debt. There are a lot of things that could happen, and none of them seem good.
